For many months she knew nothing of the flight of time. All she was
conscious of were burning intolerable pain, continual thirst, and the
presence of as an iron hand upon her head, weighing down the imprisoned
brain. All she saw in the horrible darkness, which no ray of light ever
broke, was the face of Thanatos, with the white rose pressed against his
mouth, to whom endlessly she stretched her arms in vain entreaty, but
who said only, with the passionless pity of his gaze, "I come in my own
time, and neither tarry nor hasten for any supplication of a mortal
creature."
She lived as a reed torn up from the root may live by the winds that
waft it, by the birds that carry it, by the sands that draw its fibers
down into themselves, to root afresh whether it will or no.
"The reed was worthy to die!--the reed was worthy to die!" was all that
she said, again and again, lying staring with her hot distended eyes
into the void as of perpetual night, which was all that she saw around
her. The words were to those who heard her, however, the mere
meaningless babble of madness.
When they had found her in the cell of the guard-house, she was far
beyond any reach of harm from them, or any sensibility of the worst
which they might do to her. She was in a delirious stupor, which left
her no more sense of place, or sound, or time than if her brain had been
drugged to the agonies and ecstasies of the opium-eater.
They found her homeless, friendless, nameless; a thing accursed,
destitute, unknown; as useless and as rootless as the dead Spanish
vagrant lying on the stones beside her. They cast him to the public
ditch; they sent her to the public sick wards, a league away; an ancient
palace, whose innumerable chambers and whose vast corridors had been
given to a sisterhood of mercy, and employed for nigh a century as a
public hospital.
In this prison she lay without any sense of the passing of hours and
days and months.
The accusation against her fell to the ground harmless; no one pursued
it: the gold was gone--somewhere, nowhere. No one knew, unless it were
the bee-wife, and she held her peace.
She was borne, senseless, to the old hospice in the great, dull,
saintly, historic town, and there perished from all memories as all time
perished to her.
Once or twice the sister of charity who had the charge of her sought to
exorcise the demon tormenting this stricken brain and burning body, by
thrusting into the hands that clinched the air a leaden image or a cross
of sacred wood. But those heathen hands, even in delirium, threw those
emblems away always, and the captive would mutter in a vague incoherence
that froze the blood of her hearers:
"The old gods are not dead; they only wait--they only wait! I am
theirs--theirs! They forget, perhaps. But I remember. I keep my faith;
they must keep theirs, for shame's sake. Heaven or hell? what does it
matter? Can it matter to me, so that he has his desire? And that they
must give, or break faith, as men do. Persephone ate the
pomegranate,--you know--and she went back to hell. So will I--if they
will it. What can it matter how the reed dies?--by fire, by steel, by
storm?--what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, God! the reed
was found worthy to die! And I--I am too vile, too poor, too shameful
even for _that_!"
And then her voice would rise in a passion of hysteric weeping, or sink
away into the feeble wailing of the brain, mortally stricken and yet
dimly sensible of its own madness and weakness; and all through the
hours she, in her unconsciousness, would lament for this--for this
alone--that the gods had not deemed her worthy of the stroke of death by
which, through her, a divine melody might have arisen, and saved the
world.
For the fable--which had grown to hold the place of so implicit a faith
to her--was in her delirium always present with her; and she had
retained no sense of herself except as the bruised and trampled reed
which man and the gods alike had rejected as unworthy of sacrifice.
All the late autumn and the early winter came and went; and the cloud
was dark upon her mind, and the pain of the blow dealt to her by Taric's
hand gnawed at her brain.
When the winter turned, the darkness in which her reason had been
engulfed began to clear, little by little.
As the first small trill of the wren stirred the silence in the old
elm-boughs; as the first feeble gleam of the new-year sunshine struggled
through the matted branches of the yews; as the first frail blossom of
the pale hepatica timidly peeped forth in the damp moss-grown walls
without, so consciousness slowly returned to her. She was so young; the
youth in her refused to be quenched, and recovered its hold upon life as
did the song of the birds, the light in the skies, the corn in the
seed-sown earth.
She awakened to strength, to health, to knowledge; though she awoke thus
blinded and confused and capable of little save the sense of some
loathsome bondage, of some irreparable loss, of some great duty which
she had left undone, of some great errand to which she had been
summoned, and found wanting.
She saw four close stone walls around her; she saw her wrists and her
ankles bound; she saw a hole high up above her head, braced with iron
bars, which served to let in a few pallid streaks of daylight which
alone ever found their way thither; she saw a black cross in one corner,
and before it two women in black, who prayed.
She tried to rise, and could not, being fettered. She tore at the rope
on her wrists with her teeth, like a young tigress at her chains.
They essayed to soothe her, but in vain; they then made trial first of
threats, then of coercion; neither affected her; she bit at the knotted
cords with her white, strong teeth, and, being unable to free herself,
fell backward in a savage despair, glaring in mute impotent rage upon
her keepers.
"I must go to Paris," she muttered again and again. "I must go to
Paris."
So much escaped her;--but her secret she was still strong to keep buried
in silence in her heart, as she had still kept it even in her madness.
Her old strength, her old patience, her old ferocity and stubbornness
and habits of mute resistance, had revived in her with the return of
life and reason. Slowly she remembered all things--remembered that she
had been accused and hunted down as a thief and brought thither into
this prison, as she deemed it, where the closeness of the walls pent her
in and shut out the clouds and the stars, the water and the moonrise,
the flicker of the green leaves against the gold of sunset, and all the
liberty and loveliness of earth and air for which she was devoured by a
continual thirst of longing, like the thirst of the caged lark for the
fair heights of heaven.
So when they spoke of their god, she answered always as the lark answers
when his jailers speak to him of song:--"Set me free."
But they thought this madness no less, and kept her bound there in the
little dark stone den, where no sound ever reached, unless it were the
wailing of a bell, and no glimpse of the sky or the trees could ever
come to charm to peaceful rest her aching eyes.
At length they grew afraid of what they did. She refused all food; she
turned her face to the wall; she stretched herself on her bed of straw
motionless and rigid. The confinement, the absence of air, were a living
death to the creature whose lungs were stifled unless they drank in the
fresh cool draught of winds blowing unchecked over the width of the
fields and forests, and whose eyes ached and grew blind unless they
could gaze into the depths of free-flowing water, or feed themselves in
far-reaching sight upon the radiant skies.
The errant passions in her, the inborn instincts towards perpetual
liberty, and the life of the desert and of the mountains which came with
the blood of the Zingari, made her prison-house a torture to her such as
is unknown to the house-born and hearth-fettered races.
If this wild moorbird died of self-imposed famine rather than live only
to beat its cut wings against the four walls of their pent prison-house,
it might turn ill for themselves; so the religious community meditated.
They became afraid of their own work.
One day they said to her:
"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."
She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in
which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed
Master."
"If a Christian swear it,--it must be a lie," she said, with the smile
that froze their timid blood.
But she accepted the food and the drink which they brought her, and
broke her fast, and slept through many hours; strengthened, as by strong
wine, by that one hope of freedom beneath the wide pure skies.
She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They
told her it was the early spring.
"The spring," she echoed dully,--all the months were a blank to her,
which had rolled by since that red autumn evening when in the cell of
the guard-house the voice of Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the
passion songs of Spain.
"Yes. It is spring," they said again; and one sister, younger and
gentler than the rest, reached from its place above the crucifix the
bough of the golden catkins of the willow, which served them at their
holy season as an emblem of the palms of Palestine.
She looked at the drooping grace of the branches, with their buds of
amber, long and in silence; then with a passion of weeping she turned
her face from them as from the presence of some intolerable memory.
All down the shore of the river, amongst the silver of the reeds, the
willows had been in blossom when she had first looked upon the face of
Arslàn.
"Stay with us," the women murmured, drawn to her by the humanity of
those the first tears that she had ever shed in her imprisonment. "Stay
with us; and it shall go hard if we cannot find a means to bring you to
eternal peace."
She shook her head wearily.
"It is not peace that I seek," she murmured.
Peace?
He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, she knew. What
she had sought to gain for him--what she would seek still when once she
should get free--was the eternal conflict of a great fame in the world
of men; since this was the only fate which in his sight had any grace or
any glory in it.
They kept their faith with her. They opened the doors of her
prison-house and bade her depart in peace, pagan and criminal though
they deemed her.
She reeled a little dizzily as the first blaze of the full daylight fell
on her. She walked out with unsteady steps into the open air where they
took her, and felt it cool and fresh upon her cheek, and saw the blue
sky above her.
The gates which they unbarred were those at the back of the hospital,
where the country stretched around. They did not care that she should be
seen by the people of the streets.
She was left alone on a road outside the great building that had been
her prison-house; the road was full of light, it was straight and
shadowless; there was a tall tree near her full of leaf; there was a
little bird fluttering in the sand at her feet; the ground was wet, and
sparkled with rain-drops.
All the little things came to her like the notes of a song heard far
away--far away--in another world. They were all so familiar, yet so
strange.
There was a little yellow flower growing in a tuft of grasses straight
in front of her; a little wayside weed; a root and blossom of the
field-born celandine.
She fell on her knees in the dust by it, and laughed and wept, and,
quivering, kissed it and blessed it that it grew there. It was the first
thing of summer and of sunshine that she had seen for so long.
A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and bade her get from the
ground.
"You are fitter to go back again," he muttered; "you are mad still, I
think."
Like a hunted animal she stumbled to her feet and fled from him; winged
by the one ghastly terror that they would claim her and chain her back
again.
They had said that she was free: but what were words? They had taken her
once; they might take her twice.
She ran, and ran, and ran.
The intense fear that possessed her lent her irresistible force. She
coursed the earth with the swiftness of a hare. She took no heed whence
she went; she only knew that she fled from that one unutterable horror
of the place. She thought that they were right; that she was mad.
It was a level, green, silent country which was round her, with little
loveliness and little color; but as she went she laughed incessantly in
the delirious gladness of her liberty.
She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she
caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She
listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little
brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the
rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose
apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could no longer bear the passionate
pain of all the long-lost sweetness, but, flinging herself downward,
sobbed with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.
The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.
"Ah, God!" she thought, "I know now--one cannot be utterly wretched
whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."
And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that
hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with
their eyes downward, and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so
little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to
the passage of the clouds against the sun.
When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had a little passed
away, and abated in violence, she stood in the midst of the green fields
and the fresh woods, a strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute
desolation.
Her clothes were in rags; her red girdle had been changed by weather to
a dusky purple; her thick clustering hair had been cut to her throat;
her radiant hues were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully from
beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an antelope whom men
vainly starve in the attempt to tame.
She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She had not a coin nor a
crust upon her. She could not tell where she then stood, nor where the
only home that she had ever known might lie.
She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was
beautiful, and was a woman.
She stood and looked; she did not weep; she did not pray; her heart
seemed frozen in her. She had the gift she had craved,--and how could
she use it?
The light was obscured by clouds, great, sweet rain-clouds which came
trooping from the west. Woods were all round, and close against her were
low brown cattle, cropping clovered grass. Away on the horizon was a
vague, vast, golden cloud, like a million threads of gossamer glowing in
the sun.
She did not know what it was; yet it drew her eyes to it. She thought of
the palaces.
A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed to the cloud.
"What is that light?" she asked him.
The cowherd stared and laughed.
"That light? It is only the sun shining on the domes and the spires of
Paris."
"Paris!"
She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed her hands upon her
breast, and in her way thanked God.
She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it.
She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. It looked quite
close.
She had exhausted the scanty strength which she had in her first flight;
she could go but slowly; and the roads were heavy across the plowed
lands, and through the edges of the woods. She walked on and on till it
grew dusk, then she asked of a woman weeding in a field how far it might
be yet to Paris.
The woman told her four leagues and more.
She grew deadly cold with fear. She was weak, and she had no hope that
she could reach it before dawn; and she had nothing with which to buy
shelter for the night. She could see it still; a cloud, now as of
fireflies, upon the purple and black of the night; and in a passionate
agony of longing she once more bent her limbs and ran--thinking of him.
To her the city of the world, the city of the kings, the city of the
eagles, was only of value for the sake of this one life it held.
It was useless. All the strength she possessed was already spent. The
feebleness of fever still sang in her ears and trembled in her blood.
She was sick and faint, and very thirsty.
She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked to rest the night
there.
The woman glanced at her and slammed to the door. At another and yet
another she tried; but at neither had she any welcome; they muttered of
the hospitals and drove her onward. Finally, tired out, she dropped down
on the curled hollow of an old oak stump that stood by the wayside, and
fell asleep, seeing to the last through her sinking lids that cloud of
light where the great city lay.
The night was cold; the earth damp; she stretched her limbs out wearily
and sighed, and dreamed that Thanatos touched her with his asphodels and
whispered, "Come."