The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like wolves; the
temptations of the city crouched in wait for her incessantly, like
tigers. She was always hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there
was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was
beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once of listening, of
yielding, of taking any pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never
thought of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a
supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner passions were
absorbed and slain.
Once or twice, through some lighted casement in some lamp-lit wood,
where the little gay boats flashed on fairy lakes, she would coldly
watch that luxury, that indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl
on her lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.
"To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in their breasts,
to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have both hands full of gold,
that is what women love," she thought; and laughed a little in her cold
wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the
pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their purple throats,
and broke among them her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on
the parapet and watched the round white moon rise over the shining roofs
of Paris.
She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, she was very
wretched; but she had a supreme love in her, and she was strong.
A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through the lips which
hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, would surely, the Red Mouse
thought, disbar and unclose to him sooner or later.
"You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine," the Red Mouse had said to
her, by the tongue of the old man Sartorian; and he kept his word very
patiently.
He was patient, he was wise; he believed in the power of gold, and he
had no faith in the strength of a woman. He knew how to wait--unseen, so
that this rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its
wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly incense, her.
Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go among the world
of the sleeping poor, at her threshold she would step on some gift
worthy of a queen's acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there
against the stone of the stairs.
When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of a day, all
pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless labor to and fro the
labyrinth of streets, there would be on her bare bench such fruits and
flowers as Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst
them some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the pines and
of the grapes in gold.
When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and footsore, through
the byways and over the sharp-set flints of the quarters of the outcasts
and the beggars, sick with the tumult and the stench and the squalor,
parched with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search for
one face amidst the millions,--going home!--oh, mockery of the word!--to
a bed of straw, to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal,
to a night of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a moment now and
then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, saying,--
"Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"
But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.
The mill dust; the reed by the river; the nameless, friendless, rootless
thing that her fate made her, should have been weak, and so lightly
blown by every chance breeze--so the Red Mouse told her; should have
asked no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon the
winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a crown of pleasure.
Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her
tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.
For Love was with her.
And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love's breast, and is cradled
there a welcome guest, yet when Love, once in a million times, shakes
off his sloth, and flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with
a hand of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares meddle with
Love no more.
In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather that had the
purple glow of the autumnal storms and the chills of coming winter on
it, she arose, as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent, and
lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds to rouse the
sleepers.
She had barely tasted food for many hours. All the means of subsistence
that she had was the few coins earned from those as poor almost as
herself. Often these went in debt to her, and begged for a little time
to get the piece or two of base metal that they owed her; and she
forgave them such debts always, not having the heart to take the last
miserable pittance from some trembling withered hand which had worked
through fourscore years of toil, and found no payment but its wrinkles
in its palm; not having the force to fill her own platter with crusts
which could only be purchased by the hunger cries of some starveling
infant, or by the barter of some little valueless cross of ivory or
rosary of berries long cherished in some aching breast after all else
was lost or spent.
She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she had not had even a
few grains to scatter to the hungry pigeons as they had fluttered to her
on the housetop in the stormy twilight as the evening fell.
She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of the bells sound
the hours, and seeming to say to her as they beat on the silence,--
"Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the
river, a Nothing?"
When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that fastened her door, and
went out on the crazy stairway, she struck her foot against a thing of
metal. It glittered in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up;
it was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse lurked in,
among the pearls, to spring out from their whiteness into the purer snow
of Gretchen's bread.
With it was only one written line:
"When you are tired, Folle-Farine?"
She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the
young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.
An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face,
lit with wolf's eyes, through the gloom.
"Are you not tired?" she muttered in the formula taught her. "Are you
not tired, Folle-Farine?"
"If I be, what of that?" she answered, and she thrust the case away to
the feet of the woman, still shut, and went on with her little dim taper
down round the twist of the stairs. She knew what she did, what she put
away. She had come to know, too, what share the sex of her mother takes
in the bringing to the lips of their kind the golden pear that to most
needs no pressing.
"If I had only your face, and your chances," had said to her that day a
serving-girl, young, with sallow cheeks, and a hollow voice, and eyes of
fever, who lived in a den lower down on the stairway.
"Are you mad that you hunger here when you might hang yourself with
diamonds like our Lady of Atocha?" cried a dancing-woman with sullen
eyes and a yellow skin from the hither side of the mountains, who begged
in the streets all day.
So, many tongues hissed to her in different fashions. It seemed to many
of them impious in one like her to dare be stronger than the gold was
that assailed her, to dare to live up there among the clouds, and
hunger, and thirst, and keep her silence, and strike dumb all the mouths
that tried to woo her down, and shake aside all the hands that strove
softly to slide their purchase-moneys into hers.
For they chimed in chorus as the bells did:
"Strength in the dust--in a reed--in a Nothing?"
It was a bitter windy morning; the rain fell heavily; there were no
stars out, and the air was sharp and raw. She was too used to all
changes of weather to take heed of it, but her thin clothes were soaked
through, and her hair was drenched as she crossed the courts and
traversed the passages to reach her various employers.
The first she roused was a poor sickly woman sleeping feverishly on an
old rope mat; the second an old man wrestling with nightmare, as the
rain poured on him through a hole in the roof, making him dream that he
was drowning.
The third was a woman, so old that her quarter accredited her with a
century of age; she woke mumbling that it was hard at her years to have
to go and pick rags for a crumb of bread.
The fourth was a little child not seven; he was an orphan, and the
people who kept him sent him out to get herbs in the outlying villages
to sell in the streets, and beat him if he let other children be
beforehand with him. He woke sobbing; he had dreamed of his dead mother,
and cried out that it was so cold, so cold.
There were scores like them at whose doors she knocked, or whose
chambers she entered. The brief kind night was over, and they had to
arise and work,--or die.
"Why do they not die?" she wondered; and she thought of the dear gods
that she had loved, the gods of oblivion.
Truly there were no gifts like their gifts; and yet men knew their worth
so little;--but thrust Hypnos back in scorn, dashing their winecups in
his eyes; and mocked Oneiros, calling him the guest of love-sick fools
and of mad poets; and against Thanatos strove always in hatred and
terror as against their dreaded foe.
It was a strange, melancholy, dreary labor this into which she had
entered.
It was all dark. The little light she bore scarcely shed its rays beyond
her feet. It was all still. The winds sounded infinitely sad among those
vaulted passages and the deep shafts of the stairways. Now and then a
woman's voice in prayer or a man's in blasphemy echoed dully through the
old half-ruined buildings. Otherwise an intense silence reigned there,
where all save herself were sleeping.
She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which she alone was
living.
And sometimes she had not the heart to waken them; when there was a
smile on some wan worn face that never knew one in its waking hours; or
when some childless mother in her lonely bed sleeping, in fancy drew
young arms about her throat.
This morning when all her tasks were done, and all the toilers summoned
to another day of pain, she retraced her steps slowly, bearing the light
aloft, and with its feeble rays shed on the colorless splendor of her
face, and on her luminous dilated troubled eyes that were forever
seeking what they never found.
A long vaulted passage stretched between her and the foot of the steps
that led to the tower; many doors opened on it, the winds wailed through
it, and the ragged clothes of the tenants blew to and fro upon the
swaying cords. She traversed it, and slowly mounted her own staircase,
which was spiral and narrow, with little loopholes ever and again that
looked out upon the walls, and higher on the roofs, and higher yet upon
the open sky. By one of these she paused and looked out wearily.
It was dark still; great low rain-clouds floated by; a little caged bird
stirred with a sad note; mighty rains swept by from the westward, sweet
with the smell of the distant fields.
Her heart ached for the country.
It was so still there in the dusk she knew, even in this wild autumn
night, which there would be so purple with leaf shadow, so brown with
embracing branches, so gray with silvery faint mists of lily, white with
virgin snows. Ah, God! to reach it once again, she thought, if only to
die in it.
And yet she stayed on in this, which was to her the deepest hell, stayed
on because he--in life or death--was here.
She started as a hand touched her softly, where she stood looking
through the narrow space. The eyes of Sartorian smiled on her through
the twilight.
"Do you shrink still?" he said, gently. "Put back your knife; look at me
quietly; you will not have the casket?--very well. Your strength is
folly; yet it is noble. It becomes you. I do you good for ill. I have
had search made for your lover, who loves not you. I have found him."
"Living?" She quivered from head to foot; the gray walls reeled round
her; she feared, she hoped, she doubted, she believed. Was it hell? Was
it heaven? She could not tell. She cared not which, so that only she
could look once more upon the face of Arslàn.
"Living," he answered her, and still he smiled. "Living. Come with me,
and see how he has used the liberty you gave. Come."
She staggered to her feet and rose, and held her knife close in the
bosom of her dress, and with passionate eyes of hope and dread searched
the face of the old man through the shadows.
"It is the truth?" she muttered. "If you mock me,--if you lie----"
"Your knife will sheathe itself in my body, I know. Nay, I have never
lied to you. One cannot wear a velvet glove to tame a lioness. Come with
me; fear nothing, Folle-Farine. Come with me, and see with your own
eyesight how the world of men has dealt with this your god."
"I will come."
Sartorian gazed at her in silence.
"You are a barbarian; and so you are heroic always. I would not lie to
you, and here I have no need. Come; it is very near to you. A breadth of
stone can sever two lives, though the strength of all the world cannot
unite them. Come."
She gripped the knife closer, and, with feet that stumbled as the feet
of a dumb beast that goes out to its slaughter, followed him, through
the dark and narrow ways. She had no fear for herself; she had no dread
of treachery or peril; for herself she could be strong, always: and the
point of the steel was set hard against her breast; but for him?--had
the gods forgotten? had he forgot?
She was sick, and cold, and white with terror as she went. She dreaded
the unknown thing her eyes might look upon. She dreaded the truth that
she had sought to learn all through the burning months of summer, all
through the horrors of the crowded city. Was it well with him, or ill?
Had the gods remembered at last? Had the stubborn necks of men been bent
to his feet? Was he free?--free to rise to the heights of lofty desire,
and never look downward, in pity, once?
They passed in silence through many passage-ways of the great stone hive
of human life in which she dwelt. Once only Sartorian paused and looked
back and spoke.
"If you find him in a woman's arms, lost in a sloth of passion, what
then? Will you say still, Let him have greatness?"
In the gloom he saw her stagger as though struck upon the head. But she
rallied and gazed at him in answer with eyes that would neither change
nor shrink.
"What is that to you?" she said, in her shut teeth. "Show me the truth:
and as for him,--he has a right to do as he will. Have I said ever
otherwise?"
He led the way onward in silence.
This passion, so heroic even in its barbarism, so faithful even in its
wretchedness, so pure even in its abandonment, almost appalled him,--and
yet on it he had no pity.
By his lips the world spoke: the world which, to a creature nameless,
homeless, godless, friendless, offered only one choice--shame or death;
and for such privilege of choice bade her be thankful to men and to
their deity.
He led her through many vaulted ways, and up the shaft of a stone
stairway in a distant side of the vast pile, which, from holding many
habitants of kings, and monks, and scholars, had become the populous
home of the most wretched travailers of a great city.
"Wait here," he said, and drew her backward into a hollow in the wall.
It was nearly dark.
As she stood there in the darkness looking down through the narrow
space, there came a shadow to her through the gloom,--a human shadow,
noiseless and voiceless. It ascended the shaft of the stairs with a
silent, swift tread, and passed by her, and went onward; as it passed,
the rays of her lamp were shed on it, and her eyes at last saw the face
of Arslàn.
It was pale as death; his head was sunk on his breast; his lips muttered
without the sound of words, his fair hair streamed in the wind; he moved
without haste, without pause, with the pulseless haste, the bloodless
quiet of a phantom.
She had heard men talk of those who, being dead, yet dwelt on earth and
moved amidst the living. She had no thought of him in that moment save
as among the dead. But he, dead or living, could have no horror for her;
he, dead or living, ruled her as the moon the sea, and drew her after
him, and formed the one law of her life.
She neither trembled nor prayed, nor wept nor laughed, nor cried aloud
in her inconceivable joy. Her heart stood still, as though some hand had
caught and gripped it. She was silent in the breathless silence of an
unspeakable awe; and with a step as noiseless as his own, she glided in
his path through the deep shaft of the stairs, upward and upward through
the hushed house, through the innumerable chambers, through the dusky
shadows, through the chill of the bitter dawn, through the close hive of
the sleeping creatures, up and up, into the very roof itself, where it
seemed to meet the low and lurid clouds, and to be lifted from the
habitations and the homes of men.
A doorway was open; he passed through it; beyond it was a bare square
place through which there came the feeblest rays of dawn, making the
yellow oil flame that burned in it look dull and hot and garish. He
passed into the chamber and stood still a moment, with his head dropped
on his chest and his lips muttering sounds without meaning.
The light fell on his face; she saw that he was living. Crouched on his
threshold, she watched him, her heart leaping with a hope so keen, a
rapture so intense, that its very strength and purity suffocated her
like some mountain air too pure and strong for human lungs to breathe.
He walked in his sleep; that sleep so strange and so terrible, which
drugs the senses and yet stimulates the brain; in which the sleeper
moves, acts, remembers, returns to daily habits, and resorts to daily
haunts, and yet to all the world around him is deaf and blind and
indifferent as the dead.
The restless brain, unstrung by too much travail and too little food,
had moved the limbs unconsciously to their old haunts and habits; and in
his sleep, though sightless and senseless, he seemed still to know and
still to suffer. For he moved again, after a moment's rest, and passed
straight to the wooden trestles on which a great canvas was
outstretched. He sank down on a rough bench in front of it, and passed
his hand before the picture with the fond, caressing gesture with which
a painter shows to another some wave of light, some grace of color, and
then sat there, stupidly, steadfastly, with his elbows on his knees and
his head on his hands, and his eyes fastened on the creation before him.
It was a rugged, desolate, wind-blown chamber, set in the topmost height
of the old pile, beaten on by all snows, drenched by all rains, rocked
by all storms, bare, comfortless, poor to the direst stretch of poverty,
close against the clouds, and with the brazen bells and teeming roofs of
the city close beneath.
She had dwelt by him for many weeks, and no sense of his presence had
come to her, no instinct had awakened in him towards the love which
clung to him with a faithfulness only as great as its humility. She,
praying always to see this man once more, and die--had been severed from
him by the breadth of a stone as by an ocean's width; and he--doomed to
fail always, spending his life in one endeavor, and by that one
perpetually vanquished--he had had no space left to look up at a
nameless creature with lithe golden limbs, about whose head the
white-winged pigeons fluttered at twilight on the housetop.
His eyes had swept over her more than once; but they had had no sight
for her; they were a poet's eyes that saw forever in fancy faces more
amorous and divine, limbs lovelier and more lily-like, mouths sweeter
and more persuasive in their kiss, than any they ever saw on earth.
One passion consumed him, and left him not pause, nor breath, nor pity,
nor sorrow for any other thing. He rested from his work and knew that it
was good; but this could not content him, for this his fellow-men
denied.
There was scarcely any light, but there was enough for her to read his
story by--the story of continual failure.
Yet where she hid upon the threshold, her heart beat with wildest music
of recovered joy; she had found him, and she had found him alone.
No woman leaned upon his breast; no soft tossed hair bathed his arms, no
mouth murmured against his own. He was alone. Her only rival was that
one great passion with which she had never in her humility dreamed to
mete herself.
Dead he might be to all the world of men, dead in his own sight by a
worse fate than that or any could give; but for her he was living,--to
her what mattered failure or scorn, famine or woe, defeat or despair?
She saw his face once more.
She crouched upon his threshold now, and trembled with the madness of
her joy, and courted its torture. She dared not creep and touch his
hand, she dared not steal and kneel a moment at his feet.
He had rejected her. He had had no need of her. He had left her with the
first hour that freedom came to him. He had seen her beauty, and learned
its lines and hues, and used them for his art, and let it go again, a
soulless thing that gave him no delight; a thing so slight he had
thought it scarcely worth his while even to break it for an hour's
sport. This was what he had deemed her; that she knew.
She accepted the fate at his hands with the submission that was an
integral part of the love she bore him. She had never thought of
equality between herself and him; he might have beaten her, or kicked
her, as a brute his dog, and she would not have resisted nor resented.
To find him, to watch him from a distance, to serve him in any humble
ways she might; to give him his soul's desire, if any barter of her own
soul could purchase it,--this was all she asked. She had told him that
he could have no sins to her, and it had been no empty phrase.
She crouched on his threshold, scarcely daring to breathe lest he should
hear her.
In the dull light of dawn and of the sickly lamp she saw the great
canvas on the trestles that his eyes, without seeing it, yet stared
at;--it was the great picture of the Barabbas, living its completed life
in color: beautiful, fearful, and divine, full of its majesty of godhead
and its mockery of man.
She knew then how the seasons since they had parted had been spent with
him; she knew then, without any telling her in words, how he had given
up all his nights and days, all his scant store of gold, all leisure and
comfort and peace, all hours of summer sunshine and of midnight cold,
all laughter of glad places, and all pleasures of passion or of ease,
to render perfect this one work by which he had elected to make good his
fame or perish.
And she knew that he must have failed; failed always; that spending his
life in one endeavor, circumstance had been stronger than he, and had
baffled him perpetually. She knew that it was still in vain that he gave
his peace and strength and passions, all the golden years of manhood,
and all the dreams and delights of the senses; and that although these
were a treasure which, once spent, came back nevermore to the hands
which scatter them, he had failed to purchase with them, though they
were his all, this sole thing which he besought from the waywardness of
fate.
"I will find a name or a grave," he had said, when they had parted: she,
with the instinct of that supreme love which clung to him with a
faithfulness only equaled by its humility, needed no second look upon
his face to see that no gods had answered him save the gods of
oblivion;--the gods whose pity he rejected and whose divinity he denied.
For to the proud eyes of a man, looking eagle-wise at the far-off sun of
a great ambition, the coming of Thanatos could seem neither as
consolation nor as vengeance, but only as the crowning irony in the
mockery and the futility of life.
The dawn grew into morning.
A day broke full of winds and of showers, with the dark masses of clouds
tossed roughly hither and thither, and the bells of the steeples blown
harshly out of time and tune, and the wet metal roofs glistening through
a steam of rain.
The sleepers wakened of themselves or dreamed on as they might.
She had no memory of them.
She crouched in the gloom on his threshold, watching him.
He sank awhile into profound stupor, sitting there before his canvas,
with his head dropped and his eyelids closed. Then suddenly a shudder
ran through him; he awoke with a start, and shook off the lethargy which
drugged him. He rose slowly to his feet, and looked at the open
shutters, and saw that it was morning.
"Another day--another day!" he muttered, wearily; and he turned from the
Barabbas.
Towards the form on his threshold he had never looked.
She sat without and waited.
Waited--for what? She did not know. She did not dare even to steal to
him and touch his hand with such a timid caress as a beaten dog ventures
to give the hand of the master who has driven it from him.
For even a beaten dog is a creature less humble and timid than a woman
that loves and whose love is rejected.
He took up a palette ready set, and went to a blank space of canvas and
began to cover it with shapes and shadows on the unconscious creative
instinct of the surcharged brain. Faces and foliage, beasts and scrolls,
the heads of gods, the folds of snakes, forms of women rising from
flames and clouds, the flowers of Paradise blossoming amidst the
corruption and tortures of Antenora. All were cast in confusion, wave on
wave, shape on shape, horror with loveliness, air with flame, heaven
with hell, in all the mad tumult of an artist's dreams.
With a curse he flung his brushes from him, and cast himself face
downward on his bed of straw.
The riot of fever was in his blood. Famine, sleepless nights, unnatural
defiance of all passions and all joys, the pestilence rife in the
crowded quarter of the poor,--all these had done their work upon him. He
had breathed in the foul air of plague-stricken places, unconscious of
its peril; he had starved his body, reckless of the flight of time; he
had consumed his manhood in one ceaseless, ruthless, and absorbing
sacrifice; and Nature, whom he had thus outraged, and thought to outrage
with impunity as mere bestial feebleness, took her vengeance on him and
cast him here, and mocked him, crying,--
"A deathless name?--Oh, madman! A little breath on the mouths of men in
all the ages to come?--Oh, fool! Hereafter you cry?--Oh, fool!--heaven
and earth may pass away like a scroll that is burnt into ashes, and the
future you live for may never come--neither for you nor the world. What
you may gain--who shall say? But all you have missed, I know. And no man
shall scorn me--and pass unscathed."
There came an old lame woman by laboriously bearing a load of firewood.
She paused beside the threshold.
"You look yonder," she said, resting her eyes on the stranger crouching
on the threshold. "Are you anything to that man?"
Silence only answered her.
"He has no friends," muttered the cripple. "No human being has ever come
to him; and he has been here many months. He will be mad--very soon. I
have seen it before. Those men do not die. Their bodies are too strong.
But their brains go,--look you. And their brains go, and yet they
live--to fourscore and ten many a time--shut up and manacled like wild
beasts."
Folle-Farine shivered where she crouched in the shadow of the doorway;
she still said nothing.
The crone mumbled on indifferent of answer, and yet pitiful, gazing into
the chamber.
"I have watched him often; he is fair to look at--one is never too old
to care for that. All winter, spring, and summer he has lived so
hard;--so cold too and so silent--painting that strange thing yonder. He
looks like a king--he lives like a beggar. The picture was his god:--see
you. And no doubt he has set his soul on fame--men will. All the world
is mad. One day in the springtime it was sent somewhere--that great
thing yonder on the trestles,--to be seen by the world, no doubt. And
whoever its fate lay with would not see any greatness in it, or else no
eyes would look. It came back as it went. No doubt they knew best;--in
the world. That was in the spring of the year. He has been like this
ever since. Walking most nights;--starving most days;--I think. But he
is always silent."
The speaker raised her wood and went slowly, muttering as she limped
down each steep stair,--
"There must hang a crown of stars I suppose--somewhere--since so many of
them forever try to reach one. But all they ever get here below is a
crown of straws in a madhouse."
"The woman says aright," the voice of Sartorian murmured low against her
ear.
She had forgotten that he was near from the first moment that her eyes
had once more fed themselves upon the face of Arslàn.
"The woman says aright," he echoed, softly. "This man will perish; his
body may not die, but his brain will--surely. And yet for his life you
would give yours?"
She looked up with a gleam of incredulous hope; she was yet so ignorant;
she thought there might yet be ways by which one life could buy
another's from the mercy of earth, from the pity of heaven.
"Ah!" she murmured with a swift soft trembling eagerness. "If the gods
would but remember!--and take me--instead. But they forget--they forget
always."
He smiled.
"Ay, truly, the gods forget. But if you would give yourself to death for
him, why not do a lesser thing?--give your beauty, Folle-Farine?"
A scarlet flush burned her from head to foot. For once she mistook his
meaning. She thought, how could a beauty that he--who perished
there--had scorned, have rarity or grace in those cold eyes, of force or
light enough to lure him from his grave?
The low melody of the voice in her ear flowed on.
"See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has
done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the
highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has
many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness
which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the
failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold:
it is wrong; gold is the war scythe on its chariot, which mows down the
millions of its foes and gives free passage to the sun-coursers, with
which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross
battle-fields of earth."
"You were to give that gold," she muttered, in her throat.
"Nay, not so. I was to set him free: to find his fame or his grave; as
he might. He will soon find one, no doubt. Nay; you would make no bond
with me, Folle-Farine. You scorned my golden pear. Otherwise--how great
they are! That cruel scorn, that burning color, that icelike coldness!
If the world could be brought to see them once aright, the world would
know that no powers greater than these have been among it for many ages.
But who shall force the world to look?--who? It is so deaf, so slow of
foot, so blind, unless the film before its eyes be opened by gold."
He paused and waited.
She watched silent on the threshold there.
The cruel skill of his words cast on her all the weight of this ruin
which they watched.
Her love must needs be weak, her pledge to the gods must needs be but
imperfectly redeemed, since she, who had bade them let her perish in his
stead, recoiled from the lingering living death of any shame, if such
could save him.
The sweet voice of Sartorian murmured on:
"Nay; it were easy. He has many foes. He daunts the world and scourges
it. Men hate him, and thrust him into oblivion. Yet it were easy!--a few
praises to the powerful, a few bribes to the base, and yonder thing once
lifted up in the full light of the world, would make him great--beyond
any man's dispute--forever. I could do it, almost in a day; and he need
never know. But, then, you are not tired, Folle-Farine!"
She writhed from him, as the doe struck to the ground writhes from the
hounds at her throat.
"Kill me!" she muttered. "Will not that serve you? Kill me--and save
him!"
Sartorian smiled.
"Ah! you are but weak, after all, Folle-Farine. You would die for that
man's single sake,--so you say; and yet it is not him whom you love. It
is yourself. If this passion of yours were great and pure, as you say,
would you pause? Could you ask yourself twice if what you think your
shame would not grow noble and pure beyond all honor, being embraced for
his sake? Nay; you are weak, like all your sex. You would die, so you
say. To say it is easy; but to live, that were harder. You will not
sacrifice yourself--so. And yet it were greater far, Folle-Farine, to
endure for his sake in silence one look of his scorn, than to brave, in
visionary phrase, the thrusts of a thousand daggers, the pangs of a
thousand deaths. Kill you! vain words cost but little. But to save him
by sacrifice that he shall never acknowledge; to reach a heroism which
he shall ever regard as a cowardice; to live and see him pass you by in
cold contempt, while in your heart you shut your secret, and know that
you have given him his soul's desire, and saved the genius in him from a
madman's cell and from a pauper's grave--ah! that is beyond you; beyond
any woman, perhaps. And yet your love seemed great enough almost to
reach such a height as this, I thought."
He looked at her once, then turned away.
He left in her soul the barbed sting of remorse. He had made her think
her faith, her love, her strength, her sinless force, were but the
cowardly fruit of cruelest self-love, that dared all things in
words--yet in act failed.
To save him by any martyrdom of her body or her soul, so she had sworn;
yet now!--Suddenly she seemed base to herself, and timorous, and false.
When daybreak came fully over the roofs of the city, it found him
senseless, sightless, dying in a garret: the only freedom that he had
reached was the delirious liberty of the brain, which, in its madness,
casts aside all bonds of time and place and memory and reason.
All the day she watched beside him there, amidst the brazen clangor of
the bells and scream of the rough winds above the roofs.
In the gloom of the place, the burning color of the great canvas of
Jerusalem glowed in its wondrous pomp and power against all the gray,
cold poverty of the wretched place. And the wanton laughed with her
lover on the housetop; and the thief clutched the rolling gold; and the
children lapped the purple stream of the wasted wine; and the throngs
flocked after the thief, whom they had elected for their god; and ever
and again a stray, flickering ray of light flashed from the gloom of the
desolate chamber, and struck upon it till it glowed like flame;--this
mighty parable, whereby the choice of the people was symbolized for all
time; the choice eternal, which never changes, but forever turns from
all diviner life to grovel in the dust before the Beast.
The magnificence of thought, the glory of imagination, the radiance of
color which the canvas held, served only to make more naked, more
barren, more hideous the absolute desolation which reigned around. Not
one grace, not one charm, not one consolation, had been left to the life
of the man who had sacrificed all things to the inexorable tyranny of
his genius. Destitution, in its ghastliest and most bitter meaning, was
alone his recompense and portion. Save a few of the tools and pigments
of his art, and a little opium in a broken glass, there was nothing
there to stand between him and utter famine.
When her eyes had first dwelt upon him lying senseless under the gaze of
the gods, he had not been more absolutely destitute than he was now. The
hard sharp outlines of his fleshless limbs, the sunken temples, the
hollow cheeks, the heavy respiration which spoke each breath a
pang,--all these told their story with an eloquence more cruel than lies
in any words.
He had dared to scourge the world without gold in his hand wherewith to
bribe it to bear his stripes; and the world had been stronger than he,
and had taken its vengeance, and had cast him here powerless.
All the day through she watched beside him--watched the dull mute
suffering of stupor, which was only broken by fierce unconscious words
muttered in the unknown tongue of his birth-country. She could give him
no aid, no food, no succor; she was the slave of the poorest of the
poor; she had not upon her even so much as a copper piece to buy a crust
of bread, a stoup of wine, a little cluster of autumn fruit to cool her
burning lips. She had nothing,--she, who in the world of men had dared
to be strong, and to shut her lips, and to keep her hands clean, and her
feet straight; she, whose soul had been closed against the Red Mouse.
If she had gone down among the dancing throngs, and rioted with them,
and feasted with them, and lived vilely, they would have hung her breast
with gems, and paved her path with gold. That she knew; and she could
have saved him.
Where she kneeled beside his bed she drew his hands against her
heart,--timidly, lest consciousness should come to him and he should
curse her and drive her thence--and laid her lips on them, and bathed
them in the scorching dew of her hot tears, and prayed him to pardon her
if it had been weakness in her,--if it had been feebleness and self-pity
thus to shrink from any abasement, any vileness, any martyrdom, if such
could have done him service.
She did not know; she felt astray and blind and full of guilt. It might
be--so she thought--that it was thus the gods had tested her; thus they
had bade her suffer shame to give him glory; thus they had tried her
strength,--and found her wanting.
Herself, she was so utterly nothing in her own sight, and he was so
utterly all in all; her life was a thing so undesired and so valueless,
and his a thing so great and so measureless in majesty, that it seemed
to her she might have erred in thrusting away infamy, since infamy would
have brought with it gold to serve him.
Dignity, innocence, strength, pride--what right had she to these, what
title had she to claim them--she who had been less than the dust from
her birth upward?
To perish for him anyhow--that was all that she had craved in prayer of
the gods. And she watched him now all through the bitter day; watched
him dying of hunger, of fever, of endless desire, of continual
failure,--and was helpless. More helpless even than she had been when
first she had claimed back his life from Thanatos.
Seven days she watched thus by him amidst the metal clangor of the
bells, amidst the wailing of the autumn winds between the roofs.
She moistened his lips with a little water; it was all he took. A few
times she left him and stole down amidst the people whom she had served,
and was met by a curse from most of them; for they thought that she
tended some unknown fever which she might bring amidst them, so they
drove her back, and would hear naught of her. A few, more pitiful than
the rest, flung her twice or thrice a little broken bread; she took it
eagerly, and fed on it, knowing that she must keep life in her by some
food, or leave him utterly alone. For him she had laid down all pride;
for him she would have kissed the feet of the basest or sued to the
lowest for alms.
And when the people--whose debts to her she had often forgiven, and whom
she had once fancied had borne her a little love--drove her from them
with harshest reviling, she answered nothing, but dropped her head and
turned and crept again up the winding stairs to kneel beside his couch
of straw, and wonder, in the bewildered anguish of her aching brain, if
indeed evil were good,--since evil alone could save him.
Seven days went by; the chimes of the bells blown on the wild autumn
winds in strange bursts of jangled sound; the ceaseless murmur of the
city's crowd surging ever on the silence from the far depths below;
sunrise and moonrise following one another with no change in the
perishing life that she alone guarded, whilst every day the light that
freshly rose upon the world found the picture of the Barabbas, and shone
on the god rejected and the thief adored.
Every night during those seven days the flutelike voice of her tempter
made its hated music on her ear. It asked always,--
"Are you tired, Folle-Farine?"
Her ears were always deaf; her lips were always dumb.
On the eighth night he paused a little longer by her in the gloom.
"He dies there," he said, slowly resting his tranquil, musing gaze upon
the bed of straw. "It is a pity. So little would save him still. A
little wine, a little fruit, a little skill,--his soul's desire when his
sense returns. So little--and he would live, and he would be great; and
the secret sins of the Barabbas would scourge the nations, and the
nations, out of very fear and very shame, would lift their voices loud
and hail him prophet and seer."
Her strength was broken as she heard. She turned and flung herself in
supplication at his feet.
"So little--so little; and you hold your hand!"
Sartorian smiled.
"Nay; you hold your silence, Folle-Farine."
She did not move; her upraised face spoke without words the passion of
her prayer.
"Save him!--save him! So little, so you say; and the gods will not
hear."
"The gods are all dead, Folle-Farine."
"Save him! You are as a god! Save him!"
"I am but a mortal, Folle-Farine. Can I open the gates of the tomb, or
close them?"
"You can save him,--for you have gold."
He smiled still.
"Ah! you learn at last that there is but one god! You have been slow to
believe, Folle-Farine!"
She clung to him; she writhed around him; she kissed with her soilless
lips the base dust at his feet.
"You hold the keys of the world; you can save the life of his body; you
can give him the life of his soul. You are a beast, a devil, a thing
foul and unclean, and without mercy, and cruel as a lie; and therefore
you are the thing that men follow, and worship, and obey. I know!--I
know! You can save him if you will!"
She laughed where she was stretched upon the ground, a laugh that stayed
the smile upon his mouth.
He stooped, and the sweetness of his voice was low and soft as the south
wind.
"I will save him, if you say that you are tired, Folle-Farine."
Where she was stretched face downward at his feet she shuddered, as
though the folds of a snake curled round her, and stifled, and slew her
with a touch.
"I cannot!" she muttered faintly in her throat.
"Then let him die!" he said; and turned away.
Once again he smiled.
The hours passed; she did not move; stretched there, she wrestled with
her agony as the fate-pursued wrestled with their doom on the steps of
the temple, while the dread Eumenides drew round them and
waited--waiting in cold patience for the slow sure end.
She arose and went to his side as a dying beast in the public roadway
under a blow staggers to its feet to breathe its last.
"Let him die!" she muttered, with lips dry as the lips of the dead. "Let
him die!"
Once more the choice was left to her. So men said: and the gods were
dead.
An old man, with a vulture's eyes and bony fingers, and rags that were
plague-stricken with the poisons of filth and of disease, had followed
and looked at her in the doorway, and kicked her where she lay.
"He owes me twenty days for the room," he muttered, while his breath
scorched her throat with the fumes of drink. "A debt is a debt.
To-morrow I will take the canvas; it will do to burn. You shiver?--fool!
If you chose, you could fill this garret with gold this very night. But
you love this man, and so you let him perish while you prate of 'shame.'
Oh-ho! that is a woman!"
He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he
struck his staff upon each stair,--
"The picture will feed the stove; the law will give me that."
She heard and shivered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great
canvas of the Barabbas.
Before another day had come and gone, he would lie in the common ditch
of the poor, and the work of his hand would be withered, as a scroll
withers in a flame.
If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some
deliverance, some mercy--who could say?--might yet be found, she
thought. The gods were dead; but men,--were they all more wanton than
the snake, more cruel than the scorpion?
For the first time in seven days she left his side.
She rose and staggered from the garret, down the stairway, into the
lower stories of the wilderness of wood and stone.
She traced her way blindly to the places she had known. They closed
their doors in haste, and fled from her in terror.
They had heard that she had gone to tend some madman, plague-stricken
with some nameless fever; and those wretched lives to life clung
closely, with a frantic lore.
One woman she stayed, and held with timid, eager bands. Of this woman
she had taken nothing all the summer long in wage for waking her tired
eyes at daybreak.
"Have pity!" she muttered. "You are poor, indeed, I know; but help me.
He dies there!"
The woman shook her off, and shrank.
"Get you gone!" she cried. "My little child will sicken if you breathe
on her!"
The others said the same, some less harshly, some more harshly. Twice or
thrice they added:
"You beg of us, and send the jewels back? Go and be wise. Make your
harvest of gold whilst you can. Reap while you may in the yellow fields
with the sharp, sure sickle of youth!"
Not one among them braved the peril of a touch of pity; not one among
them asked the story of her woe; and when the little children ran to
her, their mothers plucked them back, and cried,--
"Art mad? She is plague-stricken."
She went from them in silence, and left them, and passed out into the
open air.
In all this labyrinth of roofs, in all these human herds, she yet
thought, "Surely there must be some who pity?"
For even yet she was so young; and even yet she knew the world so
little.
She went out into the streets.
Her brain was on fire, and her heart seemed frozen; her lips moved
without sound, and unconsciously shaped the words which night and day
pursued her, "A little gold,--a little gold!"
So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach as Aldebaran,
when it glistened through the storm-wrack of the rain.
Why could he have not been content--she had been--with the rush of the
winds over the plains, the strife of the flood and the hurricane, the
smell of the fruit-hung ways at night, the cool, green shadows of the
summer woods, the courses of the clouds, the rapture of the keen air
blowing from the sea, the flight of a bird over the tossing poppies, the
day-song of the lark? All these were life enough for her; were freedom,
loveliness, companionship, and solace. Ah, God! she thought, if only
these had made the world of his desires likewise. And even in her
ghastlier grief her heart sickened for them in vain anguish as she
went,--these the pure joys of earth and air which were her only
heritage.
She went out into the streets.
It was a night of wind and rain.
The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. Beggars, and thieves,
and harlots jostled her in the narrow ways.
"It must be hell,--the hell of the Christians," she muttered, as she
stood alone on the flints of the roads, in the rancid smell, in the
hideous riot, in the ghastly mirth, in the choking stench, in the thick
steam of the darkness, whose few dull gleams of yellow light served to
show the false red on a harlot's cheek, or the bleeding wound on a
crippled horse, or the reeling dance of a drunkard.
It was the hell of the Christians: in it there was no hope for her.
She moved on with slow unconscious movement of her limbs; her hair blew
back, her eyes had a pitiless wonder in their vacant stare; her
bloodless face had the horror in it that Greek sculptors gave to the
face of those whom a relentless destiny pursued and hunted down; ever
and again she looked back as she went, as though some nameless,
shapeless, unutterable horror were behind her in her steps.
The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted her; when they had any
space to think of her at all.
"A little food, a little wine, for pity's sake," she murmured; for her
own needs she had never asked a crust in charity, but for his,--she
would have kissed the mud from the feet of any creature who would have
had thus much of mercy.
In answer they only mocked her, some struck her in the palm of her
outstretched hand. Some called her by foul names; some seized her with a
drunken laugh, and cursed her as she writhed from their lewd hold; some,
and these often women, whispered to her of the bagnio and the brothel;
some muttered against her as a thief; one, a youth, who gave her the
gentlest answer that she had, murmured in her ear, "A beggar? with that
face? come tarry with me to-night."
She went on through the sulphurous yellow glare, and the poisonous steam
of these human styes, shuddering from the hands that grasped, the voices
that wooed her, the looks that ravished her, the laughs that mocked her.
It was the hell of the Christians: it was a city at midnight; and its
very stones seem to arise and give tongue in her derision and cry, "Oh,
fool, you dreamt of a sacrifice which should be honor; of a death, which
should be release; of a means whereby through you the world should hear
the old songs of the gods? Oh, fool! We are Christians here: and we only
gather the reeds of the river to bruise them and break them, and thrust
them, songless and dead, in the name of our Lord."
She stumbled on through the narrow ways.
After a little space they widened, and the lights multiplied, and
through the rushing rains she saw the gay casements of the houses of
pleasure.
On the gust of wind there came a breath of fragrance from a root of
autumn blossom in a balcony. The old fresh woodland smell smote her as
with a blow; the people in the street looked after her.
"She is mad," they said to one another, and went onward.
She came to a broad place, which even in that night of storm was still a
blaze of fire, and seemed to her to laugh through all its marble mask,
and all its million eyes of golden light. A cruel laugh which mocked and
said,--
"The seven chords of the lyre; who listens, who cares, who has ears to
hear? But the rod of wealth all women kiss, and to its rule all men
crawl; forever. You dreamt to give him immortality?--fool! Give him
gold--give him gold! We are Christians here: and we have but one God."
Under one of the burning cressets of flame there was a slab of stone on
which were piled, bedded in leaves, all red and gold, with pomp of
autumn, the fruits of the vine in great clear pyramids of white and
purple; tossed there so idly in such profusion from the past
vintage-time, that a copper coin or two could buy a feast for half a
score of mouths. Some of the clusters rotted already from their
over-ripeness.
She looked at them with the passionate woeful eyes of a dog mad with
thirst, which can see water and yet cannot reach it. She leaned towards
them, she caught their delicious coldness in her burning hands, she
breathed in their old familiar fragrance with quick convulsive breath.
"He dies there!" she muttered, lifting her face to the eyes of the woman
guarding them. "He dies there; would you give me a little cluster, ever
such a little one, to cool his mouth, for pity's sake?"
The woman thrust her away, and raised, shrill and sharp through all the
clamor of the crowd, the cry of thief.
A score of hands were stretched to seize her, only the fleetness of her
feet saved her. She escaped from them, and as a hare flies to her form,
so she fled to the place whence she came.
She had done all she could; she had made one effort, for his sake; and
all living creatures had repulsed her. None would believe; none would
pity; none would hear. Her last strength was broken, her last faint hope
had failed.
In her utter wretchedness she ceased to wonder, she ceased to revolt,
she accepted the fate which all men told her was her heritage and
portion.
"It was I who was mad," she thought; "so mad, so vain, to dream that I
might ever be chosen as the reed was chosen. If I can save him, anyhow,
what matter, what matter for me?"
She went back to the place where he lay--dying, unless help came to him.
She climbed the stairway, and stole through the foulness and the
darkness of the winding ways, and retraced her steps, and stood upon his
threshold.
She had been absent but one hour; yet already the last, most abject,
most wretched penalty of death had come to him. They robbed him in his
senselessness.
The night was wet. The rain dropped through the roof. The rats fought
on the floor and climbed the walls. The broken lattice blew to and fro
with every gust of wind.
A palsied crone, with ravenous hands, sheared the locks of his fair
hair, muttering, "They will fetch a stoup of brandy; and they would take
them to-morrow in the dead-house."
The old man who owned the garret crammed into a wallet such few things
of metal, or of wood, or of paper as were left in the utter poverty of
the place, muttering, as he gathered the poor shreds of art, "They will
do to burn; they will do to burn. At sunrise I will get help and carry
the great canvas down."
The rats hurried to their holes at the light; the hag let fall her
shears, and fled through an opening in the wall.
The old man looked up and smiled with a ghastly leer upon her in the
shadows.
"To-morrow I will have the great canvas," he said, as he passed out,
bearing his wallet with him. "And the students will give me a silver
bit, for certain, for that fine corpse of his. It will make good work
for their knives and their moulding-clay. And he will be dead
to-morrow;--dead, dead."
And he grinned in her eyes as he passed her. A shiver shook her; she
said nothing; it seemed to her as though she would never speak again.
She set down her lamp, and crossed the chamber, and kneeled beside the
straw that made his bed.
She was quite calm.
She knew that the world gave her one chance--one only. She knew that men
alone reigned, and that the gods were dead.
She flung herself beside him on the straw and wound her arms about him,
and laid his head to rest upon her heart; one moment--he would never
know.
Between them there would be forever silence. He would never know.
Greatness would come to him, and the dominion of gold; and the work of
his hands would pass amidst the treasures of the nations; and he would
live and arise and say, "The desire of my heart is mine;"--and yet he
would never know that one creature had so loved him that she had
perished more horribly than by death to save him.
If he lived to the uttermost years of man, he would never know how, body
and soul, she had passed away to destruction for his sake.
To die with him!
She laughed to think how sweet and calm such sacrifice as that had been.
Amidst the folded lilies, on the white waters, as the moon rose,--she
laughed to think how she had sometimes dreamed to slay herself in such
tender summer peace for him. That was how women perished whom men loved,
and loved enough to die with them, their lips upon each other's to the
last. But she----
Death in peace; sacrifice in honor; a little memory in a human heart; a
little place in a great hereafter; these were things too noble for
her--so they said.
A martyrdom in shame; a life in ignominy--these were all to which she
might aspire--so they said.
Upon his breast women would sink to sleep; among his hair their hands
would wander, and on his mouth their sighs would spend themselves. Shut
in the folded leaves of the unblossomed years some dreams of passion and
some flower of love must lie for him--that she knew.
She loved him with that fierce and envious force which grudged the wind
its privilege to breathe upon his lips, the earth its right to bear his
footsteps, which was forever jealous of the mere echo of his voice,
avaricious of the mere touch of his hand. And when she gave him to the
future, she gave him to other eyes, that would grow blind with passion,
meeting his; to other forms, that would burn with sweetest shame beneath
his gaze; to other lives, whose memories would pass with his to the
great Hereafter, made immortal by his touch: all these she gave, she
knew.
Almost it was stronger than her strength. Almost she yielded to the
desire which burned in her to let him die,--and die there with him,--and
so hold him forever hers, and not the world's; his and none other's in
the eternal union of the grave, so that with hers his beauty should be
consumed, and so that with hers his body should be shut from human
sight, and the same corruption feed together on their hearts.
Almost she yielded; but the greatness of her love was stronger than its
vileness, and its humility was more perfect than its cruelty.
It seemed to her--mad, and bruised, and stunned with her misery--that
for a thing so worthless and loveless and despised as she to suffer
deadliest shame to save a life so great as his was, after all, a fate
more noble than she could have hoped. For her--what could it matter?--a
thing baser than the dust,--whether the feet of men trampled her in
scorn a little more, a little less, before she sank away into the
eternal night wherein all things are equal and all things forgotten.