When she awoke she was no longer in the open air by the roadside, and
the gray of the falling night about her, and the wet leaves for her bed.
She was in a wide painted chamber, sweet with many roses, hung with deep
hues of violet, filled with gold and color and sculpture and bronze,
duskily beautiful and dimly lighted by a great wood fire that glowed
upon andirons of brass.
On the wall nearest her hung all alone a picture,--a picture of a girl
asleep in a scarlet blaze of poppies, above her head a purple butterfly,
and on her breast the Red Mouse of the Brocken.
Opposite to it, beside the hearth, watching her with his small brilliant
eyes, and quite motionless, sat the old man Sartorian, who had kept his
faith with her, though the gods had not kept theirs.
And the picture and the reality grew confused before her, and she knew
not which was herself and which her painted likeness, nor which was the
little red mouse that gibbered among the red flowers, and which the
little old man who sat watching her with the fire-gleams bright in his
eyes; and it seemed to her that she and the picture were one, and he and
the mouse were one likewise; and she moaned and leaned her head on her
hands and tried to think.
The heat of the chamber, and the strong nourishment which they had
poured down her throat when she was insensible of anything they did to
her, had revived the life in her. Memory and sense returned slowly to
her; what first awakened was her one passionate desire, so intense that
it became an instinct stifling every other, to go on her way to the city
that had flashed in its golden glory on her sight one moment, only the
next to disappear into the eternal night.
"Paris!" she muttered, mechanically, as she lifted her face with a
hopeless, bewildered prayer.
"Tell me the way to Paris," she muttered, instinctively, and she tried
to rise and walk, not well knowing what she did.
The old man laughed a little, silently.
"Ah-h-h! Women are the only peaches that roll of their own accord from
the wall to the wasp's nest!"
At the sound of his voice her eyes opened wide upon him; she knew his
face again.
"Where am I?" she asked him, with a sharp terror in her voice.
"In my house," he said, simply. "I drove by you when you lay on the
roadside. I recognized you. When people dream of immortality they
generally die in a ditch. You would have died of a single night out
there. I sent my people for you. You did not wake. You have slept here
five hours."
"Is this Rioz?" She could not comprehend; a horror seized her, lest she
should have strayed from Paris back into her mother's province.
"No. It is another home of mine; smaller, but choicer maybe. Who has cut
your hair close?"
She shuddered and turned paler with the memory of that ghastly
prison-house.
"Well; I am not sure but that you are handsomer,--almost. A sculptor
would like you more now,--what a head you would make for an Anteros, or
an Icarus, or a Hyacinthus! Yes--you are best so. You have been ill?"
She could not answer; she only stared at him, blankly, with sad,
mindless, dilated eyes.
"A little gold!" she muttered, "a little gold!"
He looked at her awhile, then rose and went and sent his handwomen, who
took her to an inner chamber, and bathed and attended her with assiduous
care. She was stupefied, and knew not what they did.
They served her tenderly. They bathed her tired limbs and laid her, as
gently as though she were some wounded royal captive, upon a couch of
down.
She had no force to resist. Her eyes were heavy, and her senses were
obscured. The potence of the draught which they had forced through her
lips, when she had been insensible, acted on her as an anodyne. She sank
back unconsciously, and she slept again, all through the night and half
the day that followed.
Through all the hours she was conscious at intervals of the fragrance of
flowers, of the gleams of silver and gold, of the sounds of distant
music, of the white, calm gaze of marble fauns and dryads, who gazed on
her from amidst the coolness of hanging foliage. She who had never
rested on any softer couch than her truss of hay or heap of bracken,
dreamed that she slept on roses. The fragrance of innumerable flowers
breathed all around her. A distant music came through the silence on her
drowsy ear. For the first time in her life of toil and pain she knew how
exquisite a pleasure mere repose can be.
At noon she awoke, crying aloud that the Red Mouse claimed her soul from
Thanatos.
When her vision cleared, and her dream passed away, the music, the
flowers, the color, the coolness, were all real around her. She was
lying on a couch as soft as the rose-beds of Sybaris. About her were the
luxuries and the graces amidst which the rich dwell. Above her head,
from a golden height, a painted Eros smiled.
The light, on to which her startled eyes opened, came to her veiled
through soft, rosy hues; the blossom of flowers met her everywhere;
gilded lattices, and precious stones, and countless things for which she
knew neither the name nor use, and wondrous plants, with birds like
living blossoms on the wing above them, and the marble heads of women,
rising cold and pure above the dreamy shadows, all the color, and the
charm, and the silence, and the grace of the life that is rounded by
wealth were around her.
She lay silent and breathless awhile, with wide-open eyes, motionless
from the languor of her weakness and the confusion of her thoughts,
wondering dully, whether she belonged to the hosts of the living or the
dead.
She was in a small sleeping-chamber, in a bed like the cup of a lotos;
there was perfect silence round her, except for the faint far-off echo
of some music; a drowsy subtle fragrance filled the air, the solemn
measure of a clock's pendulum deepened the sense of stillness; for the
first time in her life she learned how voluptuous a thing the enjoyment
of simple rest can be. All her senses were steeped in it, lulled by it,
magnetized by it; and, so far as every thought was conscious to her, she
thought that this was death--death amidst the fields of asphodel, and in
the eternal peace of the realm of Thanatos.
Suddenly her eyes fell on a familiar thing, a little picture close at
hand, the picture of herself amidst the poppies.
She leapt from her bed and fell before it, and clasped it in her arms,
and wept over it and kissed it, because it had been the work of his
hand, and prayed to the unknown gods to make her suffer all things in
his stead, and to give him the desire of his soul. And the Red Mouse had
no power on her, because of her great love.
She rose from that prayer with her mind clear, and her nerves strung
from the lengthened repose; she remembered all that had chanced to her.
"Where are my clothes?" she muttered to the serving-woman who watched
beside her. "It is broad day;--I must go on;--to Paris."
They craved her to wear the costly and broidered stuffs strewn around
her; masterpieces of many an Eastern and Southern loom; but she put them
all aside in derision and impatience, drawing around her with a proud
loving action the folds of her own poor garments. Weather-stained, torn
by bush and brier, soaked with night-dew, and discolored by the dye of
many a crushed flower and bruised berry of the fields and woods, she yet
would not have exchanged these poor shreds of woven flax and goats' wool
against imperial robes, for, poor though they were, they were the
symbols of her independence and her liberty.
The women tended her gently, and pressed on her many rare and fair
things, but she would not have them; she took a cup of milk, and passed
out into the larger chamber.
She was troubled and bewildered, but she had no fear; for she was too
innocent, too wearied, and too desperate with that deathless courage,
which, having borne the worst that fate can do, can know no dread.
She stood with her arms folded on her breast, drawing together the
tattered folds of the tunic, gazing at the riches and the luxury, and
the blended colors of the room. So softly that she never heard his
footfall, the old man entered behind her, and came to the hearth, and
looked on her.
"You are better?" he asked. "Are you better, Folle-Farine?"
She looked up, and met the eyes of Sartorian. They smiled again on her
with the smile of the Red Mouse.
The one passion which consumed her was stronger than any fear or any
other memory: she only thought----this man must know?
She sprang forward and grasped his arm with both hands, with the seizure
of a tigress; her passionate eyes searched his face; her voice came hard
and fast.
"What have you done?--is he living or dead?--you must know?"
His eyes still smiled:
"I gave him his golden key;--how he should use it, that was not in our
bond? But, truly, I will make another bond with you any day,
Folle-Farine."
She shuddered, and her hands dropped from their hold.
"You know nothing?" she murmured.
"Of your Norse god? nay, nothing. An eagle soars too high for a man's
sight to follow, you know--oftentimes."
And he laughed his little soft laugh.
The eagles often soared so high--so high--that the icy vapors of the
empyrean froze them dead, and they dropped to earth a mere bruised,
helpless, useless mass:--he knew.
She stood stunned and confused: her horror of Sartorian was struggling
into life through the haze in which all things of the past were still
shrouded to her dulled remembrance--all things, save her love.
"Rest awhile," he said, gently. "Rest; and we may--who knows?--learn
something of your Northern god. First, tell me of yourself. I have
sought for tidings of you vainly."
Her eyes glanced round her on every side.
"Let me go," she muttered.
"Nay--a moment yet. You are not well."
"I am well."
"Indeed? Then wait a moment."
She rested where he motioned; he looked at her in smiling wonder.
She leaned on one of the cushioned couches, calm, motionless, negligent,
giving no sign that she saw the chamber round her to be any other than
the wooden barn or thatched cattle-sheds of the old mill-house; her feet
were crossed, her limbs were folded in that exquisite repose which is
inborn in races of the East; the warmth of the room and the long hours
of sleep had brought the natural bloom to her face, the natural luster
to her eyes, which earlier fatigue and long illness had banished.
He surveyed her with that smile which she had resented on the day when
she had besought pity of him for Arslàn's sake.
"Do you not eat?" was all he said.
"Not here."
He laughed, his low humorous laugh that displeased her so bitterly,
though it was soft of tone.
"And all those silks, and stuffs, and laces--do they please you no
better?"
"They are not mine."
"Pooh! do you not know yet? A female thing, as beautiful as you are,
makes hers everything she looks upon?"
"That is a fine phrase."
"And an empty one, you think. On my soul! no. Everything you see here is
yours, if it please you."
She looked at him with dreaming perplexed eyes.
"What do you want of me?" she said, suddenly.
"Nay--why ask? All men are glad to give to women with such a face as
yours."
She laughed a little; with the warmth, the rest, the wonder, the vague
sense of some unknown danger, her old skill and courage rose. She knew
that she had promised to be grateful always to this man: otherwise,--oh,
God!--how she could have hated him, she thought!
"Why?" she answered, "why? Oh, only this: when I bought a measure of
pears for Flamma in the market-place, the seller of them would sometimes
pick me out a big yellow bon-chrétien, soft as butter, sweet as sugar,
and offer it to me for myself. Well, when he did that, I always knew
that the weight was short, or the fruit rotten. This is a wonderful pear
you would give me; but is your measure false?"
He looked at her with a curious wonder and admiration; he was angered,
humbled, incensed, and allured, and yet he was glad; she looked so
handsome thus with the curl on her quiet lips, and her spirited head fit
for a bronze cast of Atalanta.
He was an old man; he could bear to pause and rightly appreciate the
charm of scorn, the spur of irony, the good of hatred. He knew the full
value of its sharp spears to the wonder-blooming aloe.
He left the subject for a happier moment, and, seating himself, opened
his hands to warm them by the wood fire, still watching her with that
smile, which for its very indulgence, its merry banter, she abhorred.
"You lost your Norse god as I prophesied?" he asked, carelessly.
He saw her whole face change as with a blow, and her body bend within
itself as a young tree bends under a storm.
"He went when you gave him the gold," she said below her breath.
"Of course he went. You would have him set free," he said, with the
little low laugh still in his throat. "Did I not say you must dream of
nothing else if once you had him freed? You would be full of faith; and
unbar your eagle's prison-house, and then, because he took wing through
the open door, you wonder still. That is not very wise, Folle-Farine."
"I do not wonder," she said, with fierce effort, stifling her misery.
"He had a right to do as he would: have I said any otherwise?"
"No. You are very faithful still, I see. Yet, I cannot think that you
believed my prophecy, or you--a woman--had never been so strong. You
think I can tell you of his fate? Nay, on my soul I know nothing. Men
do not speak his name. He may be dead;--you shrink? So! can it matter so
much? He is dead to you. He is a great man, but he is a fool. Half his
genius would give him the fame he wants with much greater swiftness than
the whole ever will. The world likes talent, which serves it. It hates
genius, which rules it. Men would adore his technical treatment, his
pictorial magnificence, his anatomical accuracy; but they will always be
in awe of his intensity of meaning, of his marvelous fertility, of his
extraordinary mingling of the chillest of idealisms and the most
unsparing of sensualities,--but I talk idly. Let us talk of you; see, I
chose your likeness, and he let me have it--did you dream that he would
part with it so lightly?"
"Why not? He had a million things more beautiful."
He looked at her keenly. He could measure the superb force of this
unblenching and mute courage.
"In any other creature such a humility would be hypocrisy. But it is not
so in you. Why will you carry yourself as in an enemy's house? Will you
not even break your fast with me? Nay, that is sullen, that is barbaric.
Is there nothing that can please you? See here,--all women love these;
the gypsy as well as the empress. Hold them a moment."
She took them; old oriental jewels lying loose in an agate cup on a
table near; there were among them three great sapphires, which in their
way were priceless, from their rare size and their perfect color.
Her mouth laughed with its old scorn. She, who had lost life, soul,
earth, heaven, to be consoled with the glass beads of a bauble! This man
seemed to her more foolish than any creature that had ever spoken on her
ear.
She looked, then laid them--indifferently--down.
"Three sparrow's eggs are as big, and almost as blue, among the moss in
any month of May!"
He moved them away, chagrined.
"How do you intend to live? he asked, dryly.
"It will come as it comes," she answered, with the fatalism and
composure that ran in her Eastern blood.
"What have you done up to this moment since you left my house at Rioz?"
She told him, briefly; she wanted to hide that she had suffered aught,
or had been in any measure coldly dealt with, and she spoke with the old
force of a happier time, seeking rather to show how well it was with her
that she should thus be free, and have no law save her own will, and
know that none lived who could say to her, "Come hither" or "go there."
Almost she duped him, she was so brave. Not quite. His eyes had read the
souls and senses of women for half a century; and none had ever deceived
him. As he listened to her he knew well that under her desolation and
her solitude her heart was broken--though not her courage.
But he accepted her words as she spoke them. "Perhaps you are wise to
take your fate so lightly," he said to her. "But do you know that it is
a horrible thing to be alone and penniless and adrift, and without a
home or a friend, when one is a woman and young?"
"It is worse when one is a woman and old; but who pities it then?" she
said, with the curt and caustic meaning that had first allured him in
her.
"And a woman is so soon old!" he added, with as subtle a significance.
She shuddered a little; no female creature that is beautiful and
vigorous and young can coldly brook to look straight at the doom of age;
death is far less appalling, because death is uncertain, mystical, and
may still have beauty.
"What do you intend to do with yourself?" he pursued.
"Intend! It is for the rich 'to intend,' the poor must take what
chances."
She spoke calmly, leaning down on one of the cushioned benches by the
hearth, resting her chin on her hand; her brown slender feet were
crossed one over another, her eyelids were heavy from weakness and the
warmth of the room; the soft dim light played on her tenderly; he looked
at her with a musing smile.
"No beautiful woman need ever be poor," he said, slowly spreading out
the delicate palms of his hands to the fire; "and you are
beautiful--exceedingly."
"I know!" She gave a quick gesture of her head, tired, insolent,
indifferent; and a terrible darkness stole over her face; what matter
how beautiful she might be, she had no beauty in her own sight, for the
eyes of Arslàn had dwelt on her cold, calm, unmoved, whilst he had said,
"I would love you--if I could."
"You know your value," Sartorian said, dryly. "Well, then, why talk of
poverty and of your future together? they need never be companions in
this world."
She rose and stood before him in the rosy glow of the fire that bathed
her limbs until they glowed like jade and porphyry.
"No beautiful woman need be poor--no--no beautiful woman need be honest,
I dare say."
He smiled, holding his delicate palms to the warmth of his hearth.
"Your lover drew a grand vision of Barabbas. Well--we choose Barabbas
still, just as Jerusalem chose; only now, our Barabbas is most often a
woman. Why do you rise? It is a wet day, out there, and, for the
spring-time, cold."
"Is it?"
"And you have been ill?"
"So they say."
"You will die of cold and exposure."
"So best."
"Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a dog stir."
"You would if the dog chose to go."
"To a master who forsook it--for a kick and a curse?"
Her face burned; she hung her head instinctively. She sank down again on
the seat which she had quitted. The old horror of shame which she had
felt by the waterside under the orchards bent her strength under this
man's unmerciful pressure. She knew that he had her secret, and the
haughty passion and courage of her nature writhed under his taunt of it.
"To refuse to stay is uncouth," he said to her.
"I am uncouth, no doubt."
"And it is ungrateful."
"I would not be that."
"Ungrateful! I did what you asked of me. I unloosed your Othyr of Art to
spend his strength as he will, in essaying to raise a storm-blast which
shall have force enough to echo through the endless tunnels of the time
to come."
"You gave him a handful of gold pieces for _that_!"
"Ah! if you thought that I should offer him the half of my possessions,
you were disappointed, no doubt. But you forgot that 'that' would not
sell in the world, as yet, for a handful of wheat."
She touched the three sapphires.
"Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being ignorant, esteem
them of no more value than three sparrow's eggs in the hedge?"
"My poor jewels! Well, stay here to-night; you need rest, shelter, and
warmth; and to-morrow you shall go as poor as you came, if you wish. But
the world is very hard. The world is always winter--to the poor," he
added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.
Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was
close at hand--the world in which she would be houseless, friendless,
penniless, alone.
"A hard world, to those who will not worship its gods," he repeated,
musingly. "And you astray in it, you poor barbarian, with your noble
madness, and your blindness of faith and of passion. Do you know what it
is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?"
"Do I know?" her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang
loud on the stillness. "_Do you?_ The empty dish, the chill stove, the
frozen feet, the long nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour
berries and hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the rats
fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black months, whose
saints' days are kept by new pains, and whose holy days are feasted by
fresh diseases. Do _I_ know? Do _you_?"
He did not answer her; he was absorbed in his study of her face; he was
thinking how she would look in Paris in some theatre's spectacle of
Egypt, with anklets of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind
her a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky.
"What a fool he must have been!" he thought, as his eyes went from her
to the study of her sleeping in the poppies. "What a fool! he left his
lantern of Aladdin behind him."
"You remember unlovely things," he said, aloud. "No, I do not know them;
and I should not have supposed that you, who did, could so much have
cared to know them more, or could have clung to them as the only good,
as you now seem to do. You cannot love such hardships?"
"I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them."
"Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?"
"I do not know--to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and
forever to see the sun."
"Not a low ideal. You must await the Peruvian Paradise. Meanwhile there
is a dayspring that represents the sun not ill; we call it Wealth."
"Ah!" she could not deride this god, for she knew it was the greatest of
them all; when the rod of riches had been lost, had not the Far-Striking
King himself been brought low and bound down to a slave's drudgery?
The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not change from its
musing study, its slow, vigilant smile; holding her under the subtle
influence of his gaze, Sartorian began to speak,--speak as he could at
choice, with accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery.
With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he placed before her
that world of which she knew no more than any one of the reeds that blew
by the sands of the river.
He painted to her that life of all others which was in most vital
contrast and unlikeness to her own; the life of luxury, of indolence, of
carelessness, of sovereignty, of endless pleasure, and supreme delight;
he painted to her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent,
beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from which to choose
her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, her victories, her cruelties,
and her seductions. He painted the long cloudless invigorating day of
such a favorite of fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its
laughter rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold; the same day for
the same woman, whether it were called of Rome or of Corinth, of
Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or of Paris, and whether she herself
were hailed hetaira or imperatrix. He drew such things as the skill of
his words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled him, in
language which aroused her even from the absorption of her wretchedness,
and stirred her dull disordered thoughts to a movement of restless
discontent, and of strange wonder--Arslàn had never spoken to her thus.
He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he
asked her,--
"Such lives are; do you not envy them?"
She thought,--"Envy them? she? what could she envy save the eyes that
looked on Arslàn's face?" "What were the use?" she said aloud; "all my
life I have seen all things are for others; nothing is for me."
"Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall see all things for
you, instead."
She flashed her eyes upon him.
"How can that be?"
"Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle-Farine?"
"Alone; yes."
"You have not a coin to stand a day between you and hunger?"
"Not one."
"You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much as a night?"
"Not one."
"You have just left a public place of pestilence?"
"Yes."
"And you know that every one's hand is against you because you are
nameless and bastard, and come of a proscribed people, who are aliens
alike in every land?"
"I am Folle-Farine; yes."
For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic acceptance of the fate
that made her name--merely because hers--a symbol of all things
despised, and desolate, and forsaken, touched his heart and moved him to
a sorrowful pity. But the pity died, and tie cruelty remained alive
behind it.
He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sardonic, meaning eyes.
"Well--be Folle-Farine still. Why not? But let Folle-Farine mean no
longer a beggar, an outcast, a leper, a thing attainted, proscribed, and
forever suspected; but let it mean on the ear of every man that hears it
the name of the most famous, the most imperious, the most triumphant,
the most beautiful woman of her time; a woman of whom the world says,
'look on her face and die--you have lived enough.'"
Her breath came and went as she listened; the blood in her face flushed
and paled; she trembled violently, and her whole frame seemed to dilate
and strengthen and vibrate with the electric force of that subtlest
temptation.
"I!" she murmured brokenly.
"Yes, you. All that I say you shall be: homeless, tribeless, nameless,
nationless, though you stand there now, Folle-Farine."
The wondrous promise swept her fancy for the moment on the strong
current of its imagery, as a river sweeps a leaf. This empire
hers?--hers?--when all mankind had driven and derided her, and shunned
her sight and touch, and cursed and flouted her, and barely thought her
worthy to be called "thou dog!"
He looked at her and smiled, and bent towards the warmth of the fire.
"All that I say you shall be; and--the year is all winter for the poor,
Folle-Farine."
The light on her face faded; a sudden apprehension tightened at her
heart; on her face gathered the old fierce deadly antagonism which
constant insult and attack had taught her to assume on the first instant
of menace as her only buckler.
She knew not what evil threatened; but vaguely she felt that treason was
close about her.
"If you do not mock me," she said slowly, "if you do not--how will you
make me what you promise?"
"I will show the world to you, you to the world; your beauty will do the
rest."
The darkness and the perplexed trouble deepened on her face; she rose
and stood and looked at him, her teeth shut together with a quick sharp
ring, her straight proud brows drew together in stormy silence; all the
tigress in her was awoke and rising ready to spring; yet amid that dusky
passion, that withering scorn of doubt, there was an innocent pathetic
wonder, a vague desolation and disappointment, that were childlike and
infinitely sad.
"This is a wondrous pear you offer me!" she said, bitterly. "And so
cheap?--it must be rotten somewhere."
"It is golden. Who need ask more?"
And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat.
Then, and then only, she understood him.
With a sudden unconscious instinctive action her hand sought her knife,
but the girdle was empty; she sprang erect, her face on fire with a
superb fury, her eyes blazing like the eyes of a wild beast's by night,
a magnificence of scorn and rage upon her quivering features.
Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the blows of steel.
"I ask more,--that I should pluck it with clean hands, and eat of it
with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beggar,--homeless, penniless,
tribeless, nationless! So you think, no doubt. But we who are born
outlawed are born free,--and do not sell our freedom. Let me go."
He watched her with a musing smile, a dreamy calm content; all this
tempest of her scorn, all this bitterness of her disdain, all this
whirlwind of her passion and her suffering, seemed but to beguile him
more and make him surer of her beauty, of her splendor, of her strength.
"She would be a great creature to show to the world," he thought, as he
drooped his head and watched her through his half-closed eyelids, as the
Red Mouse watched the sleeper in the poppies. "Let you go?" he said,
with that slow, ironic smile,--"let you go? Why should I let you go,
Folle-Farine?"
She stooped as a tigress stoops to rise the stronger for her death
spring, and her voice was low, on a level with his ear.
"Why? Why? To save your own life--if you are wise."
He laughed in his throat again.
"Ah, ah! It is never wise to threaten, Folle-Farine. I do not threaten.
You are foolish; you are unreasonable: and that is the privilege of a
woman. I am not angered at it. On the contrary, it adds to your charm.
You are a beautiful, reckless, stubborn, half-mad, half-savage creature.
Passion and liberty become you,--become you like your ignorance and your
ferocity. I would not for worlds that you should change them."
"Let me go!" she cried, across his words.
"Oh, fool! the winter will be hard,--and you are bare of foot,--and you
have not a crust!"
"Let me go."
"Ah! Go?--to beg your way to Paris, and to creep through the cellars and
the hospitals till you can see your lover's face, and to crouch a moment
at his feet to hear him mutter a curse on you in payment for your
pilgrimage; and then to slit your throat or his--in your despair, and
lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch."
"Let me go, I say!"
"Or else, more like, come back to me in a week's time and say, 'I was
mad but now I am wise. Give me the golden pear. What matter a little
speck? What is golden may be rotten; but to all lips it is sweet.'"
"Let me go!"
She stood at bay before him, pale in her scorn of rags, her right hand
clinched against her breast, her eyes breathing fire, her whole attitude
instinct with the tempest of contempt and loathing, which she held down
thus, passive and almost wordless, because she once had promised never
to be thankless to this man.
He gazed at her and smiled, and thought how beautiful that chained
whirlwind of her passions looked; but he did not touch her nor even go
nearer to her. There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes that daunted
him. Moreover, he was patient, humorous, gentle, cruel, wise,--all in
one; and he desired to tame and to beguile her, and to see her slowly
drawn into the subtle sweetness of the powers of gold; and to enjoy the
yielding of each moral weakness one by one, as the southern boy slowly
pulls limb from limb, wing from wing, of the cicala.
"I will let you go, surely," he said, with his low, grim laugh. "I keep
no woman prisoner against her will. But think one moment longer,
Folle-Farine. You will take no gift at my hands?"
"None."
"You want to go,--penniless as you are?"
"I will go so,--no other way."
"You will fall ill on the road afresh."
"That does not concern you."
"You will starve."
"That is my question."
"You will have to herd with the street dogs."
"Their bite is better than your welcome."
"You will be suspected,--most likely imprisoned. You are an outcast."
"That may be."
"You will be driven to public charity."
"Not till I need a public grave."
"You will have never a glance of pity, never a look of softness, from
your northern god; he has no love for you, and he is in his grave most
likely. Icarus falls--always."
For the first time she quailed as though struck by a sharp blow; but her
voice remained inflexible and serene.
"I can live without love or pity, as I can without home or gold. Once
for all,--let me go."
"I will let you go," he said, slowly, as he moved a little away. "I will
let you go in seven days' time. For seven days you shall do as you
please; eat, drink, be clothed, be housed, be feasted, be served, be
beguiled,--as the rich are. You shall taste all these things that gold
gives, and which you, being ignorant, dare rashly deride and refuse. If,
when seven days end, you still choose, you shall go, and as poor as you
came. But you will not choose, for you are a woman, Folle-Farine!"
Ere she knew his intent he had moved the panel and drawn it behind him,
and left her alone,--shut in a trap like the birds that Claudis Flamma
had netted in his orchards.
That night, when the night without was quite dark, she knelt down before
the study of the poppies, and kissed it softly, and prayed to the
unknown God, of whom none had taught her in anywise, yet whose light she
still had found, and followed in a dim, wondering, imperfect fashion, as
a little child lost in the twilight of some pathless wood, pursues in
trembling the gleam of some great, still planet looming far above her
through the leaves.
When she arose from her supplication, her choice was already made.
And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.