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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Folle-Farine
+
+Author: Ouida
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2012 [EBook #39745]
+[Last updated: November 24, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLE-FARINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          FOLLE-FARINE.
+
+                            By OUIDA,
+
+    AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "IDALIA," "TRICOTRIN," "PUCK,"
+    "GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," "UNDER TWO FLAGS," ETC.
+
+        "Un gazetier fumeux qui se croit au flambeau
+          Dit au pauvre qu'il a noyé dans les ténèbres:
+        Où donc l'aperçois-tu ce Créateur du Beau?
+          Ce Rédresseur que tu célèbres!"
+
+                                   BAUDELAIRE.
+
+
+    PHILADELPHIA
+    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
+    1871.
+
+    Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by
+
+    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,
+
+    In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
+
+
+
+
+            À
+        LA MÉMOIRE
+         D'INGRES,
+      PEINTRE-POËTE.
+
+
+
+
+FOLLE-FARINE.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from
+the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which
+flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the
+impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment,
+and then is scattered--on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight,
+down in the mud. What matters? who cares?
+
+Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in
+the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere,
+borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to
+lie in a fetid ditch.
+
+Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones,
+grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself
+Love avers that its God does grind the world.
+
+"It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born;
+it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not
+any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it
+is very like you," said the old miller, watching the millstones.
+
+Folle-Farine heard--she had heard a hundred times,--and held her peace.
+
+Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.
+
+As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The
+dust,--sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the
+shred husks and the shattered stalks.
+
+Folle-Farine,--she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from
+between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were
+thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so
+mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.
+
+The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it
+listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it
+died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the
+curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could
+mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with
+it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the
+dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.
+
+In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much
+better dealt with than she was.
+
+"Folle-Farine! Folle--Folle--Folle--Farine!" the other children hooted
+after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her
+bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and
+answered to it as others to their birthnames.
+
+It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, absolutely worthless; the
+very refuse of the winnowings of the flail of fate. But she accepted
+that too, so far as she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a
+dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, the dust had
+its wings while she had none.
+
+All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it liked, through the
+open doors, and among the tossing boughs, and through the fresh cool
+mists, and down the golden shafts of the sunbeams; and all day long she
+stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and then cursed, or
+first cursed and then beaten,--which was all the change that her life
+knew. For herself, she saw no likeness betwixt her and the dust; for
+that escaped from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode under the
+flail, always.
+
+Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew.
+
+The great black wheel churned and circled in the brook water, and
+lichens and ferns and mosses made lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent
+place; the red mill roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer
+leaves; the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their holes in
+the wall; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in many orchards filled
+the air; the great grindstones turned and turned and turned, and the
+dust floated forth to dance with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam.
+
+Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers above the wheel,
+and watched with her thoughtful eyes, and wondered again, after her own
+fashion, why her namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had
+none.
+
+Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness savagely.
+
+"Little devil!" cried the miller, "go fetch me those sacks, and carry
+them within, and pile them; neatly, do you hear? Like the piles of stone
+in the road."
+
+Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedience to the command,
+and went to the heap of sacks that lay outside the mill; small sacks,
+most of them; all of last year's flour.
+
+There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the mill-garden, where
+they were; a tall flower all scarlet and gold, and straight as a palm,
+with bees sucking into its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem.
+She stood a moment looking at its beauty; she was scarce any higher than
+its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, something after its
+fashion. She was a child of six or eight years, with limbs moulded like
+sculpture, and brown as the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half
+savage and half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and straight
+dark brows--the brows of the friezes of Egypt.
+
+Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, knotted around her
+waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure in
+the sun, to a golden-brown color, though in texture it was soft as
+velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep
+grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and purple butterflies
+over her head, an artist would have painted her and called her by a
+score of names, and described for her some mystical or noble fate: as
+Anteros, perhaps, or as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born
+to the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived by
+Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still the earth lay
+black and barren and fruitless, under the ban and curse of a bereaved
+maternity.
+
+But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine; and here she had only to
+labor drearily and stupidly like the cattle of the field; without their
+strength, and with barely so much even as their scanty fare and
+begrudged bed.
+
+The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she had a beauty which
+ripened and grew rich under their warmth, like that of a red flower bud
+or a golden autumn fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes
+that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She was Folle-Farine;
+a little wicked beast that only merited at best a whip and a cruel word,
+a broken crust and a malediction; a thing born of the devil, and out of
+which the devil needed to be scourged incessantly.
+
+The sacks were all small; they were the property of the peasant
+proprietors of the district,--a district of western Normandy. But though
+small they were heavy in proportion to her age and power. She lifted
+one, although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accustomed
+action; poised it on her back, clasped it tight with her round slender
+arms, and carried it slowly through the open door of the mill. That one
+put down upon the bricks, she came for a second,--a third,--a fourth,--a
+fifth,--a sixth, working doggedly, patiently and willingly, as a little
+donkey works.
+
+The sacks were in all sixteen; before the seventh she paused.
+
+It was a hot day in mid-August: she was panting and burning with the
+exertion; the bloom in her cheeks had deepened to scarlet; she stood a
+moment, resting, bathing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall
+tuft of lilies.
+
+The miller looked round where he worked, among his beans and cabbages,
+and saw.
+
+"Little mule! Little beast!" he cried. "Would you be lazy--you!--who
+have no more right to live at all than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad?"
+
+And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught up a piece of rope
+with which he had been about to tie his tall beans to a stake, and he
+struck the child with it. The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling
+round her bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark.
+
+She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted her head and
+looked at him, and dropped her hands to her sides. Her great eyes glowed
+fiercely; her red curling lips shut tight; her straight brows drew
+together.
+
+"Little devil! Will you work now?" said the miller. "Do you think you
+are to stand in the sun and smell at flowers--you? Pouf-f-f!"
+
+Folle-Farine did not move.
+
+"Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute," said the miller. "If you
+stand still a second before they are all housed, you shall have as many
+stripes as there are sacks left untouched. Oh-hè, do you hear?"
+
+She heard, but she did not move.
+
+"Do you hear?" he pursued. "As many strokes as there are sacks, little
+wretch. Now--I will give you three moments to choose. One!"
+
+Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head erect, her arms
+crossed on her chest. A small, slender, bronze-hued, half-nude figure
+among the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of
+the lilies.
+
+"Two!"
+
+She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a
+purple-winged butterfly lighting on her head.
+
+"Three!"
+
+She was still mute; still motionless.
+
+He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted
+the rope.
+
+It curled round her breast and back, again and again and again; she
+shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. He struck her the ten
+times; with the same number of strokes as there remained sacks
+uncarried. He did not exert any great strength, for had he used his
+uttermost he would have killed her, and she was of value to him; but he
+scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the execution of his threat,
+and the rope was soon wet with drops of her bright young blood.
+
+The noonday sun fell golden all around; the deep sweet peace of the
+silent country reigned everywhere; the pigeons fled to and fro in and
+out of their little arched homes; the millstream flowed on, singing a
+pleasant song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low sound on
+the turf; close about was all the radiance of summer flowers; of heavy
+rich roses, of yellow lime tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely
+phlox, and all the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the
+warmth the child shuddered under the scourge; against the light the
+black rope curled like a serpent darting to sting; among the sun-fed
+blossoms there fell a crimson stain.
+
+But never a word had she uttered. She endured to the tenth stroke in
+silence.
+
+He flung the cord aside among the grass. "Daughter of devils!--what
+strength the devil gives!" he muttered.
+
+Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her back bruised and
+lacerated, her eyes still glanced with undaunted scorn and untamed
+passion. Still she said nothing; but, as his hand released her, she
+darted as noiselessly as a lizard to the water's edge, set her foot on
+the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped aloft to the
+highest point, and seated herself astride on that crossbar of black
+timber on which she had been throned when he had summoned her first,
+above the foam of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of
+innumerable leaves.
+
+Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh as the voice of
+a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reckless indifference, a stave of
+song in a language unknown to any of the people of that place; a loud
+fierce air, with broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which
+rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their rebellion, through
+the foliage, and above the sound of the loud mill water.
+
+"It is a chant to the foul fiend," the miller muttered to himself.
+"Well, why does he not come and take his own? he would be welcome to
+it."
+
+And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, and said an ave or two
+over it to exorcise it.
+
+Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed; the stripes on her
+shoulders burned like flame; her little brain was dizzy; her little
+breast was black with bruises; but still she sang on, clutching the
+timber with her hands to keep her from falling into the foam below, and
+flashing her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the leaves.
+
+"Can one never cut the devil out of her?" muttered the miller, going
+back to his work among the beans.
+
+After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice
+despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the
+shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam
+and eddy below.
+
+The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole
+the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great
+lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper
+chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.
+
+The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the
+water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the
+pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned
+on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about
+them.
+
+The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat
+aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.
+
+"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not--no
+supper for you to-night."
+
+Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly,
+her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing
+like the eyes of a wild hawk.
+
+She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through
+the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.
+
+The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean
+as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and
+furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with
+pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of
+saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some
+rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal
+there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old
+serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of
+Normandy.
+
+The miller stayed the child at the threshold.
+
+"Little devil--not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the
+sacks."
+
+Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food on the board,
+past the images of the saints, past the high lancet window, through
+which the moonlight had begun to stream, and out at the opposite door.
+
+There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to which that door had
+opened, pushed aside a little wooden wicket, entered a loft in the roof,
+loosened the single garment that she wore, shook it off from her, and
+plunged into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard mosses
+which served her as a bed. Covered in these, and curled like a dormouse
+in its nest, she clasped her hands above her head and sought to forget
+in sleep her hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both.
+
+Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon it; there was a
+little rudely-sculptured representation of the Nativity; there was a
+wooden figure of St. Christopher; a portrait of the Madonna, and many
+other symbols of the church. But the child went to her bed without a
+prayer on her lips, and with a curse on her head and bruises on her
+body.
+
+Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too hurt and sore to be
+able to lie without pain; the dried grasses, so soft to her usually,
+were like thorns beneath the skin that still swelled and smarted from
+the stripes of the rope. She was feverish; she tossed and turned in
+vain; she suffered too much to be still; she sat up and stared with her
+passionate wistful eyes at the leaves that were swaying against the
+square casement in the wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and
+bright across her bed.
+
+She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the house. They
+were not many: a cat's mew, a mouse's scratch, the click-clack of the
+old woman's step, the shrill monotony of the old man's voice, these were
+all. After awhile even these ceased; the wooden shoes clattered up the
+wooden stairs, the house became quite still; there was only in the
+silence the endless flowing murmur of the water breaking against the
+motionless wheels of the mill.
+
+Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her anything to eat or
+drink. She had heard them muttering their prayers before they went to
+rest, but no hand unlatched her door. She had no disappointment, because
+she had had no hope.
+
+She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in her; but she went
+no further. She did not know what it was to hope. She was only a young
+wild animal, well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed.
+
+As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her nest of grass,
+slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her casement--a small square hole
+in the wall, and merely closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut
+in it scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush of summer
+air met her burning face; a cool cluster of foliage hit her a soft blow
+across the eyes as the wind stirred it. They were enough to allure her.
+
+Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only two instincts--air
+and liberty.
+
+She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the agility that only
+is born of frequent custom, and got upon the shelving thatch of a shed
+that sloped a foot or so below, slid down the roof, and swung herself by
+the jutting bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The housedog, a
+brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about the mill, growled
+and sprang at her; then, seeing who she was, put up his gaunt head and
+licked her face, and turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant
+patrol.
+
+Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and fervently, without
+a word. The mastiff was the only living thing that did not hate her; she
+was grateful, in a passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took
+to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin of the water,
+and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on whose edge the mill-house
+stood.
+
+Once there she was content.
+
+The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees stood thick, the
+pale quivering luminance of the moon, the mystical eerie sounds that
+fill a woodland by night, all which would have had terror for tamer and
+happier creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced
+delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of fear; and she had
+remained too ignorant to have been ever taught it.
+
+It was still warm with all the balmy breath of midsummer; there were
+heavy dews everywhere; here and there, on the surface of the water,
+there gleamed the white closed cups of the lotos; through the air there
+passed, now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird on the
+wing; the wood, whose trees were pines, and limes, and maples, was full
+of a deep dreamy odor; the mosses that clothed many of the branches
+hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies.
+
+Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as in a trance, the
+stillness only broken by some faint note of a sheep's bell, some distant
+song of a mule-driver passing homeward.
+
+The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly soothed and made
+glad, she knew not why, by all the dimness and the fragrance round her.
+
+She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that every now and
+then broke up through the grasses; she felt the dews, shaken off the
+leaves above, fall deliciously upon her face and hair; she filled her
+hands with the night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness
+as though it were milk and honey; she crouched down and watched her own
+eyes look back at her from the dark gliding water of the river.
+
+Then she threw herself on her back upon the mosses--so cool and moist
+that they seemed like balm upon the bruised hot skin--and lay there
+looking upward at the swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the
+stately flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of the swift
+brown bats, at the soft trembling of the foliage in the breeze, at the
+great clouds slowly sailing across the brightness of the moon. All these
+things were vaguely sweet to her--with the sweetness of freedom, of
+love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never
+known: so may the young large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the
+forest in the hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer
+has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no more against
+its flank.
+
+She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a sort of voluptuous
+delight, all movements in the air, all changes in the clouds, all
+shadows in the leaves. All the immense multitude of ephemeral life
+which, unheard in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering
+voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb and under every
+bough around her. The silvery ghostlike wing of an owl touched her
+forehead once. A little dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes
+floated across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint things,
+hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the stars. But none of these
+things had terror for her; they were things of the night, with which she
+felt vaguely the instinct of kinship.
+
+She was only a little wild beast, they said, the offspring of darkness,
+and vileness, and rage and disgrace. And yet, in a vague, imperfect way,
+the glories of the night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its
+melancholy and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her dauntless
+eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and stirred the
+half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some nameless ecstasy, that
+were not merely physical.
+
+And then, in her way, being stung by these, and moved, she knew not why,
+to a strange sad sense of loneliness and shame, and knowing no better
+she prayed.
+
+She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands upon her chest,
+and prayed after the fashion that she had seen men and women and
+children pray at roadside shrines and crosses; prayed aloud, with a
+little beating, breaking heart, like the young child she was.
+
+"O Devil! if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with me; leave me not alone:
+lend me thy strength and power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give
+me this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee always."
+
+She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, faltering
+language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the
+earth and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, while this
+mighty unknown King of the dominion of darkness, whose child she ever
+heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, and reigned afar in some
+great world, oblivious of her misery.
+
+The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of her own voice. She
+waited breathless for some answer, for some revelation, some reply;
+there only came the pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud
+and striking on the waters.
+
+She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the shining course of the
+stream, through the grasses and the mosses and under the boughs, to her
+little nest under the eaves.
+
+As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into the fuller light,
+her bare feet glistening and her shoulders wet with the showers of dew,
+a large dark shape flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon
+the eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept onward lost in
+shade. At that moment, likewise, a radiant golden globe flashed to her
+sight, dropped to her footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten
+from the skies.
+
+It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey; it was but a great
+meteor fading and falling at its due appointed hour; but to the heated,
+savage, dreamy fancy of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing
+of prophecy, a spirit of air; nay, why not Him himself?
+
+In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had ever heard, it had
+been often told her that he took such shapes as this.
+
+"If he should give me his kingdom!" she thought; and her eyes flashed
+alight; her heart swelled; her cheeks burned. The little dim untutored
+brain could not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or sift,
+or measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable, seemed
+to come to her and bathe her in its heat and color. She was his
+offspring, so they all told her; why not, then, also his heir?
+
+She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in those legends
+she had fed on, who was suddenly called from poverty and toil, from
+hunger and fatigue, from a tireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to
+inherit some fairy empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like
+one of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown imperial power
+smite all his poor pale barren life to splendor, so Folle-Farine,
+standing by the water's side in the light of the moon, desolate,
+ignorant, brutelike, felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men.
+If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter now were stripes
+or wounds or woe?
+
+She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair visions in his
+sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, and swung herself upward
+by the tendrils of ivy, and crouched once more down in her nest of
+mosses.
+
+And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or the influence of
+instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, for she fell asleep in her
+little loft in the roof as though she were a thing cherished of heaven
+and earth, and dreamed happily all through the hours of the
+slowly-rising dawn; her bruised body and her languid brain and her
+aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger and passion and
+pain forgotten; with the night-blooming flowers still clasped in her
+hands, and on her closed mouth a smile.
+
+For she dreamed of her Father's Kingdom, a kingdom which no man denies
+to the creature that has beauty and youth, and is poor and yet proud,
+and is of the sex of its mother.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
+there was a little Norman town, very very old, and beautiful exceedingly
+by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous
+galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and
+its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great cathedral,
+noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds,
+and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day,
+so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through
+them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for
+corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the
+wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the
+carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of
+the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of
+carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her
+lover.
+
+All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
+fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
+the fields of colza, where the white bead-dress of the women workers
+flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west were the
+deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's and
+of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the great dim
+stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
+and, whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with
+poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by
+a little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.
+
+A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place; picturesque everywhere; often
+silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
+bells or the chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
+With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
+with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
+traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
+in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
+cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the fruits and flowers in the
+market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
+under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
+opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
+stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg across to her neighbor in
+the other.
+
+Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
+uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
+dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
+but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
+hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
+jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.
+
+But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful
+rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
+the straight lithe form of their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb,
+and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
+dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire and
+the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
+the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
+cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
+white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
+painters, and the wondrous flush of color from mellow fruits and flowers
+glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual
+presence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, through frost
+and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst them, and
+beheld the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the scourged mules
+droop their humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth to
+the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and women pass through
+hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and
+the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years
+come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing
+famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said
+to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo! your God is Love."
+
+This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
+frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
+no harbor of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
+made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
+except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
+eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn, to the use of the great
+cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.
+
+Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
+of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
+and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm gray
+morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
+in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
+over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
+And she would look back often, often as she went; and when all was lost
+in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire that she still saw
+through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
+trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."
+
+But none such ever did come back.
+
+They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
+that the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
+gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
+the next morning, withered and dead.
+
+One among the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of whom
+the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through the
+lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller of
+Yprès.
+
+Yprès was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern outskirt of the town,
+a place of orchards and wooded tangle; through which there ran a branch
+of the brimming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught a
+moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by the grim mill-wheels
+that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The mill-house was
+very ancient; its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of
+shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its frontage was
+of quaint pargeted work, black and white, except where the old
+blazonries had been.
+
+It had been handed down from sire to son of the same race through many
+generations--a race hard, keen, unlearned, superstitious, and
+caustic-tongued--a race wedded to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste
+of life, cruel of judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race
+holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted virtue even
+than those gold and silver pieces which had ever been its passion,
+hidden away in earthen pipkins under old apple-roots, or in the crannies
+of wall timber, or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.
+
+Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, man-begrudging,
+Norman stock, was true to the type and the traditions of his people.
+
+He was too ignorant even to read; but priests do not deem this a fault.
+He was avaricious; but many will honor a miser quicker than a
+spendthrift. He was cruel; but in the market-place he always took heed
+to give his mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay in
+her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no language but that
+of her wistful black eyes; and this is a speech to which men stay but
+little to listen. The shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was
+feared and respected with the respect that fear begets; and in truth he
+had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of it, with scorn for those
+who found it hard to walk less straightly and less circumspectly than
+himself.
+
+He married late; his wife died in childbirth; his daughter grew into the
+perfection of womanhood under the cold, hard, narrow rule of his
+severity and his superstition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love
+as it was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her beyond all
+other things; saved for her, toiled for her, muttered ever that it was
+for her when at confession he related how his measures of flour had
+been falsely weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought by
+the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned: from one to whom
+the good report of his neighbors and the respect of his own conscience
+were as the very breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that
+he could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in his small
+sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips.
+Reprimand, or homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever
+heard from him. She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he
+held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in trembling.
+
+At twenty-two Reine Flamma was the most beautiful woman in Calvados, and
+the most wretched.
+
+She was straight as a pine; cold as snow; graceful as a stem of wheat;
+lovely and silent; with a mute proud face, in which the great blue eyes
+alone glowed with a strange, repressed, speechless passion and
+wishfulness. Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as the lives
+of the many women of her race who, before her, had lived and died in the
+shadow of that water-fed wood had always been. Her father rebuked and
+girded at her, continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the
+spotlessness of this lily, refine even the purity of this virgin gold.
+
+She never answered him anything, nor in anything contradicted his will;
+not one among all the youths and maidens of her birthplace had ever
+heard so much as a murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said
+that such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the
+marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that these dark-blue
+slumbering eyes would have given to any who should have had the skill to
+construe them right. There were none of such skill there; and so, she
+holding her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a curious dumb
+reverence, and said among themselves that the race of Flamma would die
+well and nobly in her.
+
+"A saint!" said the good old gentle bishop of the district, as he
+blessed her one summer evening in her father's house, and rode his mule
+slowly through the pleasant poplar lanes and breeze-blown fields of
+colza back to his little quiet homestead, where he tended his own
+cabbages and garnered his own honey.
+
+Reine Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took his benediction in
+silence.
+
+The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, at daybreak,
+and reciting his paternosters, thanked the Mother of the World that she
+had given him thus strength and power to rear up his motherless daughter
+in purity and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched blouse,
+groped his way down the narrow stair, and went in his daily habit to
+undraw the bolts and unloose the chains of his dwelling.
+
+There was no need that morning for him; the bolts were already back; the
+house-door stood wide open; on the threshold a brown hen perched pluming
+herself; there were the ticking of the clock, the chirming of the birds,
+the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds upon the silence.
+
+He called his daughter's name: there was no answer. He mounted to her
+chamber: it had no tenant. He searched hither and thither, in the house,
+and the stable, and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the
+wood; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he looked in every
+likely and unlikely place: there was no reply.
+
+There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat with his face to the
+south and mourned unceasingly.
+
+And from that day neither he nor any man living there ever heard again
+of Reine Flamma.
+
+Some indeed did notice that at the same time there disappeared from the
+town one who had been there through all that spring and summer. One who
+had lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, and had been
+whispered as an Eastern prince by reason of his scattered gold, his
+unfamiliar tongue, his black-browed, star-eyed, deep-hued beauty, like
+the beauty of the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger
+and Reine Flamma in each other's presence; and the rumor was discredited
+as a foulness absurd and unseemly to be said of a woman whom their
+bishop had called a saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few
+mouths, and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have perished
+in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step on the mill-timber, as
+she went at dawn to feed her doves, or by some strange sad trance of
+sleep-walking, from which she had been known more than once to suffer.
+
+Claudis Flamma said little; it was a wound that bled inwardly. He
+toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bargains, and worked early and
+late with his hireling, and took for the household service an old Norman
+peasant woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he suffered.
+All that he ever said was, "She was a saint: God took her;" and in his
+martyrdom he found a hard pride and a dull consolation.
+
+It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. He believed in
+miracles and all manner of divine interposition, and he believed
+likewise that she, his angel, being too pure for earth, had been taken
+by God's own hand up to the bosom of Mary; and this honor which had
+befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor on his
+cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,
+they cleared from his way as from a prince's, and crossed themselves as
+they changed words with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ.
+
+So six years passed away; and the name of Reine Flamma was almost
+forgotten, but embalmed in memories of religious sanctity, as the dead
+heart of a saint is imbedded in amber and myrrh.
+
+At the close of the sixth year there happened what many said was a thing
+devil-conceived and wrought out by the devil to the shame of a pure
+name, and to the hinderance of the people of God.
+
+One winter's night Claudis Flamma was seated in his kitchen, having
+recently ridden home his mare from the market in the town. The fire
+burned in ancient fashion on the hearth, and it was so bitter without
+that even his parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some
+wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and glowed, and
+shot flame up the wide black shaft of the chimney. The day's work was
+over; the old woman-servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the
+fire; the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the brick
+floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken presses that had been
+the riches of his race for generations, glimmered in the light; the
+doors were barred, the shutters closed; around the house the winds
+howled, and beneath its walls the fretting water hissed.
+
+The miller, overcome with the past cold and present warmth, nodded in
+his wooden settle and slept, and muttered dreamily in his sleep, "A
+saint--a saint!--God took her."
+
+The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook her head, and
+went on with her spinning with lips that moved inaudibly: she had been
+wont to say, out of her taskmaster's hearing, that no woman who was
+beautiful ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old
+creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable hut on the
+other side of the wood, had known more than she had chosen to tell of
+the true fate of Reine Flamma.
+
+Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded through the silence.
+The miller, awakened in a moment, started to his feet and grasped his
+ash staff with one hand, and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the
+trestle. The watch-dog arose, but made no hostile sound.
+
+A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed away faintly; there
+was stillness again; the mastiff went to the bolted door, smelt beneath
+it, and scratched at the panels.
+
+On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beating on the wood
+from without; such a slight fluttering noise as a wounded bird might
+make in striving to rise.
+
+"It is nothing evil," muttered Flamma. "If it were evil the beast would
+not want to have the door opened. It may be some one sick or stray."
+
+All this time he was in a manner charitable, often conquering the
+niggardly instincts of his character to try and save his soul by serving
+the wretched. He was a miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give;
+but since his daughter had been taken to the saints he had striven with
+all his might to do good enough to be taken likewise to that Heavenly
+rest.
+
+Any crust bestowed on the starveling, any bed of straw afforded to the
+tramp, caused him a sharp pang; but since his daughter had been taken he
+had tried to please God by this mortification of his own avarice and
+diminution of his own gains. He could not vanquish the nature that was
+ingrained in him. He would rob the widow of an ephah of wheat, and leave
+his mare famished in her stall, because it was his nature to find in all
+such saving a sweet savor; but he would not turn away a beggar or refuse
+a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, he might turn away from him
+an angel unawares.
+
+The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound outside had ceased.
+
+The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped more firmly the
+ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the stout key, and opened the door
+slowly, and with caution. A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against
+his face; a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent
+stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from head to foot,
+there stood a little child.
+
+The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly welcome. Claudis
+Flamma drew her with a rough grasp across the threshold, and went out
+into the air to find whose footsteps had been those which had trodden
+heavily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was falling fast;
+it was a cloudy moonless night. He did not dare to go many yards from
+his own portals, lest he should fall into some ambush set by robbers.
+The mastiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no danger
+near, so the old man returned, closed the door carefully, drew the bolts
+into their places, and came towards the child, whom the woman Pitchou
+had drawn towards the fire.
+
+She was a child of four or five years old; huddled in coarse linen and
+in a little red garment of fox's skin, and blanched from head to foot,
+for the flakes were frozen on her and on the little hood that covered,
+gypsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike
+figure, but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed great
+beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet berry; the radiance
+and the contrast of it were like the glow of holly fruit thrust out
+from a pile of drifted snow.
+
+The miller shook her by the shoulder.
+
+"Who brought you?"
+
+"Phratos," answered the child, with a stifled sob in her throat.
+
+"And who is that?"
+
+"Phratos," answered the child again.
+
+"Is that a man or a woman?"
+
+The child made no reply; she seemed not to comprehend his meaning. The
+miller shook her again, and some drops of water fell from the ice that
+was dissolving in the warmth.
+
+"Why are you come here?" he asked, impatiently.
+
+She shook her head, as though to say none knew so little of herself as
+she.
+
+"You must have a name," he pursued harshly and in perplexity. "What are
+you called? Who are you?"
+
+The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been fastened on the
+leaping flames, and flashed them upon his in a terror of bewildered
+ignorance--the piteous terror of a stray dog.
+
+"Phratos," she cried once more, and the cry now was half a sigh, half a
+shriek.
+
+Something in that regard pierced him and startled him; he dropped his
+hand off her shoulder, and breathed quickly; the old woman gave a low
+cry, and staring with all her might at the child's small, dark, fierce,
+lovely face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling many
+prayers.
+
+Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by some unseen snake,
+and willing to wreak his vengeance on the nearest thing that was at
+hand.
+
+"Fool! cease your prating!" he muttered, with a brutal oath. "Take the
+animal and search her. Bring me what you find."
+
+Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced his lips tightly,
+and locked his bony hands upon his knees. He knew what blow awaited him;
+he was no coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any iron
+into his soul and tell none that it hurt him.
+
+The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner of the chamber, and
+began to despoil her of her coverings. The creature did not resist; the
+freezing cold and long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids
+were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she had not strength,
+because she had not consciousness enough, to oppose whatsoever they
+might choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they
+had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, like those in a
+netted animal's impatient but untamed regard.
+
+Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her of her warm
+fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her little rough hempen shirt,
+which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow.
+
+The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom on it; it had been
+tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent,
+showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,
+but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the
+long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees.
+
+She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of
+homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor,
+either from amazement or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never
+spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and
+who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner
+of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of
+glittering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they
+were, and seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes.
+
+The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to
+guard them--fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin
+she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman on her
+side strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched
+out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought--fought
+with all the breath and the blood that were in her tiny body.
+
+She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip
+of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden
+away in a hole in the wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant
+hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles
+that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes.
+
+They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters,
+chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a
+diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them removed in
+perfect silence; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the
+battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as
+though disdainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in
+her eyes, and smouldered there like a half-stifled fire--it burned on
+and on for many a long year afterwards, unquenched.
+
+When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would
+neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall,--mute.
+
+"Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen
+them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the
+stars rose, and as Reine Flamma listened to the voice that wooed her to
+her destruction.
+
+She let the child be, and searched her soaked garments for any written
+word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's
+skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it to
+her master.
+
+Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the
+light of the lamp.
+
+He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the characters his tough
+frame trembled, and his withered skin grew red with a sickly, feverish
+quickening of the blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had
+been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible
+than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which
+the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her
+being almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a moment,
+watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet
+seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the
+fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden
+swooning sense seized him for the first time in all his life; his limbs
+failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped for breath; he
+needed not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature,
+whom he had believed so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of
+her youth, was----
+
+His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were
+filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own
+mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and
+glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands
+wildly together in the air, and cried aloud:
+
+"She was a saint, I said--a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I
+thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!"
+
+And he laughed aloud--thrice.
+
+The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as
+a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death,
+startled by that horrible mirth, came forward.
+
+The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered
+like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her
+little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking
+its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and
+burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same face ere then in
+Calvados.
+
+She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and
+discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the hearth,
+and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little
+dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not
+what.
+
+He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a
+sound. The blood flowed from her mouth.
+
+He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more.
+
+"She was a saint!--a saint! And the devil begot in her _that_!"
+
+Then he went out across the threshold and into the night, with the
+letter still clinched in his hand.
+
+The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered with ice and
+water; he took no heed, but passed through it, his head bare and his
+eyes blind.
+
+The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+All night long he was absent.
+
+The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature
+could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised
+the little wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet
+bed; restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she had
+knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly,
+as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even
+pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also
+had guessed the message of that unread letter.
+
+The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and
+was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough
+nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,
+tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually
+on the unknown name of Phratos.
+
+The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known
+the true story of that disappearance which some had called death and
+some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent
+brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves,
+that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.
+
+"She is his sure enough," she muttered. "He was the first with Reine
+Flamma. I wonder has he been the last."
+
+And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at
+any evil thought.
+
+The mastiff stayed beside the child.
+
+She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her
+spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.
+
+She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the
+past which her master and her townfolk had never held, it all seemed
+natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it
+was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.
+
+The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in
+the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman
+slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused
+her.
+
+She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led
+that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which
+the human animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine;
+put to what use she might be--to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a
+pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a
+prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a
+preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but
+she did not care: all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough to
+eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat
+at night.
+
+The night went on, and passed away: one gleam of dawn shone through a
+round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun
+arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth.
+
+She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and
+tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She
+drew it slowly open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been
+for some time morning.
+
+The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all
+the branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid
+mill-stream; in one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the
+bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even
+in its famished impatience.
+
+Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her
+master there.
+
+Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared
+to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting
+wood; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would
+have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly,
+giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod
+ankle deep in snow, and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.
+
+He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and called him by his
+name; he started, and raised his head and looked at her.
+
+Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon
+his face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather-beaten always, but it was
+livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage
+look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man
+recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the
+living world.
+
+The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her old
+blunt, dogged fashion,--
+
+"Is she to stay?"
+
+Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know
+if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her
+kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.
+
+He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make,
+held fast, yet striving to essay a death-grip; then he checked himself,
+and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and
+went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to
+venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this,
+fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his
+soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atonement.
+
+So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her
+fire, and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to
+boil, and muttered all the while,--
+
+"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."
+
+And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.
+
+Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis
+Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no
+utterance could be ever got.
+
+But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Yprès
+from that time thenceforward.
+
+Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these
+begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate
+and scorn, which did not cease but rather grew with time.
+
+The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the last that she
+received from him by many; and whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she
+showed it, not as children do, but rather like some chained and untamed
+animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the
+more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the
+people among whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one full of
+round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them.
+
+For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he
+let her lead the same life that was led by the brutes that crawled in
+the timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw.
+The woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals
+as she chose; she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the
+fire warmth reached; she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under
+the roof; so much she could do and no more.
+
+After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest
+had been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had
+never made a moan, nor sought for any solace.
+
+All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with
+her arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest;
+they were both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words
+oftentimes; they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one
+another.
+
+The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that
+was cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body
+almost motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless,
+wounded, frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual
+slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the
+bear, with the spring she awakened.
+
+When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this
+creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked
+limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she
+came. He set his teeth, and answered ever:
+
+"The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma."
+
+The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more;
+and they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to
+press it on him, or even to ask him whether his daughter were with the
+living or the dead.
+
+With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the
+frost-bound waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose
+under the shadows of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did
+hers. For she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the
+silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was
+her teacher, out into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young
+blossoming world, where the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers
+and the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where she could
+stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and
+steep her limbs in the coolness of waters, and bathe her aching feet in
+the moisture of rain-filled grasses.
+
+With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,
+incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the
+earth and the air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant,
+passionate gladness.
+
+She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year
+the people from more distant places who rode their mules down to the
+mill on their various errands stared at this child, and wondered among
+themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.
+
+He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:
+
+"The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a
+saint--Reine Flamma."
+
+And he never added more. To tell the truth, the horrible, biting,
+burning, loathsome truth, was a penance that he had set to himself, and
+from which he never wavered.
+
+They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors, and all feared
+his scourging tongue. But when they went away, and gossiped among
+themselves by the wayside well or under the awnings of the
+market-stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they had
+thought long ago; the creature had been no better than her kind; and
+they had never credited the fable that God had taken her, though they
+had humored the miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old
+woman, a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from the
+fishing village with a creel upon her back and the smell of the sea
+about her rags, heard, standing in the market-place, and laughed, and
+mocked them, these seers who were so wise after the years had gone, and
+when the truth was clear.
+
+"You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with a grin upon her face.
+"Oh, yes! you were so wise! Who said seven years through that Reine
+Flamma was a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who
+hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said that the devil had
+more to do with her than the good God, and that the black-browed gypsy,
+with jewels for eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to
+whom she gave herself? Oh-hè, you were so wise!"
+
+So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well
+knowing that indeed no creature among them had ever been esteemed so
+pure, so chaste, and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's
+daughter.
+
+Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled eyes," and saw those
+brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face
+of the child whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in
+shame whilst they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be
+said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger had been the fiend
+himself, taking human shape for the destruction of one pure soul, and
+the mocking of all true children of the church.
+
+Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote,
+ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a
+living power, traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not
+seldom triumphing: of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them
+was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at
+will shapes grotesque or awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers
+had beheld him; why not they?
+
+So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers and tanners, the
+fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the peasant proprietors from the
+country round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young
+child at Yprès as a devil-born thing. "She was hell-begotten," they
+would mutter when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and
+avoid her if they could.
+
+The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been
+permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry
+for it; the world, they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed
+like torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such treats were
+forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that, thought within
+themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it was mistaken
+mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth
+by fire of such as she.
+
+In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the
+country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which
+followed there were mildew and sickness everywhere; in the summer there
+was a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and
+great suffering and scarcity.
+
+There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to
+the advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their
+huts and homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this
+offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.
+
+Since, however, the time was past when the broad market-place could have
+been filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the gray
+cathedral have grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living
+body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and said these things
+only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding
+their children to consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the
+other side of the road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel,
+they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with her as their
+fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote--"only."
+
+Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's dulled brain awakened,
+and all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she
+found herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of
+mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the devil!" she heard again and
+again muttered as they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this
+repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her
+imputed origin.
+
+It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-daring, and
+all-enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts,
+her supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health.
+Perfect of shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of
+hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no knowledge, but
+with unerring instinct.
+
+She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their
+mother's arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother,
+and she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a
+young fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to
+starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by
+slaughter.
+
+She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took blows uncomplainingly,
+and as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.
+
+"The child of the devil!" they said. In a dumb, half-unconscious
+fashion, this five-year-old creature wondered sometimes why the devil
+had not been good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and
+veins that would not bleed.
+
+She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here;
+she thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have
+their mother's kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.
+
+Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. She was to him a
+thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin;
+but he did what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily; he fed
+her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came
+naturally to his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from
+idleness; he beat her when she did not, and not seldom when she did,
+them. He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a stick to her
+without mercy.
+
+After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to
+fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was
+right to abhor the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of
+utter darkness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul,
+begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal tempter.
+
+He never questioned her as to her past--that short past, like the span
+of an insect's life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions,
+with instincts, with desires, even with memories,--in a word, with
+character:--a character he could neither change nor break; a thing
+formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.
+
+He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set
+her hard tasks of bodily labor which she did not dispute, but
+accomplished so far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged
+patience, half ferocity, half passiveness.
+
+In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle-Farine;
+taking the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most
+despised thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and
+the name adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever
+known.
+
+Folle-Farine!--as one may say, the Dust.
+
+In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she
+began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled
+her first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French
+about her.
+
+Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a
+certain wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never
+have looked for them, never have believed in them. She was devil-born:
+she was of devil nature: in his eyes.
+
+Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would sometimes gather,
+and receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born
+stainless out of corruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.
+Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into
+his orchard, and said:
+
+"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out
+sweetness and honey? Fool!--as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the
+blossom."
+
+And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not a blank; it was
+indeed filled to overflowing with pictures that her tongue could not
+have told of, even had she spoken the language of the people amidst whom
+she had been cast.
+
+A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down that bitter
+night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of color,
+broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech
+woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise of
+torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown mountain-streams
+rushing broad and angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful
+by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock; and still
+shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and mules' bells that
+rang drowsily through leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the
+clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes; and high blue
+crests of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to the divinest
+flush of rose and amber with the setting of the sun.
+
+This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as the splendors of a
+dream of Paradise rest on the brain of some young sleeper wakening in
+squalor, cold, and pain. But the people of the place she had been
+brought to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and her
+strange, imperfect trills of song; and she could not tell them that this
+land had been no realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the
+forest region of the Liebana.
+
+Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had made their camp.
+They were a score in all; they held themselves one of the noblest
+branches of their wide family; they were people with pure Eastern blood
+in them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in their
+forms and postures.
+
+They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle; they stopped the mules
+in the passes, and lightened their load of wine-skins: they entered the
+posada, when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil
+question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like a
+threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn out of the
+girdle. They were low thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose
+livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and plundering nights;
+yet they were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of the
+East, and they wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.
+
+They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old three-stringed
+viols; and when their women danced on the sward by moonlight, under the
+broken shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines
+above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining sequins that bound
+their heavy hair, the muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar,
+shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him in his childhood by
+his grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to revelry, at
+midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom.
+
+Among them was a man yet more handsome than the rest, taller and lither
+still; wondrous at leaping and wrestling, and all athletic things;
+surest of any to win a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at
+a blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a single glance of
+his terrible eyes.
+
+His name was Taric.
+
+He had left them often to wander by himself into many countries, and at
+times when, by talent or by terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play
+the fool to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where credulity
+and luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his own
+phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right
+royally whilst his gains lasted.
+
+Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead the common, roving,
+thieving life of his friends and brethren, till the fit of ambition or
+the run of luck were again on him. Then his people would afresh lose
+sight of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in some
+painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome him ragged, famished, and
+footweary, on their own sunburnt sierras.
+
+And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them; and they made him
+welcome whenever he returned, and never quarreled with him for his
+faithlessness; but if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or
+keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always say--"Let Taric
+lead."
+
+One day their camp was made in a gorge under the great shadows of the
+Picos da Europa, a place that they loved much, and settled in often,
+finding the chestnut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the
+heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for
+feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long absence, suddenly
+standing, dark and mighty, between them and the light, as they lay
+around their soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.
+
+"There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the great cork-tree,
+against the bridge," he said to them. "Go to her some of you."
+
+And, with a look to the women which singled out two for the errand, he
+stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, and helped himself to the
+soup, and lay quiet, vouchsafing them never a word, but playing
+meaningly with the knife handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw that
+some of the men were about to oppose his share of a common meal which he
+had not earned by a common right.
+
+It was Taric--a name of some terror came to their fierce souls.
+
+Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored of them all;
+Taric, who had slain the bull that all the matadors had failed to daunt;
+Taric, who had torn up the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a
+flood, as easily as a child plucks up a reed; Taric, who had stopped the
+fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and cut the man's throat
+with no more ado than a butcher slits a lamb's.
+
+So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the fire and of the
+broth, and of the thin red wine.
+
+Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quità and Zarâ, went on their quest, and
+found things as he had said.
+
+Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long and damp, and the
+wood grew thickly, and an old rude bridge of unhewn blocks of rock
+spanned, with one arch, the river as it rushed downward from its
+limestone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just born.
+
+Quità looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by any chance, any
+gold or jewels might be on her; there were none. There was only an ivory
+cross on her chest, which Quità drew off and hid. Quità covered her with
+a few boughs and left her.
+
+Zarâ wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, and held it warm in
+her breast, and hastened to the camp with it.
+
+"She is dead, Taric," said Quità, meaning the woman she had left.
+
+He nodded his handsome head.
+
+"This is yours, Taric?" said Zarâ, meaning the child she held.
+
+He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and stretched himself.
+
+"What shall we do with her?" asked Quità.
+
+"Let her lie there," he answered her.
+
+"What shall we do with it?" asked Zarâ.
+
+He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown throat in a
+significant gesture.
+
+Zarâ said no word to him, but she went away with the child under some
+branches, on which was hung a tattered piece of awning, orange striped,
+that marked her own especial resting-place.
+
+Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, advanced, and looked
+Taric full in the eyes.
+
+"Has the woman died by foul means?"
+
+Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace him, answered him
+without offense, and with a savage candor,--
+
+"No--that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look at her if
+you like. I loved her well enough while she lived. But what does that
+matter? She is dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries."
+
+"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her body?"
+
+Taric laughed.
+
+"There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her if you choose,
+Phratos."
+
+"I will," the other answered him; and he took his way to the cork-tree
+by the bridge.
+
+The man who spoke was called Phratos.
+
+He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a mutual love for a
+life that wandered always, and was to no man responsible, and needed no
+roof-tree, and wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild
+with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather than to
+eat the good things of the earth in submission and in durance.
+
+He had not their physical perfection: an accident at his birth had made
+his spine misshapen, and his gait halting. His features would have been
+grotesque in their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and
+the gay archness of the mouth.
+
+Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face and form, Phratos
+alone was deformed and unlovely; and yet both deformity and unloveliness
+were in a way poetic and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin garments,
+knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and with his thick tangled
+hair falling down on his shoulders, they were rather the deformity of
+the brake-haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr,
+than those of a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the temper
+of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers, he loved music, and
+could make it, in all its innumerable sighs and songs, give a voice to
+all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and the woodlands;
+and for many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other things
+he forever laughed and was glad.
+
+Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight
+in his wits, yet his kin honored him.
+
+For he could draw music from the rude strings of his old viol that
+surpassed their own melodies as far as the shining of the sun on the
+summits of the Europa surpassed the trembling of the little lamps under
+the painted roadside Cavaries.
+
+He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy moved him, by a bright
+fountain at a noonday halt, under the ruined arches of a Saracenic
+temple, before the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a cool
+shadowy court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a balcony at
+night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for
+a moment from the darkness through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he
+played in suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and dogs
+still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their eyes with their
+hands, and think of old dead times, when they played and prayed at their
+mothers' knees.
+
+And his music had so spoken to himself that, although true to his tribe
+and all their traditions, loving the vagrant life in the open air, and
+being incapable of pursuing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew,
+neither tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and
+candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none could turn
+him; living on such scant gains as were thrown to him for his music from
+balconies and posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and
+towns through which he passed, and making a handful of pulse and a slice
+of melon, a couch of leaves and a draught of water, suffice to him for
+his few and simple wants.
+
+His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning their race by taking
+payment in lieu of making thefts; and they mocked him often, and taunted
+him, though in a manner they all loved him,--the reckless and
+blood-stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never quarrel
+with them, neither would he give over his strange ways which so incensed
+them, and with time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like
+other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way
+unmolested and without contradiction.
+
+If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they would have missed
+his music sorely; that music which awoke them at break of day soaring up
+through their roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the
+skies.
+
+Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off the boughs, and looked
+at her. She was quite dead. She had died where she had first sunk down,
+unable to reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green nook on
+the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the entrance of that narrow
+gorge in which the encampment had been made.
+
+The face, which was white and young, lay upward, with the shadows of the
+flickering foliage on it; and the eyes, which Quità had not closed, were
+large and blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had
+got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers and stray golden
+leaves twisted in it.
+
+Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.
+
+He could imagine her history.
+
+Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought many a one thus to share
+his fierce free life for a little space, and then drift away out of it
+by chance, or be driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken
+away like this one by death.
+
+In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It was written in a
+tongue he did not know. He held it awhile, thinking, then he folded it
+up and put it in his girdle,--it might be of use, who could tell? There
+was the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke up, and
+Zarâ left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the last butterflies of
+the fading summer, which was in all likelihood all she would do.
+
+Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had looked long enough at
+the dead creature, he turned to the tools he had brought with him, and
+set patiently to make her grave.
+
+He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, and his infirmity
+made all manual toil painful to him. His task was hard, even though the
+earth was so soft from recent heavy rains.
+
+The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it was quite
+nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. When the grave was ready
+he filled it carefully with the golden leaves that had fallen, and the
+thick many-colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpet.
+
+Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest shroud, and, with
+the moss like a winding-sheet between it and the earth which had to fall
+on it, he committed the dead woman to her resting-place.
+
+It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her there.
+
+He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest-tree and by a
+mountain-stream seemed the most natural rest at last that any creature
+could desire or claim. No rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of
+any neglect, cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in
+her loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of the wild
+roe as a requiem.
+
+Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was on him, bohemian
+though he was, as he took up his mattock and turned away, and went
+backward down the gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain
+and sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and
+the flush of the autumn, and the wildness of the winter, when the
+swollen stream should sweep above her tomb, and the famished beasts of
+the hills would lift up their voices around it.
+
+When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric.
+
+Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being able to
+understand the character, looked at it and read it through by the light
+of the flaming wood. When he had done so he tossed it behind, in among
+the boughs, in scorn.
+
+"The poor fool's prayer to the brute that she hated!" he said, with a
+scoff.
+
+Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it.
+
+In a later time he found some one who could decipher it for him.
+
+It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at Yprès, telling him
+the brief story of her fatal passion, and imploring from him mercy to
+her unborn child should it survive her and be ever taken to him.
+
+Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness and the meanness
+of her father's character; she only remembered that he had loved her,
+and had deemed her pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no
+word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred that Claudis
+Flamma had been other than a man much wronged and loving much, patient
+of heart, and without blame in his simple life.
+
+Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought it might some day
+save her offspring. This old man's vengeance could not, he thought, be
+so cruel to the child as might be the curse and the knife of Taric.
+
+"She must have been beautiful?" said Phratos to him, after awhile, that
+night; "and you care no more for her than that."
+
+Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the flame and made his
+answer:
+
+"There will be as good grapes on the vines next year as any we gathered
+this. What does it signify?--she was only a woman.
+
+"She loved me; she thought me a god, a devil, a prince, a chief,--all
+manner of things;--the people thought so too. She was sick of her life.
+She was sick of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the market.
+She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a saint. When a woman
+is young and has beauty, it is dull to be worshiped--in that way.
+
+"I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun was setting. I do not
+know why I cared for her--I did. She was like a tall white lily; these
+women of ours are only great tawny sunflowers.
+
+"She was pure and straight of life; she believed in heaven and hell; she
+was innocent as the child unborn; it was tempting to kill all that. It
+is so easy to kill it when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion
+and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She came with me,--after
+a struggle, a hard one. I kept her loyally while the gold lasted; that I
+swear. I took her to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and
+silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her; that I swear.
+
+"But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and wept in secret, and
+at times I caught her praying to the white cross which she wore on her
+breast. That made me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said
+anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that made me more mad.
+
+"Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things one by one. Not
+that she minded that, she would have sold her soul for me. We wandered
+north and south; and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking
+a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel off one of their
+dolls in their churches; and I wanted to get rid of her, and I could not
+tell how. I had not the heart to kill her outright.
+
+"But she never said a rough word, you know, and that makes a man mad.
+Maddalena or Kara or Rachel--any of them--would have flown and struck a
+knife at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have been blows
+and furious words and bloodshed; and then we should have kissed, and
+been lovers again, fast and fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only
+looks at you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her,--what is
+one to do?
+
+"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate
+berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk.
+Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway
+or on the plains, and I did not,--one is so foolish sometimes for sake
+of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,--I may have said
+so, perhaps; I do not remember.
+
+"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on
+the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I
+thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she
+fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as
+it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who
+would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his
+cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even
+show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone--for I tried to make
+her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we
+could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw
+her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the
+sun set----"
+
+His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and
+drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat
+of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from
+his heart,--truthfully.
+
+Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.
+
+He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and
+of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the
+earth-clogged mosses.
+
+"The child lives?" he said at length.
+
+Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp
+through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.
+
+"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.
+
+And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the
+nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.
+
+That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zarâ,
+who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves,
+strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.
+
+"The child lives still?" he asked.
+
+Zarâ nodded her head.
+
+"You will try and keep it alive?" he pursued.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What is the use? Taric would rather it were dead."
+
+"What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it will not hinder him.
+A child more or less with us, what is it? Only a draught of goat's milk
+or a handful of meal. So little; it cannot be felt. You have a child of
+your own, Zarâ; you cared for it?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, with a sudden softening gleam of her bright savage
+eyes.
+
+She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his naked limbs on the
+sward with joy at Phratos's music.
+
+"Then have pity on this motherless creature," said Phratos, wooingly. "I
+buried that dead woman; and her eyes, though there was no sight in them,
+still seemed to pray to mine--and to pray for her child. Be merciful,
+Zarâ. Let the child have the warmth of your arms and the defense of your
+strength. Be merciful, Zarâ; and your seed shall multiply and increase
+tenfold, and shall be stately and strong, and shall spread as the
+branches of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury in vain,
+and beneath which all things of the earth can find refuge. For never was
+a woman's pity fruitless, nor the fair deeds of her days without
+recompense."
+
+Zarâ listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive words stole on
+her ear like music. Like the rest of her people, she half believed in
+him as a seer and prophet; her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile.
+
+"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you
+fancy."
+
+And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn
+night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had
+been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky
+fir-needles.
+
+"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our
+people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien
+creature to her bosom.
+
+"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the
+sleeping face of her own son.
+
+Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and
+soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the
+forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the
+only payment in his power.
+
+Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half
+touched, half angered.
+
+"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played
+once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead
+woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat
+together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.
+
+For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours'
+span was rejected as unworthy and despised.
+
+Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and
+nevertheless, the child grew and throve.
+
+The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along
+the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely
+losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy
+peaks of the Europa.
+
+He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning
+some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to
+distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the
+woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.
+
+His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the defense
+of Phratos.
+
+Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as
+the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at
+her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the
+weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in
+time to come, she--who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on
+the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples--might bring him a
+fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its
+weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.
+
+Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his
+leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay
+asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.
+
+Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he
+left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the
+Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children.
+Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana;
+for besides them there was Phratos.
+
+Phratos never abandoned her.
+
+Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zarâ's tent there was misery very
+often.
+
+Zarâ had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a
+besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and
+blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children,
+brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs,
+and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin
+round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and
+slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in
+another like young bears.
+
+But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of
+their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood,
+was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they
+wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but
+left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to
+wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there
+were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males
+when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern
+bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was
+Phratos.
+
+Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes
+had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.
+
+Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or
+died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in
+the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the
+northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for
+his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as
+she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the
+gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of
+hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in
+gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.
+
+When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he
+who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which
+the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze
+unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry
+and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge
+broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones
+for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and
+the mulberry.
+
+When the sons of Zarâ had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the
+tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew
+thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter
+seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging
+boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard
+from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths
+cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen
+shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the
+steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the
+flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than
+her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half
+pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to
+pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was
+the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his
+tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.
+
+Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of
+Taric had entered her sixth year.
+
+She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its
+higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild
+as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the
+postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the
+fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage,
+to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to
+him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given
+her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the
+peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green
+woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they
+took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over
+their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a
+round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.
+
+In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed
+fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the
+children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana
+she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free--free to lie
+in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things
+of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under
+the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to
+climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the
+snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in
+dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.
+
+One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more
+than two years.
+
+He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and
+form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and
+in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of
+subtle ferocity new to them.
+
+His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence, the passions,
+the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy--who had retained all
+the vices of his race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living,
+and of endurance under hardship--the gall of a sharp poverty had become
+unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and wine, and boastful
+brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.
+
+The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liebana; in one of
+its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and coursed
+through by a headlong hill-stream that spread itself into darkling
+breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy
+lilies and a tangled web of water-plants.
+
+He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their camp-fire lit
+beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was welcomed, and fed, and
+plied with such as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and
+incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through all their
+quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle and the
+most faithless, of them all.
+
+He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.
+
+When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in
+the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at
+play.
+
+"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They showed her to
+him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough of ash; the
+pool beneath mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without
+words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced
+above her in the leaves.
+
+"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.
+
+"In her own fashion,--as a flower in the wind," Phratos answered him,
+with a smile; and, willing to woo for her the good graces of her father,
+he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the
+child.
+
+She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a
+fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if she
+stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of
+liquor.
+
+Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was, danced.
+
+But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed
+theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide
+her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds
+sing and the young kids gambol.
+
+Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardor beyond
+her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the fire-glow,
+the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air,
+like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never still, never
+ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet always with
+a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.
+
+Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she
+dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean
+flight.
+
+"She will do," he muttered.
+
+"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.
+
+Taric laughed.
+
+"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he answered.
+
+Phratos said nothing, but he heard.
+
+After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of
+their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if
+they should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood
+partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a
+watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.
+
+Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the
+stars were clear in midnight skies, the woman Zarâ stole out of her tent
+to him.
+
+"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice. "You want the child
+killed?"
+
+Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.
+
+"Not I; what should I gain?"
+
+"What is it you want, then, with her?"
+
+"I mean to take her, that is all. See here--a month ago, on the other
+side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was at a wineshop,
+hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with him who danced to his
+music, and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who anticked like
+a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal of silver. We got friends, he
+and I. At the week's end the brat died: some sickness of the throat,
+they said. Her master tore his hair and raved; the little wretch was
+worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he would give twelve
+gold pieces. He shall have her. She will dance for him and me; there is
+plenty to be made in that way. The women are fools over a handsome
+child; they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her away
+before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven days, by starving and
+giving the stick. She will dance while she is a child. Later on--there
+are the theaters; she will be strong and handsome, and in the great
+cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I shall take
+her away by sunrise."
+
+"To sell her?"
+
+The hard fierce heart of Zarâ rebelled against him; she had no
+tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray
+child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her
+race were roused against him by his words.
+
+Taric laughed again.
+
+"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing-dog of her for the peasants'
+pastime; and in time she will make dancing-dogs of the nobles and the
+princes for her own sport. It is a brave life--none better."
+
+The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his
+child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less
+offended the instincts and prejudices of her clan.
+
+"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.
+
+"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say--or do? The little
+beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it refuse to
+pipe when we play for it, I will."
+
+The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left
+him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a
+right to do what he chose with his own. So went and lay down among her
+brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.
+
+Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,
+lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with
+fresh boughs of resinous wood.
+
+When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his
+slumber was one not easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and
+threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a
+dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was Phratos.
+
+He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and
+the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a thing
+for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than
+to turn him aside from his purpose.
+
+"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he stood there,
+and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with self-reproach for a
+crime.
+
+He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he
+went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the
+skins of Zarâ's tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams
+slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the woman,
+sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her litter
+of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the
+entrance, the slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric.
+
+She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.
+
+"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the stifled cry died
+on her lips.
+
+He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the
+curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.
+Her eyes had closed again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy
+with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing
+that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold
+feared nothing.
+
+Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a
+half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his dreams
+with the knife that was thrust in his waistband.
+
+Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of
+the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over which
+the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro
+its chain. No one heard him.
+
+He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,
+carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her
+hair there were still the sequins. They glittered in the white light as
+he went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his
+shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from them.
+
+"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.
+
+"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was content and slept
+again--the strings of the viol sending a soft whisper in her drowsy ear,
+each time that the breeze arose and swept across them.
+
+When the morning came it found him far on his road, leaving behind him
+the Liebana.
+
+There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as
+she had never been.
+
+They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills
+and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were
+never weary. They rode aloft whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he
+weary, for the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the
+sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+It was late in the year.
+
+The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and
+gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer
+fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been
+gathered in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of
+good humor.
+
+Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad
+market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper
+coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust
+for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but
+moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.
+
+He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and her feet
+were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of
+hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood
+and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half
+leafless, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid
+in soft gold mists of vapor; and saw all these as in a dream, herself
+borne high in air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar
+fraternity of the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content,
+like a mole or a dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never
+hungry nor cold; no one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.
+
+It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was
+nearly always on foot.
+
+Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some
+straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of vegetables,
+that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the marshy
+lands, or the poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as a rule
+he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and
+shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which
+he traveled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his
+garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced child who ran
+by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.
+
+"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of those
+shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.
+
+She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy
+tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance
+that they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter
+Phratos's hand--half terrified, half triumphant.
+
+The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet
+glories of the south and of the west, their red leafage and purple
+flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level
+pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the
+northerly lands.
+
+The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped
+them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,
+ethereal as vapor; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that
+seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green
+cultivated hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds
+seemed never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed
+with leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow
+and obscure with vapor. These were for what they exchanged the pomp of
+dying foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the
+mistral, the odors of the nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of
+the aloes and olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network
+against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich southwest.
+
+The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, and disquieted; but
+she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.
+
+She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly
+fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild
+shapes of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted
+with age. But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had
+supreme faith in Phratos.
+
+One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and
+hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a
+little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and
+roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the
+poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.
+
+The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice
+choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied
+air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;
+through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and
+the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their
+rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the
+night in a heavy snowstorm.
+
+Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot
+drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the
+wood and the mill of Yprès.
+
+They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of
+Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.
+
+He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little
+town along a road by the river towards the country.
+
+"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in
+his voice.
+
+The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out
+the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but
+she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."
+
+They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a
+dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the
+mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense
+silence.
+
+He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a
+garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not
+closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked
+to him--a houseless wanderer from his youth up--strangely warm and safe
+and still.
+
+An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span,
+on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs
+smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of
+the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves;
+from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of
+onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and
+carved wood.
+
+He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be
+sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell
+that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal
+selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other
+souls in eternal damnation.
+
+He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what
+the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.
+
+"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and
+prosperous, and alone by their fireside."
+
+It seemed that they must be so.
+
+Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.
+
+His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and
+to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the
+hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who
+was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and
+often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a
+woman-child,--and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as
+Taric.
+
+To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his
+tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,
+wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found
+him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way
+to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to
+place her with her mother's people.
+
+She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at
+the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.
+
+He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the
+letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.
+
+"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant
+fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle,
+and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come
+and see how it fares with thee."
+
+Her small hands tightened upon his.
+
+"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the
+gypsy children.
+
+There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and
+the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos.
+She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being
+thrust into the cage,--not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid
+of it and rebelling by instinct.
+
+He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the
+first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's
+foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for
+neither caresses nor compassion--knowing well that to the love-child of
+Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last
+could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.
+
+"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on
+the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the
+child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low
+entrance-place.
+
+Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood
+into the gloom and the storm of the night.
+
+He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her
+evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the
+peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust,
+and disdain.
+
+"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he
+faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with her--let it be
+well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair
+where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be
+hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a
+far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."
+
+And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to
+him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the
+vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he
+had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the
+future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much
+in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that
+was possible to him.
+
+Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though
+he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the
+clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise
+with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into
+the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for
+evermore.
+
+"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague
+remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.
+
+But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which
+forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in
+all the many years that came.
+
+For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,
+lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and
+wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert,
+on which no single star-ray shone.
+
+The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of
+snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen
+in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All
+lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the
+tempest of the winds.
+
+The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.
+Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow.
+Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a
+strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the
+silence and then died again.
+
+At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in
+the great colorless waste.
+
+But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face
+again.
+
+"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew
+their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their
+saints that they were safe beneath a roof.
+
+He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the
+blast.
+
+A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a
+hundred times he failed; and moved only round and round vainly, never
+escaping the maze of the endless white fields.
+
+Now the night was long, and he was weakly.
+
+In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the
+cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered
+on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his
+foot as he passed her.
+
+"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger But the lad lives--save
+him."
+
+And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat rattled, and she
+died.
+
+The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.
+
+Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and
+worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at
+the driving snow.
+
+Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had
+nearly covered the body of his mother.
+
+All around were the fields. There was no light, except from the lantern
+on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The stillness
+was intense. The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from
+the sound of them.
+
+The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his
+limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,
+struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and then
+he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a shallow
+pool of ice.
+
+At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could
+bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold
+upon the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes
+beating on him.
+
+"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she was a
+beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him. Neither could she ever
+bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.
+
+He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it and
+folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew
+the little body away under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and
+wrapped it closely round, and left it there.
+
+It was all that he could do.
+
+Then, with no defense between him and the driving cold, he strove once
+more to find his road.
+
+It was quite dark; quite still.
+
+The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was patchless as the sea.
+
+He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and bruised yet holds
+its way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience. His veins were
+frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge; a
+sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.
+
+He knew well what it meant.
+
+He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;
+and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose
+laughter he would fain have heard.
+
+He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers
+had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and dumb:
+it only sighed in answer.
+
+He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and put it
+in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.
+
+Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple, and cold to
+the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.
+
+There was no light anywhere.
+
+The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands stretched all around
+him; where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light
+could penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only
+sound that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some
+perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.
+
+But what he saw and what he heard were not these going barefoot and
+blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the
+golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness
+of flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the
+swift feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in
+the desolate courts of old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons
+shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea.
+
+These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know,
+and sleep conquered him; he dropped down on the white earth noiselessly
+and powerlessly as a leaf sinks; the snow fell and covered him.
+
+When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor in the fields,
+while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both
+his body and the child's.
+
+The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter of the sheepskin:
+Phratos was dead.
+
+The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him so that his life
+was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives
+the stricken deer.
+
+"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there,
+and the snow kept him.
+
+His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their
+children.
+
+But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the
+viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.
+
+And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never
+again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and
+never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the
+tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the
+birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps
+cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.
+
+An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very
+bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by
+one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand
+pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen
+years instead of ninety were at work on them.
+
+When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a
+slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his
+hammer aside, took off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its
+heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black
+crust and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry.
+
+The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no
+rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the
+air, with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds
+were mute and invisible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious
+shadow, swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the
+roofing of broad chestnut leaves.
+
+The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless
+poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The fields were all ablaze
+around on every side with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the
+scarlet flame of innumerable poppies.
+
+Here and there they were broken by some little house, white or black, or
+painted in bright colors, which lifted up among its leaves a little
+tower like a sugar-loaf, or a black gable, and a pointed arch beneath
+it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless
+in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with fruits ruby red,
+some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.
+
+Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords,
+where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient
+picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.
+
+The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score
+of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all
+long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.
+
+He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread;
+he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the
+dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky,
+the air and the landscape: why not?
+
+They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him,
+and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and
+bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.
+
+He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his
+hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were
+cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the
+gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue
+piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and
+his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.
+
+His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time--a
+time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the
+sun.
+
+With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the
+lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to
+kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and
+because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all
+that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a
+thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so
+intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray
+and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in
+its humanity.
+
+For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White
+Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;
+the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"
+
+He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour
+was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;
+when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses, served also
+to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the
+child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the
+juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the
+bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat
+here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of
+the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him,
+because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed
+God and died.
+
+Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering
+sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road
+a girl.
+
+She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight
+and supple as one who passed her life on the open lands and was abroad
+in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless
+measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia;
+she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs
+were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor
+of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country,
+but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket,
+filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a mass of color and of
+blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes,
+blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the
+sun.
+
+She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that
+were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.
+Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet
+as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one
+another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep
+it--until death.
+
+As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which
+for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,
+and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.
+
+She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,
+small and even, like rows of cowry shells.
+
+"You are well, Marcellin?"
+
+The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own
+keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and
+absorbed retrospection will lend.
+
+"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know
+that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"
+
+"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"
+
+She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a
+voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any
+peasantry.
+
+She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk
+of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.
+
+"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said
+curtly.
+
+Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.
+
+He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her
+head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk
+that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed
+nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her
+made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was
+fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a
+galley-slave.
+
+The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.
+
+"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not
+understand."
+
+The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.
+
+"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that
+a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may be shot as
+it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to
+grace a rich man's table. You see?"
+
+She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but
+barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy
+track of a metaphorical utterance.
+
+But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face
+again.
+
+"The 'possible,' then, is only--the worse?" she said slowly.
+
+The old man smiled still grimly.
+
+"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will
+give--one day--the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and
+the lark's power to sing _Laus Deo_ in heaven. _I_ do not say--they do."
+
+"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable
+curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was
+unfathomable and mute.
+
+"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that
+priests hold the gifts of it?"
+
+Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance
+fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.
+
+"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have
+beauty: the devil will give you one."
+
+"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of
+the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that
+is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.
+
+"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of
+men."
+
+His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood
+leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless
+and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.
+
+"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do
+they, then, so hate me?"
+
+The old man stroked his beard.
+
+"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe
+him."
+
+She mused over the saying; silent still.
+
+The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air,
+mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against
+the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which
+flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the
+shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.
+
+Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.
+
+"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'----"
+
+"When it means Death," she added.
+
+The old man took his pipe back and smoked.
+
+"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."
+
+Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the luster of her
+eyes.
+
+"But the lark praised God--why should it be so dealt with?"
+
+Marcellin smiled grimly.
+
+"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the steel."
+
+She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons
+born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied
+had been Cain.
+
+At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and
+through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of
+scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not
+from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that
+burned on the hillside.
+
+There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from
+it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber
+wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew
+larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green
+water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.
+
+It was a procession of the Church.
+
+It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it
+approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his
+head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest
+against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.
+
+The Church passed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and
+the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains
+and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing
+children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of
+the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells
+ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.
+
+The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a
+choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit
+air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and
+pierced through the noonday silence.
+
+It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were
+choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old
+man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting
+eyelids.
+
+"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.
+"Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded eyes."
+
+Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.
+
+The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
+
+"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and
+to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."
+
+The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and
+winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens
+for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the
+priests prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and
+the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the
+grasses and the bright butterfly dead in the dust.
+
+The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids;
+the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a
+little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of
+defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the
+wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.
+
+"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one
+fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little,
+white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the
+sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.
+
+"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a
+handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow
+to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village
+chapel.
+
+And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched
+more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they
+went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of
+darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because
+they had thus passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their
+lips, with the cross as their symbol.
+
+So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of
+sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the river,
+into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the
+great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then
+rose and sang the "Angelus."
+
+Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under
+the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored
+God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of
+harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.
+
+The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;
+and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears,
+dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:--"We have had
+no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to
+dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We had never such droughts
+as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell
+was among us."
+
+For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the
+earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were
+dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to
+few men to know--a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and
+delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams;
+a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers
+blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid,
+unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out
+of an air that was death, off an earth that was hell.
+
+When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had
+seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he
+had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had
+been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of
+Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he
+had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had been his
+playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had
+beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within
+king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,
+and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white
+beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats
+that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had
+his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and
+all women martyrs or furies.
+
+And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed him
+by cursed him, saying,--
+
+"This man slew a king."
+
+For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red
+at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for
+in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so
+deadly as age.
+
+Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the
+Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the
+fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full
+crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all
+around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once
+looked his eyes rested there.
+
+She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among
+the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had
+seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the
+red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as
+the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the
+land.
+
+The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;
+above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple;
+around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as
+gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders,
+blue and black from the marks of a thong.
+
+He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a
+look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the
+same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he
+hated.
+
+"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put
+her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.
+
+"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be
+hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.
+
+"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"
+
+She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.
+
+"Who beat you?" he pursued.
+
+A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.
+
+"Flamma."
+
+"You were wicked?"
+
+"They said so."
+
+"And what do you do when you are beaten?"
+
+"I shut my mouth."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be glad."
+
+Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen,
+passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was
+shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.
+
+"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret
+and the ache out of your bruises."
+
+The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first
+creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of
+his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only
+those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on
+their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling
+and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped
+hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and
+passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a
+curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she
+had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading
+cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched
+down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway--a
+hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old
+republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in
+solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without
+content.
+
+He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with
+water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand
+was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with
+carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh,
+from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his
+only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of
+woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried
+life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with
+greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.
+
+"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold.
+The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and
+timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a
+blow.
+
+"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human
+thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after
+her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the
+poppies.
+
+"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child,
+who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it
+seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom--which they
+called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises;
+and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.
+
+"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red
+poppies.
+
+And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved
+to one another, being outcasts from all others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to
+wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed
+stillness--a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand
+sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old
+dead centuries.
+
+On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual
+chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population.
+The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of
+mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt
+smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own
+tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by
+the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers
+had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to
+adhere.
+
+But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the
+peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at
+their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned
+into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place
+was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely
+a dog asleep in the sun.
+
+When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and
+donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily
+avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were
+put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy
+choristers and the little children put their white linen and their
+scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and
+sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to
+their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to
+their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the
+poor flies they killed in the sun.
+
+The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy
+silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places
+about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons
+dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken
+carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of
+lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.
+
+Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,
+there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the
+wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.
+
+She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her
+burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched
+out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.
+
+The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a
+moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that
+spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall--an ancient well, with a
+stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone
+running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved
+loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its
+service.
+
+She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick
+green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain,
+she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it
+again and again thirstily.
+
+The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered
+limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many
+feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket
+which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries,
+melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had
+not taken even one to freshen her dry mouth.
+
+Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, and drank it, and
+steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone bench,
+with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round limbs
+full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther.
+
+The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing
+movement of water, possess an ineffable charm for natures that are
+passion-tossed, feverish, and full of storm.
+
+There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise
+for her, in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the lichen-grown
+walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the clusters of
+delicate carvings beneath and below; in the sculptured frieze where
+little nests that the birds had made in the spring still rested; in the
+dense brooding thickness of the boughs that brought the sweetness and
+the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled town.
+
+She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,
+a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her guerdon.
+
+As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters
+opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high,
+fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap that are the female
+note of that especial town.
+
+The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,
+shrieked shrilly to her son,--
+
+"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is drinking the
+blest water!"
+
+The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the little garden behind
+his house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of
+the cathedral, that overshadowed it.
+
+He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man, though
+stout and strong.
+
+The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable
+sanctity attached to it.
+
+According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at
+the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St.
+Jerome, who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, and dwelt for awhile near the cathedral, working at the
+honorable trade of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles
+throughout the district.
+
+It was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the
+fountain, and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day in full
+faith and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and
+purified of bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry
+flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and drank; to the
+benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to that of their souls and
+bodies.
+
+Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified spring.
+
+"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child of hell! How durst
+you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God struck water from the
+stone for such as you?"
+
+Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her
+audacious eyes and laughed; then tossed her head again and plunged it
+into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the
+rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.
+
+The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,
+shrieked aloud:
+
+"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint the gift
+of God with lips of the devil!"
+
+And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the
+other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her
+head in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her
+lofty headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, screamed to him
+to show he was a man, and have no mercy.
+
+As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow across her,
+Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her
+beautiful fierce face.
+
+She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift
+movement from its hold, and, catching his head under her left arm,
+rained blows on him from his own weapon, with a sudden gust of
+breathless rage which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular
+limbs the strength and the force of man.
+
+Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung him from
+her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of the
+court, caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the
+water over him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word,
+walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the
+carriage of her bare limbs and the folds of her ragged garments, bearing
+the empty osier basket on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the
+screams of the sacristan and his mother.
+
+In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were
+sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old
+woman's voice remained unheard.
+
+The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their
+niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog
+aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out
+into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living
+creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open
+country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of
+the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace
+shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.
+
+She laughed a little as she saw.
+
+"They will not come after _me_," she said to herself. "They are too
+afraid of the devil."
+
+She judged rightly; they did not come.
+
+She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in
+the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat
+prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling
+heap of refuse.
+
+The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed
+like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.
+
+The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed
+motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing
+of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles
+of the cathedral.
+
+Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked
+streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,
+twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its
+only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of
+timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and
+grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing
+beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to
+be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and
+honesty to a noble offspring.
+
+The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound
+that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique
+mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.
+
+In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and
+color.
+
+The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted
+pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow
+casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and
+rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail,
+which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a
+little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the
+sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.
+
+From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the
+rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.
+
+She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her
+amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to
+Folle-Farine,--
+
+"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"
+
+Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.
+
+"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things
+had a fascination for her.
+
+This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she
+looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down
+through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral
+windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands
+full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the
+laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she
+passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the
+things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had
+no part or likeness.
+
+She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the
+jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above
+in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins
+shaking in her yellow tresses.
+
+"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy
+nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and
+fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your
+father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good
+things?"
+
+"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him
+endlessly with breathless prayer?
+
+"Will he not? Wait a year--wait a year."
+
+"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.
+
+"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."
+
+"He hears you."
+
+The fair woman above laughed:
+
+"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."
+
+And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the
+rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but
+a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.
+
+"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you
+witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if
+you stare so."
+
+Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart.
+That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a
+time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only
+mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.
+
+The street was dark for her like all the others now.
+
+The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the
+vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.
+
+"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the
+thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.
+
+Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head
+dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.
+
+She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and
+usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But
+from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden
+leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of
+light might wander even to her.
+
+She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,
+where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts
+and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.
+
+The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,
+the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the
+fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen
+were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the
+scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.
+
+Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and
+there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The
+cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers;
+the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.
+
+At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a
+spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.
+
+Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty,
+and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins,
+keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.
+
+The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.
+
+A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of
+wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its
+garden.
+
+Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on
+her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from
+under the tower of her high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a
+student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a
+beard yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her
+white wrist as he caught the red flower.
+
+Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and a
+nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?
+
+Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a
+sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall twisted
+stone chimneys, and a beurré pear covering with branch and bloom its old
+gray walls.
+
+An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and a young one was
+sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing gayly as she
+swept.
+
+"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to look tenderly
+at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the sycamore leaves
+were playing.
+
+The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee-bowl.
+
+"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."
+
+She was happy though she was blind.
+
+Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of
+honeysuckle.
+
+"How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear your voice like
+that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and the
+corn, half softened, half enraged.
+
+Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or
+take gladness in her life? Or was she greater than they because all
+human delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?
+
+Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between the yellowing seas
+of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, over which a swarm of bees was
+murmuring, there came a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her
+heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails
+as she went to the herds on the hillside.
+
+She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half
+asleep, with his curly head against her breast. As she passed, the woman
+drew her kerchief over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the
+child.
+
+"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered. "Her look
+withered Rémy's little limb."
+
+And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she
+should tread a separate pathway through the clover, and did not brush
+the garments of the one she was compelled to pass.
+
+Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.
+
+She knew of what the woman was thinking.
+
+In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the
+western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in
+haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,
+hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard
+his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and
+looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.
+
+But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had
+stepped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his
+left leg at the knee. The limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled
+by a tendency to disease, had never been restored, but hung limp,
+crooked, useless, withered from below the knee.
+
+Through all the country side the little cripple, Rémy, creeping out into
+the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out in a passionate pity as the
+object of her sorcery, the victim of her vengeance. When she had heard
+what they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing together her
+straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.
+
+All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant covered the boy's
+face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud and swept on
+through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic
+movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or the
+antelope, singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the
+sigh of the wind, which were all the language that lingered in her
+memory from the land that had seen her birth.
+
+To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of
+even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the
+community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription
+without wonder and without resistance.
+
+Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth hold?
+
+In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of
+Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
+and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.
+
+Few of the people could read and fewer still could write. They knew
+nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to
+believe. They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock
+crew: they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and
+to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood
+that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the
+best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins.
+
+Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though
+their lives were content and mirthful, and the most part pious. They
+went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to
+pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with
+which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and chanting
+dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows.
+
+The beauty and the faith of the old Mediæval life were with them still;
+and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty
+likewise. They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest,
+and among themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of
+color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless
+communism and characterless monotony of modern cities.
+
+But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their
+beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in
+legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
+superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
+and at their hearths.
+
+Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable
+against her, and thought that in being so they did their duty.
+
+They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
+Flamma race; the strong poetic veneration of their forefathers, which
+had symbolized itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or
+buttress in their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a
+weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in their blood;
+the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.
+
+Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open
+square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in
+brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the
+cross, and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism
+of the sword in the red days of revolution.
+
+They were the same people still: industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,
+wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of
+heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with
+the brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this
+outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.
+
+When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,
+mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift among
+strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly
+tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends
+with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the
+mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around her in the
+glad green world of summer.
+
+But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;
+at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into
+terror. She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than
+understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her
+own kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures
+of the fields and the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and
+the water.
+
+"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed the youths in the
+market-place against her as the little child went among them, carrying a
+load for her grandsire heavier than her arms knew how to bear.
+
+"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the old man himself, as
+she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of his storehouses,
+carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to
+need such convoy.
+
+"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the six-year-old
+infants at play by the river when she waded in amidst them to reach with
+her lither arm the far-off water-flowers they were too timorous to
+pluck, and tender it to the one who had desired it.
+
+"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight after thou hadst
+laid hands on her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick as she went
+near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad dockleaf
+the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.
+
+So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away when she tried to do
+good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute,
+callous, isolated.
+
+There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so tender of
+heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonized, that had
+compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad
+gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the
+noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of the lamb, in
+the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she
+had sympathy and she had example.
+
+She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they were sinless,
+diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of base masters; loving
+greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten, overtasked, slaughtered.
+
+She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter
+hatred.
+
+So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in
+a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.
+
+The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had termed
+heavenward; but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would
+have none of them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had
+availed; she would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they
+would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit
+herself to their religion.
+
+As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned
+her to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the
+whole province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or
+known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an
+exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the bypaths
+of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.
+
+Where had she learnt these?
+
+They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.
+
+Who had he been?
+
+Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in its
+dimness.
+
+She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,
+nor in what land they had dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on
+her remembrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be known again; a
+life odorous with bursting fruits and budding flowers; full of strangest
+and of sweetest music; spent forever under green leaves and suns that
+had no setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding forests;
+forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the measure of deep winds and
+drifting clouds.
+
+For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the
+old gypsy life of the Liebana remained with her only as some stray
+fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now
+an exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature,
+in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her
+anguish of vain desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds
+than those amidst which she toiled. At times she remembered likewise the
+songs and the melodies of Phratos; remembered them when the moon rays
+swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, or the breath of spring
+stole through the awakening woods; and when she remembered them she
+wept--wept bitterly, where none could look on her.
+
+She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a
+human form and was now dead in an earthly grave; her memory of him was
+of some nameless creature, half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter
+and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice
+forever singing; clad in goat's hair, and gigantic and gay; a creature
+that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice,
+that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep
+under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft
+sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth,
+or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to
+spare the bare feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an
+empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her
+memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the
+Piræus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of
+mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars,
+to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.
+
+This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the
+priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful
+scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though
+she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.
+
+She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on
+her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert
+women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.
+
+She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily
+tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much
+knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a
+future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words;
+hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.
+
+Yet for all that she sang;--sang because the vitality in her made her
+dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her
+glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the
+soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly
+cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze,
+the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.
+
+Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was
+breaking stones.
+
+His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and
+hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust
+was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the
+people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet
+to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot
+unbroken azure of the skies.
+
+Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one
+another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly;
+when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one
+hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any
+proscription overlong.
+
+The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a
+curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who
+had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to
+believe that he had served hell.
+
+With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people
+had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each
+other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love
+between them.
+
+"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed
+him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.
+
+"The birds in cage sing," she answered him. "But, think you they are
+glad?"
+
+"Are they not?"
+
+She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
+and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
+straying over into the corn beyond.
+
+"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the great south
+road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people, no doubt,
+were gone to labor in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
+wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
+his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
+drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
+torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
+crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall. His song
+was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle
+was glad?"
+
+"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a
+monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.
+
+"I took the cage down and opened the door."
+
+"And he?"
+
+"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
+where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running;
+and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
+the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among
+the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"
+
+"And what do you mean by that?"
+
+Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
+herself, but it was beyond her to express it.
+
+All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy
+was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and
+too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into
+metaphor or deduction.
+
+The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he
+had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was
+not gladness, and neither was silence pain.
+
+Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also
+knew.
+
+"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the
+cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing
+sound of the falling hammer.
+
+A smile curled her lips.
+
+"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done
+wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their
+thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."
+
+"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh
+lean face.
+
+He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and
+left.
+
+"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept
+over her.
+
+"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could
+not understand it in connection with herself.
+
+A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working
+her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice
+tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the
+open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was
+a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her
+child at her breast.
+
+She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a
+beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to
+fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope,
+neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious
+hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.
+
+"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You
+might be a man worth something; but a woman!--a thing that has no
+medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the
+hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into
+the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which
+will you do in the future?"
+
+"What?"
+
+She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures
+round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their
+peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's
+nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a
+future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant
+to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low
+lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.
+
+She had one desire, indeed--a desire vague but yet fierce--the desire
+for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had
+known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind
+was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of
+hope she knew nothing.
+
+The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He
+smiled with a certain bitter pity.
+
+"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But
+yet----"
+
+Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of
+her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as
+great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew
+that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its
+hand the tender of at least one future--one election, one kingdom, one
+destiny.
+
+"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"
+
+Marcellin smiled bitterly.
+
+"Many will love you, doubtless--as the wasp loves the peach that he
+kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"
+
+She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in
+the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which
+it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she
+now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.
+
+"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she
+said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves
+the peach?"
+
+Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,--
+
+"Wait!"
+
+She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her
+thoughts--strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as
+incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.
+
+"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not,
+and that is to come--is it so?"
+
+"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old
+man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses
+in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and
+yet a thing that one sees always--sees even when one lies a-dying, they
+say--for men are fools."
+
+Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of
+her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching
+a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the
+hot, pale, sickly dust.
+
+"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded
+insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."
+
+Marcellin smiled.
+
+"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish
+things, called poets, do."
+
+"What is a poet?"
+
+"A foolish thing, I tell you--mad enough to believe that men will care
+to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who
+never looks and never listens."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others,
+and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the
+simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat
+quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by
+the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the
+dawn.
+
+"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most
+often. I seem to remember, when I dream--so much! so much!"
+
+"Remember--what should you remember? You were but a baby when they
+brought you hither."
+
+"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdom--in the
+devil's kingdom. Why not?"
+
+Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all
+through all our lives hanker to get back to it.
+
+"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."
+
+"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a
+woman."
+
+"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no
+fitness with herself.
+
+A woman!--she!--a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned,
+and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!
+
+"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and
+wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty
+years. I remember the woman that they say bore you--Reine Flamma. She
+was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She
+wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot
+of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away
+her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God
+never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard--and
+replied."
+
+"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"
+
+Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and
+strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.
+
+"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his
+following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.
+That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul,
+striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.
+The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the
+world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like
+the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the
+shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets,
+where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It
+is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is
+perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to
+itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the
+trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor,
+yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in
+distress--since of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest--comes to
+the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards
+the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet
+passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in
+its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems
+divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made
+the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its
+weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its
+cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."
+
+He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint
+stones.
+
+She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike
+eyes dilated.
+
+In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he
+had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a
+raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare
+times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the
+unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her,
+but to no other.
+
+Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to
+the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of
+purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though
+she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb
+unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.
+
+"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.
+
+He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now,
+freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove
+in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.
+
+"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes,
+and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and
+in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill
+it--with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soul--no more."
+
+She freed it from his hand.
+
+"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much power,
+why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you
+always?"
+
+"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand years--since the
+world began--without an answer. Because the law of all creation is
+cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always the breath of
+life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and lives again
+in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little. The worms
+destroy; the grasses nourish. Few great men do more than the first, or
+do as much as the last."
+
+"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his parable; "it is
+two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way you pay for it with
+your body. Begone."
+
+She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and
+yet she knew, in a vague way, that he cared for her; moreover, she
+rejoiced in that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man
+amidst them, held all men.
+
+His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its
+natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of
+knowledge--something, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from
+sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in
+idiocy or in self-murder.
+
+She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight
+white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her
+home.
+
+There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth had the faint
+light of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it
+never seemed possible to her that her fate could be other than it was,
+since so long the messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had
+been silent and leaden-footed to her call.
+
+Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two mouths that day
+bidden her "wait"?
+
+She entered at length the little wood of Yprès, and heard that rush and
+music of the deep mill water which was the sole thing she had learned to
+love in all the place.
+
+Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered
+Claudis Flamma back full recompense for all the toil they cost
+him--recompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that poverty
+which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on him. Both
+were now rich in all their maturer abundance, since the stream which
+rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long
+drought so severely felt in all other districts.
+
+The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit; the great
+pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny orange heaps; little
+russet-breasted bullfinches beat their wings vainly at the fine network
+that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall apricots; a gray cat was
+stealing among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a
+round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous
+dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown
+and white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny
+summer joys.
+
+Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower-garden stretched,
+spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of
+lichens; and the earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden
+gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the deep-blue lupins,
+and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green slender stems and the pure
+white cups of the virginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with
+their purple tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites
+drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet glad garden
+world, the butterflies, purple and jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby
+dress, the dainty azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled
+wasp with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his
+pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising,
+praising, rejoicing.
+
+The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow,
+where the river tumbled down in two or three short breaks and leaps
+which broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a
+sheet of dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of
+the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.
+
+The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the old fashion when men
+builded their dwellings slowly and for love; common with all its
+countless carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque
+human likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the
+green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep shelving eaves
+bright with diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day
+with curling swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.
+
+It was beautiful; and the heart of Reine Flamma's young daughter
+doubtless would have clung to it with all a child's instinct of love and
+loyalty to its home had it not been to her only a prison-house wherein
+three bitter jailers forever ruled her with a rod of iron--bigotry and
+penury and cruelty.
+
+She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the long grass under a
+mulberry-tree, ere she went in to give her account of the fruit sold and
+the moneys brought by her.
+
+She had been on foot since four o'clock in the dawn of that sultry day;
+her only meal had been a bowl of cold milk and a hunch of dry bread
+crushed in her strong small teeth. She had toiled hard at such bodily
+labor as was set to her; to domestic work, to the work of the distaff
+and spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had never been able to
+break her; they had found that she would be beaten black and blue ere
+she would be bound to it; but against open air exertion she had never
+rebelled, and she had in her all the strength and the swiftness of the
+nomadic race of the Liebana, and had not their indolence and their
+dishonesty.
+
+She was very hungry, she was again thirsty; yet she did not break off a
+fruit from any bough about her; she did not steep her hot lips in any
+one of the cool juicy apricots which studded the stones of the wall
+beyond her.
+
+No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in that dim dead time
+when Phratos had closed her small hands in his whenever they had
+stretched out to some forbidden thing, and had said, "Take the goods the
+gods give thee, but steal not from men." And yet honest she was, by
+reason of the fierce proud savage independence in her, and her dim
+memories of that sole friend loved and lost.
+
+She wanted many a thing, many a time--nay, nearly every hour that she
+lived, she wanted those sheer necessaries which make life endurable; but
+she had taught herself to do without them rather than owe them, by
+prayer or by plunder, to that human race which she hated, and to which
+she always doubted her own kinship.
+
+Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the bodily delights of
+rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet odors; the scent of the fruits and
+flowers was heavy on the air; the fall of the water made a familiar
+tempestuous music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though
+deadened by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by the tender
+tones of the numberless birds that sang about her.
+
+"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
+the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
+birds float from blossom to blossom.
+
+For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pantheistic instinct
+of the divine age, when the world was young, to behold a sentient
+consciousness in every leaf unfolded to the light; to see a soul in
+every created thing the day shines on; to feel the presence of an
+eternal life in every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows; in
+every flame that lifts itself to heaven; in every bell that vibrates on
+the air; in every moth that soars to reach the stars.
+
+Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
+though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
+of burden.
+
+"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sunrays
+pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the
+deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
+scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
+blossoms of the limes.
+
+All birds were her friends.
+
+Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of their various songs,
+and many ways and means of luring them to come and rest upon her
+shoulder and peck the berries in her hand.
+
+She had lived so much in the open fields and among the woods that she
+had made her chief companions of them. She could emulate so deftly all
+their voices, from the call of the wood dove to the chant of the
+blackbird, and from the trill of the nightingale to the twitter of the
+titmouse, that she could summon them all to her at will, and have dozens
+of them fluttering around her head and swaying their pretty bodies on
+her wrist.
+
+It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so weird and
+magical, and they would come home from their fields on a spring daybreak
+and tell their wives in horror how they had seen the devil's daughter in
+the red flush of the sunrise, ankle-deep in violets, and covered with
+birds from head to foot, hearing their whispers, and giving them her
+messages to carry in return.
+
+One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. Francis had done as
+much and it had been accredited to him as a fair action and virtuous
+knowledge, but she was frowned down and chattered down by her louder
+neighbors, who told her that she might look for some sharp judgment of
+heaven for daring to couple together the blessed name of the holy saint
+and the accursed name of this foul spirit.
+
+But all they could say could not break the charmed communion between
+Folle-Farine and her feathered comrades.
+
+She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she had always saved
+some of her scanty meal for them, and in the springtime and the summer
+they always rewarded her with floods of songs and soft caresses from
+their nestling wings.
+
+There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
+cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
+things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of characters.
+
+The robins with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
+real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
+the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
+of finches in their gay apparelings; the plain brown bird that fills the
+night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
+princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
+air; the kingfishers that have hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
+upon the rivers that they have caught the colors of the flowers on their
+wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
+waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
+liberties; all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
+crowds of court or city.
+
+She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
+did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
+peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
+reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
+an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.
+
+Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
+pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
+a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle. She rose and looked; a line of
+twine was trembling against the foliage; in its noosed end the throat of
+the mavis had been caught; it hung trembling and clutching at the air
+convulsively with its little drawn up feet. It had flown into the trap
+as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.
+
+There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.
+
+She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
+down upon the ivy; the succor came too late; the little gentle body was
+already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
+soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
+from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.
+
+"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
+the little dead bird in her hand.
+
+Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
+curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
+bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
+air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.
+
+Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
+God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
+rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
+song.
+
+All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
+lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
+trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and
+had fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly
+to the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of
+men; and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a
+human greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper
+coin.
+
+Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
+in his hand and a basket to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
+cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
+Visitation of Mary.
+
+He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled as he went by to
+himself.
+
+"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
+how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
+grass and the leaves.
+
+She said nothing; but a darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
+came in sight in the distance.
+
+She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth and laid moss in it and
+put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
+handfuls of fallen rose leaves and with a sprig or two of thyme. Around
+her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries;--who
+now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now should rove
+with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit with him
+beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves?--who
+now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn
+break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Meanwhile Claudis Flamma cut the lilies for the cathedral altars,
+muttering many holy prayers as he gathered the flowers of Mary.
+
+When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, kept fresh in wet moss
+by the young chorister who had been sent for them, the miller turned to
+her.
+
+"Where is the money?"
+
+She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern thong about her
+waist, opened the pouch, and counted out the coins, one by one, on the
+flat stone of a water-tank among the lilies and the ivy.
+
+There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some dozens of copper
+ones. The fruit had been left at various stalls and houses in small
+portions, for it was the custom to supply it fresh each day.
+
+He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, counted them again
+and again, and yet again; after the third enumeration he turned sharply
+on her:
+
+"There are two pieces too little: what have you done with them?"
+
+"There are two sous short," she answered him curtly. "Twelve of the figs
+for the tanner Florian were rotten."
+
+"Rotten!--they were but overripe."
+
+"It is the same thing."
+
+"You dare to answer me?--animal! I say they had only tasted a little too
+much of the sun. It only made them the sweeter."
+
+"They were rotten."
+
+"They were not. You dare to speak! If they had been rotten they lay
+under the others; he could not have seen----"
+
+"I saw."
+
+"You saw! Who are you?--a beggar--a beast--a foul offspring of sin. You
+dared to show them to him, I will warrant?"
+
+"I showed him that they were not good."
+
+"And gave him back the two sous?"
+
+"I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing for the rotten
+ones."
+
+"Wretch! you dare to tell me that!"
+
+A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth; her eyes looked at him
+with all their boldest fiercest luster.
+
+"I never steal--not even from you, good Flamma."
+
+"You have stolen now!" he shrieked, his thin and feeble voice rising in
+fury at his lost coins and his discovered treachery. "It is a lie that
+the figs were rotten; it is a lie that you took but seven sous. You
+stole the two sous to buy you bread and honey in the streets, or to get
+a drink at the wineshops. I know you; I know you; it is a devil's device
+to please your gluttonous appetite. The figs rotten!--not so rotten as
+is your soul would they be, though they were black as night and though
+they stunk as river mud! Go back to Denis Florian and bring me the two
+sous, or I will thrash you as a thief."
+
+She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter.
+
+"You can thrash me; you cannot make me a thief."
+
+"You will not go back to Florian?"
+
+"I will not ask him to pay for what was bad."
+
+"You will not confess that you stole the money?"
+
+"I should lie if I did."
+
+"Then strip."
+
+She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment's hesitation
+unloosened the woolen sash knotted round her waist, and pushed down the
+coarse linen shirt from about her throat.
+
+The white folds fell from off the perfect curves of her brown arms, and
+left bare her shining shoulders beautiful as any sculptured Psyche's.
+
+She was not conscious of degradation in her punishment; she had been
+bidden to bow her head and endure the lash from the earliest years she
+could remember. According to the only creed she knew, silence and
+fortitude and strength were the greatest of all the virtues. She stood
+now in the cross-lights among the lilies as she had stood when a little
+child, erect, unquailing, and ready to suffer, insensible of humiliation
+because unconscious of sin, and because so tutored by severity and
+exposure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and the fugitive
+shrinking of her sex.
+
+She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be silent, which she
+had had when she had stood among the same tall lilies, in the same
+summer radiance, in the years of her helpless infancy.
+
+She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound crouches to it; not
+from inborn cowardice, but simply from the habit of obedience and of
+endurance.
+
+He had ever used her as the Greeks the Helots; he always beat her when
+she was in fault to teach her to be faultless, and when without offense
+beat her to remind her that she was the offspring of humiliation and a
+slave.
+
+He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick rope which lay
+coiled upon the turf ready for the binding of some straying boughs; and
+struck her with it, slowly. His arm had lost somewhat of its strength,
+and his power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss of his
+copper pieces and the sense that she had discovered the fraudulent
+intention of his small knavery lent force to his feebleness; as the
+scourge whistled through the air and descended on her shoulders it left
+bruised swollen marks to stamp its passage, and curling, adder-like, bit
+and drew blood.
+
+Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she had stood in her
+childhood; not a nerve quivered, not a limb flinched; the color rushed
+over her bent face and her bare bosom, but she never made a movement;
+she never gave a sound.
+
+When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she still said not one word;
+she drew tight once more the sash about her waist, and fastened afresh
+the linen of her bodice.
+
+The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and throbbed; but she
+was used to such pain, and bore it as their wounds were borne by the
+women of the Spartan games.
+
+"Thy two sous have borne thee bitterness," he muttered with a smile.
+"Thou wilt scarce find fruit rotten again in haste. There are bread and
+beans within; go get a meal; I want the mule to take flour to
+Barbizène."
+
+She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the burning of her skin
+made her feel sick and weak. She went away and cast herself at full
+length in the shade of the long grasses of the orchard, resting her chin
+upon her hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp moss;
+thinking, thinking, thinking, of what she hardly knew, except indeed
+that she wished that she were dead, like the bird she had covered with
+the rose leaves.
+
+He did not leave her long to even so much peace as this; his shrill
+voice soon called her from her rest; he bade her get ready the mule and
+go.
+
+She obeyed.
+
+The mule was saddled with his wooden pack; as many sacks as he could
+carry were piled upon the framework; she put her hand upon his bridle,
+and set out to walk to Barbizène, which was two leagues away.
+
+"Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat her out of her,"
+muttered the miller, as he watched the old mule pace down the narrow
+tree-shadowed road that led across the fields: and he believed that he
+did rightly in this treatment of her.
+
+It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, indeed, but he did
+not think that in such self-indulgence he ever erred. He was a bitter,
+cunning, miserly old man, whose solitary tenderness of feeling and
+honesty of pride had been rooted out forever when he had learned the
+dishonor of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In the ten years of
+time which had passed since first the little brown, large-eyed child had
+been sent to seek asylum with him, he had grown harder and keener and
+more severe with each day that rose.
+
+Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept her, partly from a
+savage sense of duty, partly from the persuasion that she had the power
+in her to make the strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned.
+
+For the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that the devil, in some
+witchery of human guise, had polluted his daughter's body and soul, and
+that it was by the foul fiend and by no earthly lover that she had
+conceived and borne the creature that now abode with him.
+
+Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometimes felt more furious
+against this offspring of hell because ever and again some gleam of
+fantastic inborn honor, some strange savage instinct of honesty, would
+awake in her and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small and
+secret sins of chicanery wherein his soul delighted, and for which he
+compounded with his gods.
+
+He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the body labored
+hardest when the brain was still asleep, which is true; she could not
+read; she could not write; she knew absolutely nothing. Yet there was a
+soul awake in her; yet there were innumerable thoughts and dreams
+brooding in her fathomless eyes; yet there was a desire in her fierce
+and unslacked for some other life than this life of the packhorse and of
+the day laborer which alone she knew.
+
+He had done his best to degrade and to brutalize her, and in much he had
+succeeded; but he had not succeeded wholly. There was a liberty in her
+that escaped his thraldom; there was a soul in her that resisted the
+deadening influence of her existence.
+
+She had none of the shame of her sex; she had none of the timorous
+instincts of womanhood. She had a fierce stubborn courage, and she was
+insensible of the daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to
+his word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and worthless
+to dread the pain of the lash. She would bathe in the woodland pool,
+remembering no more that she might be watched by human eyes than does
+the young tigress that has never beheld the face of man.
+
+In all this she was brutalized and degraded by her tyrant's bondage: in
+other things she was far higher than he and escaped him.
+
+Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of severe physical
+labor, it had still irony and it had still imagination; and under the
+hottest heats of temptation there were two things which by sheer
+instinct she resisted, and resisted so that neither of them had ever
+been forced on her--they were falsehood and fear.
+
+"It is the infamous strength of the devil!" said Claudis Flamma, when he
+found that he could not force her to deviate from the truth.
+
+The world says the same of those who will not feed it with lies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+That long dry summer was followed by an autumn of drought and scarcity.
+
+The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring down rain. The
+wooden Christs gazed all day long on parching lands and panting cattle.
+Even the broad deep rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink
+in the long drought. The orchards sickened for lack of moisture, and the
+peasants went about with feverish faces, ague-stricken limbs, and
+trembling hearts. The corn yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and
+when the winter came it was a time of dire scarcity and distress.
+
+Claudis Flamma and a few others like him alone prospered.
+
+The mill-house at Yprès served many purposes. It was a granary, a
+market, a baker's shop, an usurer's den, all in one.
+
+It looked a simple and innocent place. In the summertime it was peaceful
+and lovely, green and dark and still, with the blue sky above it, and
+the songs of birds all around; with its old black timbers, its
+many-colored orchards, its leafy gardens, its gray walls washed by the
+hurrying stream.
+
+But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. The water roared,
+and the leafless trees groaned in the wind, and the great leaden clouds
+of rain or fog enveloped it duskily.
+
+To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it with
+aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible; they
+dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master--the hardest
+and the shrewdest and the closest-fisted Norman of them all.
+
+For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter
+subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with
+their labor or their suffering, with the best of all their wool, or oil,
+or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom
+for five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old
+pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg of their little pet
+daughter's dowry.
+
+And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit
+them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well
+with the good saints and with holy church,--a wise man, in a word, with
+whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and
+avarice.
+
+For the most part the population around Yprès was thrifty and thriving
+in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and by this portion
+of it the silent old miser was much honored as a man laborious and
+penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must
+have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or
+under the bricks of his kitchen.
+
+By the smaller section of it--poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools--who
+belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and
+slow to save, and who so fell into want and famine and had to borrow of
+others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate
+deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe,
+and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.
+
+In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn, these and their
+like fell further in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and
+beg of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living.
+They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible
+extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give
+them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they
+could do no better.
+
+It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and
+being never quit of his hold his debtors never could try for aid
+elsewhere.
+
+The weather towards the season of Noël became frightfully severe; the
+mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped
+pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open
+country, and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the higher
+lands.
+
+There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare
+harvests of a district usually so opulent in all riches of the soil
+brought trouble and dearth in their train. Sickness prevailed because
+the old people and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots
+unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, many homes
+were flooded, and some even swept away.
+
+Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never
+stopped work, and famine prices could be asked in this extremity.
+
+Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after month,
+with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being left
+her that she could claim as her own.
+
+She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in
+frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even
+the young men among them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face
+of hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the
+golden glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness: and
+if they did note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the
+marks of a vagrant and accursed race.
+
+She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never
+dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she
+went by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well
+with the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.
+
+The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her
+head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the fire and
+dreams in her musing eyes--all these were so unlike themselves that they
+saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.
+
+Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except
+such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her.
+So had every winter gone since she had come there--a time so long ago
+that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often
+doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.
+
+Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of
+the mule and the bullocks--indifferent and knowing no better, and only
+staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty
+night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever
+come to her--those splendid and familiar unknown things that looked on
+all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to
+care.
+
+Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were
+together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor
+suffered immeasurably.
+
+A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and a score
+of times saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog,
+pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire
+deny them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times
+its value for some niggard grant of food.
+
+"Why should I think of it, why should I care?" she said to herself; and
+yet she did both, and could not help it.
+
+There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from
+the mill, by name Manon Dax.
+
+She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled and bent, yet strong,
+with bright eyes like a robin's, and a tough frame, eighty years old.
+
+She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cutter; he had been
+dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their
+offspring die too; and had now left on her hand to rear four young
+great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for
+food as new-born birds cry in their nests.
+
+She washed a little when she could get any linen to wash, and she span,
+and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot
+of ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes
+and herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four
+nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and
+worked in hail and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained,
+but said that God was good to her.
+
+She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live
+long--that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God would
+take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought her
+to do, and was content.
+
+Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of the
+winter fell like a knife. She was only one among thousands.
+
+Nobody noticed her; still it was hard.
+
+All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was
+no well nearer than half a league, and half a league out and half a
+league back every day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two
+heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has
+only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one's withered limbs.
+
+The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her fiercely
+by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a hard time coming in which their
+pigs would be ill fed. The roots in her little garden-plot were all
+black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and
+stewed and eaten.
+
+The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were
+ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by rievers younger and more
+agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.
+
+The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for
+food, and she had none to give them.
+
+"If it were only myself!" she thought, stopping her ears not to hear
+them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to creep
+away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold
+froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and
+tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was
+good, and so to let death come--content.
+
+But it was not only herself.
+
+The poor are seldom so fortunate--they themselves would say so
+unhappy--as to be alone in their homes.
+
+There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish
+things she had loved,--small lives that had been rosy even on so much
+hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful
+even at the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of
+mouldy crusts, or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been--until now,
+when even so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay
+were soaked through with snow-water; now--when they were quite silent,
+except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.
+
+"I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was born asked man
+or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper coin," she thought,
+sitting by her black hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and
+stopping her ears to shut out the children's cries.
+
+She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter living,--she had
+scores of times in her long years been as famished as this, and as cold,
+and her house had been as desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never
+asked for an alms, being strong and ignorant, and being also in fear of
+the world, and holding a debt a great shame.
+
+But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish;
+being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in
+their strength before her.
+
+The struggle was long and hard with her. She would have to die soon, she
+knew, and she had striven all her lifetime so to live that she might die
+saying, "I have asked nothing of any man."
+
+This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a
+feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten. Any
+way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something; or
+else those four small things, who were like a cluster of red berries on
+a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.
+
+"It is bitter, but I must do it," she thought. "Sure it is strange that
+the good God cares to take any of us to himself through so sharp a way
+as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say, 'Not heaven
+for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.'"
+
+And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on
+which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all
+of them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.
+
+"Be still, my treasures," she said to them, striving to speak cheerily,
+and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born; "I go away for a
+little while to try and get you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care
+of them till I come back."
+
+Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of
+the little black door of the hut on to the white road and into the
+rushing winds.
+
+"I will go to Flamma," she said to herself.
+
+It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this season of midwinter.
+
+The business of the day was done. The people had come and gone, favored
+or denied, according to such sureties as they could offer. The great
+wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill sat
+against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in
+his ledger--crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to
+understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his
+pen.
+
+All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of
+every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were
+hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had
+saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to
+know that he held all that, and also withheld it. It moved him with a
+certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants
+stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered
+out an entreaty--which he denied.
+
+It was what he liked; to sit there and count his gains after his
+fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the howling wind and
+driving hail, and chuckle to think how lean and cold and sick they were
+outside--those fools who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy's
+leman.
+
+To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be
+implored with tears of supplication, and answer with a grim jest; to see
+a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the
+big brass pans full of milk, and say to her "All that makes butter for
+Paris," and then see her go away wailing and moaning that her child
+would die, and tottering feebly through the snow--all this was sweet to
+him.
+
+Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man,
+yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had
+been aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an
+angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the
+poignancy of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to
+wound, and to see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only
+pleasure life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly,
+according to his light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and
+his God and his child had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had
+turned to gall.
+
+The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut
+and the water-mill.
+
+They were roads which passed through meadows and along cornfields,
+beside streamlets, and among little belts of woodland, lanes and paths
+green and pleasant in the summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and
+whistled through by northeast winds. She held on her way steadily,
+stumbling often, and often slipping and going slowly, for she was very
+feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity of the cold drove
+through and through her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth
+of the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the weather was so
+wild that the poplar-trees were bent to the earth, and the little light
+in the Calvary lamp by the river blew to and fro, and at last died out.
+Still she held on, a little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her
+lips and a hope in her heart.
+
+The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring,
+in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast gray
+waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times
+to and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she
+groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength,
+or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached
+the mill-house.
+
+Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores
+of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to
+Phratos, a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from
+the inclement night.
+
+She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma,
+who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which
+represented to him his earthly wealth.
+
+She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face
+working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an
+intense anxiety of appeal.
+
+"Flamma," she said simply to him, "we have been neighbors fifty years
+and more--thou and I, and many have borrowed of thee to their hurt and
+shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked
+anything of man or woman or child. But I come to-night to ask bread of
+you--bread for the four little children at home. I have heard them cry
+three days, and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two off
+the trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have come to you."
+
+He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbors, as she
+had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the
+same altar, side by side.
+
+"What dost want?" he asked simply.
+
+"Food," she made answer; "food and fuel. They are so cold--the little
+ones."
+
+"What canst pay for them?" he asked.
+
+"Nothing--nothing now. There is not a thing in the house except the last
+hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a little--just a
+little--while the weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the
+weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash and spin. I will pay
+faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin to any man. But I am
+so old, and the children so young----"
+
+Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen.
+
+Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. Where he went there
+stood pans of new milk, baskets of eggs, rolls of bread, piles of
+fagots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes
+glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.
+
+He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a
+thorn-tree.
+
+"Give these to thy children's children," he said, with a dark smile.
+"For these--and for no more--will they recompense thee when they shall
+grow to maturity."
+
+She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant
+but a stern jest.
+
+"Good Flamma, you mock me," she murmured, trembling; "the babies are
+little, and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for God's sake! A jest is
+well in season, but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a
+stripe."
+
+He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating voice,--
+
+"I give thee the only thing given without payment in this world--advice.
+Take it or leave it."
+
+She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and
+her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense
+in them.
+
+"You jest, Flamma! You only jest!" she muttered. "The little children
+starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for them? Just a little
+bread? I will pay as soon as the weather breaks."
+
+"I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor," he answered her, with the
+habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again, and went on
+counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his books.
+
+His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease her
+work, nor intercede by a word. The poor can be better to the poor than
+any princes; but the poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any
+slave-drivers.
+
+The old woman's head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and felt
+her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the air. It
+was already dark with the darkness of the descending night.
+
+The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone; all was cold--cold as
+death.
+
+She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children were
+alone. The winds blew and drove the snowflakes in a white cloud against
+her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the
+roar of the mill-water filled the air.
+
+There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden;
+beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way. She
+fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but lay
+still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the snowstorm
+beating together upon her.
+
+"The children! the children!" she moaned feebly, and then was still; she
+was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not lift herself nor
+see what was around her; she thought that she was in her bed at home,
+and felt as though she would soon sleep.
+
+Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly-moving shape,
+that flew as silently and as quickly as a night-bird, and paused as
+though on wings beside her.
+
+A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to
+her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.
+
+"Hush, it is I! I--Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not
+much--they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what
+you said--I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you
+pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it."
+
+"Food--for the children!"
+
+The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a
+little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to
+her.
+
+But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a
+groan--her limb was broken.
+
+Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk's
+through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.
+
+"You cannot get up; you are old," she said abruptly. "See--let me carry
+you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much;
+but it will serve."
+
+She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion.
+What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had
+always mocked and hated her.
+
+"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses," she
+thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.
+
+Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for
+strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to
+the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.
+
+Why did she do it?
+
+She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this woman,
+so poor and so brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied
+in her extremity.
+
+Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer
+them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.
+
+"I cannot rise," she murmured; "my leg is broken, I think. But it is no
+matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are, you are good, and
+have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my
+life--anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain--indeed."
+
+Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped and lifted the
+old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy burden set
+out on her way in the teeth of the storm.
+
+She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, by sight and name.
+
+Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart,
+but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbors, had
+drawn the little ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak,
+lest the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner's youngest born, should
+fall on them, and harm them in like manner.
+
+Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as
+Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through the
+frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the
+sacks of corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a
+packhorse.
+
+Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even strive to speak
+again; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement,
+of a close, soft pressure that sheltered her from the force of the
+winds, of a subtle warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame,
+and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be still.
+
+She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.
+
+Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and listened.
+
+"Did you speak?" she whispered.
+
+Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.
+
+"God is good," she muttered, like one speaking in a dream.
+
+Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow,
+pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a
+reindeer, and sure of eye in the dark as a night-hawk.
+
+"Are you in pain?" she asked once of the burden she carried.
+
+There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep.
+
+The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and
+inured to all hardships of the weather; yet short as it was, it cost her
+an hour to travel it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with
+snow-water, blown back continually by the opposing winds, and forced to
+stagger and to pause by the fury of the storm.
+
+At last she reached the hut.
+
+The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children
+echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep,
+cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in
+unchecked; all was quite dark.
+
+She felt her way within, and being used by long custom to see in the
+gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and birds can see, she found the bed
+of hay, and laid her burden gently down on it.
+
+The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest ones crept up
+close to their grandmother, and pressed their cheeks to hers, and
+whispered to her eagerly, with their little famished lips, "Where is
+the food, where is the food?"
+
+But there was still no answer.
+
+The clouds drifted a little from the moon that had been so long
+obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapor of the heavy sky; the
+whitened ground threw back the rays increased tenfold; the pale gleam
+reached the old still face of Manon Dax.
+
+There was a feeble smile upon it--the smile with which her last words
+had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"
+
+She was quite dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.
+
+The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow
+which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been
+too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.
+
+She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of
+its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay
+together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the
+leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors
+and plains; it is a common fate.
+
+She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and
+quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not
+taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter,
+tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of
+it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the
+door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all
+night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the
+clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she
+could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.
+
+"They die of famine--and they die saying their 'God is good,'" she
+thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and
+melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of
+the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel,
+and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the
+warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a
+nest.
+
+She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner
+of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she
+had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against
+her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single
+gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so
+bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying "God
+is good." She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving
+animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.
+
+She forgave--because she forgot--that in other winters this door had
+been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had
+mocked her in their first imperfect speech.
+
+The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter's day came; the storm had lulled,
+but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was
+piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.
+
+She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she
+knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they
+too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had
+no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never
+spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for
+its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.
+
+Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and
+mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common
+humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they
+disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.
+
+At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going
+to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude
+hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.
+
+She rose and called to him.
+
+He stared and stood still.
+
+She went to the doorway and signed to him.
+
+"Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are here,
+alone, and they starve."
+
+"Manon Dax dead?" he echoed stupidly: he was her nearest neighbor; he
+had helped her fetch her washing-water sometimes from the well half a
+league away; when his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old
+woman had nursed her carefully and well through many a tedious month.
+
+"Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had broken
+her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one. The
+little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too."
+
+It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that
+addressed him; but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to
+her, he recognized the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight
+brow, the fathomless eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising
+there suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn and
+shadow.
+
+He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the
+darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he
+had gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the
+sleeping children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.
+
+The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice
+of the roads would allow.
+
+His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a
+few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop
+made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its
+wide-spreading orchards and their excellence of fruits.
+
+Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the
+people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds;
+women were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the
+sleepy-eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers
+played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost.
+
+The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the
+ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins
+flew to and fro songless.
+
+His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.
+
+"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.
+
+"What of that?" said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had
+died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine
+themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.
+
+"This of that," said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of
+his own terrors. "The young devil of Yprès has killed her, that I am
+sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like
+coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that."
+
+"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe;
+while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the
+women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange
+news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day
+was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it
+than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse
+had fared with the swelling in the throat.
+
+They were very dull there from year's end to year's end; once a month,
+maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a
+peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from
+the outer world;--beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing,
+and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone
+crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.
+
+This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be
+challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil
+omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true
+an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly
+matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears
+and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his
+listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had
+encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been
+slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.
+
+Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be
+accredited of the begotten of the fiend:--a fiend, whom all the grown
+men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come
+to ruin poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels,
+and his strength passing the strength of all men.
+
+The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the
+bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials
+of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily
+labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who
+had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.
+
+A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the
+village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and
+deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his
+tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two
+hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.
+
+"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been
+struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are
+there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We--good Christians and
+true--should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the
+young ones hither."
+
+Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be
+driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.
+
+"That is as it should be," assented the other women. "Go, Flandrin, and
+we--we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to
+the public charity; better cannot be done. Go."
+
+"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply,"
+cried his wife.
+
+"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee," said
+another.
+
+"Not she," grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. "One day my
+blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his
+cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said
+'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you
+are to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed and went on. What
+are you to do with a witch like that,--eh?"
+
+"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus. "Go! Every minute you
+waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!"
+
+"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly. "I will not go
+after those infants, it is not a man's work."
+
+In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him,
+of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly
+down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black,
+fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused,
+that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the devil's prey, than those,
+his choicest, swine.
+
+The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But
+vainly--he would not move alone. He had become possessed with the
+terrors that his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for
+all their imprecations.
+
+"Let us go ourselves, then!" screamed his wife at length, flourishing
+above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow. "Men are
+forever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes
+to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the fire!"
+
+There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to
+emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a
+broom, a pegstick, each whatever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin
+in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe of
+poplars. They were not very sure in their own minds why they went, nor
+for what they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and
+pious, and they had a great hate in their hearts against her.
+
+They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them, and their
+tongues flew still faster than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made
+them sharp and keen on their prey; they screamed themselves hoarse,
+their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the
+creaking of the trees; and they inflamed each other with ferocious
+belief in the sorcery they were to punish.
+
+They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little, they
+toiled hard from their birth to their grave, they were most of them
+chaste wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they
+slaved in fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were
+narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, where
+they thought themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable. They
+were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for
+another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the
+priests and lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that
+it is a creed holy and honorable--how can the people know that it is at
+once idiotic and hellish?
+
+Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof, and
+watched the open door.
+
+The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned
+and caught her hand, and held it.
+
+She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the
+woodstack, or their grandam's skirts, a hundred times when they had seen
+her on the road or in the orchard. But she was sorry for them; almost as
+sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when their nests were
+scattered on the ground in a tempest, or for the little starveling
+rabbits when they screamed in their holes for the soft, white mother
+that was lying, tortured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap.
+
+She was sorry for them--half roughly, half tenderly--with some shame at
+her own weakness, and yet too sincerely sorry to be able to persuade
+herself to leave them to their fate there, all alone with their dead.
+
+For in the savage heart of Taric's daughter there was an innermost
+corner wherein her mother's nature slept.
+
+She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and listening for
+footsteps.
+
+The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds; the dense fog of
+the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the
+trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard by there
+wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin's cattle, deserted
+of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds.
+
+She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet, she had
+resolved not to leave the children all alone; though Flamma should come
+and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So
+she sat still and waited.
+
+After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen
+snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused
+clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter
+morning.
+
+The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little
+passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the
+hill with Flandrin in their midst.
+
+She rose and looked out at them quietly.
+
+For a minute they paused--irresolute, silent, perplexed: at the sight of
+her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the crime they
+came to bring against her.
+
+The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the
+onslaught.
+
+"What!" she screamed, "nine good Christians fearful of one daughter of
+hell? Fie! for shame! Look; my leaden Peter is round my neck! Is he not
+stronger than she any day?"
+
+In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the same time, they were
+through the door and on the mud floor of the hearth, close to her,
+casting hasty glances at the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires
+they had left to die out all through that bitter winter. They came about
+her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop, flourishing their
+sticks in her eyes, and casting at her a thousand charges in one breath.
+
+Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the threshold, wishing he
+had never said a word of the death of Manon Dax to his good wife and
+neighbors.
+
+"You met that poor saint and killed her in the snow with your
+witcheries!" one cried.
+
+"You have stifled that poor babe where it lay!" cried another.
+
+"A good woman like that!" shrieked a third, "who was well and blithe and
+praising God only a day ago, for I saw her myself come down the hill for
+our well water!"
+
+"It is as you did with the dear little Rémy, who will be lame all his
+life through you," hissed a fourth. "You are not fit to live; you spit
+venom like a toad."
+
+"Are you alive, my angels?" said a fifth, waking the three children
+noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. "Are you alive after that
+witch has gazed on you? It is a miracle! The saints be praised!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not comprehending why
+they thus with one accord fell upon her. She pointed to the bodies on
+the hearth, with one of those grave and dignified gestures which were
+her birthright.
+
+"She was cold and hungry," she said curtly, her mellow accent softening
+and enriching the provincial tongue which she had learned from those
+amidst whom she dwelt. "She had fallen, and was dying. I brought her
+here. The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with the rest
+because they were frightened, and alone. There is no more to tell. What
+of it?"
+
+"Thou hadst better come away. What canst thou prove?" whispered Flandrin
+to his wife.
+
+He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would fain have stilled
+it. But that was beyond his power. The women had not come forth half a
+league in the howling winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with
+a mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken.
+
+They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused
+her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a
+thousand tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their
+sticks; and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of
+Manon Dax lay upward in the dim light.
+
+The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had
+seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him
+and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long
+and dreary night.
+
+The woman covered his eyes with a scream.
+
+"Ah--h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child is bewitched! It is
+horrible!"
+
+"Look on that;--oh, infernal thing!" cried Flandrin's wife, lifting up
+her treasured figure of Peter. "You dare not face that blessed image.
+See--see all of you--how she winces, and turns white!"
+
+Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called her. Its
+gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her in
+any human thing.
+
+She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw
+it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She
+stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it
+through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then
+she folded her arms, and waited for them.
+
+There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed
+on her.
+
+They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted
+hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were
+strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and
+they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked
+alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and
+the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.
+
+They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her,
+they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the
+malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and
+its own security.
+
+Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power
+against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her
+backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their
+worst on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, nor lift
+herself to wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of
+wringing from her a single cry, and that she did. She was mute while the
+rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were
+driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched at her hair,
+and twisted and tore it,--she was quite mute throughout.
+
+"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I have
+heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried Flandrin's
+wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.
+
+Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in
+their midst, and a dozen eager, violent hands seized a closer grip upon
+her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud
+floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell. The
+smooth, soft skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without
+spot or blemish.
+
+"What matter,--what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin. "When our fathers
+hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for that? Draw blood, and
+you will see."
+
+She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her
+prey.
+
+"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she cried, with a
+laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.
+
+Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. She was powerless,
+defenseless, flung on her back amidst her tormentors, fastened down by
+treading feet and clinching hands; she could resist in nothing, she
+could not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud eyes looked
+unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.
+
+The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her
+chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a
+wounded bird,--not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these
+women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their hands.
+
+The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak. Except for
+her eyes, which glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to and fro,
+seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down
+by ruffians to make a bonfire.
+
+"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried
+the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to
+that uttermost test.
+
+Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:
+
+"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come
+out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to
+try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick--as you love your
+lives--quick!"
+
+The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a
+name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.
+
+They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the
+hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing
+sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.
+
+The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the
+little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.
+
+"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his
+gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.
+
+The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest
+infant likewise--of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to
+say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of
+charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were
+quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see
+their work.
+
+"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told
+us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little
+Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken
+the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them
+food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and
+do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."
+
+"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who
+liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's
+births, and who was a good old man, though stern.
+
+He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by
+the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged
+his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed
+in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be
+beforehand with him there.
+
+"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough
+for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange
+mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues
+sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.
+
+The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a
+sullen impatience.
+
+"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Yprès!" they
+muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get
+over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That
+will teach her to leave honest folk alone."
+
+And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.
+
+"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing
+Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you
+in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy
+great-grandmother."
+
+But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into
+silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly
+withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old
+kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at
+twilight by the bright wood fire.
+
+Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery
+slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village,
+and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.
+
+For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and
+blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.
+
+Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily
+and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the
+sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they
+have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter
+will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his
+outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in
+the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease
+from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.
+
+When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon
+Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they
+should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in
+accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest,
+a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could
+gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side;
+but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts
+that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily
+justified to the law.
+
+"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of
+all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a
+bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil--anything,--except now and then an
+honest woman."
+
+But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered
+it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old
+grandam and the year-old infant.
+
+When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her
+tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to
+raise herself from the floor, and had failed.
+
+She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that
+her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first
+sharp moment of the persecution.
+
+As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the
+blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what
+had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and
+lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.
+
+It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and
+outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.
+
+She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.
+
+"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known
+how they pay any good done to them."
+
+She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course
+of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid
+with.
+
+She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she
+hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and
+pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed
+and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without
+her vengeance.
+
+"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she
+thought--this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its
+teaching.
+
+She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into
+the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or
+token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the
+ashes of the hearth.
+
+"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that
+her God was good!"
+
+She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff
+and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin
+deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her
+ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been
+flung backward on her head.
+
+She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had
+done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The
+sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled
+through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and
+grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through
+the woods and pastures.
+
+The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull
+red ray here and there above the woods in the east.
+
+It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still
+rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over
+the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the
+snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.
+
+She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when
+he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then
+tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any
+creature that might need one.
+
+That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence
+was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour
+more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown
+her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that
+she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow,
+beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her
+eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all
+for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland
+meadows, starved and stiff.
+
+She did not know;--and had she known, wretched though existence was to
+her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be
+slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again--a
+change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and
+no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.
+
+By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of
+the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her
+eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.
+
+She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first
+morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and
+for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which
+the sheds and storehouses ran.
+
+She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy
+or remission of her labors.
+
+She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had
+brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.
+
+She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass; and
+she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there
+leaning her head on her hands.
+
+The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal
+flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty
+fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly
+against her, purring all the while.
+
+The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her
+master,--
+
+"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."
+
+The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the
+courtyard.
+
+"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not
+lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"
+
+Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her
+eyes.
+
+"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
+
+"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth;
+enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than
+himself.
+
+A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its
+stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief
+phrases,--
+
+"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the
+road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed
+there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told
+him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed
+old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is
+no matter. But it made me late."
+
+In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an
+unconscious glimmer of appeal,--a vague fancy that for once she might,
+perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and
+contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any
+compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once
+he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
+
+But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since
+first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
+
+Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost
+ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it
+would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so
+mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it
+infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have
+had pity and charity where he had lacked them.
+
+He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue
+with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her
+bosom had been stained with blood.
+
+"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer
+to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal
+rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them
+of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them
+that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for
+a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able
+to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be
+the worse for thee."
+
+She obeyed him.
+
+There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with
+her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead
+thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.
+
+But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness,
+without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the
+dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake
+her with the kisses of his rough tongue.
+
+She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once
+spoke to her.
+
+"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good
+Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon,
+and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his
+neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl
+maddened my dame,--spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image
+away in a ditch."
+
+"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward
+through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or
+were displeased.
+
+Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very
+spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should
+also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair
+offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.
+
+The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too
+ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use;
+they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all
+rousing of their sticks, or of their words.
+
+They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay
+in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in
+pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually,
+thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold
+spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the
+hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana,
+and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended,
+shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned
+to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise
+little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol
+ringing always through her brain.
+
+The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.
+
+There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked
+fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned,
+and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare,
+and rioted over by furious cross winds.
+
+Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked
+up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,--for the first time since
+they had had to do with her,--she had committed, for the millionth time,
+a crime.
+
+There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a
+spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens
+straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping,
+and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the
+intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.
+
+There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the
+woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless
+house.
+
+The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white
+roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering
+in its light.
+
+There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought
+their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.
+
+She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,--a
+yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside
+the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged
+him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those
+bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a
+sentinel slain at his post--frozen to death in his old age after a life
+of faithfulness repaid with blows.
+
+She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had
+loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of
+the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to
+sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round
+her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.
+
+She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead,
+lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so
+that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should
+be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well
+to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of
+summer liberty and leisure.
+
+She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow
+above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and
+she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another
+for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can
+exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone,
+and love and trust each other only out of all the world.
+
+Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept
+forever in the old gray orchard, she had but one left. She went to seek
+this one.
+
+Her heart ached for a kind glance--for a word that should be neither of
+hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to know such
+a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that
+despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die hard, without murmur
+or appeal.
+
+Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to all save
+herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin, who to all save
+herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.
+
+He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way; they had the kinship
+of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent,
+savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might
+love each other in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter
+and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.
+
+She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold, and
+alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by
+his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous
+time when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream
+which was never to come true upon earth.
+
+Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed ever in it.
+
+She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the insults
+of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place; but each
+one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and
+killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts that had
+survived in her through all the brutalizing debasement of her life.
+
+She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood,
+and, being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of
+it, as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and
+now and then the thought crossed her--why not take a flint and a bit of
+tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow
+at the foot of the hill?
+
+She thought of it often--would she ever do it?
+
+She did not know.
+
+It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired
+a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had
+lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also?
+They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried
+to do good to one of them the others had set on her as a witch.
+
+In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through
+their hamlet to seek Marcellin.
+
+The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows
+and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a
+solitary tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the
+snowdrifts; here and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of
+ice that covered all the streams and pools.
+
+The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with
+all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her
+scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her shirt,
+and it gripped fast the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which
+the reward for her charity had taught her--a lesson not lightly to be
+forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.
+
+In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbors, kept
+high festival for a fresh year begun.
+
+Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and
+many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood
+cracking and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many
+of their interiors as she went by in the shadow without.
+
+In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, roasting chestnuts
+in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another they romped with
+their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.
+
+In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that
+was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung round with dried herbs and fruits,
+an old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for
+a short glad hour.
+
+In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savory odor, and
+the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she watched her
+youngest-born playing with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors,
+and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.
+
+In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a wife that day, kept
+open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing to the music of
+a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with
+many-hued ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in the
+noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still woods, and in the
+midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height of the hill, the
+little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.
+
+She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on her knife.
+
+"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation that
+possessed her--"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a bonfire they
+would have for their feasting!"
+
+The thought was sweet to her.
+
+Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do
+well and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil
+sorcery.
+
+She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to
+see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them
+with a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives,
+"Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"
+
+Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint and
+tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to
+pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.
+
+She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet
+to her--so sweet because so horrible.
+
+How soon their mirth would be stilled!
+
+As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the red glare that
+would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid
+flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the children's
+shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, with
+a halo of light round its head: the thing was little Bernardou, and the
+halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.
+
+He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.
+
+"I know you--you were good that night. The people all say you are
+wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back to
+gran'mère--oh, take me back!"
+
+She was startled and bewildered. This child had never mocked her, but he
+had screamed and run from her in terror, and had been told a score of
+stories that she was a devil, who could kill his body and soul.
+
+"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice was troubled,
+and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time to a child
+without being derided or screamed at in fear.
+
+"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff and cold, I know,
+and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know she would, if
+she only heard _us_. We never cried in the night but she heard in her
+sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell her--do, do tell her!"
+
+She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness
+of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and held her mute.
+
+"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him suddenly,
+glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins' house, through
+which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the
+gilded bells.
+
+"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want gran'mère," he
+said, with a sob. "They beat me often, and oh! if she knew, she would
+wake and come. Do tell her--do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex
+her, if only she will come back!"
+
+His piteous voice was drowned in tears.
+
+His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs
+had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him,
+clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in the
+cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first daisy
+of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to
+sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.
+
+It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he
+wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in
+another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they expected
+him to be.
+
+It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and
+they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.
+
+"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary
+softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and
+fierce temper. "I wish I could."
+
+For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds,
+and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away
+and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which
+she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the
+snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither
+where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too
+dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the
+world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and
+dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing
+be hostile to her.
+
+Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that
+eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.
+
+As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts,
+a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside
+Flandrin's house,--
+
+"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out
+there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."
+
+The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she
+was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place
+and the children in order.
+
+"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch
+that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine
+whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst
+bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."
+
+She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above
+the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the
+tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them
+a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.
+
+Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then
+she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and
+carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.
+
+She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's words
+had touched and softened her, she remembered the long patient bitter
+life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second
+year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last, "God is good."
+
+"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for Him, and He seems to care
+nothing for them whether they be old or young."
+
+Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the house in which
+little Bernardou was sheltered.
+
+His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet
+to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveler upon the
+highest Alpine summits--a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste.
+
+The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the
+fields that were in summer all one scarlet group of poppies.
+
+The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells
+in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was
+still.
+
+On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in
+the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in
+the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and
+a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.
+
+In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten--the
+dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.
+
+Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her
+enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had
+turned.
+
+But she walked on steadily.
+
+At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one
+welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that
+would look on her without a frown.
+
+It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail
+drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of
+her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and
+give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each
+other, and want no other cheer or comrade.
+
+It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the
+poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year's-night she
+had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had
+loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad,
+though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the
+hearth had been cold.
+
+She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her
+spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its
+door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached
+the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without
+derision or told her woes without condemnation.
+
+His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the
+side of a stream.
+
+A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of
+its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel
+rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only
+sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on
+the rarefied sharp air.
+
+She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night,
+and went to the door and pushed against it to open it--it was locked.
+
+She struck it with her hand.
+
+"Open, Marcellin--open quickly. It is only I."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.
+
+A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull
+light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is
+there?"
+
+"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an
+hour with you. Is anything amiss?"
+
+The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her,
+peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire,
+and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.
+
+"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.
+
+"Marcellin, yes--where is he?"
+
+"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my
+place."
+
+"Died!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her
+limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich
+and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.
+
+"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that God
+would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never
+thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years
+for him--you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger
+than the saints--somehow. You are that thing of Yprès, are you not? Get
+you gone!"
+
+"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.
+
+Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set
+on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.
+
+"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he
+dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole
+day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what
+can one do?----and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest
+has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe
+nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take
+your foot from my door!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood motionless.
+
+"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.
+
+"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night
+from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet
+dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do
+not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer--anyways he
+was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with
+the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch
+him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last
+they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He
+died just under the great Calvary--it was like his blasphemy. They have
+put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a
+saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God,
+and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you
+gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul
+fiend for him--they are surely together now."
+
+And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.
+
+"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she muttered, as
+she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.
+
+Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way
+through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.
+
+"He died alone--he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she
+crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate
+was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one
+friend on earth.
+
+The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness
+to all the maledictions of men.
+
+The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing
+glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with
+the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,--these which were
+so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on
+soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell
+as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.
+
+For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her
+strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower
+in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the
+public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a
+hundred years.
+
+For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her
+life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
+itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and
+many sighs of shuddering breezes.
+
+The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
+the heavens.
+
+There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
+the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
+the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.
+
+Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
+black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
+blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
+driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither
+and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the
+winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops
+and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.
+
+The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
+life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
+the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
+
+Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
+boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
+went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
+early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
+face.
+
+A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
+sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and,
+striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing
+wall within.
+
+It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a
+prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged
+slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an
+old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood
+among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
+
+A man watched the spider as it went.
+
+It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
+glow of the sunken sun.
+
+It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
+on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
+breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
+troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
+for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
+and multiplied.
+
+It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
+whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
+who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
+
+This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
+also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.
+
+He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun
+die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
+
+For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
+northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
+been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
+twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his
+trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.
+
+He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst
+the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
+bitter to the rich.
+
+But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart
+in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his
+yielding to their torments.
+
+He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what
+they gained, would have held him accursed--the madness that starves and
+is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
+For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the
+future who cares,--save the madmen themselves?
+
+He watched the spider as it went.
+
+It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
+story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
+kingdom--if only in dreams.
+
+This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth;
+and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and
+power and worth.
+
+The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the
+vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the
+floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon
+the dull rugged surface of stone.
+
+Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.
+
+It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at
+length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
+swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast
+about.
+
+Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm,
+in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
+begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
+tropic flower.
+
+It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a
+gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
+been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
+Night's Dream.
+
+A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
+lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.
+
+A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow
+chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
+that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that
+glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
+dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
+sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a
+lotus-leaf.
+
+A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells
+to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
+
+The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread
+out their pale gold on the level of the floor.
+
+It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
+wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
+the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the
+night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
+yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.
+
+It lived before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which, being
+born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering
+in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
+wretchedness.
+
+It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
+life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
+flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
+the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent
+wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.
+
+There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
+shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.
+
+The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
+the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead
+violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
+forgotten.
+
+The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
+teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
+plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its
+hoard.
+
+He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth.
+Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
+of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
+which perishes of divine desire.
+
+Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand
+and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.
+
+His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his
+breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured
+indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even
+this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to
+die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows
+of winter hid all offal from its fangs.
+
+It was horrible.
+
+He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels
+of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all--the
+sheer animal need of food. "_J'avais quelque chose là!_" was, perhaps,
+the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the
+guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was
+the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with
+it.
+
+When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and
+sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in
+his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave
+life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights,
+because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
+yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is
+the agony of Prometheus.
+
+With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which
+moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which
+compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
+worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
+
+Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety,
+of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs
+that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly
+fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon
+earth.
+
+Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and
+made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will
+be that in him greater than himself, which he knows--and cannot know
+without some fierce wrench and pang--will be numbed and made impotent,
+and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all
+that men behold of death.
+
+It was so with this man now.
+
+Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of
+obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he
+believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a
+purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his
+power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die;
+it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any
+toothless snake would perish in its swamp.
+
+He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had
+spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of
+the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the
+title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.
+
+For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly
+as he looked:
+
+"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my
+body in a ditch," he thought.
+
+And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he
+instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and
+took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of
+the lamp behind him.
+
+They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some
+housewife's kitchen-stove.
+
+What matter?
+
+He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his
+soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as
+his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had
+power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.
+
+Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.
+
+He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire
+seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and
+choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his
+naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.
+
+He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more
+torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and
+manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this
+slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.
+
+He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that
+uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of
+release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.
+
+He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its
+throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn--it might be
+before midnight--this agony would grow so great that it would conquer
+him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of
+besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a
+knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.
+
+Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any
+other thing than of the passion that ruled him.
+
+Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a
+sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some
+broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed
+lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a
+dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;--all these he gazed on and
+touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or
+deepened line of his chalk stylus.
+
+All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely
+sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to
+him,--"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave _us_ alone?"
+
+And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and
+wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the
+night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon
+him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed
+the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased,
+confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men
+wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards
+senseless on his hearth.
+
+The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in
+through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by,
+uttering weary cries against the storm.
+
+On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its
+filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the
+hearth, and saying in its heart,--"Thou Fool!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water
+through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and
+where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black
+timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin,
+of fiend and of martyr.
+
+She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with
+her foot.
+
+The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river
+inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were
+seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she
+glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily,
+dreamily.
+
+She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and
+grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at
+the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with
+their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce
+sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats
+of the land.
+
+Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free
+effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the
+water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some
+lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement
+arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old
+creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of
+some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year
+fragrant in her boddice.
+
+The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the
+dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely
+interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which
+brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and
+leaning on their swords.
+
+In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round
+the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the
+kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at
+soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire had worn in
+the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned
+glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her
+fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous
+laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved
+ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high
+oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face,
+bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping
+on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had
+charge of, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her
+own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,--only--and
+therefore hopeless.
+
+All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the
+water below.
+
+She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned
+them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures
+of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned
+bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.
+
+Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt,
+these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and
+enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always
+together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people,
+whose god on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who
+toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and
+scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and
+content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling
+to one another, and in a way be glad.
+
+Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted
+with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it
+was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of
+ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.
+
+As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw that it stood
+open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the
+broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open
+beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within;
+there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the
+hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp
+night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected
+and thrice-welcome guest.
+
+She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white
+cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her
+blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her,
+a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind
+her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was
+there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with
+pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and
+shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within
+shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.
+
+Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped,
+she was stirred with a vague, passionate, contemptuous wonder: what was
+this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no
+share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet----
+
+There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the
+wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the
+water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that
+severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day
+was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists
+were setting in from the sea as the night descended.
+
+She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the
+rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray
+upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the
+melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved
+the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in
+round her with the darkness.
+
+The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other
+place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy
+with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was
+the window of the gardener's wife.
+
+At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but
+some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced
+them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.
+
+The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown
+shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror
+before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both
+hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells
+brought to her from the sea.
+
+"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine,
+looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water
+with envy at her heart.
+
+She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more
+like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and
+hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked
+her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They
+cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as
+she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road
+with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or
+twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.
+
+For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had
+killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious
+people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry,
+through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and
+the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on
+her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for
+the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking
+chestnuts.
+
+It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a
+desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten
+by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so
+stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark
+repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way,
+with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories
+that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed,
+when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or
+sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to
+arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of
+hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was
+alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.
+
+She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more
+despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any
+creature.
+
+To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone;
+by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge
+and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her
+brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that
+consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people
+who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted
+him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some
+noxious beast.
+
+Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance;
+a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her.
+The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage
+into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood
+upon a crime.
+
+It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within
+her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be;
+but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and
+tow-horse,--something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and
+the dog for their services.
+
+The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury
+inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime
+could have made her free she would have seized it.
+
+She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked
+out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without
+one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike
+waste.
+
+The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong
+in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by
+ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief
+for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the
+public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was
+too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the
+desert and the forest was too hot.
+
+What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she
+had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
+mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew
+whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
+stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
+its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
+where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the
+air; and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so
+vanished;--a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of
+freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a
+thing of heaven and of liberty.
+
+The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.
+
+There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.
+She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness
+of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the
+storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer
+over a bridge.
+
+There was no other light.
+
+The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe
+behind her in the still sad air.
+
+There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong
+tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many
+tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong.
+Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned
+it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river
+had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because
+legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men
+who haunted it.
+
+No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after
+nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry
+grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his
+market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one
+trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.
+
+To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.
+
+The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts,
+with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and
+always wondrous beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and
+with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold
+in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream
+that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that
+wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.
+
+For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life
+or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created
+thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.
+
+As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with
+fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew
+wilder yet.
+
+There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of
+tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom.
+The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the
+boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were
+submerged.
+
+She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all
+that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it
+should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the
+river reeds.
+
+For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her
+own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to
+Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it
+would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.
+
+As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the
+darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been
+placed so low down against the shore, that its front walls, strong of
+hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the
+dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and
+brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of
+one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square
+casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted
+by a sickly glimmer of the moon.
+
+Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by
+a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes
+entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of
+setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the
+land, and use her force to push it off into the current.
+
+She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her
+kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the
+sand, and stood to her waist in the water.
+
+But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it
+lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked
+and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her
+boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.
+
+She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had
+time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window
+behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird
+had come.
+
+She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp
+within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she
+paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.
+
+The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays
+of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level
+with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain
+fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this
+legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone;
+dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to
+and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in
+the capitals of its columns.
+
+No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its
+way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.
+
+She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had
+gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had
+never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors
+in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.
+
+Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed--believed that the
+dead lived and gathered there.
+
+White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all
+motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible
+loveliness of death.
+
+In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the
+tombs of the kings of the East.
+
+Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a
+leaf; yet she was not afraid.
+
+A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her
+life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she
+had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in
+the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and
+only told that it was day by blows.
+
+She had no fear of them--these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the
+lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the
+sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture
+and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if
+these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal
+homes--whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?
+
+It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.
+
+She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself
+lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the
+floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world--stood
+motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw
+breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven
+from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected
+back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy
+light on all the forms around her.
+
+"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and
+she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its
+beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower
+than the dust--a mortal amidst this great immortal host.
+
+The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with
+a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and
+impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge
+of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.
+
+They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her
+they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they
+seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of
+silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which
+she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to
+the skies at night from a sleepless bed.
+
+They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth
+was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were
+not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in
+every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the
+west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar
+groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by
+the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were
+felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.
+
+They were indeed the dead: the dead who--dying earliest, whilst yet the
+earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to
+remember them, and to count them worthy of lament--perished in their
+bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.
+
+From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her
+through the mist.
+
+Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of
+the dark sea-gates.
+
+Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on
+by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.
+
+Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight,
+on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds
+of daffodils and asphodel.
+
+Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless,
+bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of
+the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe
+increase.
+
+Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless
+nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that
+heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.
+
+Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest
+wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the
+kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which
+empty air could make in a hollow reed.
+
+Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos;
+their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering
+fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the
+old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the
+same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their
+coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,--the gods of the
+Night and of the Grave.
+
+These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the
+halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from
+the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor
+story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them;
+she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the
+eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of
+Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten
+love.
+
+Just so had he looked so long ago--so long!--in the deep woods at
+moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping
+waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.
+
+They had called him an outcast,--and lo!--she found him a god.
+
+She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,--wept
+with grief for the living lost forever,--wept with joy that the dead
+forever lived.
+
+Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them
+human things,--things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back
+and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain,
+rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for
+once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with
+her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain,
+and looked around her fearfully.
+
+She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as
+mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.
+
+As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body
+of a man.
+
+It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare;
+upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs
+were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the
+moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.
+
+In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a
+statue, in that passionless rest,--that dread repose.
+
+Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent
+forward and looked closer on his face.
+
+He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,--not as they
+were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and
+with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,--but
+dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath
+frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the
+burden of their sin and woe.
+
+She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,--sorrowful,
+because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had
+the shadow of mortality upon him.
+
+Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as
+though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and
+wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a
+divine, but a human form,--dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a
+man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love
+to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of
+their own faults and follies.
+
+Had the gods slain him--being a mortal--for his entrance there?
+
+Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.
+
+He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden,
+full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very
+strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and
+rugged faces of the populace around her.
+
+That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of
+that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest
+beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some
+murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its
+fall.
+
+"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she
+thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,--he,--only a man, and
+dead?"
+
+The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time
+or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies
+seem possible to her as truth.
+
+Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the
+immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an
+infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet,
+having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.
+
+She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she
+stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe,
+but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with
+the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and
+gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide
+of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the
+lily.
+
+A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved
+her,--for he was beautiful, and he was dead.
+
+"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for
+the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he
+who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's
+face no more.
+
+The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the
+flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw
+nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence
+to his lips.
+
+On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:
+
+"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that
+dead man--perish."
+
+She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an
+irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the
+delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.
+
+She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods,
+if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned;
+whilst he who lay dead--though so still and so white, and so mute and so
+powerless,--he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring
+had killed him.
+
+"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,--I am nothing--nothing. Let
+me die as the Dust dies--what matter?"
+
+The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone
+through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.
+
+He alone heard. He--the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone
+remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods--for this
+man's sake--she chose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her
+tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the
+form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the
+hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.
+
+He was dead still;--or so she thought;--she watched him with dim
+dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.
+
+She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the
+closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his
+heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had
+brought back to him.
+
+It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a
+stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a
+nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given
+back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the
+gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of
+love; but hers--hers--shared only with the greatness she had bought for
+him.
+
+Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart;
+she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.
+
+His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster
+in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.
+
+"To die--of hunger--like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat,
+and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the
+stones.
+
+She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his
+cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her
+feet.
+
+She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of
+all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain,
+as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from
+altar fires of sacrifice.
+
+The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of
+her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.
+
+"To die--of hunger!"
+
+She muttered the phrase after him--shaken from her stupor by its gaunt
+and common truth.
+
+It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart
+rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in
+wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had
+killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had
+gathered there as to a festival to see him die.
+
+As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous
+odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has
+long fasted, almost unto death.
+
+She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon
+Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds
+of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against
+alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all
+that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had
+often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and
+wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad
+to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to
+quiet the gnawing of their entrails.
+
+She stood still beside him, and thought.
+
+All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes
+were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of
+the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head;
+this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the
+feebly beating heart;--these she saw as she would have seen the white
+outlines of a statue in the dark.
+
+He moved a little with a hollow sigh.
+
+"Bread--bread--bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"
+
+At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard
+life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the
+dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her
+poetic ignorance.
+
+The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she
+had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for
+him--that was well--if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it?
+The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone,
+she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.
+
+In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread.
+It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in
+scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch;
+she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some
+jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.
+
+That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing
+towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched
+teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand
+gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood,
+which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and
+full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that
+hour drenched with water.
+
+She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air,
+the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the
+reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had
+seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of
+that fell disease.
+
+There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so
+much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever
+dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human
+hand--to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child--was always
+clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot
+of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged
+mercy or aid at any human hearth.
+
+She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such
+need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men,
+women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the
+land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work
+hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst
+multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to
+which appeal could in such straits be made.
+
+If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of
+it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of
+fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.
+
+What could she do? she pondered.
+
+Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she
+stood irresolute.
+
+To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft
+to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.
+
+In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.
+
+All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued
+with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most
+harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to
+her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood
+her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her
+continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to
+see the children and the maidens--those who held her accursed, and were
+themselves held so innocent and just--steal the ripe cherries from the
+stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls,
+pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie
+softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a
+soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at,
+despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless
+and her lips untouched.
+
+It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they,"
+when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on
+their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which
+she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have
+reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and
+her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone,
+though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with
+which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths
+of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all
+other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for
+sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never
+sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose
+face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to
+the thing which she abhorred.
+
+She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of
+passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens
+around her were haunted;--so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless
+arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and
+taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of
+their vengeful and indolent masters.
+
+She had been so proud!--and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this
+immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had
+worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her
+as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure
+she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.
+
+It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she
+had offered for his to the gods.
+
+She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn
+with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her
+straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the
+darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that
+burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.
+
+"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to
+swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in
+the delirium of his brain.
+
+The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung
+her to action as the spur stings a horse.
+
+She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open
+portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water;
+she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and
+climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched
+into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and
+the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.
+
+It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by
+her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in
+water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot
+deep.
+
+She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue,
+of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the
+black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking
+strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran
+hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of
+was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her
+the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of
+lead,--the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the
+watch of the cruel gods.
+
+She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog
+does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the
+driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for
+even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts
+had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
+
+As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard,
+stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom,
+with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as
+familiar by night as day.
+
+The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The
+shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma
+and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might
+save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.
+
+She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network
+of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her
+own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the
+body of the house.
+
+Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the
+staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses
+to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near
+at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.
+
+She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She
+did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done,
+that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor,
+she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue.
+She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she
+had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to
+execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred
+in her, blood and bone.
+
+Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly
+found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were
+wanted in the house were stored.
+
+The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly,
+but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It
+had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all
+communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper
+casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents;
+the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter
+in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats
+floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to
+sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.
+
+Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint
+gray glimmer from the clearing skies.
+
+A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters
+fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the
+chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a
+twittering outcry.
+
+She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly
+forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket
+that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food
+as was to be found there--loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a
+flask of the richest wine--wine of the south, of the hue of the violet,
+sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.
+
+That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of
+fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square,
+and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and
+lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the
+agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.
+
+She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then
+threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the
+osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.
+
+She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.
+
+She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to
+walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets
+roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she
+felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her
+limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and
+unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the
+reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the
+darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were
+blowing with a sound like the sea.
+
+She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet,
+holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.
+
+Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow
+against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her.
+It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes
+as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the
+outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of
+the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the
+boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.
+
+The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays
+upon the path she followed.
+
+At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy;
+the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and
+gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little
+creek.
+
+She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.
+
+"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was
+the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who
+flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of
+their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her;
+it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the
+dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had
+avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in
+Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten
+figs for sweet.
+
+For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who
+cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres
+a nation for a throne.
+
+She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on
+through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load:--in Christ's name
+they would have seized her as a thief.
+
+The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight
+was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower,
+and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the
+basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below,
+then again followed them herself.
+
+Her heart thrilled as she entered.
+
+Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her
+absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with
+her, they had not raised him from the dead.
+
+"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet
+yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.
+
+She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on
+fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a
+little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop
+through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
+
+The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a
+rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker
+movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his
+mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made
+nestless by the hurricane.
+
+He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without
+knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a
+strong shudder shook him.
+
+His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.
+
+"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice
+rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.
+
+"J'avais quelque chose là!" and with a sigh he fell back once more--his
+head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.
+
+Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with
+him--that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died
+like a dog, powerless to save them.
+
+The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath--the one
+bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp
+out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs--stayed on the
+blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its
+helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create--that
+once it had been clear to record--that once it had dreamed the dreams
+which save men from the life of the swine--that once it had told to the
+world the truth divested of lies,--and that none had seen, none had
+listened, none had believed.
+
+There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
+brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
+reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these
+have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent;
+like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a
+swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon
+ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all
+joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of
+the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
+theft of the parasite.
+
+She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
+reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
+but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
+agony.
+
+For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.
+
+For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor
+and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
+
+"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the
+light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of
+negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones
+that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on
+the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"
+
+Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the
+darkness over the expanse of the flood.
+
+The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and
+moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, awakened and afraid,
+came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation
+of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge
+from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of
+the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the
+granaries above.
+
+She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard
+was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the
+human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.
+
+The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing
+eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the
+Lykegènés toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to
+grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.
+
+But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human
+form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half
+sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of
+the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the
+day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the
+beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
+
+He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times
+of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious,
+words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament
+for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.
+
+After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less
+frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire,
+and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer
+time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he
+grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he
+sank to a deep sleep.
+
+The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed
+creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an
+instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in
+this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of
+Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and
+visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all
+thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act
+like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less
+dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that
+unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and
+unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.
+
+To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and
+he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as
+she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have
+found frozen in the woods of winter.
+
+His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture
+that gave him easiest rest.
+
+With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the
+lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the
+inaudible beating of his heart.
+
+Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like
+the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses
+and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.
+
+For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from
+off her ear she was happy.
+
+She did not ask wherefore,--neither of herself or of the gods did she
+question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.
+
+She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he
+slept, and was content.
+
+So the hours passed.
+
+Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of
+waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.
+
+Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen
+world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.
+
+He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as
+it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too
+great sweetness of a summer shower.
+
+It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted
+with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close
+in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been
+conscious;--under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill
+stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming
+of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly
+human.
+
+A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly
+from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.
+
+It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.
+
+She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows
+it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and
+market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all
+aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious,
+thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and
+dared not, because her teeth were strong.
+
+She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as
+she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed
+amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and
+unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine
+back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.
+
+Now,--as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the
+hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun
+was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot
+shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.
+
+She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted
+above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the
+boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water,
+and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the
+shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her
+arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin
+and the curves of her shining shoulders.
+
+A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as
+she was;--wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes,
+outcast and ashamed.
+
+She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even
+as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in
+theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their
+water-world in tempest.
+
+She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more
+conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the
+earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those
+eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in
+abhorrence and in scorn;--and that he could have any other look, for
+her, she had no thought.
+
+She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any
+human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every
+tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in
+welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.
+
+For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;--that
+she had known when she had offered it.
+
+She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall,
+through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was
+flushed as with some great guilt.
+
+With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.
+
+With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy
+and shame.
+
+The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on
+her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the
+creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men
+had made her.
+
+At the casement, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon
+him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky
+and watery mists of the cold dawn.
+
+She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her
+flight.
+
+The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness
+and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.
+
+He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a
+fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like
+an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with
+water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with
+mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the
+half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him
+all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of
+honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms
+tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed,
+fair and free.
+
+But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened
+they had passed.
+
+Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she
+went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the
+sighing rushes.
+
+The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road
+was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the
+ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in
+any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the
+half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Yprès.
+
+The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all
+the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but
+the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats
+went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the
+night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse
+had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
+
+From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the
+fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its
+fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and
+with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.
+
+Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the
+wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns
+sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a
+sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath
+of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken
+primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.
+
+A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh
+moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin
+had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the
+wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill
+notes of woe.
+
+Folle-Farine saw nothing.
+
+She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of
+long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or
+cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.
+
+Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the
+place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any
+other thing than blows.
+
+As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it,
+though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in
+the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of
+honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion
+fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same
+she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he
+had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly;
+and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and
+thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or
+not.
+
+It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all
+creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her
+right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be
+beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.
+
+The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.
+
+Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he
+was weighing corn for the grinding.
+
+"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.
+
+She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.
+
+He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the
+same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.
+
+"Where is the boat?--that is worth more than your body. And soul you
+have none."
+
+She raised her head and looked upward.
+
+"I have lost the boat."
+
+She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she
+had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel,
+he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for
+many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes
+and the cheerless grassy ways.
+
+That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but
+this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from
+the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the
+confusion of the saints God.
+
+"Drifted where?"
+
+"I do not know--on the face of the flood,--with the tide."
+
+"You had left it loose."
+
+"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It
+went adrift."
+
+"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"
+
+"You can."
+
+"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat--find it above
+or below water--or to the town prison you go as a thief."
+
+The word smote her with a sudden pang.
+
+For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in
+silence at his bidding.
+
+In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets,
+she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely
+less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon
+the cross worked no miracles for her;--a child of sin.
+
+For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to
+drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink
+upon the road. She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in
+their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might
+have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the
+few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.
+
+She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she
+could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do
+for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze,
+she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being
+blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and
+fast as in a net.
+
+At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the
+entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her
+homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against
+the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar,
+away to the northward, in the full sunrise.
+
+It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Yprès,
+brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their
+boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy
+breaths of charity.
+
+She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and
+delving in the red and chilly day.
+
+She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river
+weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.
+
+"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was
+faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for
+once was bowed.
+
+He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at
+his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed
+such weakness neither in his eye nor words.
+
+"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will
+spare you half the stripes:--strip."
+
+Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow
+of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough
+garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness,
+drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.
+
+"I am guilty--this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:--she was
+thinking of her theft.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager
+and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with
+fervent and rapturous oratory.
+
+It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter
+world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding
+leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning
+the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to
+blossom.
+
+The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of
+fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the
+mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty
+subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a
+manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a
+mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great
+sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed
+them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it
+stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself,
+but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic
+and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land,
+raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and
+who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned
+and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a
+genius heaven-sent.
+
+When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the
+mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any
+sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way
+beautiful, had come upon him.
+
+He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations;
+and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never
+assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never
+tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village;
+mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the
+dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which
+thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times,
+the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.
+
+He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and
+very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on
+the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its
+sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under
+the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.
+
+Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast
+green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye
+could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and
+foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the
+force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to
+princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great
+cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness
+and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of
+men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the
+nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high
+endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And
+his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them,
+telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had
+gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.
+
+This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of
+the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening
+with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the
+purple pines:
+
+"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among
+the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
+
+"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
+people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves,
+'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
+or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for
+him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
+dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
+were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
+
+"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
+he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended upon him as
+wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and
+with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept
+it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble
+palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart
+was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury,
+with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to
+gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in
+other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury
+overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in
+the short space of a single summer-day.
+
+"But it was bought with a price.
+
+"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
+path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
+called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words
+across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
+metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the
+red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
+pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at
+eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here
+at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his
+best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into
+his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met
+his own.
+
+"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
+agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
+was wealth.
+
+"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
+barter its life away.
+
+"Look you,--this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish,
+even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
+own fulfilled desire.
+
+"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
+men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.
+
+"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's lust
+of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of
+wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
+falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with
+poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
+green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every
+gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed,
+because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one
+vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field,
+nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
+know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
+of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
+old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough,
+and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and
+cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead,
+and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
+perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
+hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
+the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
+but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
+health, holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."
+
+His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the
+sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on the
+shore.
+
+The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had
+spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were the words of truth.
+
+Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang, clear,
+scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of youth:
+
+"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or bird, or
+rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and mass my
+armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered? You are
+mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you know
+not, and that never has smiled upon you."
+
+The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his hand; he
+was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that curled
+loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like
+steel in their scorn.
+
+The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which
+blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash
+doubter from that sacred audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their
+hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.
+
+"Is it thee, Arslàn? Dost thou praise gold?--I thought thou hadst
+greater gods."
+
+The boy hung his head and his face flushed.
+
+"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And without power what is
+life?"
+
+And he went on his way out from the people, with the dead bird, which he
+had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mysteries of
+its silvery hues.
+
+The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.
+
+"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured. "For there is
+that in him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it, if he
+would."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+And the words of the Preacher had come true; so true that the boy Arslàn
+grown to manhood, had dreamed of fame, and following the genius in him,
+and having failed to force the world to faith in him, had dropped down
+dying on a cold hearth, for sheer lack of bread, under the eyes of the
+gods.
+
+It had long been day when he awoke.
+
+The wood smouldered, still warming the stone chamber. The owls that
+nested in the ceiling of the hall were beating their wings impatiently
+against the closed casements, blind with the light and unable to return
+to their haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside him on the
+floor; the fire had scared the rats from theft.
+
+He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate and drank with the
+avidity of long fast. Then he stared around him blankly, blinded like
+the owls.
+
+It seemed to him that he had been dead; and had risen from the grave.
+
+"It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space," he muttered
+dully.
+
+His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weariness. He did not
+reason. He only felt.
+
+His mind was a blank.
+
+Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered
+that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, endured much
+torment of the body, had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness.
+This was all he could recall.
+
+He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of
+brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked
+at the gray closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There
+was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood
+and the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs to render the
+place different from what it had been when he last had seen it.
+
+He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had
+suffered, and must have slept.
+
+Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to
+him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold
+and hunger; that some one must have seen and succored his necessity; and
+that the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been
+the food of alms.
+
+His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought stole on him.
+
+To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking
+aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in
+all the vigor of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be
+saved by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the
+travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be called back
+to life by aid that was degradation!
+
+He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes
+must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent
+over him in his misery. Some other human form must have been near his in
+this hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have
+been; he would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in
+its swamp or a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him
+tenfold preferable to a life restored to him by such a means as this.
+
+Death before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal may be great; but
+life paved by alms is a failure, and a failure forever inglorious.
+
+So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed with him the
+benefit.
+
+"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul against those
+unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation.
+"Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was
+passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"
+
+And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only
+birthright--freedom.
+
+Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would soon
+have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his
+wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some miser
+at prayers, for a bag of gold--rather crime than the debt of a beggar.
+
+So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced
+humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal
+craving, he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his
+own.
+
+He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad
+only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against
+this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease and
+ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes in
+his teeth so long as his life should last.
+
+He arose slowly and staggered to the casement.
+
+He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so
+long desired. He knew that he had been starving long--how long? Long
+enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively
+he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine cask,
+the wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life;
+they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.
+
+Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.
+
+That was his only thanksgiving.
+
+The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon
+the rising day--a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness,
+after the deluge of the rains.
+
+The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed
+over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists floated
+before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave back, as
+in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries, and
+the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.
+
+On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to
+drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes, the
+great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pursuing
+their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in the
+twilight of the damp gray vapor; a world half seen, half shrouded,
+lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden
+powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its visions
+of the future.
+
+"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled wearily as he
+said it.
+
+Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague light; in
+that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met heaven.
+
+Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of
+moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It
+was beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no
+sound except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor,
+whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery
+air; this colorless transparent exhalation, breathing up from the land
+to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every
+common and familiar form became transfigured.
+
+It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely
+by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.
+
+Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and
+things full of anguish, had their being:--the cattle in the
+slaughter-houses; the drunkard in the hovels; disease and debauch and
+famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the
+hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the
+inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent,
+cramped, and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured,
+forever blameless, yet forever accursed;--all these were there beneath
+that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender
+shafts of spires and the chimes of half-heard bells.
+
+He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the
+vapors shifted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a
+disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and casement answered
+casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved
+daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at
+their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went
+forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.
+
+Then he turned away.
+
+The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven
+out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple
+truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in
+his necessity and succored.
+
+He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the
+refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his
+shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.
+
+He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labor, this
+abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being
+derided for his pains, while other men prostituted their powers to base
+use and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and applause; he had
+grown tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew
+them not when it beheld them.
+
+He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had
+passion, and had manhood. Tired--utterly, because he was destitute of
+all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.
+
+"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any worth." It does
+not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be lying dying in old
+age to know thus much in all truth and all bitterness.
+
+"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart, as he turned
+aside from the risen sun.
+
+He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of
+existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by
+death ere we can set it straight.
+
+He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling
+greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been
+fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had
+been never reached.
+
+As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream that rushed
+beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the opposite wall, where the
+white shapes of his cartoons were caught by the awakening sun.
+
+The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
+at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
+yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.
+
+Among them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its
+full radiance.
+
+This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic
+symmetrical supple form of a man who was also a god.
+
+In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
+divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
+that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
+tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
+corn-mill he labored, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that
+toiled beside him.
+
+For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.
+
+The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
+with murder; the beauty which had the light and luster of the sun had
+been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
+earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
+of Zeus.
+
+He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
+with fruitfulness and gladness,--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
+things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
+doom of all unspent ages,--he, the Far-Striking King, labored here
+beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.
+
+In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.
+
+Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
+sacrifice.
+
+With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
+Lètô's son.
+
+The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of
+Delphinios.
+
+At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
+breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
+still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him
+wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding
+from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly
+to bear his yoke in Thessaly.
+
+Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his
+bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow
+mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen
+eyes, even as though he cried:
+
+"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
+me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and
+the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even
+thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine
+empire to me! Will human ears give heed to thy song, now thy scepter has
+passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision
+foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit
+thee now?"
+
+Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
+of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
+and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.
+
+For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
+the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
+to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
+Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds,
+and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
+no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
+
+And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
+calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
+and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried
+his face in his hands and wept.
+
+He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
+chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
+carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
+mill to grind for bread.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by
+the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds;
+dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the
+bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other
+end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which
+the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in
+the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of
+the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster above a sea of
+phosphorescent fire; those were Arslàn's earliest memories--those had
+made him what he was.
+
+In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a
+few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with
+torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed
+by more than a day's journey from any other of the habitations of men.
+
+There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely
+springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the
+white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and
+glorious summers, when the children's eyes saw the elves kiss the roses,
+and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair
+hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the
+long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all
+things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the
+wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed
+over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood
+fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told
+strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep,
+prayed God to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen
+in the snow.
+
+In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of
+stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there
+was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to
+the church. It was the house of the pastor.
+
+The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of
+his life,--save a few that he had passed in a town as a student,--and he
+had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than
+this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of
+tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open
+weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his
+herb-garden, and his few sheep.
+
+On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself
+believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the
+young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.
+
+He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he
+was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he
+loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to
+torture the innocent.
+
+It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like
+music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own
+blue skies on a summer night.
+
+She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the
+old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her
+with an intense power; she desired passionately without knowing what she
+desired.
+
+The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls'
+garland of alpine flowers, the youths' singing in the brief rose
+twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep
+midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old
+Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to
+her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly;
+beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one
+day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her,
+and she went--whither?
+
+They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their
+mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a
+prison. They could not tell.
+
+They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did
+not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.
+
+After awhile they heard of her.
+
+She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud,
+she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice
+which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the
+nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief
+words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever
+ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon--pardon
+for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.
+
+The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the
+heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself;
+but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does
+not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was
+a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the
+old man was left alone.
+
+The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice,
+severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the
+letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he
+chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between
+them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.
+
+The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking
+up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing
+with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the
+red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain
+grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing
+down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling
+the maidens to the dance.
+
+In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining
+above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with
+the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a
+lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a
+half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of
+the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell
+at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned
+she had given birth to a male child and was dead.
+
+Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury,
+malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her
+even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement,
+she had no strength.
+
+She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no
+name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslàn.
+
+When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with
+her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a
+mask of marble, the old pastor knew little--nothing--of what her life
+through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a
+word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had
+triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw.
+Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had
+lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been
+eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she
+had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world
+to be able to learn.
+
+That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native
+mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he
+knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.
+
+In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that
+strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the
+crown of them nor the root.
+
+The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and
+stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom
+their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the multitude: and
+who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled
+fearlessly at the noonday sun.
+
+The child had his mother's Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble
+statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his
+free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide,
+wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection.
+The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad
+was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained
+their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was
+never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke
+with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them
+extraordinary in one so young.
+
+But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged
+with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and
+braced him with a scholar's lore and by a mountaineer's exposure; so
+that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken
+old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his
+age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to
+guide it justly.
+
+The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the
+spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape
+the dire perils of that world in which his mother's life had been caught
+and consumed like a moth's in flame. But Arslàn's eyes looked ever
+across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother's;
+and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was
+silent.
+
+Moreover, he--who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of
+pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and
+lindens,--he had the gift of art in him.
+
+He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and
+unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of
+his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he
+drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn
+granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at
+liberty for his usage.
+
+When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little.
+"I will never leave the old man," he made answer; and he kept his word.
+Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply,
+after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were passed in the open
+air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst
+the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely
+forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or
+away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great
+arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the shore
+as a panther its prey.
+
+On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his
+mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life
+of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with
+the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the
+arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circumstance thus
+held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full
+shape and full stature.
+
+Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the
+patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to
+be lost again.
+
+In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's
+house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a
+mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers
+withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above
+their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there
+were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving
+woman.
+
+The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and
+the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or
+fuel, or any ray of light.
+
+The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by
+in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising
+God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his
+strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the
+dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day
+had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and
+still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and
+recompensed his service with agony.
+
+For two more days and nights Arslàn remained in his living tomb,
+enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his
+hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without
+companionship.
+
+On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had
+labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.
+
+As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the
+mountains, seeking a new world.
+
+His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it
+save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall
+stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it
+had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried
+freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he
+went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's
+between the hills.
+
+He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of
+triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of
+old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs,
+had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves
+and in the teeth of an adverse wind.
+
+He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless;
+he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those
+still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest
+possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm
+and cattle to Arslàn; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and
+vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslàn, when he
+became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he
+went without care for the future on this score into the world of men;
+his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper
+compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism;
+his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but
+half savage in its intensity.
+
+From that spring, when he had passed away from his birthplace as the
+winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain
+flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs,
+until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before
+the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and
+all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.
+
+Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds,
+and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his
+country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were
+in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure--as yet.
+
+In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme
+north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with
+Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their
+miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw;--the
+pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white,
+snow-world, the red moon fantastic and horrible in a sky of steel, the
+horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of
+the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had passed many
+seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal
+desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has
+either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often
+weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its
+inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men's wants and
+weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the
+works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the
+voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything
+he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.
+
+Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill,
+and being for the other half too sensual.
+
+The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height
+and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not
+one man in a million knew his name.
+
+During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an
+undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity
+in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it
+requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath
+the sun; he had studied the passions in all their deformities, as well
+as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in
+pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries,
+he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned
+back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight
+into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare
+himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his
+brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held
+needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling
+beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore
+of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors
+of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and
+purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl's cheek, the
+rottenness of corruption on a dead man's limbs, the hellish tint of a
+brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he
+studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save
+for one end,--knowledge and art.
+
+So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that it seemed to have
+left him without other passions; even as the surgeon dissects the fair
+lifeless body of some woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex,
+only intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, which he
+seeks therein, so did he study the physical beauty of women and their
+mortal corruption, without other memories than those of art. He would
+see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a goddess,
+and would think only to himself,--"How shall I render this so that on my
+canvas it shall live once more?"
+
+One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man was stabbed,--a
+young Maronite,--who lay dying in the roadway, without sign or sound,
+whilst his assassins fled; the silver Syrian moon shining full on his
+white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted
+on the dagger he had been spared no time to use; a famished street dog
+smelling at his blood. Arslàn, passing through the city, saw and paused
+beside him; stood still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched
+figure; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, rigid face,
+the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the
+wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, following on his steps,
+joined him a little later, and started from his side in horror.
+
+"My God! what do you do there?" he cried. "Do you not see?--the man is
+dying."
+
+Arslàn looked up--"I had not thought of that," he answered.
+
+It was thus always with him.
+
+He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to
+women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him,
+and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they
+had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of
+noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike fiercely what comes
+before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.
+
+But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet
+recompensed him nothing.
+
+Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
+they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.
+
+His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
+impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
+forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
+acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
+and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
+were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world,
+which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every
+art, would have none of them.
+
+So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts
+been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;--travel,
+study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends,
+utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in
+peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their
+common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though
+it had appeared inexhaustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors
+also were costly, and they brought him no return.
+
+The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the
+world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to
+find himself face to face with beggary.
+
+His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.
+
+All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other
+painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations
+themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his
+compeers and the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him the
+old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain;
+and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own
+cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike
+obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and
+they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it
+without remorse, and even with contentment.
+
+He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he
+possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute,
+if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it
+cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused
+utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty
+to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he
+refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.
+
+"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always
+hooted against him.
+
+It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in
+its unwilling ears.
+
+So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seashores came to
+pass; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he
+perished for want of bread.
+
+For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which
+he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell
+through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he
+disputed with the rats.
+
+The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized
+without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner
+than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for
+many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and
+had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that
+pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in
+which he dwelt.
+
+He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort,
+because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in
+a contemptuous despair.
+
+He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing
+pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not
+have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these
+worse than itself.
+
+There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above;
+but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men
+to fetch some from the store, Arslàn let the boat be moored against the
+wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current,
+without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"
+
+And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst
+the noble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his
+hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any
+other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest
+days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights
+glow above the winter seas.
+
+Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
+that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
+and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.
+
+It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
+its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
+it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
+creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
+existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
+merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
+was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
+was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
+for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
+great minds.
+
+Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
+desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the
+food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
+give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
+mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
+joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
+bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
+soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
+discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circumstance; he did his
+best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the
+child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
+refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
+the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
+ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as
+her own.
+
+Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his
+veins, the old passion, the old worship, returned to him.
+
+The momentary weakness which had assailed him passed away. He shook
+himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he
+had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to
+the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous
+still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have
+cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which
+he saw must surely have been his own.
+
+Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for
+several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to
+gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather
+the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for
+many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame
+which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had
+enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be
+charity!
+
+Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the
+white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and
+smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.
+
+His was the old old story;--the rod of wealth bartered for the empty
+shell that gave forth music.
+
+Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.
+
+Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive god
+who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the
+mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind;
+Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice
+and cry to him:--"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the
+spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear--the
+melody of gold!"
+
+Arslàn turned from the great cartoon of the gods in Pheræ, and went out
+into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent
+stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves
+and cleared his brain.
+
+When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its
+gods upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since
+life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon
+his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not
+accept the labor of his brain.
+
+Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body
+and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion
+which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance.
+In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud
+to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But
+now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the
+foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like
+a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his
+daily bread.
+
+So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.
+
+The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had
+come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full
+a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad
+slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads,
+these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to
+all that his life had known.
+
+These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed
+with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight
+slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that
+stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,--all these had had a certain
+charm for him.
+
+He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible
+to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and
+unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands
+and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further
+effort.
+
+Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted
+innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and
+autumnal landscapes. And of late--through the bitter winter--of late it
+had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.
+
+When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common
+ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead
+brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside
+poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the
+ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.
+
+He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for
+any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and
+to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this
+world, and so he found it.
+
+They repulsed him everywhere.
+
+They had their own people in plenty, they had their sturdy, tough,
+weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm,
+for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their
+field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of
+arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as
+the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their
+tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that
+lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.
+
+They would have none of him.
+
+"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have
+none of him.
+
+He had an evil name with them.
+
+They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been
+seen since he had come to the granary by the river.
+
+Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the
+fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son;
+the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with
+carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead--dead like the
+flowers that were still among his curls.
+
+Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton,
+half a singer and half a gypsy--handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous:
+the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden
+bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a
+fantoccini player who accompanied her.
+
+Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a
+rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier
+of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that
+date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined
+until it died.
+
+The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills
+of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to
+the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had
+arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds;
+all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circumstance.
+But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry
+always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it
+became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living
+thing should be painted by the artist Arslàn would assuredly never
+survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.
+
+In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman,
+nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage
+of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long
+repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.
+
+At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early
+habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he
+would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood,
+or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one
+with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and
+bitter there as gall.
+
+He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn
+had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from
+the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on
+the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.
+
+The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that
+reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only
+breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a
+sudden passion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the
+clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were
+it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than
+here.
+
+He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the
+strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun
+as it leapt at dawn from the waters.
+
+The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests
+filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean
+ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies,
+the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these
+came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by
+him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for
+their freedom.
+
+As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and looked out upon
+the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a
+flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose
+with a hiss from the sedges.
+
+The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who
+steered by a string wound round her foot.
+
+She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her
+bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke;
+her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he
+saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of
+the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine
+bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of
+the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their
+color struck him with a sudden surprise.
+
+He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers,
+treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of
+countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen
+water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such
+limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky,
+upon the desert's edge. But here!--a face of Asia among the cornlands of
+Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with
+wonder.
+
+The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving
+the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of
+the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the
+clouds of river-mist.
+
+He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a skiff full of corn
+down a sluggish stream. There was nothing to tell him that he was
+looking upon the savior of his body from the thralls of death; if there
+had been,--in his mood then,--he would have cursed her.
+
+The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a flock of
+water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted at some floating kernels
+of wheat that had fallen over the vessel's side; they fought and hissed,
+and flapped and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder; a large
+rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their exultation, and seized
+their leader and bore him struggling and beating the air with
+blood-stained wings away to a hole in the bank; a mongrel dog, prowling
+on the shore, hearing the wild duck's cries, splashed into the sedges,
+and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold sharp fangs, and
+bore both rat and bird, bleeding and dying, to the land; the owner of
+the mongrel, a peasant, making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying
+fields, snatched the duck from the dog to bear it home for his own
+eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for having ventured to
+stray without leave and to do him service without permission. "The
+dulcet harmony of the world's benignant law," thought Arslàn, as he
+turned aside to enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling.
+"To live one must slaughter--what life can I take?"
+
+At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil of the vapor, and
+glowed through the fog.
+
+The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the ruddy haze, and was
+visible; the water around it, like a lake of flame, the white steam
+above it like the smoke of a sacrifice fire.
+
+Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once more, all light
+faded, and the day was dead.
+
+He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along the reedy shore
+towards his dreary home. He wondered dully why his life would not end:
+since the world would have none of him, neither the work of his brain
+nor the work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it.
+
+He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, among the reeds,
+and let it flow over his face and breast, and kiss him softly and coldly
+into the sleep of death. He had desired this many times; what held him
+back from its indulgence was not "the child within us that fears death,"
+of which Plato speaks; he had no such misgiving in him, and he believed
+death to be a simple rupture and end of all things, such as any man had
+right to seek and summon for himself; it was rather that the passion of
+his art was too strong in him, that the power to create was too intense
+in him, so that he could not willingly consign the forces and the
+fantasies of his brain to that assimilation to which he would, without
+thought or pause, have flung his body.
+
+As he entered the haunted hall which served him as his painting-room, he
+saw a fresh fire of logs upon the hearth; whose leaping flames lighted
+the place with cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food,
+sufficient to last several days, and a brass flagon filled with wine.
+
+A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. It was less
+surprise at the fact, for his senses told him that it was the work of
+some charity which chose to hide itself, than it was wonder as to who,
+in this strange land, where none would even let him earn his daily
+bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his necessities thus. And
+with this there arose the same intolerant bitterness of the degradation
+of alms, the same ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to class
+him among beggars, which had moved him when he had awakened with the
+dawn.
+
+He felt neither tenderness nor gratitude, he was only conscious of
+humiliation.
+
+There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to
+sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his
+callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find
+themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their
+forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But
+it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which,
+wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.
+
+There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was
+the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had
+drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have
+borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been
+indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the
+art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.
+
+He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
+world would cherish.
+
+Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to
+give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene
+that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty has long been leveled
+with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame,
+still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"
+
+It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler
+emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This
+food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet--by means of
+this sheer bodily subsistence--it would be possible for him to keep
+alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him
+to compel his fame from men.
+
+He stood before the Phoebus in Pheræ, thinking; it stung him with a
+bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden--this debt which
+came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And
+yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which
+thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into
+his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.
+
+He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and
+ate and drank of the red wine:--he did not thank God or man as he broke
+his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his
+heart:
+
+"Since I must live, I will triumph."
+
+And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the
+generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well
+how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their
+bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe,
+for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.
+
+Hermes--Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise--knew how men's oaths were
+kept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered that he had been
+robbed--robbed more than once: he swore and raved and tore his hair for
+loss of a little bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He did
+not suspect his granddaughter; accusing her perpetually of sins of which
+she was innocent, he did not once associate her in thought with the one
+offense which she had committed. He thought that the window of his
+storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made no doubt that his
+spoiler was some vagabond from one of the river barges. Through such
+tramps his henhouse and his apple-lofts had often previously been
+invaded.
+
+She heard his lamentations and imprecations in unbroken silence; he did
+not question her; and without a lie she was able to keep her secret.
+
+In her own sight she had done a foul thing--a thing that her own hunger
+had never induced her to do. She did not seek to reconcile herself to
+her action by any reflection that she had only taken what she had really
+earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind was not
+sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a mould to be capable
+of the deft plea of a sophistry. She could dare the thing; and do it,
+and hold her peace about it, though she should be scourged to speak; but
+she could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself; for this she had
+neither the cunning nor the cowardice.
+
+Why had she done it?--done for a stranger what no pressure of need had
+made her do for her own wants? She did not ask herself; she followed her
+instinct. He allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was like
+nothing else her eyes had ever seen; and she was drawn by an
+irresistible attraction to this life which she had bought at the price
+of her own from the gods. Yet stronger even than this sudden human
+passion which had entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had
+ransomed from his death should he know his debt to her.
+
+Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any one on this thing
+which she had done. Silence was natural to her; she spoke so rarely,
+that many in the province believed her to be dumb; no sympathy had ever
+been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the passions that burned
+latent in her veins, or the tenderness that trembled stifled in her
+heart.
+
+Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water-tower undetected,
+both by the man whom she robbed, and the man whom she succored. Thrice
+again did she find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner's
+absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the cold blank
+hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma note the diminution of his
+stores, and burnish afresh his old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half
+the night on his dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of
+poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he placed, with a
+cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the eyes of his spoilers.
+
+But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this trap set, and was
+aware of it.
+
+In a week or two the need for these acts which she hated ceased. She
+learned that the stranger for whom she thus risked her body and soul,
+had found a boatman's work upon the water, which, although a toil rough
+and rude, and but poorly paid, still sufficed to give him bread. Though
+she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a time, that as she went
+through the meadows and hedge-rows she was glad to crush in her teeth
+the tender shoots of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she
+never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy crust thrown out to
+be eaten by the poultry.
+
+Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the
+saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the
+poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever
+flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the
+earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their
+glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in
+death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.
+
+For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise God.
+
+She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.
+
+"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished,"
+she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches
+turned upward in death on the turf.
+
+She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.
+
+The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of
+the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice.
+Their God was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed
+the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.
+
+"How shall a God be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute
+young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong passion for justice,
+a strong instinct towards what was righteous.
+
+As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer
+instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through
+crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until
+they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature
+strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards
+those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no
+matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.
+
+Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even
+like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its
+leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke
+and fetid odors of a city.
+
+Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as
+vaguely sought it.
+
+With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town,
+fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as
+this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each passage up and down the
+river, she passed by the dwelling of Arslàn.
+
+Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her;
+she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly
+on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when
+she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes
+wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes
+that were shadowed forth upon the walls.
+
+The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and
+took him often leagues away--simple hardy toil, among fishers and
+canal-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his
+nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his
+fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more
+splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he
+labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.
+
+"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the
+gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of
+the palace can ever beget.
+
+Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere
+his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works
+conceived.
+
+The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the flesh, the
+deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the
+indolences,--all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go
+to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them;
+but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.
+
+The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and
+the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the
+aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen
+pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the
+caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that
+glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds
+and feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the
+roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full
+odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.
+
+Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
+its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
+through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
+poison--that one deathless serpent which is Memory.
+
+Arslàn had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies,
+and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect
+utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was
+absolute,--when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife
+with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,--when he kept his body
+alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the
+fields,--when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,--when
+only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking
+his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,--when it
+seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous
+was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull
+bleaching white on the sand.
+
+Yet he had never done greater things,--never in the long years through
+which he had pursued and studied art.
+
+With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the
+tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and
+simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and
+color the imaginations of his brain.
+
+And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of
+Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when
+she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing,
+scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute
+and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness
+her brief youth had ever known.
+
+Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord,
+there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the
+imaginative senses latent in her,--enough of the old mediæval fancy, of
+the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a
+consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.
+
+Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of
+a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in
+which she dwelt.
+
+Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,--where the
+common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a
+thousand fashions,--where the graceful and the grotesque and the
+terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite,
+confusion,--where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the
+jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking
+sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on
+which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some
+trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead hand,--where all these
+were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any
+poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.
+
+Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely
+ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic
+incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that
+intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.
+
+Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of
+forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore
+them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds
+of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude,
+lying waste, bearing no harvest.
+
+Of these visits Arslàn himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild
+temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.
+
+She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole
+in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the
+stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals,
+which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.
+
+And this secret--in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times
+blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face
+and frame--changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless,
+passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into
+desires.
+
+For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she
+became human.
+
+All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows
+stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only
+with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days
+of his leisure.
+
+Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and
+stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and
+watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of
+the oil-lamp burning behind him.
+
+She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes
+created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget
+worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a
+little dust.
+
+The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he
+wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found
+him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like
+nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command
+like this, yet perish for a crust!--that fusion of omnipotence and
+powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad
+strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.
+
+She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed
+spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took
+no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.
+
+She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take
+form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or
+on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike
+such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile,
+the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the
+temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command,
+and beneath his touch.
+
+She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon
+him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him;
+and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his
+generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant
+failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness
+which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful
+service, and would not let him do as other men did--tell the world lies,
+and take its payment out in gold.
+
+Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it
+were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a
+trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.
+
+But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human
+sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter
+unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at
+him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of
+his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often
+past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like
+the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to
+his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.
+
+She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young
+and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this
+love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and
+savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of
+the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his
+easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she
+knew not why, into the deepest shadow.
+
+Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself
+atonement for her fault--the fault through which those tender little
+bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the
+year.
+
+She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied
+herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set
+aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those
+learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his
+revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she
+toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had
+taken.
+
+Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil
+origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute;
+she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands
+pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.
+
+So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath
+of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the
+boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses--a
+spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the
+past winter.
+
+It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the
+other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire,
+that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast
+fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.
+
+The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
+the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
+
+It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
+
+Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
+women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
+their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
+their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
+knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
+boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of
+toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all
+together in competition but in amity.
+
+Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
+a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a
+soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom
+amidst tufts of thyme.
+
+The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
+copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging
+the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.
+
+The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses
+or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of
+the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their
+baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of
+their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they
+had garnered through all the winter.
+
+Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the
+wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest,
+of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of
+the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of
+the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly
+budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of
+velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of
+lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the
+homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.
+
+It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the
+music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill
+paddles.
+
+In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a
+favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of
+large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her
+pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and
+a little ruddy wild strawberry.
+
+Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood
+surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms
+a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping
+as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof
+above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.
+
+"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she passed with her
+wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment
+the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I
+saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have
+gone this very night to Paris."
+
+"Thou art not alone, Edmée," groaned an old woman, tottering from her
+egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up
+in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen--the best sitter I
+have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noël--just cackled
+and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog
+rushed in and killed the blessed bird--killed her in her basket! A great
+yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again
+into the earth, like lightning."
+
+"Not worse than she did to my precious Rémy," said a tanner's wife, who
+drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen,
+querulous child.
+
+"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the
+days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh
+lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.
+
+"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three
+Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a
+living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like
+nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's
+curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce
+have known him. You remember?"
+
+"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken
+almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by
+her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would
+never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"
+
+"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little
+Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her
+eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."
+
+"A _jettatrice_ ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of
+Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.
+
+"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not
+for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."
+
+"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with
+which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed
+sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my
+son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she
+went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood
+from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken
+carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he
+slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:--she is a witch; there is no
+question but she is a witch."
+
+"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the
+youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.
+
+"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time,
+and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is
+blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of
+water.
+
+"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from
+me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron
+instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit
+the tongue of a quivering starling.
+
+"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried
+a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.
+
+"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman
+who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.
+
+"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping
+green herbs together for salads.
+
+And all the while the girl Edmée clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over
+it.
+
+"If she were only here," swore Edmée's lover, under his breath.
+
+At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.
+
+She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for
+one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the
+flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.
+
+Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither
+hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free,
+firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a
+little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But
+the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of
+her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added
+impulse to their rage.
+
+They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing
+hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them.
+They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor
+chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to
+her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they
+had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a
+selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech
+and act.
+
+The lover of Edmée loosened his hand from the silver beads about her
+throat, and caught up instead a stone.
+
+"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of
+her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her
+course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.
+
+"Who lamed my Rémy?" screamed the cripple's mother.
+
+"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.
+
+"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.
+
+"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with
+the starling.
+
+"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.
+
+"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?"
+shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.
+
+"Who is a witch?--who dances naked?--who bathes with devils at the full
+moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he
+stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at
+her as she came.
+
+"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured
+the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no
+echo.
+
+The old soldier even rebuked her. "A _jettatrice_ should be killed for
+the good of the people," he mumbled.
+
+Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon
+the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps
+into their midst; unfaltering.
+
+The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a
+thing that was devil-begotten.
+
+"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!"
+cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his
+small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and
+nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling
+them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly,
+steadily, with her face set against the light.
+
+Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the
+stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her--a
+jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest.
+It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced
+with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty
+and their own savage hate.
+
+"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only
+laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they
+arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once
+losing their luminous calm scorn.
+
+The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to
+see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his
+laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"
+
+One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while
+the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering
+in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so
+rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her
+clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then,
+swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking
+out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered
+from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.
+
+Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way
+across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed
+against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her
+invulnerable and possessed.
+
+She moved calmly with a firm tread backward--backward--backward; holding
+her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the
+sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps.
+They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the
+rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great
+square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth
+curled in contemptuous laughter.
+
+"Strike _now_!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood
+still.
+
+But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not
+so much as a word that answered her.
+
+She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the
+tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them
+stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and
+was still.
+
+At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung
+above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and
+their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of
+tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had
+they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she
+had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give
+freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow
+birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?
+
+She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and
+went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe
+through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side.
+There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly
+down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the
+shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to
+keep out the sun.
+
+A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse
+dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no
+one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his
+little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all
+there were here to look on her.
+
+She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the
+town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her
+shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still
+bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it,
+and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to
+her to be but little. She had passed through similar scenes before,
+though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her,
+except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.
+
+The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.
+
+The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of
+peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In
+the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there
+were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes
+of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid
+breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open casement,
+some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the
+people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were
+made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.
+
+The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all
+the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible
+at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past
+the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone
+walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the
+poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with
+the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and
+the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt
+giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.
+
+When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks
+and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift
+in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through
+the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the casement
+into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly
+apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.
+
+It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things
+that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his
+bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted
+except at earliest dawn.
+
+The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and
+shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were
+free to her; she had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek
+them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its
+coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after
+the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless
+sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her
+more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad,
+cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from
+without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the gods of Oblivion.
+
+
+Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
+most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
+beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had
+repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the
+same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance;
+like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For
+Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his
+mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his
+golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was
+a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were
+welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand
+of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery
+nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and
+colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an
+unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden
+with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and
+the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things,
+had learned that there was but one good possible in all the
+universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their
+blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there
+was a great darkness.
+
+So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
+brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
+in their mute majesty.
+
+They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,--they
+are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who stay with the
+exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe
+in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a
+beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and lust, and
+brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the
+loneliest nights for genius and youth,--they are the gods of consolation
+and of compensation,--the gods of the orphan, of the outcast, of the
+poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs
+of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of
+all who hunger with the body or with the soul.
+
+And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her only friends,--as
+the only rulers who ever could loose the bands of her fate and let her
+forth to freedom--Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.
+
+They were above her where she sank upon the stone floor; the shadows
+were dark upon the ground; but the sunrays striking through the distant
+window against the opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy
+Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet.
+
+She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, the populace that
+had hooted her abroad, the stripes that awaited her at home. The
+answering gaze of the gods magnetized her; the poetic virus which had
+stirred dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered brain.
+Without knowing what she wanted, she longed for freedom, for light, for
+passion, for peace, for love.
+
+Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultuous pageantry; the higher
+instincts of her nature rose and struggled to burst the bonds in which
+slavery and ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew nothing,
+knew no more than the grass knew that blew in the wind, than the
+passion-flower knew that slept unborn in the uncurled leaf; and yet
+withal she felt, saw, trembled, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all
+blindly, all in confusion and in pain.
+
+The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, that had never
+quailed before the fury of any living thing; her head fell on her chest;
+she wept bitterly,--not because the people had injured her,--not because
+her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore,--but because a distance
+so immeasurable, so unalterable, severed her from all of which these
+gods told her without speech.
+
+The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst the stones on
+which she sat and her own form were dark in shadow; and as though the
+bright boy Hypnos pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had
+compassion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb
+violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion with it.
+
+The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness of fasting, the
+fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences of the place, had their
+weight on her. Crouching there half on her knees, looking up ever in the
+faces of the three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her and
+stilled her; its languor stole through her veins; its gentle pressure
+closed her eyelids; gradually her rigid limbs and her bent body relaxed
+and unnerved; she sank forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms,
+and the stillness of a profound sleep encompassed her.
+
+Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, delirious dreams
+floated through her brain, and peopled her slumber with fairer things
+than the earth holds, and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were
+wet.
+
+Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her with his dark sad
+eyes, and held his finger on his close-pressed lips, as though he
+said--"Not yet."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Her sleep remained unbroken; there was no sound to disturb it. The caw
+of a rook in the top of the poplar-tree, the rushing babble of the
+water, the cry of a field-mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the
+far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern road that ran
+broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing of the rats in the
+network of timbers which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the
+noises that reached this solitary place, and these were both too faint
+and too familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slumber heavy,
+and the forms on which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full of
+dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows lengthened, the day
+advanced: nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell rang
+over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria from the cathedral in
+the town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned around.
+
+As the chimes died, Arslàn crossed the threshold of the granary and
+entered the desolate place where he had made his home. For once his
+labor had been early completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare
+and precious moments of the remaining light.
+
+He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying beneath his
+cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused and looked down.
+
+Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all the abandonment of
+youth and of sleep; her face was turned upward, with quick silent
+breathings parting the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the
+linen of her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back
+from her right arm and shoulder; the whole supple grace and force that
+were mingled in her form were visible under the light folds of her
+simple garments. The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of
+Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor where she was
+stretched.
+
+As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.
+
+But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he
+recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen
+rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for
+her strange unlikeness to all around her.
+
+He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep
+overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.
+
+He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which,
+at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet
+beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in
+her for his art.
+
+A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the
+light fell, he began to sketch her attitude, rapidly, in black and
+white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such
+transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which
+color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and
+slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins;
+the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red
+carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the
+eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming;
+while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in
+full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;--these gave a picture which
+required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.
+
+He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with
+something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown
+out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their
+mere outline.
+
+Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as
+though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold
+and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But
+she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every
+curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as
+little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as that with which the vivisector
+tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist
+plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to
+examine.
+
+The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see
+them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand
+tremble a moment in such translation.
+
+To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from the female
+corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and
+to Arslàn the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as
+sexless, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the
+tools for his art: no more.
+
+When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside
+the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the
+deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight
+the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he
+had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude
+than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had
+recorded in his works.
+
+He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; and he had sought
+women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of
+contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative
+affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always--
+
+    "De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,
+      De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,
+    Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!
+      Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle aux trois crayons."
+
+And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so hotly for an
+instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or
+satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance
+of chastity.
+
+He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness
+of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which
+tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient
+existence.
+
+She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who
+looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily
+blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.
+
+She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled
+there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He
+painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep
+in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him
+than these would have been.
+
+The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the
+boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from
+the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children
+going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips
+of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air
+through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.
+
+The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they
+pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up
+suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood
+fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves
+strained to listen and striving to combat.
+
+For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that
+she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were
+from the clamor of her late tormentors.
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+"What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of the country.
+
+She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew her disordered
+dress together, and stood mute, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and
+the blood coming and going under her transparent skin.
+
+"What do you fear?" he asked again.
+
+"_I_ fear?"
+
+She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous defiance; the heroism
+of her nature, which an hour earlier had been lashed to its fullest
+strength, cast back the question as an insult; but her voice was low and
+husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.
+
+For she feared him; and for the moment she had forgotten how she had
+come there and all that had passed, except that some instinct of the
+long-hunted animal was astir in her to hide herself and fly.
+
+But he stood between her and the passage outward, and pride and shame
+held her motionless. Moreover, she still listened intently: the confused
+voices of the children still seemed to her like those of the multitude
+by whom she had been chased; and she was ready to leap tiger-like upon
+them, rather than let them degrade her in his sight.
+
+He looked at her with some touch of interest: she was to him only some
+stray beggar-girl, who had trespassed into his solitude; yet her untamed
+regard, her wide-open eyes, the staglike grace of her attitude, the
+sullen strength which spoke in her reply,--all attracted him to closer
+notice of these.
+
+"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly. "You were asleep here
+when I came, more than an hour ago."
+
+The color burned in her face: she said nothing.
+
+The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from
+beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy
+these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in
+her.
+
+"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to
+return to the attitude sketched out upon his easel.
+
+She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined
+with the apprehensiveness of chastisement which becomes second nature to
+every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every
+real or imagined fault.
+
+"I came to see _those_," she answered him, with a backward movement of
+her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the
+gods above her.
+
+The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as
+this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom,
+throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had
+never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this
+outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent
+of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he
+be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his
+works.
+
+"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be to _you_?"
+
+She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her
+head drooped; she knew that they were much to her--friends, masters,
+teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to
+tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been
+ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was
+ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts,
+and it locked her lips to silence.
+
+Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind
+and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the
+half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape
+and cannot.
+
+Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of
+blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in
+her linen left it bare.
+
+"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It is nothing."
+
+"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"
+
+"The people struck me."
+
+"Struck you? With what?"
+
+"Stones."
+
+"And why?"
+
+"I am Folle-Farine."
+
+She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient
+reply.
+
+But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the
+populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to
+have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had
+never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence.
+To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost
+that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.
+
+"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate
+you?"
+
+She gave a gesture of assent.
+
+"And you hate them in return?"
+
+She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a
+trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.
+
+"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in
+my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I
+have never killed one yet."
+
+He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed
+passion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn
+which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands
+clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was
+a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that
+conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its
+exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he
+moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence
+against you?"
+
+"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything
+else.
+
+"Have you no other name?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you must have a home? You live--where?"
+
+"At the mill with Flamma."
+
+"Does he also ill use you?"
+
+"He beats me."
+
+"When you do wrong?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"Wrong?" "Right?"
+
+They were but words to her--empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat
+her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught
+that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.
+
+Arslàn looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her
+to return to the attitude necessary to the completion of his picture.
+
+He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At
+all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was
+afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to
+her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a fear as though, in
+lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some
+crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it
+seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had
+wearied of, and might have wished to lose.
+
+"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.
+
+She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's
+face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made
+her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of
+this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift,
+which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a
+burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.
+
+"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does
+the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could
+ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever
+touch.
+
+By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as
+she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned,
+had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature
+beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him
+one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel.
+Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study
+on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same
+watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in
+her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished
+to turn to the purpose of his art--like a flower that he plucked on his
+way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some
+vacant nook in a mountain foreground.
+
+"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him,
+flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarrassed, with her hands
+nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her
+sad, lustrous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered
+fear.
+
+"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."
+
+"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care
+to come?"
+
+Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was
+burning.
+
+"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a
+pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.
+
+He laughed a little; bitterly.
+
+"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your
+way. Has no one ever told you so?"
+
+"I?"
+
+She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly; she thought that
+he spoke in derision of her.
+
+"You," he answered. "Why not? Look at yourself here: all imperfect as it
+is, you can see something of what you are."
+
+Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused waves of dull
+color, out of whose depths her own face arose, like some fair drowned
+thing tossed upward on a murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had
+wounded her, and stood still, trembling.
+
+She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque water of the
+bathing pool, with a certain sense of their beauty wakening in her; she
+had tossed the soft, thick, gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her
+bare shoulder, with a certain languor and delight; she had held a knot
+of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast with her own
+white skin;--but she had never imagined that she had beauty.
+
+He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus taught her creep with
+all its poison into her veins.
+
+He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before in Nubian girls
+with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, who had never thought that they
+had loveliness,--though they had seen their forms in the clear water of
+the wells every time that they had brought their pitchers thither,--and
+who had only awakened to that sweet supreme sense of power and
+possession, when first they had beheld themselves live again upon his
+canvas.
+
+"You are glad?" he asked her at length.
+
+She covered her face with her hands.
+
+"I am frightened!"
+
+Frightened she knew not why, and utterly ashamed, to have lain thus in
+his sight, to have slept thus under his eyes; and yet filled with an
+ecstasy, to think that she was lovely enough to be raised amidst those
+marvelous dreams that peopled and made heaven of his solitude.
+
+"Well, then,--let me paint you there," he said, after a pause. "I am
+too poor to offer you reward for it. I have nothing----"
+
+"I want nothing," she interrupted him, quickly, while a dark shadow,
+half wrath, half sorrow, swept across her face.
+
+He smiled a little.
+
+"I cannot boast the same. But, since you care for all these hapless
+things that are imprisoned here, do me, their painter, this one grace.
+Lie there, in the shadow again, as you were when you slept, and let me
+go on with this study of you till the sun sets."
+
+A glory beamed over all her face. Her mouth trembled, her whole frame
+shook like a reed in the wind.
+
+"If you care!" she said, brokenly, and paused. It seemed to her
+impossible that this form of hers, which had been only deemed fit for
+the whip, for the rope, for the shower of stones, could have any grace
+or excellence in his sight; it seemed to her impossible that this face
+of hers, which nothing had ever kissed except the rough tongue of some
+honest dog, and which had been blown on by every storm-wind, beaten on
+by every summer sun, could have color, or shape, or aspect that could
+ever please him!
+
+"Certainly I care. Go yonder and lie as you were lying a few moments
+ago--there in the shadow, under these gods."
+
+She was used to give obedience--the dumb unquestioning obedience of the
+packhorse or the sheepdog, and she had no idea for an instant of
+refusal. It was a great terror to her to hear his voice and feel his
+eyes on her, and be so near to him; yet it was equally a joy sweeter and
+deeper than she had ever dreamed of as possible. He still seemed to her
+like a god, this man under whose hand flowers bloomed, and sunrays
+smiled, and waters flowed, and human forms arose, and the gracious
+shapes of a thousand dreams grew into substance. And yet, in herself,
+this man saw beauty!
+
+He motioned her with a careless, gentle gesture, as a man motions a
+timid dog, to the spot over which the three brethren watched hand in
+hand; and she stretched herself down passively and humbly, meekly as the
+dog stretches himself to rest at his master's command. Over all her
+body the blood was leaping; her limbs shuddered; her breath came and
+went in broken murmurs; her bright-hued skin grew dark and white by
+turns; she was filled with a passionate delight that he had found
+anything in her to desire or deem fair; and she quivered with a
+tumultuous fear that made her nervous as any panting hare. Her heart
+beat as it had never done when the people had raged in their fury around
+her. One living creature had found beauty in her; one human voice had
+spoken to her gently and without a curse; one man had thought her a
+thing to be entreated and not scorned;--a change so marvelous in her
+fate transfigured all the world for her, as though the gods above had
+touched her lips with fire.
+
+But she was mute and motionless; the habit of silence and of repression
+had become her second nature; no statue of marble could have been
+stiller, or in semblance more lifeless, than she was where she rested on
+the stones.
+
+Arslàn noticed nothing of this; he was intent upon his work. The sun was
+very near its setting, and every second of its light was precious to
+him. The world indeed he knew would in all likelihood never be the wiser
+or the richer for anything he did; in all likelihood he knew all these
+things that he created were destined to moulder away undisturbed save by
+the rats that might gnaw, and the newts that might traverse, them. He
+was buried here in the grave of a hopeless penury, of an endless
+oblivion. They were buried with him; and the world wanted neither him
+nor them. Still, having the madness of genius, he was as much the slave
+of his art as though an universal fame had waited his lowliest and
+lightest effort.
+
+With a deep breath that had half a sigh in it he threw down his brushes
+when the darkness fell. While he wrought, he forgot the abject
+bitterness of his life; when he ceased work, he remembered how hateful a
+thing it is to live when life means only deprivation, obscurity, and
+failure.
+
+He thanked her with a few words of gratitude to her for her patience,
+and released her from the strain of the attitude. She rose slowly with
+an odd dazzled look upon her face, like one coming out of great darkness
+into the full blaze of day. Her eyes sought the portrait of her own
+form, which was still hazy and unformed, amidst a mist of varying hues:
+that she should be elected to have a part with those glorious things
+which were the companions of his loneliness seemed to her a wonder so
+strange and so immeasurable that her mind still could not grasp it.
+
+For it was greatness to her: a greatness absolute and incredible. The
+men had stoned, the women cursed, the children hooted her; but he
+selected her--and her alone--for that supreme honor which his hand could
+give.
+
+Not noticing the look upon her face he placed before her on the rude
+bench, which served in that place for a table, some score of small
+studies in color, trifles brilliant as the rainbow, birds, flowers,
+insects, a leaf of fern, an orchid in full bloom, a nest with a blue
+warbler in it, a few peasants by a wayside cross, a child at a well, a
+mule laden with autumn fruit--anything which in the district had caught
+his sight or stirred his fancy. He bade her choose from them.
+
+"There is nothing else here," he added. "But since you care for such
+things, take as many of them as you will as recompense."
+
+Her face flushed up to the fringes of her hair; her eyes looked at the
+sketches in thirsty longing. Except the scarlet scarf of Marcellin, this
+was the only gift she had ever had offered her. And all these
+reproductions of the world around her were to her like so much sorcery.
+Owning one, she would have worshiped it, revered it, caressed it,
+treasured it; her life was so desolate and barren that such a gift
+seemed to her as handfuls of gold and silver would seem to a beggar were
+he bidden to take them and be rich.
+
+She stretched her arms out in one quick longing gesture; then as
+suddenly withdrew them, folding them on her chest, whilst her face grew
+very pale. Something of its old dark proud ferocity gathered on it.
+
+"I want no payment," she said, huskily, and she turned to the threshold
+and crossed it.
+
+He stayed her with his hand.
+
+"Wait. I did not mean to hurt you. Will you not take them as reward?"
+
+"No."
+
+She spoke almost sullenly; there was a certain sharpness and dullness of
+disappointment at her heart. She wanted, she wished, she knew not what.
+But not that he should offer her payment.
+
+"Can you return to-morrow? or any other day?" he asked her, thinking of
+the sketch unfinished on the sheet of pinewood. He did not notice the
+beating of her heart under her folded arms, the quick gasp of her
+breath, the change of the rich color in her face.
+
+"If you wish," she answered him below her breath.
+
+"I do wish, surely. The sketch is all unfinished yet."
+
+"I will come, then."
+
+She moved away from him across the threshold as she spoke; she was not
+afraid of the people, but she was afraid of this strange, passionate
+sweetness, which seemed to fill her veins with fire and make her drunk
+and blind.
+
+"Shall I go with you homeward?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"But the people who struck you?--they may attack you again?"
+
+She laughed a little; low in her throat.
+
+"I showed them a knife!--they are timid as hares."
+
+"You are always by yourself?"
+
+"Always."
+
+She drew herself with a rapid movement from him and sprang into her boat
+where it rocked amidst the rushes against the steps; in another instant
+she had thrust it from its entanglement in the reeds, and pulled with
+swift, steady strokes down the stream into the falling shadows of the
+night.
+
+"You will come back?" he called to her, as the first stroke parted the
+water.
+
+"Yes," she answered him; and the boat shot forward into the shadow.
+
+Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars
+sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.
+
+There was little need to exact the promise from her.
+
+Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which,
+whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth,
+and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime
+world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that hell which
+none,--once having entered it,--can ever more forsake.
+
+She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from
+the shore and the stream into the gloom of the night.
+
+He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted
+shadows.
+
+Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where
+it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the
+night.
+
+"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I
+have nearly enough for remembrance there."
+
+And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to
+those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for
+whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of
+the dead.
+
+From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she
+was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its
+home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its
+grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up
+into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom,
+or to fall into the fowler's snare;--what matter which?
+
+The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the
+great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the
+gloom.
+
+She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her
+as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.
+
+She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the
+silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a
+fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into
+little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or
+a smith's forge.
+
+By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge
+betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical,
+silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings
+and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless
+whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the city whither it goes.
+
+It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just
+rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was
+moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to
+and fro in his wood-yard.
+
+At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches,
+and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the
+minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted,
+and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud
+reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest
+terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.
+
+In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and
+dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered,
+puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle;
+there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that
+made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and
+fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter;
+under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a
+nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring;
+on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a
+gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap
+in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.
+
+The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and
+unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with
+a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold
+of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the
+gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslàn.
+
+She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp
+earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on
+her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of
+dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night air
+lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of
+rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had
+brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.
+
+The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance
+at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up
+the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray
+bent brows.
+
+"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth.
+"Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"
+
+The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the
+softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.
+
+"I say nothing," she answered.
+
+"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to
+make thee speak. Nothing!--when three of the clock should have seen thee
+back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without
+account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure--in shame and
+iniquity--in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"
+
+"Since you know, why ask?"
+
+She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge
+from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought
+her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they
+had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.
+
+"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left
+undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to
+name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell,
+or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"
+
+"I have done as I chose."
+
+She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own
+that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.
+
+"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak--_you!_--a thing
+less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose--you!--who have not a
+rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat,
+not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine--mine--mine. As you
+choose. _You!_--you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you
+sloth! You are nothing--nothing--less than the blind worm that crawls in
+the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it
+shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break
+your will."
+
+As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an
+oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he
+raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that
+dumb, passive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted
+whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.
+
+But the creature, silent and stirless, who before had stood to receive
+his lashes as though her body were of bronze or wood, that felt not, was
+changed. A leonine and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She
+started out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure as a
+willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs back, released, into
+the air.
+
+She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by a sudden gesture
+from him, and flung it away to the farther end of the chamber; then she
+turned on him as a hart turns brought to bay.
+
+Her supple body was erect like a young pine; her eyes flashed with a
+luster he had never seen in them; the breath came hard and fast through
+her dilated nostrils.
+
+"Touch me again!" she cried aloud, while her voice rang full and
+imperious through the stillness. "Touch me again; and by the heaven and
+hell you prate of, I will kill you!"
+
+So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the old man dropped
+his hands and stood and gazed at her aghast and staring; not recognizing
+the mute, patient, doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this
+stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him in all the
+royalty of wrath, in all the passion of insurrection.
+
+He could not tell what had altered her, what had wrought this
+transformation, what had changed her as by sorcery; he could not tell
+that what had aroused a human soul in her had been the first human voice
+that she had listened to in love; he could not tell that her body had
+grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her beautiful, and
+that her life for the first time had acquired a worth and dignity in her
+sight because one man had deemed it fair.
+
+He could not tell; he could only see that for the first time his slave
+had learned somewhere, and in somewise, what freedom meant; and had
+escaped him. This alone he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid.
+
+She waited, watching him some moments, with cold eyes of disdain, in
+which a smouldering fire slept, ready to burst into an all-devouring
+flame.
+
+There was not a sound in the place; the woman spinning stopped her
+wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, savage fashion; the lean cat ceased
+its cries; there was only the continual swish of the water in the
+sluices under the wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black
+Forest clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in its
+cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the thyme, and the sage,
+and the onions hung among the twisted rafters.
+
+Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her hip, her lips
+curved scornfully and close, her face full of passion, which she kept
+still as the dead birds hanging on the wall; whilst all the time the
+tawny smoky hues of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic
+play over her head and limbs.
+
+Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently,
+without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the
+horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble
+fortitude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as
+was the daily bread she broke.
+
+But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the gods upon her, now
+she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she
+would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her
+body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the
+water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath
+the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslàn.
+
+There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held
+motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.
+
+Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the
+moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily
+in him; some vague remembrance passed over him, that, whatsoever else
+she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and
+kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will,
+with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.
+
+He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard
+at her in the dusky lamp-light.
+
+He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and
+groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant
+life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would
+have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and
+trample it under foot, and spit on it.
+
+He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his
+path, while he struck out the light with his staff.
+
+"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late.
+To-morrow I will deal with thee."
+
+She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like
+stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her
+nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew
+that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslàn
+had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to
+preserve it by death from that indignity.
+
+From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been used to bare her
+shoulders to the lash, and take the stripes as food and wages; she had
+no more thought to resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on
+earth, has to resist his master's blows; the dull habits of a soulless
+bondage had been too strong on her to be lightly broken, and the
+resignation of the loyal beasts that were her comrades, had been the one
+virtue that she had seen to follow.
+
+But now at length she had burst her bonds, and had claimed her freedom.
+
+She had tasted the freshness of liberty, and the blood burned like fire
+in her face as she remembered the patience and the shame of the years of
+her slavery.
+
+There was no mirror in her little room in the gabled eaves; all the
+mirror she had ever known had been that which she had shared with the
+water-lilies, when together she and they had leaned over the smooth dark
+surface of the mill-pond. But the moon streamed clearly through the one
+unshuttered window, a moon full and clear, and still cold; the
+springtide moon, from which the pale primroses borrow those tender hues
+of theirs, which never warm or grow deeper, however golden be the sun
+that may shine.
+
+Its clear colorless crescent went sailing past the little square lattice
+hole in the wall; masses of gorgeous cloud, white and black, swept by in
+a fresh west wind; the fresh breath of a spring night chased away the
+heat and languor of the day; the smell of all the blossoms of the spring
+rose up from wood and orchard; the cool, drowsy murmuring of the
+mill-stream beneath was the only sound on the stillness, except when now
+and then there came the wild cry of a mating owl.
+
+The moonbeams fell about her where she stood; and she looked down on her
+smooth skin, her glistening shoulders, her lustrous and abundant hair,
+on which the wavering light played and undulated. The most delicious
+gladness that a woman's life can know was in tumult in her, conflicting
+with the new and deadly sense of shame and ignorance. She learned that
+she was beautiful, at the same time that she awoke to the knowledge of
+her dumb, lifeless slavish inferiority to all other human things.
+
+"Beautiful!" she muttered to herself, "only as a poppy, as a snake, as a
+night-moth are beautiful--beautiful and without fragrance, or sweetness,
+or worth!"
+
+And her heart was heavy, even amidst all its pleasure and triumph, heavy
+with a sense of utter ignorance and utter worthlessness.
+
+The poppy was snapped asunder as a weed, the snake was shunned and
+cursed for his poison, the night-moth was killed because his nature had
+made him dwell in the darkness; none of the three might have any fault
+in truth in them; all of the three might have only the livery of evil,
+and no more; might be innocent, and ask only to breathe and live for a
+little brief space in their world, which men called God's world. Yet
+were they condemned by men, and slain, being what they were, although
+God made them.
+
+Even so she felt, without reasoning, had it been and would it be, with
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+In the room below, the old Norman woman, who did not fear her
+taskmaster, unbarred the shutter to let the moon shine in the room, and
+by its light put away her wheel and work, and cut a halved lettuce up
+upon a platter, with some dry bread, and ate them for her supper.
+
+The old man knelt down before the leaden image, and joined his knotted
+hands, and prayed in a low, fierce, eager voice, while the heavy
+pendulum of the clock swung wearily to and fro.
+
+The clock kept fitful and uncertain time; it had been so long imprisoned
+in the gloom there among the beams and cobwebs, and in this place life
+was so dull, so colorless, so torpid, that it seemed to have forgotten
+how time truly went, and to wake up now and then with a shudder of
+remembrance, in which its works ran madly down.
+
+The old woman ended her supper, munching the lettuce-leaves thirstily in
+her toothless mouth, and not casting so much as a crumb of the crusts to
+the cat, who pitifully watched, and mutely implored, with great ravenous
+amber-circled eyes. Then she took her stick and crept out of the
+kitchen, her wooden shoes clacking loud on the bare red bricks.
+
+"Prayer did little to keep holy the other one," she muttered. "Unless,
+indeed, the devil heard and answered."
+
+But Claudis Flamma for all that prayed on, entreating the mercy and
+guidance of Heaven, whilst the gore dripped from the dead rabbit, and
+the silent song-birds hung stiff upon the nail.
+
+"Thou hast a good laborer," said the old woman Pitchou, with curt
+significance, to her master, meeting him in the raw of the dawn of the
+morrow, as he drew the bolts from his house-door. "Take heed that thou
+dost not drive her away, Flamma. One may beat a saddled mule safely, but
+hardly so a wolf's cub."
+
+She passed out of the door as she spoke with mop and pail to wash down
+the paved court outside; but her words abode with her master.
+
+He meddled no more with the wolf's cub.
+
+When Folle-Farine came down the stairs in the crisp, cool,
+sweet-smelling spring morning that was breaking through the mists over
+the land and water, he motioned to her to break her fast with the cold
+porridge left from overnight, and looking at her from under his bent
+brows with a glance that had some apprehension underneath its anger,
+apportioned her a task for the early day with a few bitter words of
+command; but he molested her no further, nor referred ever so faintly to
+the scene of the past night.
+
+She ate her poor and tasteless meal in silence, and set about her
+appointed labor without protest. So long as she should eat his bread, so
+long she said to herself would she serve him. Thus much the pride and
+honesty of her nature taught her was his due.
+
+He watched her furtively under his shaggy eyebrows. His instinct told
+him that this nameless, dumb, captive, desert animal, which he had bound
+as a beast of burden to his mill-wheels, had in some manner learned her
+strength, and would not long remain content to be thus yoked and driven.
+He had blinded her with the blindness of ignorance, and goaded her with
+the goad of ignominy; but for all that, some way her bandaged eyes had
+sought and found the light, some way her numbed hide had thrilled and
+swerved beneath the barb.
+
+"She also is a saint; let God take her!" said the old man to himself in
+savage irony, as he toiled among his mill-gear and his sacks.
+
+His heart was ever sore and in agony because his God had cheated him,
+letting him hold as purest and holiest among women the daughter who had
+betrayed him. In his way he prayed still; but chiefly his prayer was a
+passionate upbraiding, a cynical reproach. She--his beloved, his marvel,
+his choicest of maidens, his fairest and coldest of virgins--had escaped
+him and duped him, and been a thing of passion and of foulness, of
+treachery and of lust, all the while that he had worshiped her.
+Therefore he hated every breathing thing; therefore he slew the birds in
+their song, the insects in their summer bravery, the lamb in its
+gambols, the rabbit in its play amidst the primroses. Therefore he cried
+to the God whom he still believed in, "Thou lettest that which was pure
+escape me to be defiled and be slaughtered, and now Thou lettest that
+which is vile escape me to become beautiful and free and strong!" And
+now and then, in this woe of his which was so pitiful and yet so brutal,
+he glanced at her where she labored among the unbudded vines and
+leafless fruit trees, and whetted a sickle on the whirling grindstone,
+and felt its edge, and thought to himself. "She was devil-begotten.
+Would it not be well once and for all to rid men of her?" For, he
+reasoned, being thus conceived in infamy and branded from her birth
+upward, how should she be ever otherwise than to men a curse?
+
+Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the bushes and by the
+glancing water, she saw the steel hook and caught his sideway gaze, and
+read his meditation.
+
+She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, "He shall not do it
+till I have been back _there_."
+
+Before the day was done, thither she went.
+
+He had kept her close since the sunrise.
+
+Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the country, which
+had a certain pleasure to her, because she gained by them liberty and
+air, and the contentment of swift movement against fresh blowing winds.
+Nor did he send her to the town. He employed her through ten whole hours
+in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and carrying from his yard to
+his lofts, always within sight of his own quick eye, and within call of
+his harsh voice.
+
+She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do swiftly and well. There
+was no fault to find in any of her labors.
+
+When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, the last burden
+borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her roughly go indoors and winnow
+last year's wheat in the store chambers till he should bid her cease.
+
+She came and stood before him, her eyes very quiet in their look of
+patient strength.
+
+"I have worked from daybreak through to sunset," she said, slowly, to
+him. "It is enough for man and beast. The rest I claim."
+
+Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone wall that parted the
+timber-yard from the orchard, and was out of sight, flying far and fast
+through the twilight of the boughs.
+
+He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped on his breast, his
+hands worked restlessly on the stone coping of the wall, his withered
+lips muttered in wrath.
+
+"There is hell in her," he said to himself. "Let her go to her rightful
+home. There is one thing----"
+
+"There is one thing?" echoed the old woman, hanging washed linen out to
+dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed almond-shrubs.
+
+He gave a dreary, greedy, miser's chuckle:
+
+"One thing;--I have made the devil work for me hard and well ten whole
+years through!"
+
+"The devil!" mumbled the woman Pitchou, in contemptuous iteration. "Dost
+think the devil was ever such a fool as to work for thy wage of blows
+and of black bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how should he
+rule unless he paid his people well?"
+
+Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, through the pastures
+where the leek herds dreamed their days away, through the young wheat
+and the springing colza, and the little fields all bright with promise
+of the spring, and all the sunset's wealth of golden light.
+
+The league was but as a step to her, trained as her muscles were to
+speed and strength until her feet were as fleet as are the doe's. When
+she had gained her goal then only she paused, stricken with a sudden
+shyness and terror of what she hardly knew.
+
+An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards a little
+grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose water never stirred, save by
+a pigeon's rosy foot, or by a timid plover's beak, was motionless and
+clear as any mirror.
+
+Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, and taught her
+eyes to seek her own reflection. It had a certain wonder in it to her
+now that fascinated her with a curious indefinable attraction. For the
+first time in her life she had thought of it, and done such slight
+things as she could to make it greater. They were but few,--linen a
+little whiter and less coarse--the dust shaken from her scarlet sash;
+her bronze-hued hair burnished to richer darkness; a knot of wild
+narcissi in her bosom gathered with the dew on them as she came through
+the wood.
+
+This was all; yet this was something; something that showed the dawn of
+human impulses, of womanly desires. As she looked, she blushed for her
+own foolishness; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood-flowers
+into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, though only a moment
+earlier she had gathered them, so senseless and so idle to have decked
+herself with their borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these
+he cared!
+
+Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.
+
+Arslàn stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle
+of wood.
+
+He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and
+looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she
+saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face,
+closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand
+moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his
+hold like lead.
+
+She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and
+incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty
+nor terror.
+
+It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He
+started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and
+threw a black cloth over the trestle.
+
+"Do not look there," he said to her. "I had forgotten you.
+Otherwise----"
+
+"I have looked there. It is only a dead woman."
+
+"Only! What makes you say that?"
+
+"I do not know. There are many--are there not?"
+
+He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or
+curiosity was true and not assumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread,
+and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory
+of death were wholly absent from her.
+
+"There are many indeed," he made answer, slowly. "Just there is the
+toughest problem--it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds
+of human ephemeræ, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the
+millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be
+choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is the
+_numbers_ that kill one's dreams of immortality!"
+
+She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had
+spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere
+cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl
+young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.
+
+"It is Fortis, the ragpicker's daughter," she said, indifferently, and
+dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she
+envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode
+there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its
+calm limbs.
+
+"Yes," he answered her. "It is his daughter. She died twenty hours
+ago,--of low fever, they say--famine, no doubt."
+
+"Why do you have her here?" She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the
+girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born;
+she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.
+
+"The dead sit to me often," he said, with a certain smile that had
+sadness and yet coldness in it.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"That they may tell me the secrets of life."
+
+"Do they tell them?"
+
+"A few;--most they keep. See,--I paint death; I must watch it to paint
+it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks
+his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the
+riverside last night. He said to me, 'You like studying the dead, they
+say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving;--and it cannot hurt
+her.' So I gave him the coin--though I am as poor as he--and I took the
+dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl
+shall go to her grave when I have done with her."
+
+She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled
+her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious
+pain.
+
+She did not care for the body lying there--it had been but the other day
+that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called
+her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past
+it; but there passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she,
+likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than
+this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.
+
+The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to
+lay her down in the cool water and let it take her to long sleep and to
+complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of
+value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb
+still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner,
+she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her
+absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his
+thought.
+
+Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his
+art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never
+occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak
+shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of
+life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond
+measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.
+
+She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his
+service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the
+sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple
+altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;--this seemed to her the
+most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's
+daughter lying there in such calm content.
+
+"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no
+harm; if I did, what would she know?"
+
+"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain
+perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to
+you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for
+that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often
+thought of it lately."
+
+He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken
+steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the
+district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being
+offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face
+with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they
+gained from their study but little.
+
+For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed
+there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He
+could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the
+bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were
+only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical
+development, but mindless as any clod of earth.
+
+He did not know how to answer her.
+
+"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so
+bitter to you?"
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"
+
+"But you are so young,--and you are handsome, and a woman?"
+
+She laughed a little.
+
+"A woman! Marcellin said that."
+
+"Well! What is there strange in saying it?"
+
+She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till
+the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.
+
+"That was a woman--a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow
+hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her
+lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I
+am a devil, they say."
+
+His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and
+whose irony escaped her.
+
+"What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call
+you so?"
+
+Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.
+
+"You do not believe that I am a devil?"
+
+"How should I tell? If you covet the title claim it,--you have a
+right,--you are a woman!"
+
+"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.
+
+"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. "And there
+is your creator."
+
+"_He!_"
+
+She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.
+
+"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words
+out of the empty wind. Hephæstus made her heart, fusing for it brass and
+iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages.
+But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night,
+and tell me your story while I work."
+
+She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had
+motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of
+Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.
+
+The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough
+to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a
+likeness to his own.
+
+It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely
+moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so
+little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and
+so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very
+slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to
+self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body
+and of the senses.
+
+As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing
+people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the
+night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his
+senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of
+the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests,
+and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn
+strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion:
+these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in
+the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?
+
+And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
+soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
+eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
+of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
+and stirs in the strange _loves_ of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
+song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
+with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
+every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of
+man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
+thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
+tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence
+pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual
+torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking
+creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all
+creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured,
+at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly
+assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of
+inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus
+universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he
+pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse staggering
+beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age;
+the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through
+the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the
+slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under
+the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector
+while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable
+hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures
+dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of
+men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was
+the softest thing in all his nature.
+
+But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased.
+It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such
+simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast
+broadcast.
+
+Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her--that
+she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal
+in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights
+and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange
+kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid attitudes, in her curt,
+unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides,
+although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two
+years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship of
+boors, with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme
+poverty in which the latter months of his life had been passed, had
+excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none
+without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man
+even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who
+had brought the dead girl to him for a few brass coins, had been the
+only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made
+such change in it worse than its continuance.
+
+In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless,
+hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his
+curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his
+mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a
+wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if
+aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in
+quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance,
+he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.
+
+He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long
+imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with
+the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an
+intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the
+stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.
+
+The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once streaming across the
+darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out
+again among his fellows, then--the spider is left to miss the human love
+that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue
+flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom
+alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still
+locked they are much.
+
+Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world's neglect, and
+they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible
+dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining
+to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.
+
+And in these, in their bondage, there were little patience, or sympathy,
+or softness, and to them, even nature itself at times looked horrible,
+though never so horrible, because never so despicable, as humanity.
+Yet, still even in these an instinct of companionship abided; and this
+creature, with a woman's beauty, and an animal's fierceness and
+innocence, was in a manner welcome.
+
+"Why were women ever made, then?" she said, after awhile, following,
+though imperfectly, the drift of his last words, where she lay stretched
+obedient to his will, under the shadow of the wall.
+
+He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he has heard from the
+raving lips of some friend fever-stricken.
+
+"Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in the desert. He
+was content in his solitude: he was holy and at peace: the honey of the
+wild bee and the fruit of the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him;
+the lions were his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves; the eagle
+flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms were his
+messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and the soul alone had
+dominion; and day and night, upon the lonely air, he breathed the praise
+of God.
+
+"Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he said to himself, 'I
+have lived content; so shall I die purified, and ready for the kingdom
+of heaven.' For it was in the day when that wooden god, who hangs on the
+black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but had a name of
+power and of might, adjuring which, his people smiled under torture, and
+died in the flame, dreaming of a land where the sun never set, and the
+song never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest.
+
+"So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was glad and at peace.
+
+"One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain torrents fell, to the
+door of his cave there came a wayfarer, fainting, sickly, lame,
+trembling with terror of the desert, and beseeching him to save her from
+the panthers.
+
+"He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, for he said,
+'Wheresoever a woman enters, there the content of a man is dead.' But
+she was in dire distress, and entreated him with tears and supplications
+not to turn her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and he
+felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened the door to her,
+and bade her enter and be at sanctuary there in God's name.
+
+"But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and want fell from off
+her, her eyes grew as two stars, her lips were sweet as the rose of the
+desert, her limbs had the grace of the cheetah, her body had the
+radiance and the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And she
+laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, 'Thou thinkest thou hast lived,
+and yet thou hast not loved! Oh, sage! oh, saint! oh, fool, fool, fool!'
+Then into his veins there rushed youth, and into his brain there came
+madness; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity loathsome
+since passionless; and he stretched his arms to her and sought to
+embrace her, crying, 'Stay with me, though I buy thee with hell.' And
+she stayed.
+
+"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a
+phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the
+desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she
+beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the
+noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the
+rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.
+
+"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he
+searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to
+die."
+
+He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters,
+the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of
+passionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness
+of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the
+Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the
+phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed
+in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial,
+with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts
+in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning
+women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but
+when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into
+picture-like formations.
+
+She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire
+brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy
+allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.
+
+No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and
+beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed
+to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung
+as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.
+
+"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.
+
+"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."
+
+Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with
+the new light that broke in on her.
+
+"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"
+
+Arslàn rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic
+smile.
+
+"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's
+kingdom of heaven!"
+
+She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had
+understood the parable of his narrative, yet the passion of it had
+passed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.
+
+"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.
+
+"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who
+remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse
+through which he has walked--himself sane--in a bygone time.
+
+"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong,
+half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want--I want to
+have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and
+they pray."
+
+"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his god. "Who does
+not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever
+you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."
+
+A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly
+faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not,
+since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the
+passion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power
+might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all
+men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her
+to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.
+
+"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she
+muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has
+none."
+
+"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech
+him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but
+it is your god only whom in their hearts they worship. See how the
+Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."
+
+"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none
+to the devil?"
+
+"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret god. Look you: I will tell you
+another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to
+all the various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under the sun.
+There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of
+ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before
+all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense
+before its divinity.
+
+"Now, no nation would look at the god of another; and each people
+clustered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying
+out, 'There is no god but this god.'
+
+"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king,
+whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and
+very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal
+peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought
+nothing but discord and war.'
+
+"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and
+he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be
+not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar
+whereat all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.'
+
+"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on
+it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with
+a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man,
+but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.
+
+"And each man forsook his god, and came and kneeled before this nameless
+altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in
+solitude. The poor forsaken gods stood naked and alone; there was not
+one man left to worship one of them."
+
+She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy
+fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled
+through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and
+every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.
+
+She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken
+God on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since
+she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of
+hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities
+alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that worship them.
+
+"If I had a god," she said, suddenly, "if a god cared to claim me--I
+would be proud of his worship everywhere."
+
+Arslàn smiled.
+
+"All women have a god; that is why they are at once so much weaker and
+so much happier than men."
+
+"Who are their gods?"
+
+"Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods of their offspring, of
+their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as
+tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples.
+Others--less innocent--make gods of their own forms and faces; of bright
+stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and
+fine linen, of passions, and vanities, and desires; gods that they
+consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat,
+and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these gods will be
+yours?"
+
+She thought awhile.
+
+"None of them," she said at last.
+
+"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"
+
+She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and
+even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations
+naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for
+her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.
+
+"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that God is deaf. He
+must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no
+God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I were He.
+Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a
+little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing,
+quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been
+screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
+the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
+scream--scream--scream. All in vain. Its God never heard. When I got it
+free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had
+bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much
+blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it
+down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could;
+but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun
+rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed
+any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a
+little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a
+god since all gods let these things be?"
+
+Arslàn smiled as he heard.
+
+"Child,--men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
+heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
+life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
+You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human, then. If you were
+human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
+yourself a lease of immortality."
+
+She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him,
+and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity.
+It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been
+flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed
+little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of
+all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the
+field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were
+hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to
+gratify the appetites or the avarice of humanity--these sufferings were
+horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,--a crime
+for which she hated God and Man.
+
+"There is no god pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no god--not one?"
+
+"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three
+brethren that watched above her.
+
+"Are they your gods?"
+
+A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed a moment over his
+mouth.
+
+"My gods?--No. They are the gods of youth and of age--not of manhood."
+
+"What is yours, then?"
+
+"Mine?--a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen
+hands I have put them and myself--forever."
+
+She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest
+of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he passed his years
+in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous
+shapes that rose and bloomed around him.
+
+"Those are gentler gods?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the
+brethren above her. "Do you never--will you never--worship them?"
+
+"I have ceased to worship them. In time--when the world has utterly
+beaten me--no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one,
+see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."
+
+"And that god is----"
+
+"Death!"
+
+She was silent.
+
+Was this god not her god also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest
+and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?
+
+"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.
+
+And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the
+secrets of men,--he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's
+souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the
+braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling
+what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds
+silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all
+things fall at last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and
+returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the
+ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave
+any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know--and had he
+known would not have heeded--that instead of going on her straight path
+back to Yprès she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the
+bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the
+riverside.
+
+It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and
+then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some
+night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went
+slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of
+the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the
+fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a
+republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The
+young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of
+the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in
+which all their metal tongues joined musically.
+
+She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of
+the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale
+rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black
+shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the
+strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead
+body, and the bending figure of Arslàn as he stooped above the corpse
+and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of
+death.
+
+To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil
+thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make
+death--men's conqueror--his servant and his slave; she only begrudged
+every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid
+limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with
+a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and
+lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.
+
+He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any
+bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night
+breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the
+darkness.
+
+He worked more than half the night--worked until the small store of oil
+he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of
+a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and
+rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His
+hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his
+breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon
+his lungs.
+
+The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth
+that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever
+on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever
+on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that
+must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should
+have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For
+these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had
+neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death
+too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain
+glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the
+flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in
+his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of
+poverty and of obscurity.
+
+The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his
+manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to
+make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life
+by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the
+morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work
+of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.
+
+Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is
+Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to
+aim wildly and weakly?"
+
+He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again
+and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only
+that one dead woman shared.
+
+He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in
+search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be
+in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not
+in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to
+honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought,
+until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for
+once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once
+despairs of itself as self-deception.
+
+Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his
+fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him
+and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told
+himself, it must be so.
+
+He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing
+what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp
+exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few
+stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the
+silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon
+him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men
+that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the
+strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead
+also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave
+where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands
+powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices
+and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world
+above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of
+which paused by his tomb.
+
+It grew horrible to him--this death in life, to which in the freshness
+of manhood he found himself condemned.
+
+"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be
+without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long--let me
+be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days.
+Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men
+cannot, if they wish, let die."
+
+Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say?
+Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human
+creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and
+asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all
+the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to
+perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim
+exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"
+
+One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow sighing rushes,
+bathed in the moonlight and the mists; and the impersonal passion which
+absorbed him found echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just
+wakened in its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life
+as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of its
+involuntary cry.
+
+She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and yet her heart ached
+with his desire, and shared the bitterness of his denial. What kind of
+life he craved in the ages to come; what manner of remembrance he
+yearned for from unborn races of man; what thing it was that he
+besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, all peace, all
+personal woes and physical delights, she did not know; the future to her
+had no meaning; and the immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god,
+of whose worship she had no comprehension; and yet she vaguely felt that
+what he sought was that his genius still should live when his body
+should be destroyed, and that those mute, motionless, majestic shapes
+which arose at his bidding should become characters and speak for him to
+all the generations of men when his own mouth should be sealed dumb in
+death.
+
+This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured him, though the
+famine of the flesh had had no power to move him, thrilled her with the
+instinct of its greatness. This thirst of the mind, which could not
+slake itself in common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and
+pleasure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that dim
+instinct which had made her nerves throb at the glories of the changing
+skies, and her eyes fill with tears at the sound of a bird's singing in
+the darkness of dawn, and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as
+for some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant hush of
+earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she suffered; and a sweet
+newborn sense of unity and of likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter
+pity of her soul. To her he was as a king: and yet he was powerless. To
+give him power she would have died a thousand deaths.
+
+"The gods gave me life for him," she thought. "His life instead of mine.
+Will they forget?--Will they forget?"
+
+And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bulrushes she flung
+herself down prostrate in supplication, her face buried in the long damp
+river-grass.
+
+"Oh, Immortals," she implored, in benighted, wistful, passionate faith,
+"remember to give me his life and take mine. Do what you choose with me;
+forsake me, kill me; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind; let
+me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the chaff; let me be
+bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always; let me always suffer and
+always be scorned; but grant me this one thing--to give him his desire!"
+
+Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that vain would be the gift
+of life--the gift of mere length of years which she had bought for him.
+
+Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its solitude dreams
+had sprung forth windsown, like wayside grasses, and vague desires
+wandered like wild doves: but although blank, the soil was rich and deep
+and virgin.
+
+Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she had learned no evil: a
+stainless though savage innocence had remained with her. She had been
+reared in hardship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to her
+scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if they had been borne
+with courage and without murmur. On her, profoundly unconscious of the
+meaning of any common luxury or any common comfort, the passions of
+natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the empire of gold, had
+no hold at any moment. To toil dully and be hungry and thirsty, and
+fatigued and footsore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of
+the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich command. She knew
+scarcely of the existence of the simplest forms of civilization:
+therefore she knew nothing of all that he missed through poverty; she
+only perceived, by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he
+gained through genius.
+
+Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character trained by cruelty only
+to endurance: yet the soil was not rank but only untilled, not barren
+but only unsown; nature had made it generous, though fate had left it
+untilled; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to it and
+held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold.
+
+The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in
+her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the
+defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as
+they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and
+imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good
+things of which no man had taught her in anywise.
+
+Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by
+it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters,
+the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed
+into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless
+freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though
+she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the
+sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her
+which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.
+
+He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual
+delight, but only this one thing--a name that should not perish from
+among the memories of men.
+
+And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she
+yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on
+a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty
+pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's
+sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with
+every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works
+of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his
+body should be destroyed.
+
+It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
+when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
+blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
+though weakened.
+
+The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
+an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
+darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
+he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
+pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
+life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
+at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
+and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the
+forest-land and water-world are audible.
+
+He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
+impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
+lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
+thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
+which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never
+will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will
+drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
+oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
+devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
+when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
+
+Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to
+feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have
+told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered
+to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a
+greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had
+known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a
+half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his
+life, and honored it without doubt or question.
+
+No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours
+under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.
+
+She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the
+first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But
+when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not
+dare to say her nay.
+
+A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly opening to her; the
+life of the imagination.
+
+All these many years since the last song of Phratos had died off her
+ear, never again to be heard, she had spent with no more culture and
+with no more pleasure than the mule had that she led with his load along
+the miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through that utter
+neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, some wild natural fancy
+had been awake in her, some vague sense stir that brought to her in the
+rustle of leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists,
+the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the open-air
+world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did not bear for any of
+those around her.
+
+Now in the words that Arslàn cast to her--often as idly and
+indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds on snow, birds that
+he pities and yet cares nothing for--the old religions, the old beliefs,
+became to her living truths and divine companions. The perplexities of
+the world grew little clearer to her, indeed; and the miseries of the
+animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion of all things
+was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might be, they deepened and grew
+more entangled. He could imbue her with neither credulity nor
+contentment; for he possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool's
+paradise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that they have
+ascended Zion.
+
+The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of such a mind as
+his can furnish anodynes neither to itself nor any other. But such
+possessions and consolations--and these are limitless--as the
+imagination can create, he placed within her reach. Before she had
+dreamed--dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of
+tyranny; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon a mist-swept hill,
+by the western seas, while all the earth is dark, and only its dim
+fugitive waking sounds steal dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through
+the myths and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed
+almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting sun on the
+wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which all common things of daily
+life grow glorious, and through whose rosy hues the only sound that
+comes is some rich dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and
+melody of prayer.
+
+The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel place of labor and
+butchery, in which all creatures suffered and were slain. All things
+rose to have their story and their symbol for her; Nature remaining to
+her that one sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had feebly
+felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer to her, and made
+fuller of compassion. All the forms and voices of the fair dead years of
+the world seemed to grow visible and audible to her, with those
+marvelous tales of the old heroic age which little by little he
+unfolded to her.
+
+In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had no belief; she
+wanted a faith, and found one in all these strange sweet stories of a
+perished time.
+
+She had never thought that there had been any other generation before
+that which was present on earth with her; any other existence than this
+narrow and sordid one which encircled her. That men had lived who had
+fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, and stained
+those vivid hues in its ancient casements, had been a fact too remote to
+be known to her, though for twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in
+reverence of their loveliness.
+
+Through Arslàn the exhaustless annals of the world's history opened
+before her, the present ceased to matter to her in its penury and pain;
+for the treasury-houses of the golden past were opened to her sight.
+Most of all she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages; and
+every humble and homely thing became ennobled to her and enriched,
+beholding it through the halo of poetry and tradition.
+
+When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two sparrows pecked and
+screamed and spent the pleasant summer hours above in the flower-scented
+air in shrill dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard
+in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and Cyx. When
+the wild hyacinths made the ground purple beneath the poplars and the
+pines, she saw in them the transformed loveliness of one who had died in
+the fullness of youth, at play in a summer's noon, and died content
+because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest of all gods,
+the god that loved him best. As the cattle, with their sleek red hides
+and curling horns, came through the fogs of the daybreak, across the
+level meadows, and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no
+more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the milk-white
+herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures of Pieria.
+
+All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song of the
+nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer for her a little
+brown bird that sang to the budding fruit and the closed daisies, but
+was the voice of Ædon bewailing her son through the ages, or the woe of
+Philomela crying through the wilderness. When through the white hard
+brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down the beams of light,
+she saw no longer in it an insect-hunter, a house-nesting creature, but
+saw the shape of Procne, slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding
+none. And when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing water,
+bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the mules to the
+mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she had heard the old glad story
+of the children of Zeus who dwelt so long within a herdsman's hut,
+nameless and dishonored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see
+the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise up and obey
+the magic of their song.
+
+Arslàn in his day had given many evil gifts, but this one gift that he
+gave was pure and full of solace: this gift of the beauty of the past.
+Imperfect, obscure, broken in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance,
+it was indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory that time
+could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance could not impair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"What has come to that evil one? She walks the land as though she were a
+queen," the people of Yprès said to one another, watching the creature
+they abhorred as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the
+market-stall.
+
+She seemed to them transfigured.
+
+A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her eyes; a proud
+elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance of her carriage: her face
+had a sweet musing mystery and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her
+smile was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair tidings
+in her heart unspoken.
+
+Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, absorbed in their
+small trades or in their continual field labor, were struck by the
+change in her, and looked after her, and listened in a stupid wonder to
+the sonorous songs in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips
+as she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden mules through
+the fords.
+
+They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, that she had thrown
+off their yoke, and had escaped from their narrow world, and was happy
+with some rich, mute, nameless happiness that they could neither evade
+nor understand.
+
+The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding
+a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that
+fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance
+which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and
+so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with
+indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than
+she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast
+that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure
+in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing
+the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful,
+clouded, fierce face.
+
+As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and
+to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came
+naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for
+some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest
+for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious
+sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed
+in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of
+ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden
+with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and
+the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free
+forest animal, was in a way welcome.
+
+All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was
+so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so
+unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift
+a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him
+when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another
+planet than his own.
+
+He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to
+inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without
+passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked
+in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured
+sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again
+with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful
+tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the
+tyranny of a human love.
+
+She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told
+himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows,
+and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious
+sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was
+a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of
+a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet
+appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake
+what slumbered there.
+
+But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she
+listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.
+
+The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created
+was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the
+peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.
+
+He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had
+flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of
+those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the
+walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself;
+despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the
+souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing--a
+thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of
+it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who
+was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the
+breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed
+at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,--these
+were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own
+weakness.
+
+She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he
+was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a
+worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.
+
+Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this
+new shame which they could cast at her.
+
+"She has found a lover,--oh-ho!--that brown wicked thing! A lover meet
+for her;--a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the
+mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own
+likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"--so the women
+screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or
+heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.
+
+At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a
+deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was
+only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and
+whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.
+
+In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated
+might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body
+or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy
+itself in its own darkness:--he had never stretched a finger to hold it
+back.
+
+The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of
+this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to
+him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should
+live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside
+he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first
+day, breathed a word to Arslàn of the treatment that she received at
+Yprès. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his
+pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her
+how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well
+enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.
+
+And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did
+not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire,
+and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her
+teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to
+revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.
+
+So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslàn's
+tower she spent in acquiring another art,--she learned to read.
+
+There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to
+her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly
+word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was
+better educated than most, and could even write a little.
+
+To her Folle-Farine went.
+
+"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every
+nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never
+find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you
+will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."
+
+The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have
+you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still----" The wish for
+the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared
+to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She
+consented.
+
+Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and
+scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little
+brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those
+green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no
+one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and
+despair of all the market-place.
+
+Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping
+under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green
+bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in
+rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the
+Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder,
+and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible
+things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.
+
+Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslàn.
+
+It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night
+and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings;
+the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing
+against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle
+and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their
+folded white lilies,--these were all things he cared to study.
+
+The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
+artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then
+break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and
+revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much
+deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and
+the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to
+move abroad.
+
+Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her
+shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule
+seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them
+together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of
+all honest folk, were after some unholy work--coming from the orgy of
+some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them
+the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.
+
+For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and
+whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.
+
+Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the
+dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages
+she could for learning the art of letters.
+
+The acquisition was hard and hateful--a dull plodding task that she
+detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the
+lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with
+the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant
+was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen
+in communion with the wicked thing of Yprès.
+
+Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of
+the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from
+that belonged to the herb-seller--a rude old tattered pamphlet
+recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she
+had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the
+thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know
+these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you
+were not so ignorant!"--and since that day she had set herself to clear
+away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood
+with her hatchet.
+
+It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand
+before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles
+to me."
+
+He praised her; and she was glad and proud.
+
+It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full
+of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;--a love that
+unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her,
+and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.
+
+He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.
+
+A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman
+woods,--what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the
+desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he
+gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his
+exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission,
+was welcome to him.
+
+And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of
+her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes
+dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow
+dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.
+
+She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or
+the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would
+have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them
+more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at
+the blue-rock on the wing.
+
+This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit--habit, and the
+callousness begotten by his own continual pain.
+
+The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever
+knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty
+of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to
+change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind
+into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.
+
+He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his
+fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.
+
+His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition--a passion pure as
+crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his
+name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be
+his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into
+oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of
+his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into
+the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on
+the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.
+
+"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his
+paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so
+much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of
+hours--waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so
+many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly.
+It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes
+to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to
+do with you, go and hang yourself--or if you fear to do that, dig a
+ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows
+what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs
+to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what
+your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before
+you, Hosannah."
+
+So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his
+cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and
+which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that
+flew over them.
+
+Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the
+wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught
+her.
+
+"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
+aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere
+on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and
+nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to
+have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to
+make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a
+thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice were
+wrong once, why not twice?"
+
+Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
+than the ice floes of his native seas.
+
+"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
+sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent,
+the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
+of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
+elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
+Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
+every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
+its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."
+
+She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
+roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.
+
+"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
+round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they
+bow when they pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
+with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
+him?"
+
+Arslàn laughed a little.
+
+"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
+whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
+young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb
+that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
+who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money greeds and
+delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the
+assassination that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that
+deals moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned
+Fraud in the place of mailed Force,--lives always in purple and fine
+linen, and ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over
+his corpse."
+
+He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
+thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
+others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
+more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
+where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
+his hand.
+
+She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.
+
+"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly. "I have thought of
+something."
+
+And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
+surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
+a vision had arisen before him.
+
+The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone
+walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the
+level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded
+away as though they had existed only in a dream.
+
+All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes
+that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
+them.
+
+The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed
+before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he
+saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble
+palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of
+Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a
+city at high festival.
+
+And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had
+rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.
+
+A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
+womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
+in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
+a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow streamed; a sun which
+parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which
+it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the
+myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose gleaming marble walls the
+silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling
+cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple
+plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had
+scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they
+had one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes
+were filled with a god's pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned,
+and lashed, and hooted.
+
+And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
+men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
+brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
+eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of
+brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed,
+rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
+victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with
+wide-open throats and brazen lungs,--"Barabbas!"
+
+There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a
+terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or
+of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.
+
+One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
+stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.
+
+A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and
+shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and
+fled.
+
+A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
+rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
+on him.
+
+A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he
+stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
+captive.
+
+A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
+dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
+sacrifice.
+
+A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
+sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
+her in Barabbas' train.
+
+On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
+looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
+boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
+beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion
+of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to
+the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.
+
+And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above
+all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one
+faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure
+ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close,
+and tearing at each other's breasts.
+
+Six nights the conception occupied him--his days were not his own, he
+spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while
+his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the
+end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
+could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
+many of the greatest works the world has seen;--oaks sprung from the
+acorn that a careless child has let fall.
+
+When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood
+motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his
+sleepless eyes.
+
+He knew that his work was good.
+
+The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god
+when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne
+their full fruit.
+
+It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will
+discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the
+feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor
+of his ideal; the more surely will he--though the world ring with
+applause of him--be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.
+
+But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense,
+surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with
+a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain
+and of his hand contents him,--it is the purest joy on earth.
+
+Arslàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he
+had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger
+and thirst and the passage of time.
+
+He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him.
+He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed
+with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had
+worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived
+there, recorded for the world that denied him.
+
+As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith
+in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what
+other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation
+remained with him.
+
+His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of
+the passing night.
+
+The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and
+plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the
+light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his
+fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.
+
+He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the
+best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the
+genius in him had ever conceived and put forth;--and he knew too that he
+was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he
+were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed
+whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame,
+unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken
+with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.
+
+There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in
+him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future
+generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were
+none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful
+things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their
+scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his
+mind and his hand--and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving
+one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for
+their meaning.
+
+To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few
+coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the
+bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.
+
+A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent
+life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle
+with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.
+
+"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to
+be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on
+it."
+
+All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he
+doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on
+canvas.
+
+If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to
+leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with
+each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the
+wing of the owl and the flittermouse.
+
+The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.
+
+Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.
+
+She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of
+his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then
+she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and
+bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts
+of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had
+brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have
+remembered.
+
+She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him
+and looked;--looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.
+
+The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of
+radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there
+was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.
+
+One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.
+
+She stood and gazed at it.
+
+She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of
+dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the
+dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was
+darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a
+thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its
+unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have been more
+marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch
+wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But
+now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the
+pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the
+creation, its creator.
+
+All she saw was the face of the Christ,--the pale bent face, in whose
+eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach
+that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.
+
+She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the
+people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ
+moved her strangely--there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken
+while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.
+
+Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated
+her with their ironies and with their woe--the parable of the genius
+rejected and the thief exalted.
+
+She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.
+
+"They have talked of their God--often--so often," she muttered. "But I
+never knew till now what they meant."
+
+Arslàn turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.
+
+"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well--the world refuses me fame; but I do
+not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your
+admiration."
+
+"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the
+Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You
+care for the world--you?--who have painted _that_?"
+
+Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.
+
+He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless
+truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the
+painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a
+worldly success.
+
+Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?
+
+It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this
+untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious
+and mature intellect of the man of genius.
+
+He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.
+
+"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters,
+can see the truth and can tell it,--we are prophets so far,--but when we
+come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the
+dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no
+better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set
+to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."
+
+She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.
+
+Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks
+faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the
+wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the
+child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the
+soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there
+kneeled and prayed.
+
+Without looking at her, Arslàn went out to his daily labor on the
+waters.
+
+The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed
+in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and
+voices of innumerable birds.
+
+"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and
+die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."
+
+Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire
+with a child's desire, the stars.
+
+For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and
+fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy;
+and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and
+his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will
+dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have
+closed on him and shut him forever from sight.
+
+When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its
+recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
+fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or
+left down-trodden.
+
+But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
+it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
+nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
+count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
+under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
+moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.
+
+Why should it not be?
+
+It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.
+
+And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from
+his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same
+old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound
+of the wind, and forever--forever unanswered!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats
+of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere
+the sun set.
+
+"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"
+
+"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You
+who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"
+
+"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it
+is."
+
+"The man has never yet lived who could tell--in fit language. Poseidon
+is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and
+reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."
+
+So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the
+osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet
+the swift salt waves.
+
+It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her
+errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the
+town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people
+of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that
+took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought
+the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself
+she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always
+in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran,
+spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a
+broad estuary.
+
+She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on
+which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something
+unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to
+herself.
+
+When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as
+probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull
+pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy
+burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of
+the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the
+sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in
+human nature.
+
+A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in
+by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little
+fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy
+with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded
+with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of
+the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of
+great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome
+cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the
+death-screams of scalded shellfish.
+
+He did not take her thither.
+
+He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily
+beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of
+silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some
+apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the
+water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with
+that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known
+restraint.
+
+Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road
+to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an
+old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for
+her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his
+clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing
+birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet
+hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and
+there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage;
+all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and
+the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze,
+for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.
+
+"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly
+as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and
+over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale
+crescent of a week-old moon.
+
+"To live apart?"--she did not understand.
+
+"Yes--like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man
+exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"
+
+Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.
+
+"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing--not
+so much as a fair word. That is well."
+
+"I think it is well--if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."
+
+"I am strong."
+
+She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force,
+which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.
+
+"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered.
+"I know what you mean--now. It is well--it was well with those men you
+tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to
+live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm,
+and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"
+
+"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such
+worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and
+he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool.
+And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild
+dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and
+despised?"
+
+Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and
+fierce as she answered him:
+
+"See here.--There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town
+who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says
+to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother
+Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are
+twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of God
+in Paradise.'
+
+"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is
+dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to
+go near by a league.
+
+"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the
+fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pass.
+He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they
+are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like
+betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need
+sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay,
+greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in
+each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.
+
+"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the
+fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the
+priests honor her, and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind
+mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall,
+and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on
+the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a
+night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now--is it well or no to be
+hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have
+become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."
+
+She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the
+caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and classing the
+kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a
+theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true
+instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any
+creature.
+
+She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of
+which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a
+passion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in
+common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as
+free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.
+
+He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and
+gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He
+answered her merely, with a smile:
+
+"You are only a barbarian; how should you understand that the seductions
+of civilization lie in its multiplications of the forms of vice? Men
+would not bear its yoke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their
+sins. You are an outcast from it;--so you have kept your hands honest
+and your lips pure. You may be right to be thankful--I would not pretend
+to decide."
+
+"At least--I would not be as they are," she answered him with a curl of
+the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes: the pride of the old nomadic tribes,
+whose blood was in her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority
+of the tamed and hearth-bound races--blood that ran free and fearless to
+the measure of boundless winds and rushing waters; that made the forest
+and the plain, the dawn and the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and
+the hiding-place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, sweeter
+than any nuptial bed.
+
+She had left the old life so long--so long that even her memories of it
+were dim as dreams, and its language had died off her lips in all save
+the broken catches of her songs; but the impulses of it were in her,
+vivid and ineradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid
+races of hearth and of homestead regarded her, she, the daughter of
+Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure.
+
+"I would not be as they are!" she repeated, her eyes glancing through
+the sunshine of the cloudless day. "To sit and spin; to watch their
+soup-pot boil; to spend their days under a close roof; to shut the stars
+out, and cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their straw
+in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, fearing to do what they
+will, lest the tongue of their neighbor wag evil of it; to cheat a
+little and steal a little, and lie always when the false word serves
+them, and to mutter to themselves, 'God will wash us free of our sins,'
+and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will not see and
+sure that their God will give them a quittance;--that is their life. I
+would not be as they are."
+
+And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana seemed to
+flash on her for one moment clear and bright through the veil of the
+weary years, and she walked erect and swiftly through the gorse, singing
+by his side the bold burden of one of the old sweet songs.
+
+And for the first time the thought passed over Arslàn:
+
+"This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, and be yoked as a
+beast of burden,--if I chose."
+
+Whether or no he chose he was not sure.
+
+She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he
+cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to
+seek love from her he did not care.
+
+And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert
+mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared
+for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the
+gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.
+
+There was so little passion left in him.
+
+He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and
+the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its
+own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more
+than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses
+were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so,
+he had taught himself to desire it; and yet----
+
+As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the
+summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing
+creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a
+yellowhammer.
+
+Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the
+interior was visible. It was very poor--a floor of mud, a couch of
+rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls
+lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and
+trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that
+hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who
+was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple
+as herself.
+
+In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted
+her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks,
+he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white
+lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let
+the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head
+against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslàn glanced at them
+as he passed.
+
+"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to
+be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a
+woman's lips."
+
+Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled
+suddenly, and walked on in silence.
+
+A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made her afraid: this
+forest-born creature, who had never known what fear was.
+
+The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
+wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
+the fire of the late afternoon sun. The slope was too gradual to break
+their monotony.
+
+Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
+parched green; other color there was none; one little dusky panting bird
+flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.
+
+She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
+she hated the dull heat, the colorless waste, the hard scorch of the
+air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
+had chosen to come to them.
+
+A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
+covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the
+stunted bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the
+slope grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and
+them, steep and barren as a house-roof.
+
+Once he asked her,--
+
+"Are you tired?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
+in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
+dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
+weakness.
+
+He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.
+
+The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
+air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
+them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
+their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them.
+He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
+and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and
+prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
+
+On the summit he stood still and released her.
+
+"Now look."
+
+She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led
+out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
+
+Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
+laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
+dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
+
+For what she saw was the sea.
+
+Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
+waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
+of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
+it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
+rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent
+air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the
+cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch
+and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown
+curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that
+gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still,
+still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift
+wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher
+sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
+
+The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the
+earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again
+in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed
+away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.
+
+Arslàn watched her in silence.
+
+He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
+thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the
+northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's
+work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through
+all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the
+stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep
+through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the
+grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the
+corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take
+the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it
+claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the
+first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt
+small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to
+see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own
+conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters
+over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.
+
+Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
+almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
+would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
+death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous; a death on which no
+woman should look and in which no man should have share.
+
+He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
+paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
+figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
+breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching the wondrous
+brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
+Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
+who for the first time hears of God.
+
+"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
+but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings,
+with little heed whether he thus added to either.
+
+At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
+answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters,--
+
+"It has been there always--always--so near me?"
+
+"Before the land, the sea was."
+
+"And I never knew!"
+
+Her head drooped on her breast; tears rolled silently down her checks;
+her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She knew all
+she had lost--this is the greatest grief that life holds.
+
+"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
+you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
+climb theirs all their lives long."
+
+The words and their meaning escaped her.
+
+She had for once no remembrance of him; nor any other sense save of this
+surpassing wonder which had thus burst on her--this miracle that had
+been near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
+dreamed.
+
+She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
+straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.
+
+There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
+where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
+circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
+gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
+behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
+the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears
+gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
+was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.
+
+He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:
+
+"Since it pains you come away."
+
+A great sob shuddered through her.
+
+"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?--it
+is life, heaven, liberty!"
+
+For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
+which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the
+dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them
+unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all
+the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and
+passions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now
+in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.
+
+Arslàn looked at her, and let her be.
+
+Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the passions of
+this untrained and intense nature had interest for him--the cold
+interest of analysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed
+her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of
+mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with
+little pity and little tenderness.
+
+The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
+into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
+westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
+edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
+cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
+and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still
+that look of one who worships with intense honor and passionate faith an
+unknown God.
+
+The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
+the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
+the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
+in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
+rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
+the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
+fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
+faint and weirdlike.
+
+Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and
+draw her to it with some unseen power.
+
+She started again as Arslàn spoke.
+
+"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had
+seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic
+world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the
+twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"
+
+She gave a heavy stifled sigh.
+
+"It looks so free. And I----"
+
+On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only
+exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of
+ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more
+binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived
+the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and
+yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her
+to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a
+slave--since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its
+weight was upon her.
+
+He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of
+poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much
+poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.
+
+"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that
+govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty,
+but obedience--just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when
+it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in
+its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of
+the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it,
+but nature has never accorded it."
+
+The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the
+radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that
+trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from
+off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a
+rose.
+
+"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only
+known--I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on
+it--as that bird floats--it would be so quiet there and it would not
+fling me back, I think. It would have pity."
+
+Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire
+was in it.
+
+"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his
+words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"
+
+"You live," she said, simply.
+
+He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so
+clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had
+gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed
+was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.
+
+"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."
+
+With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in
+a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the
+shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and
+fled at the human footsteps.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little
+scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she
+obeyed.
+
+With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the
+purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might
+be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.
+
+It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the
+callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the
+dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed
+people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these
+things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of
+thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.
+
+But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would
+have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed
+thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his
+bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to
+cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.
+
+He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her
+the center of innumerable stories.
+
+He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after
+Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on
+the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty
+burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg.
+He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her
+streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed
+her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into
+the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the
+fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being
+purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's
+sake spoke not.
+
+He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking
+her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her
+beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind
+and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in
+other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell,
+the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by
+its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.
+
+Of all the studies he made from her--he all the while cold to her as any
+priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of
+sacrifice,--those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him
+best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and
+unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as
+with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
+
+In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating
+slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant
+blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the
+intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath,
+around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon
+her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in
+her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the
+sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep
+curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her
+with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken--the one touch of
+pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through
+the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.
+
+In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the
+same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of
+white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and
+twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same
+loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the
+face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and
+the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone
+there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips
+the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was
+left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,--ready for the
+mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,--ready for the
+feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in
+dust.
+
+And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all
+the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they
+were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so
+unsparing and unfaltering a hand.
+
+Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power,
+because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder,
+which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to
+which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it
+pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her
+beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his
+bidding.
+
+She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.
+
+She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would.
+That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her
+all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslàn seemed sweet
+as the south wind.
+
+To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was
+to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life
+sublime to her.
+
+"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from
+the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Yprès went down
+the water-street beneath.
+
+"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no
+better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are--the little
+mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they
+say--sooner or later--to every creature that lives again for him in his
+art?"
+
+Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers
+of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they
+had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton
+temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.
+
+"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.
+
+"And you have no fear?"
+
+"I have no fear."
+
+The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow
+tresses.
+
+"Well--the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for
+the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you--his daughter--to lend
+yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the
+market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that
+for you--his own-begotten--I will cleave close to the saints and the
+angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the
+lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."
+
+The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision
+which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the
+fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around
+which they beat with their wings the empty air.
+
+The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched.
+If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught
+it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of
+pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing,
+she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her
+eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.
+
+Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.
+
+The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they
+were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling
+eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky
+orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen
+down,--she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her
+treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a
+human joy.
+
+Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely,
+with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the
+country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all
+unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep
+speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal
+tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her--nay, unfelt--went on her
+daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes,
+and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and
+entered into a heritage of grace.
+
+She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity;
+proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance
+made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in
+his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a
+thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed
+to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God
+for it--that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom
+she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the
+setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries
+of the starlit skies.
+
+Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in
+its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him,
+and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have
+crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave;
+she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of
+resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his
+hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be
+broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the
+greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to
+see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had
+any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could
+befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the
+wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then
+casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to
+this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and
+sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from
+the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was
+unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would
+have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the
+fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.
+
+To be of use to him,--to be held of any worth to him,--to have his eyes
+find any loveliness to study in her,--to be to him only as a flower that
+he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out
+on the land to wither as it would,--this, even this, seemed to her the
+noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.
+
+That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her
+limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of
+the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of
+the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never
+touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme,
+passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated
+all that they consumed.
+
+"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live
+forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself
+perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin
+first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.
+
+The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
+she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
+her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
+feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
+behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
+sky of Spain.
+
+He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
+
+She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
+his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is
+always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
+the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
+passion.
+
+Art is so vast; and human life is so little.
+
+It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be
+sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the
+heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It
+might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance and submission to
+his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make
+these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good
+was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they
+decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of
+the Mexican nation.
+
+The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
+face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
+opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
+enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
+the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
+perished frozen in perpetual night.
+
+So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice
+that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which
+perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?
+
+The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
+ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
+of its priests.
+
+"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
+the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
+tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.
+
+She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.
+
+"I was thinking,--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of,--the
+one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
+down to make into a flute."
+
+"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are
+only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the
+market."
+
+"That is not the fault of the reeds?"
+
+"Not that I know; it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink
+of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do
+you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed from its
+fellows?"
+
+"No--or the god would not have chosen it"
+
+"What, then?"
+
+A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
+her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
+the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
+into the little life of a day.
+
+"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
+forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
+among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
+the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them
+all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
+remember that long--long--ago, the breath of a great god was in them."
+
+Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds,
+and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about
+her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the
+thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden
+butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.
+
+He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.
+
+"Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
+comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
+you, he would think you mad."
+
+"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"
+
+"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long
+ago--that was chosen?"
+
+"Who would not?"
+
+"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing
+there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
+the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
+the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."
+
+"Nay;--how do you know?"
+
+Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.
+
+"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather it was born in the sands, among
+the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one asking, no
+one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one caring
+where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such millions
+of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a
+thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out
+despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn.
+And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge of the river,
+and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the
+earth forever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme
+that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange
+flame of the tall sand-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the
+sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed
+pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then
+he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;--killed it as a
+reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears
+of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers
+of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a
+god first spoke through it?"
+
+Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
+pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
+the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
+planets through the rain.
+
+She spoke of the reed and the god:--she thought of herself and of him.
+
+He was silent.
+
+The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze of the evening, and
+cast a malignant eye upon them, and bent his back and drew the curve of
+his hook through the rushes.
+
+Arslàn watched the sweep of the steel.
+
+"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was
+cruel. "And the gods are all dead--Folle-Farine."
+
+She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her
+lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild
+strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.
+
+The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies
+grew dark.
+
+He looked, and let her go;--alone.
+
+In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which
+all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes,
+when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to
+make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslàn, his reed was but a
+reed as the rest were--a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve--a thing of
+the stagnant water and drifting sand--a thing that lived by the breath
+of the wind--a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for
+a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any
+wise remember--a reed of the river, as the rest were.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the
+Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the
+dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I
+should be free; and with me _these_."
+
+The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he
+thought himself alone.
+
+This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this
+aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent
+in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as
+well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he
+despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him
+might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which
+he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his
+fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his
+brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.
+
+So little!--just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons,
+fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with
+which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;--and
+having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and
+arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still
+continue to deny him other victories.
+
+It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His
+boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a
+strong and hardy mountain-people.
+
+It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger
+unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes
+of wild weather.
+
+In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a
+salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had passed a
+winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the
+seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.
+
+None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its
+imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the
+impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual
+narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these
+were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his
+wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.
+
+"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so
+little--ever so little!"
+
+For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier
+times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at
+Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try
+once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the
+highest tributes that the multitude can give to the genius that arises
+amidst it.
+
+There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that
+wove in the darkness among the timbers.
+
+It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of
+the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes,
+and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the
+shore; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were
+wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.
+
+Otherwise it was intensely silent.
+
+In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of
+the tower, the market-boat of Yprès glided by, and the soft splash of
+the passing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.
+
+But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up
+at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and
+listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through
+the open casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his
+heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.
+
+She heard and understood.
+
+Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.
+
+"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the
+bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone
+tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down
+with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his
+sake.
+
+She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past--of
+all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their
+joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and
+the habits of the world--nothing of the world's pleasures and the
+world's triumphs.
+
+To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than
+this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the
+simplicity of it, seemed noble, and all that the heart of a man could
+desire from fate.
+
+Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of
+the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea,
+and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the
+pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the
+turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud,
+the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the
+leaves; or to lie still on the grass or the sand by the shore, and see
+the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb
+of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness
+of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams
+of worlds beyond the stars;--such a life as this seemed to her beyond
+any other beautiful.
+
+A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound
+of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between
+him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a
+street--a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and
+thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,--it seemed to
+her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was
+freest, simplest, and highest.
+
+She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the
+ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is
+doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the
+hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter
+and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.
+
+Of these she knew nothing.
+
+She had no conception of them--of the weakness and the force that twine
+one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and
+beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly
+disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could
+stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.
+
+But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that
+escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one
+that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her
+years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the
+twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.
+
+Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper
+pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a
+stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities
+would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads
+and cabins which had been her only world.
+
+"A little gold!--a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went
+on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase
+any pleasure for his appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever
+whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse
+circumstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the
+caged eagle.
+
+"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted
+on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the
+baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the
+air.
+
+"A little gold!"
+
+It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to
+stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought
+to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den
+still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary
+for him as she went.
+
+"What use for the gods to have given him back life," she thought, "if
+they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless
+desire?"
+
+It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality
+which they had given to Tithonus.
+
+"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.
+
+Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it
+as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to
+her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslàn now. No gifts would she
+give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered
+and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding
+under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.
+
+When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had
+cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and
+glad in her eyes.
+
+A thought had come to her.
+
+In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together,
+under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden
+produce.
+
+"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."
+
+"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find
+those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's
+and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one
+ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to
+dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms,
+and he wanted to plant a young cherry."
+
+"There must have been a mass of coin?"
+
+"No,--only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up
+to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he
+sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found
+were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time--whatever he might mean by
+that."
+
+"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if
+one buried a brass button only long enough, he would give one a
+bank-note for it."
+
+"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would
+dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know
+about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the
+hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture
+he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a god. To
+worship old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like
+that,--how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the
+edge of the road."
+
+"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."
+
+"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."
+
+Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:
+
+"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"
+
+The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite
+horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the
+mill of Yprès.
+
+"He is a great noble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.
+
+"And where is his dwelling?"
+
+"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"
+
+She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with
+a glow at her heart.
+
+"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the
+Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that
+they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse
+with the devil's daughter.
+
+An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:
+
+"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces
+than for old coins; and--how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"
+
+She had passed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.
+
+"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and
+her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with
+a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope,
+that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not
+wholly hatred.
+
+That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell
+through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors,
+she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the
+steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.
+
+It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a casement that was
+never unclosed.
+
+On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's
+working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of
+leaden beads.
+
+On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the
+labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces,
+muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the
+sweet sins of her life and of her master's.
+
+She cared for her soul--cared very much, and tried to save it; but
+cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the
+fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and
+wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the
+tenth of a cherry.
+
+Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the
+sleeper.
+
+"Wake! I want a word with you."
+
+Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in
+horrible fear.
+
+Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.
+
+"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head.
+Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."
+
+The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her
+knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.
+
+Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and
+swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise
+against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and
+tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with
+terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of
+the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.
+
+It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable
+value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night
+and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master
+should discover and claim it.
+
+Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed--a quiet cold
+laugh--at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her
+in her infancy.
+
+"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?"
+she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you
+choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am
+strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst
+of the reckoning."
+
+And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing
+well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.
+
+It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.
+
+She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of
+hay in the loft.
+
+There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds
+that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity
+could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern
+clouds.
+
+She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon
+them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased
+to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never
+occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she
+had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.
+
+As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a
+strong emotion came over her.
+
+The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from
+the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment
+revived for her.
+
+The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of
+the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music,
+the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the
+hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,--all arose to
+her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile
+had buried them.
+
+The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins,
+she thought of Phratos.
+
+She had never known his fate.
+
+The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by
+the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted
+at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.
+
+Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her
+life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.
+
+All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father's race
+had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern
+seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made
+no plunder.
+
+The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among
+her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and
+tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the
+smile and the voice of Phratos.
+
+"I would never part with them for myself," she thought; "I would die of
+hunger first--were it only myself."
+
+And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little
+treasure--the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her,
+even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.
+
+The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded
+daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their
+golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.
+
+At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslàn, she spoke to him,
+timidly,--
+
+"I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for
+Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I
+might do there--for you?"
+
+"Do? What should you do?" he answered her, with inattention and almost
+impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of
+inaction.
+
+She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as
+though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her
+lips.
+
+She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.
+
+"If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps," she said to
+herself.
+
+So she kept silence.
+
+On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the
+two mules, to Rioz.
+
+It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both
+the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she
+could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in
+either hand.
+
+The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some
+twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her
+own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new
+waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of
+a pastoral country in late summer.
+
+She met few people; a market-woman or two on their asses, a walking
+peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd--these were all.
+
+The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet
+roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only
+sound in the silence.
+
+It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell,
+surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a
+quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its
+roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble
+and the gorse grew wild.
+
+But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the
+roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore;
+she herself grew tired and fevered.
+
+She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway,
+where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a
+scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her
+brass pails on the ground.
+
+She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great
+bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a
+shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her
+bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered
+them.
+
+The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky,
+half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at
+their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great
+walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs
+was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept
+the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she
+would bring her food and drink.
+
+But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches,
+refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.
+
+The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the
+market-women had said, "What does the like of you want with the Prince?"
+
+"I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will," she
+answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.
+
+The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over
+the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed
+the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.
+
+"What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?" she muttered,
+watching the form of the girl as it passed up the steep sunshiny street.
+
+"Some evil, no doubt," answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was
+skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to
+founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb, _bon plaisir_, and the
+philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a _cajote_."
+
+Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the
+mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:
+
+"No one would ask the road _there_ for any good; that is sure. No doubt
+she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all
+the Arts!"
+
+Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.
+
+In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he
+had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things--girls' faces, coils of
+foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming
+on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown
+waters;--things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been
+transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of
+genius.
+
+She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and
+grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded
+slopes,--those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince
+Sartorian.
+
+One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry,
+looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his
+wife:
+
+"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his
+velvet-lined cupboards."
+
+And the wife laughed in answer,--
+
+"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."
+
+The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could
+mean; but she would not turn back to ask.
+
+Her feet were weary, like her mules'; the sun scorched her; she felt
+feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp
+ascent that rose in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river
+ran.
+
+At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all
+brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and shields. She pushed one
+open--there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the
+domain which they guarded.
+
+At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were
+green, the grass long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by
+she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to
+her.
+
+Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous
+flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of
+water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver
+breasts of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood
+here and there amidst the leavy darkness.
+
+She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.
+
+She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.
+
+A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great,
+fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was
+beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it,
+wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.
+
+A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it,
+thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it
+changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted,
+silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer's
+kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while,
+always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these
+cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.
+
+At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush
+and the lotos, and the white pampas-grass, and the flamelike flowering
+reed, of the East and of the West.
+
+All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets
+of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her
+to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a
+maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace.
+A door stood open near. She entered it.
+
+She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear
+in her whole temper.
+
+Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an
+endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the
+wonders that are gathered together by the world's luxury were for the
+first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the
+rich lived.
+
+She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.
+
+On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on
+the moss of the orchard at Yprès. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as
+fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups,
+the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were
+folded.
+
+It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by the dazzle of mere
+wealth. She walked through the splendid and lonely rooms wondering,
+indeed, and eager to see more; but there was no spell here such as the
+gardens had flung over her. To the creature free born in the Liebana no
+life beneath a roof could seem beautiful.
+
+She met no one.
+
+At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, she paused before
+a great picture in a heavy golden frame; it was the seizure of
+Persephone. She knew the story, for Arslàn had told her of it.
+
+She saw for the first time how the pictures that men called great were
+installed in princely splendor; this was the fate which he wanted for
+his own.
+
+A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, stood before it:
+she recalled the words of the woman in the market-place; in her
+ignorance, she thought the picture was worshiped as a divinity, as the
+people worshiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned
+incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with something of gloomy
+contempt in her eyes, at the painting which was mantled in massive gold,
+with purple draperies opening to display it; for it was the chief
+masterpiece upon those walls.
+
+"And he cares for _that_!" she thought, with a sigh half of wonder, half
+of sorrow.
+
+She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his works were
+greater hanging on their bare walls where the spiders wove.
+
+"Who is 'he'?" a voice asked behind her.
+
+She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, humorous eyes, and
+an elfin face, delicate in its form, malicious in its meaning.
+
+She stood silent, regarding him; herself a strange figure in that lordly
+place, with her brown limbs, her bare head and feet, her linen tunic,
+her red knotted girdle.
+
+"Who are you?" she asked him curtly, in counter-question.
+
+The little old man laughed.
+
+"I have the honor to be your host."
+
+A disappointed astonishment clouded her face.
+
+"You! are you Sartorian?" she muttered--"the Sartorian whom they call a
+prince?"
+
+"Even I!" he said with a smile. "I regret that I please you no more. May
+I ask to what I am indebted for your presence? You seem a fastidious
+critic."
+
+He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuff whilst he looked at the
+lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, as he thought her, whom he had
+found thus astray in his magnificent chambers.
+
+She amused him; finding her silent, he sought to make her speak.
+
+"How did you come in hither? You care for pictures, perhaps, since you
+seem to feed on them like some wood-pigeons on a sheaf of corn?"
+
+"I know of finer than yours," she answered him coldly, chilled by the
+amused and malicious ridicule of his tone into a sullen repose. "I did
+not come to see anything you have. I came to sell you these: they say in
+Yprès that you care for such bits of coin."
+
+She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and tendered them to
+him.
+
+He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no sort of value;
+such things as he could buy for a few coins in any bazaar of Africa or
+Asia. But he did not say so.
+
+He looked at her keenly, as he asked:
+
+"Whose were these?"
+
+She looked in return at him with haughty defiance.
+
+"They are mine. If you want such things, as they say you do, take them
+and give me their value--that is all."
+
+"Do you come here to sell them?"
+
+"Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman from near Rioz say
+that you liked such things. Take them, or leave them."
+
+"Who gave them to you?"
+
+"Phratos."
+
+Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still loved the memory of
+Phratos.
+
+"And who may Phratos be?"
+
+Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning.
+
+"That is none of your business. If you think that I stole them, say so.
+If you want them, buy them. One or the other."
+
+The old man watched her amusedly.
+
+"You can be very fierce," he said to her. "Be gentle a little, and tell
+me whence you came, and what story you have."
+
+But she would not.
+
+"I have not come here to speak of myself," she said obstinately. "Will
+you take the coins, or leave them?"
+
+"I will take them," he said; and he went to a cabinet in another room
+and brought out with him several shining gold pieces.
+
+She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily.
+
+"Here is payment," he said to her, holding them to her.
+
+Her eyes fastened on the money entranced; she touched it with a light,
+half-fearful touch, and then drew back and gazed at it amazed.
+
+"All that--all that?" she muttered. "Is it their worth? Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite sure," he said with a smile. He offered her in them some thirty
+times their value.
+
+She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good fortune, then
+darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and took them and put them to her
+lips, and laughed a sweet glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her
+bosom.
+
+"I am grateful," she said simply; but the radiance in her eyes, the
+laughter on her mouth, the quivering excitement in all her face and
+form, said the same thing for her far better than her words.
+
+The old man watched her narrowly.
+
+"They are not for yourself?" he asked.
+
+"That is my affair," she answered him, all her pride rising in arms.
+"What concerned you was their value."
+
+He smiled and bent his head.
+
+"Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for? Wherever you came
+from, is this all that brought you here?"
+
+She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought the sketches
+from their hiding-place. She placed them before him.
+
+"Look at those."
+
+He took them to the light and scanned them slowly and critically; he
+knew all the mysteries and intricacies of art, and he recognized in
+these slight things the hand and the color of a master. He did not say
+so, but held them for some time in silence.
+
+"These also are for sale?" he asked at length.
+
+She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense expectation, her
+longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips quivering with eagerness. That he
+was a stranger and a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth;
+she saw he had perception.
+
+"See here!" she said, swiftly, the music of her voice rising and falling
+in breathless, eloquent intonation. "Those things are to the great works
+of his hand as a broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a
+thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a breadth of sand, a
+woman's face, and under his hand it grows glorious and gracious. He
+dreams things that are strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods,
+and he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he works for his
+bread, and in the gray night he wanders where none can follow him; and
+he brings back marvels and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories
+that are like the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees the
+things of his hand; and he is sick of his life, because the days go by
+and bring no message to him, and men will have nothing of him; and he
+has hunger of body and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he
+does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. But to him it is
+bitter that it is only seen by the newt, and the beetle, and the
+night-hawk. It wears his soul away, because he is denied of men. 'If I
+had gold, if I had gold!' he says always, when he thinks that none can
+hear him."
+
+Her voice trembled and was still for a second; she struggled with
+herself and kept it clear and strong.
+
+The old man never interrupted her.
+
+"He must not know: he would kill himself if he knew; he would sooner die
+than tell any man. But, look you, you drape your pictures here with gold
+and with purple, you place them high in the light; you make idols of
+them, and burn your incense before them. That is what he wants for his:
+they are the life of his life. If they could be honored, he would not
+care, though you should slay him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you
+idols of his: they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart is
+sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I would not care; but
+he cares, so that he perishes."
+
+She shivered as she spoke; in her earnestness and eagerness, she laid
+her hand on the stranger's arm, and held it there; she prayed, with more
+passion than she would have cast into any prayer to save her own life.
+
+"Where is he; and what do you call him?" the old man asked her quietly.
+
+He understood the meaning that ran beneath the unconscious extravagance
+of her fanciful and impassioned language.
+
+"He is called Arslàn; he lives in the granary-tower, by the river,
+between the town and Yprès. He comes from the north, far away--very,
+very far, where the seas are all ice and the sun shines at midnight.
+Will you make the things that he does to be known to the people?
+You have gold; and gold, he says, is the compeller of men."
+
+"Arslàn?" he echoed.
+
+The name was not utterly unknown to him; he had seen works signed with
+it at Paris and at Rome--strange things of a singular power, of a union
+of cynicism and idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world,
+and too pure for the other half.
+
+"Arslàn?--I think I remember. I will see what I can do."
+
+"You will say nothing to him of me."
+
+"I could not say much. Who are you? Whence do you come?"
+
+"I live at the water-mill of Yprès. They say that Reine Flamma was my
+mother. I do not know: it does not matter."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust."
+
+"A strange namesake."
+
+"What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff of breath--less
+than the dust, anyhow."
+
+"Is it? I see, you are a Communist."
+
+"What?"
+
+"A Communist--a Socialist. You know what that is. You would like to
+level my house to the ashes, I fancy, by the look on your face."
+
+"No," she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, "I do not care to do
+that. If I had cared to burn anything it would have been the Flandrins'
+village. It is odd that you should live in a palace and he should want
+for bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So
+it is even, perhaps."
+
+The old man smiled, amused.
+
+"You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. Come in another
+chamber and take some wine, and break your fast. There will be many
+things here that you never saw or tasted."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"The thought is good of you," she said, more gently than she had before
+spoken. "But I never took a crust out of charity, and I will not begin."
+
+
+"Charity! Do you call an invitation a charity?"
+
+"When the rich ask the poor--yes."
+
+He looked in her eyes with a smile.
+
+"But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is young and beautiful,
+on which side lies the charity then?"
+
+"I do not favor fine phrases," she answered curtly, returning his look
+with a steady indifference.
+
+"You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. Well, come hither, a
+moment at least."
+
+She hesitated; then, thinking to herself that to refuse would seem like
+fear, she followed him through several chambers into one where his own
+mid-day breakfast was set forth.
+
+She moved through all the magnificence of the place with fearless steps,
+and meditative glances, and a grave measured easy grace, as tranquil and
+as unimpressed as though she walked through the tall ranks of the
+seeding grasses on a meadow slope.
+
+It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice adornment, the
+unnumbered treasures, and the familiar luxuries of a great noble's
+residence; but such things as these had no awe for her.
+
+The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations of luxury, could
+not impress her for an instant; she passed through them indifferent and
+undaunted, thinking to herself, "However they may gild their roofs, the
+roofs shut out the sky no less."
+
+Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet cast in the visible
+shape of sculpture or of painting, did her glance grow reverent and
+humid; only when she recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured
+stories, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith as pure and
+true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian child, did she falter and
+pause a little to gaze there with a tender homage in her eyes.
+
+The old man watched her with a musing studious glance from time to time.
+
+"Let me tempt you," he said to her when they reached the
+breakfast-chamber. "Sit down with me and eat and drink. No? Taste these
+sweetmeats at the least. To refuse to break bread with me is churlish."
+
+
+"I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin now," she answered
+obstinately, indifferent to the blaze of gold and silver before her, to
+the rare fruits and flowers, to the wines in their quaint flagons, to
+the numerous attendants who waited motionless around her.
+
+She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and
+the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits
+assailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.
+
+She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby glass, rimmed
+with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as
+indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained
+among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.
+
+"Your denial is very churlish," he said, after many a honeyed entreaty,
+which had met with no other answer from her. "How shall you bind me to
+keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of
+snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?"
+
+She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the
+golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.
+
+"A word that needs compelling," she answered him curtly, "is broken by
+the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root,
+to put faith in a man that needs a bond."
+
+He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amusement.
+
+"Where have you got all your wisdom?" he asked.
+
+"It is not wisdom; it is truth."
+
+"And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well."
+
+She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.
+
+"I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen."
+
+"And that is----"
+
+"I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain,
+so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round,--and I knew its birth
+was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false
+thing that would poison all that should eat of it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the
+toadstool that springs from their breath?"
+
+"Who taught you so much suspicion?"
+
+Her face darkened in anger.
+
+"Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am
+afraid of nothing."
+
+"So it would seem."
+
+He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a
+gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them
+because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He
+tried to tempt her otherwise.
+
+She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta.
+She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color
+and for grace. There was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom.
+She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with
+such passion for another.
+
+He had various treasures shown to her,--treasures of jewels, of gold and
+silver, of fine workmanship, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as
+the wing of a butterfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her
+eyes had rested on such things all her days.
+
+"They are beautiful, no doubt," she said simply. "But I marvel that
+you--being a man--care for such things as these."
+
+"Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me,--as
+one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at
+least out of these to keep in remembrance of me."
+
+Her eyes burned in anger.
+
+"If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think
+to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?"
+
+"You are very perverse," he said, relinquishing his efforts with regret.
+
+He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of
+temptation: gold was a forcing-heat--slow, but sure.
+
+She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and
+yet a vague apprehension.
+
+"Are you the Red Mouse?" she said suddenly.
+
+He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he
+laughed--his little low cynical laugh.
+
+"What makes you think that?"
+
+"I do not know. You look like it--that is all. He has made one sketch of
+me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and
+it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant
+by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same
+triumph in your eye."
+
+He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.
+
+"He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I
+shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead--if I am indeed,
+the Red Mouse."
+
+She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of
+aversion.
+
+"I must go," she said abruptly. "The mules wait. Remember him, and I
+will remember you."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when
+it unlocks your eagle's cage and unbinds his wings?"
+
+"What?"
+
+She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no
+memory of her own fate had retarded or hastened her footsteps.
+
+"Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?"
+
+A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face.
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb
+triumph in her eyes. "He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live
+as the rose lives, on his canvas--a thing of a day that he can make
+immortal!"
+
+The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had
+found what he wanted--as he thought.
+
+"And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the
+world's sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can
+understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of
+the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra."
+
+"Farnarina? What is that?"
+
+"Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day's life of a rose, and who
+got eternal life for it,--as you think to do."
+
+She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over the dauntless
+brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.
+
+"I?" she murmured. "Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a
+little place--anywhere--wherever my life can live with his on the
+canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each
+other, 'See, it is true--he thought her worthy of _that_, though she was
+less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,' it will be
+enough for me--more than enough."
+
+The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his
+eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.
+
+She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite
+yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph
+which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.
+
+She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly,
+as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.
+
+He waited awhile; then he spoke:
+
+"But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if
+you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would
+lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter
+yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one
+wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast
+as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that
+his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me
+turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?"
+
+She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a
+smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of
+memory, so pitiful of his doubt.
+
+She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had
+bought his life back for him, with her own, from the gods. For the pact
+was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.
+
+But of it her lips never spoke.
+
+"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will
+see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty,
+and I will give you gratitude. Farewell."
+
+Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side,
+and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the
+gardens without.
+
+He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but
+vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades
+in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native
+forest.
+
+The old man sat silent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to
+slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded
+lands.
+
+She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters
+had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for
+her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight
+for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought
+left--the gold that she had gained.
+
+The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen
+words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her
+for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be
+not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the
+grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed.
+The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her
+long a prey to any thought of her own fate.
+
+She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.
+
+"What will it matter how or when the gods take my life, so only they
+keep their faith and give me his?" she thought.
+
+And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart
+content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.
+
+She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the
+human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those
+nine gold pieces.
+
+"A little gold," he had said; and here she had it--honest, clean, worthy
+of his touch and usage.
+
+Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth
+which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden
+haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as
+young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the
+shade of angels above their heads.
+
+When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been
+sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye
+bread that she had carried in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that
+she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink
+there.
+
+Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their
+own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the
+house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk
+of the falling night.
+
+She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only
+a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings,
+and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which
+flew by her over the fields.
+
+"A little gold," he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green
+chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering
+pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love,
+all honor, all peace, and all fealty?
+
+"Phratos would have wished his gift to go so," she thought to herself,
+with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.
+
+For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their
+hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed
+them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood
+alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the grass, and
+the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.
+
+"A little gold!--a little gold!" she murmured, and she laughed aloud in
+her great joy, and blessed the gods that they had given her to hear the
+voice of his desire.
+
+"A little gold," he had said, only; and here she had so much!
+
+No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed
+on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma's eyes she had
+seen glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of an
+emperor's treasury.
+
+She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds
+silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air,
+past the dark Christ who would not look,--who had never looked, or she
+had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved
+Thanatos.
+
+Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and
+lightly as a swallow on the wing passed through the dreary portals into
+Arslàn's chamber.
+
+His lamp was lighted.
+
+He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there
+with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces,
+with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as
+soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the
+yellow sunshine of her first-born's curls.
+
+His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, with a sadness
+sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes
+those dreams which went so far--so far--into worlds whose glories his
+hand could portray for no human sight.
+
+He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.
+
+"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the
+squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the
+fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end--since
+you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to
+bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not,
+and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of
+his ideals,--save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms
+to it vainly, and die?"
+
+There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some
+eager bird.
+
+She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a
+radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous
+and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had
+been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.
+
+"Here is the gold!" she cried.
+
+Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.
+
+"Gold?"
+
+He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her
+sudden presence there.
+
+"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and
+full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A
+little gold,' you said, you remember?--'only a little.' And this is
+much. Take it--take it! Do you not hear?"
+
+"Gold?" he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and
+comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had
+spoken in his solitude.
+
+"Yes! It is mine," she said, her voice broken in its tumult of
+ecstasy--"it is mine--all mine. It is no charity, no gift to me. The
+chain was worth it, and I would only take what it was worth. A little
+gold, you said; and now you can make the Barabbas live forever upon
+canvas, and compel men to say that it is great."
+
+As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, she drew the green
+leaf with the coins in it from her bosom, and thrust it into his hand,
+eager, exultant, laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of
+her nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy possessing
+her.
+
+The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands stung him to
+comprehension; his face flushed over all its pallor; he thrust it away
+with a gesture of abhorrence and rejection.
+
+"Money!" he muttered. "What money?--yours?"
+
+"Yes, mine entirely; mine indeed!" she answered, with a sweet, glad ring
+of victory in her rejoicing voice. "It is true, quite true. They were
+the chains of sequins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his
+music in the mountains; and I have sold them. 'A little gold,' you said;
+'and the Barabbas can live forever.' Why do you look so? It is all mine;
+all yours----"
+
+In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, and sank low,
+with a dull startled wonder in it.
+
+Why did he look so?
+
+His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the language his glance
+spoke was one plain to her. It terrified her, amazed her, struck her
+chill and dumb.
+
+In it there were disgust, anger, loathing,--even horror; and yet there
+was in it also an unwonted softness, which in a woman's would have shown
+itself by a rush of sudden tears.
+
+"What do you think that I have done?" she murmured under her breath.
+"The gold is mine--mine honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I
+got it as I say. Why will you not take it? Why do you look at me so?"
+
+"I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?"
+
+She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her
+innocent rapture frozen into terror.
+
+"I have done nothing wrong," she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and
+wonder--"nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not
+take it--for their sake?"
+
+He turned on her with severity almost savage:
+
+"It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you
+think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?"
+
+His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.
+
+He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt
+her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible
+to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own
+abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he
+had difficulty to control--being touched by her ignorance and by her
+gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.
+
+She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light
+had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated
+strangely.
+
+For some moments there was silence between them.
+
+"You will not take it?" she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice,
+like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes
+all quiet around it.
+
+"Take it!" he echoed. "I could sooner kill a man out yonder and rob him.
+Can you not understand? Greater shame could never come to me. You do not
+know what you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no doubt,
+but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I frightened you? I did not
+mean to frighten you. You mean well and nobly, no doubt--no doubt. You
+do not know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter,
+and sap the strength of the receiver; but from woman to man they are--to
+the man shameful. Can you not understand?"
+
+Her face burned duskily; she moved with a troubled, confused effort to
+get away from his gaze.
+
+"No," she said in her shut teeth. "I do not know what you mean. Flamma
+takes all the gold I make. Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?"
+
+"Flamma is your grandsire--your keeper--your master. He has a right to
+do as he chooses. He gives you food and shelter, and in return he takes
+the gains of your labor. But I,--what have I ever given you? I am a
+stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I could be base
+enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. I make no disguise with
+you,--you know too well how I live. But can you not see?--if I were mean
+enough to take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more worthy
+of the very name of man. It is for the man to give to the woman. You
+see?"
+
+She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the confused pain on
+it of one who has fallen or been struck upon the head, and half forgets
+and half remembers.
+
+"I do not see," she muttered. "Whoever has, gives: what does it matter?
+The folly in me was its littleness: it could not be of use. But it was
+all I had."
+
+"Little or great,--the riches of empires, or a beggar's dole,--there
+could be no difference in the infamy to me. Have I seemed to you a
+creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put such shame
+upon me?"
+
+Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel than he had
+consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped to speech, and stung her as
+scorpions sting.
+
+She said nothing; her teeth clinched, her face changed as it had used to
+do when Flamma had beaten her.
+
+She said nothing, but turned away; and with one twist of her hand she
+flung the pieces through the open casement into the river that flowed
+below.
+
+They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.
+
+He caught her wrist a second too late.
+
+"What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the
+river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay
+you back in their stead! I did not mean to hurt you; it was only the
+truth,--you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity
+that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me
+with debts that I cannot pay--with gifts that I would die sooner than
+receive. But, then, how should you know?--how should you know? If I
+wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong."
+
+There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he
+spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not
+change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to
+her throat as though she choked.
+
+"You cannot do wrong--to me," she muttered, true, even in such a moment,
+to the absolute adoration which possessed her.
+
+Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled
+out from his presence into the dusk of the night.
+
+The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside
+above the sands where the gold had sunk.
+
+A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for
+it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust,
+from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might
+desire, a thing that a breeze might break.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In
+the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground,
+while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild
+flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits
+filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the
+fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled
+down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples
+down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on
+the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The
+chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed
+in the rolling woods.
+
+An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow
+of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She
+was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her
+eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips
+murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven
+palpitating breaths.
+
+It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing,
+and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather.
+The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and
+autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus
+of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy
+wooden shoe on his right foot.
+
+"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at
+day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle
+feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."
+
+She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and
+looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and
+rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience
+begotten by long slavery.
+
+There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had
+wandered sleepless all night long.
+
+"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at
+her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall
+have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver
+bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not
+mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only
+thing worth a rush in the house."
+
+She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats
+against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy
+dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she
+went, "A little gold! a little gold!"
+
+"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant,
+shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut
+ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say
+the devil-begotten never bleed."
+
+The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it
+was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any
+should blame the slayer.
+
+The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy
+warmth of the early morning.
+
+She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among
+his fellows--and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest
+shame that his life had ever known.
+
+"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out
+against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked,
+she had laid on him the debt of life.
+
+If ever he should know----
+
+She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the
+night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn
+of his reproaches.
+
+He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in
+intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the
+old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves,
+to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter
+end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as
+Adrastus upon Atys.
+
+On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the
+water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms
+of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in
+waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth,
+chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian
+skies.
+
+She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on
+the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the
+scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
+
+She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of
+herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies
+asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of
+a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the
+willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great
+guilt was on her soul.
+
+Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of
+the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat.
+She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and
+luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.
+
+Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who
+had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes
+of death as children in their mother's.
+
+The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like
+fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange
+mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing
+apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed
+from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her
+and beyond her.
+
+All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its
+pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the
+passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was
+buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as
+the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel,
+broke the silence.
+
+The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky
+woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the
+gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which
+her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those
+beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her--mysterious,
+unreal.
+
+She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead.
+And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide
+from his and every eye.
+
+She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
+
+The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her
+with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the
+barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the
+frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
+
+She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say
+hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things
+of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music
+arisen,"--and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
+
+Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets
+of elder and thorn--where she had made her bed in her childhood many a
+summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the
+mill-house;--there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to
+her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to
+slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out
+of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars
+throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
+
+In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that
+she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt
+the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.
+
+Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early
+day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and
+muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed
+when the sun breaks?"
+
+She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled
+in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her;
+her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with
+music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.
+
+Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad
+dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.
+
+She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she
+obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Yprès
+by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which
+takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways
+to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and
+unbidden.
+
+Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing
+in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver
+wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.
+
+"I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!" she said bitterly in her
+heart, "but I am not worthy--even to die."
+
+For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this--to be cut
+down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world
+might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.
+
+She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old
+mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head;
+the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the
+wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then
+fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from
+the high towers and spires of the town.
+
+At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had
+arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was
+still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the
+casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers
+under the roof.
+
+The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and
+fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees.
+The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with
+wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands
+to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A
+dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of
+timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle
+down above his head upon the breeze.
+
+The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no
+noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around
+stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as
+though it were still night.
+
+She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
+
+"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"
+
+The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned,
+and answered on his hands, "Flamma is _almost_ dead, they say."
+
+And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural
+noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of
+laughter.
+
+She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the
+stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant
+in unison.
+
+He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for
+generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so
+callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her--and to the country
+round--that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with
+him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the
+latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a
+little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the
+sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even
+by age or death?--it seemed to her impossible.
+
+All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the
+morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a
+strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the
+mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those
+wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
+
+She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat
+mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the
+bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered
+with a scared face out from her master's chamber.
+
+"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy
+grandsire lies a-dying."
+
+"Dying?"
+
+"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he
+came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as
+good as dead. You are glad."
+
+"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost
+step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for;
+and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her
+and hurt her.
+
+She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of
+the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor
+coming--coming--coming--through so many winters to beg bread, and going
+away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this
+death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.
+
+Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.
+
+"Will he leave her the gold or no?" she questioned in herself; musing
+whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit
+all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world--who could say
+which?
+
+After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went
+into the room.
+
+It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and
+a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The
+square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro;
+a linnet sang.
+
+On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of
+his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to
+life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon
+her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible
+effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone
+had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:
+
+"She was a saint--a saint: God took her. So I said:--and was proud.
+While all the while man begot on her _that_!"
+
+Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed
+again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking--awfully.
+
+Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on
+him.
+
+"You mean--my mother?"
+
+It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice
+lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.
+
+He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for
+the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.
+
+She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.
+
+She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to
+him.
+
+"Try and speak to me of my mother--once--once," she murmured, with a
+pathetic longing in her voice.
+
+A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on
+her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief,
+memory, fear--she could not tell.
+
+Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from
+its hole.
+
+"Ask where the money is hid," she hissed in a shrill whisper.
+"Ask--ask--while he can yet understand."
+
+He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a
+moment.
+
+Folle-Farine did not hear.
+
+"Tell me of my mother;--tell me, tell me," she muttered. Since a human
+love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother
+whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.
+
+His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay
+silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment
+remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.
+
+It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell,
+mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.
+
+A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear
+voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet;
+there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the
+dying man.
+
+They turned her from the chamber.
+
+The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.
+
+She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she
+went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on
+her hands.
+
+The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the
+murmurs of the priest's words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism.
+A great bitterness came on her mouth.
+
+"One crust in love--to them--in the deadly winters, had been better
+worth than all this oil and prayer," she thought. And she could see
+nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the
+moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, "God is good."
+
+The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a
+stillness as of cold.
+
+Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill,--
+
+"I loved her! Oh, God!--_Thou_ knowest!"
+
+She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the
+death-chamber.
+
+He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the
+gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal
+agony, a passion of reproach.
+
+With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests
+had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it,
+and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.
+
+"Even _Thou_ art a liar!" he cried,--it was the cry of the soul leaving
+the body,--with the next moment he fell back--dead.
+
+In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had
+shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had
+broken and shown no wound.
+
+For what agony had been like unto his?
+
+Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure
+white soul he had believed in once? Yea--who? Not man; not even God.
+
+Therefore had he suffered without hope.
+
+She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy
+noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down
+upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.
+
+All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.
+
+From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of
+the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the
+pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit
+harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.
+
+Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof,
+had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on
+bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore
+for him; and judged him without hatred.
+
+All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her;
+and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became
+sanctified in her sight.
+
+She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only
+that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his
+faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the
+darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every
+other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, "O
+Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"
+
+And now he was dead.
+
+What did it matter?
+
+Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died
+forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?--the little
+fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved
+in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for
+some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their
+famine by his greed and gain?
+
+It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the
+hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe
+to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his
+heart would never soften.
+
+Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had
+let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and
+lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his
+death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
+
+"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry
+eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
+
+And she had reason.
+
+For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
+its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one
+narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh,
+drowns him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the
+precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness
+seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth,
+lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.
+
+The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired
+watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned
+beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was
+closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the
+scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People
+came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Yprès
+was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not
+lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in
+the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead--at
+last."
+
+No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down
+by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the
+good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.
+
+The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she
+sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of
+the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and
+varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.
+
+No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left
+in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear
+is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at
+noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some
+simple meal of crusts and eggs.
+
+"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to
+herself,--"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if
+so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to
+seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."
+
+For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for
+pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.
+
+"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant
+muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at
+noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.
+
+"The wealth,--whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She
+had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft,
+and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible
+inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been
+too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his
+heir.
+
+"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with
+her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious
+eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always
+done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his
+wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot
+for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he
+has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass
+of gold hid away somewhere or another--the notary knows, I suppose--it
+is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money
+far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with
+never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the
+thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And,
+maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so
+near. Where think you it will go?"
+
+A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.
+
+"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of
+their hearts and their bodies."
+
+"Then you have no hope for yourself:--you?"
+
+"I?"
+
+She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and
+stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of
+Pitchou.
+
+"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away
+through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of
+hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other
+hope than the hope of the gold! Well,--as for me,--I never pretend to
+lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the
+gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's
+mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."
+
+She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet
+shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.
+
+Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to
+her with the woman's words of greed.
+
+Before another day had sped, it was possible,--so even said one who
+hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at
+the miser's board,--possible that she would enter into the heritage of
+all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered
+together.
+
+One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her
+with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslàn, and
+there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would
+have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do
+as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I
+will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer
+than kings!"
+
+But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She
+would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with
+her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."
+
+She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen,
+unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said,
+"You have no right to burden me with debt"?
+
+Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great
+mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface
+that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the
+day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been
+set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her
+sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.
+
+If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought,
+to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of
+his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for
+the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped
+gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind
+and hand.
+
+And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to
+rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in
+its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held
+it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love,
+she submitted without question to its cruelty.
+
+At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little.
+The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time
+willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,--"who can say?
+She may yet get it all, who knows?"
+
+At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her
+eyes.
+
+"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought
+was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal.
+She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it
+would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.
+
+With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood.
+She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming
+and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and
+none sought her.
+
+All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.
+
+Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash
+of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white
+robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the
+little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden
+bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the
+people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had
+stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the
+living a fair savor.
+
+No one came to her. What had they to do with her,--a creature
+unbaptized, and an outcast?
+
+She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory
+of the fields.
+
+She did not think of herself--since Arslàn had looked at her, in his
+merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.
+
+It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no
+longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to
+the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could
+not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and
+fortune.
+
+She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be
+free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could
+not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was
+like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that
+when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds
+uncompanioned.
+
+She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds;
+she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they
+were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached--she thought
+always:
+
+"If only I might die for him,--as the reed for the god."
+
+The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they
+and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude
+had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.
+
+The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the
+waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was
+a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown,
+and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.
+
+From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to
+her ear in the shadow of the solitude.
+
+"Folle-Farine,--I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to
+stay me. Say--do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave
+of the Snakes?"
+
+She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw
+shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the
+eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they
+noted the change in her since the last sun had set.
+
+"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.
+
+She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face;
+she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price
+for her chain of coins.
+
+He laughed a little softly.
+
+"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to
+sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!--female things, with
+eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"
+
+She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her
+head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her
+intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's
+probe.
+
+"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but
+one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."
+
+She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:
+
+"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the
+river."
+
+She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its
+degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him
+strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery
+to any debt or burden of a service done.
+
+The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves,
+looked at her long and thoughtfully.
+
+"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"
+
+She gave a sign of assent.
+
+"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and
+shut together.
+
+"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."
+
+"You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold
+because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."
+
+A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.
+
+"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."
+
+"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then--this god of yours?"
+
+She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her
+faith would not be turned.
+
+"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth;
+"because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."
+
+"You are very truthful."
+
+She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
+
+The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have
+watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of
+wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which
+made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never
+allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her
+limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the
+cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young
+desert mare.
+
+"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the
+same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of
+scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on
+the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my
+many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen
+sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is
+Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?"
+
+But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the
+prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight
+of the curled lasso.
+
+"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for
+your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons?
+It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will
+bleed many a day."
+
+She lifted her head.
+
+"Have I complained?--have I asked your pity, or any man's?"
+
+"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's
+wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."
+
+"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him
+for that?"
+
+"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you
+still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What, still?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be
+shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken
+yourself, is shaken from his feet!"
+
+"No doubt."
+
+She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood
+unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her
+eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still
+upon the reaches of the river.
+
+"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man
+is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye
+and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always;
+he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will
+be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give
+this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which
+shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you
+be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him?
+Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that
+you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on
+to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so
+much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage,
+or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form
+to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women
+have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her
+charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will
+displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free--to
+forget you?"
+
+She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other
+days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her
+master.
+
+"He shall be free--to forget me."
+
+The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were
+echoed through her locked teeth.
+
+The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet
+he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the
+torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a
+female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs
+quiver, and those bare nerves heave.
+
+"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong
+though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's sex,
+Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than
+your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are
+beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with
+a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If
+his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be
+yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without
+some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your
+Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by
+poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness
+on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at
+least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and
+who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light
+beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be
+the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach
+of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of
+any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you
+doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I
+have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against
+it to withstand it--this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily
+beauty of a woman."
+
+His voice ceased softly in the twilight--this voice of
+Mephistopheles--which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of
+straining this strength to see if it should break--of deriding this
+faith to see if it would bend--of alluring this soul to see if it would
+fall.
+
+She stood abased in a piteous shame--the shame that any man should thus
+read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all
+innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased
+to bear the gaze of any human eyes,--to bear the light of any noonday
+sun.
+
+And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle
+force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood--the
+ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with
+her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved
+for one single day,--to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms
+hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a
+hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned,
+and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,--
+
+"I have lived: it is enough!"
+
+He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled
+through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.
+
+He might be hers--all her own--each pulse of his heart echoing hers,
+each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!--she hid her
+face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her
+and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.
+
+She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one
+idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she
+would have given her body and her soul. Her soul--if the gods and man
+allowed her one--her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one
+single day of Arslàn's love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they
+would--but his?
+
+Not for this had she sold her life to the gods--not for this; not for
+the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.
+
+What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in
+him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in
+his stead to die.
+
+"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze
+smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in
+solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the
+cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by
+the river?"
+
+The reeds by the river.
+
+The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the
+bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the
+river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life
+might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her
+faith,--to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius
+perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know
+delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man
+heart-sick and heart-broken?
+
+She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would
+have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was
+once more strong.
+
+"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce
+glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your
+word; set him free. His freedom let him use--as he will."
+
+Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of
+the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.
+
+Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully
+and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood,
+along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people
+waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and
+alone.
+
+"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime
+unreason--that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold,
+as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe
+yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it
+drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that
+though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh,
+at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was
+twisting.
+
+He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the
+public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and
+fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had
+once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill
+scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
+
+It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from
+the porch.
+
+In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily
+through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the
+house.
+
+She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance
+of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a
+man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought
+ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?--forget
+quite--when he is free?"
+
+The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat
+rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under
+the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of
+the doorway.
+
+Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her
+eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet,
+leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind
+her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its
+wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.
+
+She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated
+for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the
+pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke
+so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through
+the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and
+stupor.
+
+"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told,
+and her heart breaks for the gold."
+
+The thought was sweet to her--precious with the preciousness of
+vengeance.
+
+"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give
+thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a
+Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no
+longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."
+
+Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that
+she spoke.
+
+"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude
+coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.
+
+"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now;
+and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they
+eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do
+for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all
+men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn
+as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."
+
+Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending;
+scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength
+spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had
+assailed her.
+
+"You mean," she muttered, "you mean----What would you tell me? I do not
+know."
+
+The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the
+carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof
+seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate
+of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."
+
+All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth
+shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:----and Pitchou,
+looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's
+treasure!
+
+She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose
+crushed brain there was only one thought--"Will he forget--forget
+quite--when he is free?"
+
+The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager,
+hissing, tumultuous words:
+
+"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for,
+but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the
+love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all
+his land and household things. God rest his soul! He was a man. He
+forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all
+that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle
+boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money
+go--eh, eh? Canst guess?"
+
+"Go?"
+
+Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:
+
+"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did
+ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the
+lands, and the things--every coin, every inch, every crumb--is willed
+away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for
+the will of God and the glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said
+for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as
+good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is
+old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and
+manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney
+corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night,
+but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church
+will scarce go to roost together."
+
+Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not
+understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in
+the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its
+familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.
+
+"Go!"--she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a
+vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the
+creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.
+
+"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I
+serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it
+fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed
+as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night--I would not be
+overharsh--but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost
+hear?"
+
+Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.
+
+The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away
+down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and
+vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and
+of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in
+her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured
+her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for
+the loss of the sequins.
+
+"How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint's-day!" she
+thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church
+and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.
+
+Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her
+sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments
+which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and
+went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across
+the bridge into the woods.
+
+She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a
+tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse,
+like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the
+trance of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any
+sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty
+fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were,
+yet been all the difference between home and homelessness--between
+existence and starvation.
+
+She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.
+
+She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the
+mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables
+and its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and
+wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet
+chestnut woods.
+
+She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded
+them.
+
+She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only
+pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself
+was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its
+dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and
+feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,--these had been
+her consolations often,--these, in a way, she loved.
+
+Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its
+cool pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart
+clove to it in this moment when she left it--forever. She looked once at
+it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her way.
+
+She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds
+fluttered about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that
+had befallen her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no
+canopy but the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the ripe
+wheat-ears.
+
+The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe
+of the lonely death that she had witnessed, wore on her too heavily, and
+with too dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her
+thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.
+
+Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on
+her. She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though
+she walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as
+through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she
+meant to do, or whither she desired to go.
+
+The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and
+their day at the town-market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of
+them cast some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all
+the countryside that Flamma's treasure was gone to Holy Church.
+
+They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless
+arrows of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and
+laughed, and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so
+much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she,
+nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and her heart hardened, and
+her blood burned.
+
+Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they marched by
+through the purpling leaves or the tall seed-grasses. Not one of them,
+mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember
+that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay her head that night
+than any sick hart driven from its kind.
+
+She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in the fruit-hung
+ways, along the edge of the meadows: fathers with their little children
+running by them, laden with plumes of meadow-sweet; mothers bearing
+their youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young
+lovers talking together as they drove the old cow to her byre; old
+people counting their market gains cheerily; children paddling knee-deep
+in the brooks for cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for
+her;--all had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her so much
+as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much as a brief
+good-night.
+
+"She will quit the country now; that is one good thing," she heard many
+of them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying,
+how pure as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God!
+
+The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating
+sought its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came
+out under the lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the
+distance there came the sound of voices singing together; now and then
+there fell across her path two shadows turning one to the other.
+
+She only was alone.
+
+What did she seek to do?
+
+She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water
+in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream.
+None desired her--none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a
+little, for love's sake."
+
+"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she
+thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against
+them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her
+with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The
+visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the
+thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking
+world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had
+been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him--she
+felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a
+thousand deaths.
+
+What was she to him?--a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose
+very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.
+
+"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be
+fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of
+horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one
+religion, this--her love.
+
+She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an
+old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.
+
+The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the
+plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All
+was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and
+of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were
+but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night.
+White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim
+world.
+
+She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.
+
+She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had
+no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.
+
+Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the
+gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a
+human hand; Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.
+
+With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by
+passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from
+the only eyes she loved.
+
+Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their
+blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud
+and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the
+midnight of calamity.
+
+Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown
+limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red
+girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.
+
+Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses,
+caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A
+tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps
+failed her. She faltered and fell.
+
+Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was
+in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the
+stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the
+night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the
+moon shone.
+
+She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor
+of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks,
+from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was
+beautiful with the beauty of women.
+
+"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the
+song of the reed by the river!
+
+But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that
+was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on
+a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a
+thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on
+his way.
+
+He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake
+to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of
+her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had
+scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all
+that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the
+passion of love in a man to a woman.
+
+So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no
+light in his own eyes.
+
+"Do not fly from me," he said to her. "I have sought you, to ask your
+forgiveness, and----"
+
+She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest
+in the posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was hidden in
+the shadow; her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and
+was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of her homelessness he had
+heard nothing.
+
+"I was harsh to you," he said, gently. "I spoke, in the bitterness of
+my heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;--I forgot that you
+could not know. Can you forgive?"
+
+"The madness was mine," she muttered. "It was I, who forgot----"
+
+Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not
+look up; she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young
+tree which has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She
+knew well what his words would say.
+
+"You are generous, and you shame me--indeed--thus," he said with a
+certain softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its
+coldness and serenity.
+
+This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this
+silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to
+utter one reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but
+see that this nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any
+common nobility of any human thing.
+
+"I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much," he
+said slowly. "I feel base and unworthy; for--I have sought you to bid
+you farewell."
+
+She had awaited her death-blow; she received its stroke without a sound.
+
+She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing
+there her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all
+her beauty changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.
+
+She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands
+crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.
+
+His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love
+for her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude
+savage women who had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined
+Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and plain,
+who had come on here before him in the light of the East, and had passed
+as the shadows passed, and, like them, were forgotten.
+
+She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think--all this
+mighty love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy
+loveliness would die out here, as the evening colors had died out of the
+skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.
+
+He knew that he had but to say to her, "Come!" and she would go beside
+him, whether to shame or ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and
+rejoicing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them
+the gates of paradise.
+
+He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could
+make her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he
+could bid her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he
+knew that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death
+he told her; he knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his
+side would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or
+heaven. And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice
+with such love as this.
+
+Yet,--he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the
+death-stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet
+surely home--to the heart.
+
+"A stranger came to me an hour or more ago," he said to her; and it
+seemed even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and
+stronger than his own,--"an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his
+face--far away, long ago--I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He
+seemed a man of knowledge, and a man critical and keen. That study of
+you--the one among the poppies--you remember--took his eyes and pleased
+him. He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of paper
+money--money enough to take me back among men--to set me free for a
+little space. Oh child! you have seen--this hell on earth kills me. It
+is a death in life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I
+must hurt something, or go mad."
+
+She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was
+like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored,
+broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.
+
+He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this
+creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,--it was wearying to
+him; all he desired was power among men.
+
+"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded
+you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my
+foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"
+
+"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor
+did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh
+metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.
+
+He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were
+pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been
+pitiless to her--with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is
+born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the
+senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne
+to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he
+himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and
+so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe
+music through its shattered grace again.
+
+"When do you go?" she asked.
+
+Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift
+the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;--all the
+ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field
+where men have fought and died.
+
+He answered her, "At dawn."
+
+"And where?"
+
+"To Paris. I will find fame--or a grave."
+
+A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the
+darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the
+poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The
+purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken;
+but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in
+silence.
+
+He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.
+
+He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the
+dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all
+warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him,
+to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot--as he chose.
+
+"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base
+to you,--brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;--yet I would have
+loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all
+the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is
+dead in me, I think, otherwise----"
+
+She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain
+reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under
+the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms
+about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that
+strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss
+the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they
+never again will rest.
+
+Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields,
+and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows
+it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
+
+He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was
+tender. He had no love for her; and yet--now that he had thrown her from
+him forever--he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again
+in their terrible eloquence upon his own.
+
+But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.
+
+He went back to his home alone.
+
+"It is best so," he said to himself.
+
+For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his
+coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing--a reed of
+the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.
+
+He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the
+creations that alone he loved.
+
+"They shall live--or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war
+to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?
+
+That night Hermes had no voice for him.
+
+Else might the wise god have said, "Many reeds grow together by the
+river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one
+reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that
+reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long,--yea, all the years
+of his life."
+
+But Hermes that night spake not.
+
+And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by
+the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither
+she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had
+dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in
+its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little
+from her mouth.
+
+It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl
+on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving
+things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green
+and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light
+anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.
+
+No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole
+frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of
+the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many
+hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the
+grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and
+wondered what had chanced to her.
+
+The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon.
+She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick
+and dull.
+
+A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of
+the river-shore; her eyes vacantly followed the insect's aimless
+circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly
+and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his
+maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of
+it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She
+shivered and was cold.
+
+The sun rose--a globe of flame above the edge of the world.
+
+Memory flashed on her with its light.
+
+She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of
+blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains
+from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent,
+flowing water.
+
+Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and thought, and
+thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that
+it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even
+when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.
+
+She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by
+weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through
+it as with tongues of flame.
+
+The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand.
+He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and
+trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile;
+then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had
+fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth--that in his last embrace
+he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof
+he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.
+
+Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would
+have suffered far less if he had killed her.
+
+He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed
+her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other
+driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.
+
+The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.
+
+Gold!--such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the
+corners of the streets!
+
+The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself.
+Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not
+have cast this shame upon her.
+
+She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching
+eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.
+
+Her heart was breaking.
+
+Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword,
+and killed forever.
+
+She did not reason--all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who
+loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there
+long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring
+instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as
+eternally as though his grave had closed on him.
+
+She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too
+perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right
+to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best
+might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had
+deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.
+
+She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went
+along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as
+she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning
+air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her
+slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have
+sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.
+
+Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet
+orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge
+than the lizard at her feet.
+
+Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all
+youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them
+was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the
+summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was
+resolute to follow him,--to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his
+footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across
+his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and
+by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to
+share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.
+
+To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as
+it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.
+
+She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she
+hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would
+have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn
+asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor
+by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a
+thing that was vile.
+
+But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to
+her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at
+once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as
+the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands,
+but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.
+
+She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.
+
+He had said that he would leave at dawn.
+
+In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast
+ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some
+league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the
+river where he dwelt.
+
+She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too,
+she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She
+wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his
+eyes would kill her.
+
+It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and
+feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the
+ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the
+stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that
+the place was desolate.
+
+The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the
+pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the
+figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light
+fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the
+stone.
+
+She entered and looked at them.
+
+She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there--alone.
+
+The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute
+and content;--and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread
+winged King,--the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden
+apples in their hands,--the women dancing upon Cithæron in the
+moonlight,--the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,--all the
+familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old
+sweet life of the heroic times, were there--left to the rat and the
+spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no
+heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.
+
+The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights
+would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the
+skies, and they would be there--alone.
+
+To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up
+with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one
+brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as
+the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.
+
+She held them in a passionate tenderness--these, the first creatures who
+had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness
+of her life.
+
+She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them
+in an agony of prayer--prayed for them that the hour might come, and
+come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would
+remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in
+worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to
+whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart,
+towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and
+consolation.
+
+Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving
+them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To
+have them live, she would have given her own life.
+
+Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first
+time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the
+floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.
+
+When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and
+Thanatos--the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.
+
+They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet
+their look struck coldly to her heart.
+
+Sleep, Dreams, and Death,--were these the only gifts with which the
+gods, being merciful, could answer prayer?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+At the little quay in the town many boats were lading and unlading, and
+many setting their sails to go southward with their loads of eggs, or of
+birds, of flowers, of fruit, or of herbage; all smelling of summer rain,
+and the odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest of the
+lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them.
+
+Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and learned what she
+needed without any asking, in turn, question of her.
+
+Arslàn had sailed at sunrise.
+
+There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded with Russian
+violets from a flower-farm. The old man was angered and in trouble: the
+lad who steered for him had failed him, and the young men and boys on
+the canals were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage for the
+wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and leaned towards him.
+
+"Do you go the way to Paris?"
+
+The old man nodded.
+
+"I will steer for you, then," she said to him; and leaped down among his
+fragrant freight. He was a stranger to her, and let her be. She did for
+him as well as another, since she said that she knew those waters well.
+
+He was in haste, and, without more words, he loosened his sail, and cut
+his moor-rope, and set his little vessel adrift down the water-ways of
+the town, the violets filling the air with their odors and blue as the
+eyes of a child that wakes smiling.
+
+All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and dim passages,
+all the ropes on which the lanterns and the linen hung, all the wide
+carved stairways water-washed, all the dim windows that the women filled
+with pots of ivy and the song of birds,--she was drifting from them with
+every pulse of the tide, never again to return; but she looked at them
+without seeing them, indifferent, and having no memory of them; her
+brain, and her heart, and her soul were with the boat that she followed.
+
+It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat-bottomed boats were
+coming in at sunrise, in each some cargo of green food or of farm
+produce; a strong girl rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the
+white glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds' eggs,
+children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, old women nursing a
+wicker cage of cackling hens or hissing geese, mules and asses, shaking
+their bells and worsted tassels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin
+saddles,--these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, or
+on the broad highroad that ran for a space by the water's edge.
+
+All of these knew her well; all of these some time or another had jeered
+her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled from her. But no one stopped her.
+No one cared enough for her to care even to wonder whither she went.
+
+She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew so well, along the
+line of the wood and the orchards of Yprès. But what at another time
+would have had pain for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad
+familiarity, now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great
+passion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all slighter memories.
+
+All day long they sailed.
+
+At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust as part of her
+wage; she tried to eat them, knowing she would want all her strength.
+
+They left the course of the stream that she knew, and sailed farther
+than she had ever sailed; passed towns whose bells were ringing, and
+noble bridges gleaming in the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome,
+and bright orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. She
+knew none of them. There were only the water flowing under the keel, and
+the blue sky above, with the rooks circling in it, which had the look of
+friends to her.
+
+The twilight fell; still the wind served, and still they held on; the
+mists came, white and thick, and stars rose, and the voices from the
+shores sounded strangely, with here and there a note of music or the
+deep roll of a drum.
+
+So she drifted out of the old life into an unknown world. But she never
+once looked back. Why should she?--He had gone before.
+
+When it was quite night, they drew near to a busy town, whose lights
+glittered by hundreds and thousands on the bank. There were many barges
+and small boats at anchor in its wharves, banging out lanterns at their
+mast-heads. The old man bade her steer his boat among them, and with a
+cord he made it fast.
+
+"This is Paris?" she asked breathlessly
+
+The old man laughed:
+
+"Paris is days' sail away."
+
+"I asked you if you went to Paris?"
+
+The old man laughed again:
+
+"I said I came the Paris way. So I have done. Land."
+
+Her face set with an anger that made him wince, dull though his
+conscience was.
+
+"You cheated me," she said, briefly; and she climbed the boat's side,
+and, shaking the violets off her, set her foot upon the pier, not
+stopping to waste more words.
+
+But a great terror fell on her.
+
+She had thought that the boat would bring her straight to Paris; and,
+once in Paris, she had thought that it would be as easy to trace his
+steps there as it had been in the little town that she had left. She had
+had no sense of distance--no knowledge of the size of cities; the width,
+and noise, and hurry, and confusion of this one waterside town made her
+helpless and stupid.
+
+She stood like a young lost dog upon the flags of the landing-place, not
+knowing whither to go, nor what to do.
+
+The old man, busied in unlading his violets into the wicker creels of
+the women waiting for them, took no notice of her; why should he? He had
+used her so long as he had wanted her.
+
+There were incessant turmoil, outcry, and uproar round the
+landing-stairs, where large cargoes of beetroot, cabbages, and fish were
+being put on shore. The buyers and the sellers screamed and swore; the
+tawny light of oil-lamps flickered over their furious faces; the people
+jostled her, pushed her, cursed her, for being in the way. She shrank
+back in bewilderment and disgust, and walked feebly away from the edge
+of the river, trying to think, trying to get back her old health and her
+old force.
+
+The people of the streets were too occupied to take any heed of her.
+Only one little ragged boy danced before her a moment, shrieking, "The
+gypsy! the gypsy! Good little fathers, look to your pockets!"
+
+But she was too used to the language of abuse to be moved by it. She
+went on, as though she were deaf, through the yelling of the children
+and the chattering and chaffering of the trading multitude.
+
+There was a little street leading off the quay, picturesque and ancient,
+with parquetted houses and quaint painted signs; at the corner of it sat
+an old woman on a wooden stool, with a huge fan of linen on her head
+like a mushroom. She was selling roasted chestnuts by the glare of a
+little horn lantern.
+
+By this woman she paused, and asked the way to Paris.
+
+"Paris! This is a long way from Paris."
+
+"How far--to walk?"
+
+"That depends. My boy went up there on foot last summer; he is a young
+fool, blotting and messing with ink and paper, while he talks of being a
+great man, and sups with the rats in the sewers! He, I think, was a week
+walking it. It is pleasant enough in fair weather. But you--you are a
+gypsy. Where are your people?"
+
+"I have no people."
+
+She did not know even what this epithet of gypsy, which they so often
+cast at her, really meant. She remembered the old life of the Liebana,
+but she did not know what manner of life it had been; and since Phratos
+had left her there, no one of his tribe or of his kind had been seen in
+the little Norman town among the orchards.
+
+The old woman grinned, trimming her lantern.
+
+"If you are too bad for them, you must be bad indeed! You will do very
+well for Paris, no doubt."
+
+And she began to count her chestnuts, lest this stranger should steal
+any of them.
+
+Folle-Farine took no notice of the words.
+
+"Will you show me which is the road to take?" she asked. Meanwhile the
+street-boy had brought three or four of his comrades to stare at her;
+and they were dancing round her with grotesque grimace, and singing,
+"Houpe là, Houpe là! Burn her for a witch!"
+
+The woman directed her which road to go as well as she could for the
+falling darkness, and she thanked the woman and went. The
+street-children ran at her heels like little curs, yelling and hissing
+foul language; but she ran too, and was swifter than they, and
+outstripped them, the hardy training of her limbs standing her in good
+service.
+
+How far she ran, or what streets she traversed, she could not tell; the
+chestnut-seller had said "Leave the pole-star behind you," and the star
+was shining behind her always, and she ran south steadily.
+
+Great buildings, lighted casements, high stone walls, groups of people,
+troopers drinking, girls laughing, men playing dominoes in the taverns,
+women chattering in the coffee-houses, a line of priests going to a
+death-bed with the bell ringing before the Host, a line of soldiers
+filing through great doors as the drums rolled the _rentrée au
+caserne_,--thousands of these pictures glowed in her path a moment, with
+the next to fade and give place to others. But she looked neither to the
+right nor left, and held on straightly for the south.
+
+Once or twice a man halloed after her, or a soldier tried to stop her.
+Once, going through the gateway in the southern wall, a sentinel
+challenged her, and leveled his bayonet only a second too late. But she
+eluded them all by the swiftness of her flight and the suddenness of her
+apparition, and she got out safe beyond the barriers of the town, and on
+to the road that led to the country,--a road quiet and white in the
+moonlight, and bordered on either side with the tall poplars and the dim
+bare reapen fields which looked to her like dear familiar friends.
+
+It was lonely, and she sat down on a stone by the wayside and rested.
+She had no hesitation in what she was doing. He had gone south, and she
+would go likewise; that she might fail to find him there, never occurred
+to her. Of what a city was she had not yet any conception; her sole
+measurement of one was by the little towns whither she had driven the
+mules to sell the fruits and the fowls.
+
+To have been cheated of Paris, and to find herself thus far distant from
+it, appalled her, and made her heart sink.
+
+But it had no power to make her hesitate in the course she took. She had
+no fear and no doubt: the worst thing that could have come to her had
+come already; the silence and the strength of absolute despair were on
+her.
+
+Besides, a certain thrill of liberty was on her. For the first time in
+all her life she was absolutely free, with the freedom of the will and
+of the body both.
+
+She was no longer captive to one place, bond-slave to one tyranny; she
+was no longer driven with curses and commands, and yoked and harnessed
+every moment of her days. To her, with the blood of a tameless race in
+her, there was a certain force and elasticity in this deliverance from
+bondage, that lifted some measure of her great woe off her. She could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open sky was above her, and
+the smell of the fields about her, and on her face the breath of the
+blowing winds.
+
+She had that love which is as the bezoar stone of fable--an amulet that
+makes all wounds unfelt, and death a thing to smile at in derision.
+
+Without some strong impulsion from without, she might never have cut
+herself adrift from the tyranny that had held her down from childhood;
+and even the one happiness she had known had been but little more than
+the exchange of one manner of slavery for another.
+
+But now she was free--absolutely free; and in the calm, cool night--in
+the dusk and the solitude, with the smell of the fields around her, and
+above her the stars, she knew it and was glad,--glad even amidst the woe
+of loneliness and the agony of abandonment. The daughter of Taric could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open air was about her, and
+the world was before her wherein to roam.
+
+She sat awhile by the roadside and counted his gold by the gleam of the
+stars, and put it away securely in her girdle, and drank from a brook
+beside her, and tried to eat a little of the bread which the old boatman
+had given her as her wages, with three pieces of copper money.
+
+But the crust choked her; she felt hot with fever, and her throat was
+parched and full of pain.
+
+The moon was full upon her where she sat; the red and white of her dress
+bore a strange look; her face was colorless, and her eyes looked but the
+larger and more lustrous for the black shadows beneath them, and the
+weary swollen droop of their lids.
+
+She sat there, and pondered on the next step she had best take.
+
+A woman came past her, and stopped and looked.
+
+The moonlight was strong upon her face.
+
+"You are a handsome wench," said the wayfarer, who was elderly and of
+pleasant visage; "too handsome, a vast deal, to be sitting alone like
+one lost. What is the matter?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered.
+
+The old reserve clung to her and fenced her secret in, as the prickles
+of a cactus-hedge may fence in the magnolia's flowers of snow.
+
+"What, then? Have you a home?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Eh! You must have a lover?"
+
+Folle-Farine's lips grew whiter, and she shrunk a little; but she
+answered steadily,--
+
+"No."
+
+"No! And at your age; and handsome as a ripe, red apple,--with your skin
+of satin, and your tangle of hair! Fie, for shame! Are the men blind?
+Where do you rest to-night?"
+
+"I am going on--south."
+
+"And mean to walk all night? Pooh! Come home with me, and sup and sleep.
+I live hard by, just inside the walls."
+
+Folle-Farine opened her great eyes wide. It was the first creature who
+had ever offered her hospitality. It was an old woman, too; there could
+be nothing but kindness in the offer, she thought; and kindness was so
+strange to her, that it troubled her more than did cruelty.
+
+"You are good," she said, gratefully,--"very good; but I cannot come."
+
+"Cannot come? Why, then?"
+
+"Because I must go on to Paris; I cannot lose an hour. Nevertheless, it
+is good of you."
+
+The old woman laughed roughly.
+
+"Oh-ho! the red apple must go to Paris. No other market grand enough! Is
+that it?"
+
+"I do not know what you mean."
+
+"But stay with me to-night. The roads are dangerous. There are vagrants
+and ill-livers about. There are great fogs, too, in this district; and
+you will meet drunken soldiers and beggars who will rob you. Come home
+with me. I have a pretty little place, though poor; and you shall have
+such fare as I give my own daughters. And maybe you will see two or
+three of the young nobles. They look in for a laugh and a song--all
+innocent: my girls are favorites. Come, it is not a stone's throw
+through the south gate."
+
+"You are good; but I cannot come. As for the road, I am not afraid. I
+have a good knife, and I am strong."
+
+She spoke in all unconsciousness, in her heart thankful to this, the
+first human creature that had ever offered her shelter or good nature.
+
+The woman darted one sharp look at her, venomous as an adder's bite;
+then bade her a short good-night, and went on her way to the gates of
+the town.
+
+Folle-Farine rose up and walked on, taking her own southward road.
+
+She was ignorant of any peril that she had escaped. She did not know
+that the only animals which prey upon the young of their own sex and
+kind are women.
+
+She was very tired; long want of sleep, anguish, and bodily fatigue made
+her dull, and too exhausted to keep long upon her feet. She looked about
+her for some place of rest; and she knew that if she did not husband her
+strength, it might fail her ere she reached him, and stretch her on a
+sick-bed in some hospital of the poor.
+
+She passed two or three cottages standing by the roadside, with light
+gleaming through their shutters; but she did not knock at any one of
+them. She was afraid of spending her three copper coins; and she was too
+proud to seek food or lodging as an alms.
+
+By-and-by she came to a little shed, standing where no house was. She
+looked into it, and saw it full of the last season's hay, dry and
+sweet-smelling, tenanted only by a cat rolled round in slumber.
+
+She crept into it, and laid herself down and slept, the bright starry
+skies shining on her through the open space that served for entrance,
+the clatter of a little brook under the poplar-trees the only sound upon
+the quiet air.
+
+Footsteps went past twice or thrice, and once a wagon rolled lumbering
+by; but no one came thither to disturb her, and she sank into a fitful
+heavy sleep.
+
+At daybreak she was again afoot, always on the broad road to the
+southwest.
+
+With one of her coins she bought a loaf and a draught of milk, at a
+hamlet through which she went. She was surprised to find that people
+spoke to her without a curse or taunt, and dealt with her as with any
+other human being.
+
+Insensibly with the change of treatment, and with the fresh, sweet air,
+and with the brisk movement that bore her on her way, her heart grew
+lighter, and her old dauntless spirit rose again.
+
+She would find him, she thought, as soon as ever she entered Paris; and
+she would watch over him, and only go near him if he needed her. And
+then, and then----
+
+But her thoughts went no further. She shut the future out from her; it
+appalled her. Only one thing was clear before her--that she would get
+him the greatness that he thirsted for, if any payment of her body or
+her soul, her life or her death, could purchase it.
+
+A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no personal terrors
+can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. Hunger, thirst, fatigue,
+hardship, danger,--these were all in her path, and she had each in turn;
+but not one of them unnerved her.
+
+To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked through flames, or
+fasted forty days.
+
+For two days and nights she went on--days cloudless, nights fine and
+mild; then came a day of storm--sharp hail and loud thunder. She went on
+through it all the same; the agony in her heart made the glare of
+lightning and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an April
+breeze over a primrose bank.
+
+She had various fortunes on her way.
+
+A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and tried to insult her;
+she showed them her knife, and, with the blade bare against her throat,
+made them fall back, and scattered them.
+
+A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry ditch under a
+tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join with them and share their
+broken food. She eluded them with disgust; they were not like the
+gitanos of the Liebana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as,
+indeed, they were.
+
+At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy face, spoke softly
+and cheerily to her, and bade her rest awhile on the bench in the porch
+under the vines; and brought out some white pigeons to show her; and
+asked her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her fierceness
+and her shyness, was touched, and wondered greatly that any female thing
+could be thus good.
+
+She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a monkey on his
+shoulder. He was old and infirm. She carried his organ for him awhile,
+as they went along the same road; and he was gentle and kind in return,
+and made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, with a
+shake of his head, that Paris would be either hell or heaven to such as
+she. And she, hearing, smiled a little, for the first time since she had
+left Yprès, and thought--heaven or hell, what would it matter which, so
+long as she found Arslàn?
+
+Of Dante she had never heard; but the spirit of the "_questi chi mai da
+me non piu diviso_" dwells untaught in every great love.
+
+Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having watched her count the
+gold and notes which she carried in her girdle. He dragged her to a
+lonely place, and snatched at the red sash, grasping the money with it;
+but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a fashion that
+he slunk away limping, and told his fellows to beware of her; for she
+had the spring of a cat, and the stroke of a swan's wing.
+
+On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it had done: the men
+were seldom insolent, taking warning from the look in her flashing eyes
+and the straight carriage of her flexile frame; and the women more than
+once were kind.
+
+Many peasants passed her on their market-mules, and many carriers' carts
+and farm-wagons went by along the sunny roads.
+
+Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and gave her a lift of
+a league or two on their piles of grass, of straw, or among their crates
+of cackling poultry, as they made their slow way between the lines of
+the trees, with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of their
+uncouth harness.
+
+All this while she never touched the gold that he had given her. Very
+little food sufficed to her: she had been hardily reared; and for the
+little she had she worked always, on her way.
+
+A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood hewn and stacked, a
+crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug or watered, these got her the
+simple fare which she fed on; and for lodging she was to none indebted,
+preferring to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or under
+a stack against some little blossoming garden.
+
+The people had no prejudice against her: she found few foes, when she
+had left the district that knew the story of Reine Flamma; they were, on
+the contrary, amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with
+the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it chanced to her to
+get no tasks of any sort to do, and at these times she went without
+food: touch his gold she would not. On the road she did what good she
+could; she walked a needless league to carry home a child who had broken
+his leg in a lonely lane; she sought, in a foggy night, for the straying
+goat of a wretched old woman; she saved an infant from the flames in a
+little cabin burning in the midst of the green fields: she did what came
+in her path to do. For her heart was half broken; and this was her way
+of prayer.
+
+So, by tedious endeavor, she won her passage wearily towards Paris.
+
+She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at times, and having
+often wearily to retrace her steps.
+
+On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a green hollow
+amidst woods.
+
+It had an ancient church; the old sweet bells were ringing their last
+mid-day mass, _Salutaris hostia_; a crumbling fortress of the Angevine
+kings gave it majesty and shadow; it was full of flowers and of trees,
+and had quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made her
+think of the streets round about the cathedral of her mother's
+birthplace, away northwestward in the white sea-mists.
+
+When she entered it, noon had just sounded from all its many clocks and
+chimes. The weather was hot, and she was very tired. She had not eaten
+any food, save some berries and green leaves, for more than forty hours.
+She had been refused anything to do in all places; and she had no
+money--except that gold of his.
+
+There was a little tavern, vine-shaded and bright with a Quatre Saisons
+rose that hid its casements. She asked there, timidly, if there were any
+task she might do,--to fetch water, to sweep, to break wood, to drive or
+to stable a mule or a horse.
+
+They took her to be a gypsy; they ordered her roughly to be gone.
+
+Through the square window she could see food--a big juicy melon cut in
+halves, sweet yellow cakes, warm and crisp from the oven, a white
+chicken, cold and dressed with cresses, a jug of milk, an abundance of
+bread. And her hunger was very great.
+
+Nine days of sharper privation than even that to which she had been
+inured in the penury of Yprès had made her cheeks hollow and her limbs
+fleshless; and a continual consuming heat and pain gnawed at her chest.
+
+She sat on a bench that was free to all wayfarers, and looked at the
+food in the tavern kitchen. It tempted her with the terrible animal
+ravenousness begotten by long fast. She wanted to fly at it as a starved
+dog flies. A rosy-faced woman cut up the chicken on a china dish,
+singing.
+
+Folle-Farine, outside, looked at her, and took courage from her smiling
+face.
+
+"Will you give me a little work?" she murmured. "Anything--anything--so
+that I may get bread."
+
+"You are a gypsy," answered the woman, ceasing to smile. "Go to your own
+folk."
+
+And she would not offer her even a plate of broken victuals.
+
+Folle-Farine rose and walked wearily away. She could not bear the sight
+of the food; she felt that if she looked at it longer she would spring
+on it like a wolf. But to use his gold never occurred to her. She would
+have bitten her tongue through in famine ere she would have taken one
+coin of it.
+
+As she went, being weak from long hunger and the stroke of the sunrays,
+she stumbled and fell. She recovered herself quickly; but in the fall
+the money had shaken itself from her sash, and been scattered with a
+ringing sound upon the stones.
+
+The woman in the tavern window raised a loud cry!
+
+"Oh-hè! the wicked liar!--to beg bread while her waistband is stuffed
+with gold like a turkey with chestnuts! What a rogue to try and dupe
+poor honest people like us! Take her to prison."
+
+The woman cried loud; there were half a dozen stout serving-wenches and
+stable-lads about in the little street, with several boys and children.
+Indignant at the thought of an attempted fraud upon their charity, and
+amazed at the flash and the fall of the money, they rushed on her with
+shrieks of rage and scorn, with missiles of turf and stone, with their
+brooms raised aloft, or their dogs set to rage at her.
+
+She had not time to gather up the coins and notes; she could only stand
+over and defend them. Two beggar-boys made a snatch at the tempting
+heap; she drew her knife to daunt them with the sight of it. The people
+shrieked at sight of the bare blade; a woman selling honeycomb and pots
+of honey at a bench under a lime-tree raised a cry that she had been
+robbed. It was not true; but a street crowd always loves a lie, and
+never risks spoiling, by sifting, it.
+
+The beggar-lads and the two serving-wenches and an old virago from a
+cottage door near set upon her, and scrambled together to drive her away
+from the gold and share it. Resolute to defend it at any peril, she set
+her heel down on it, and, with her back against the tree, stood firm;
+not striking, but with the point of the knife outward.
+
+One of the boys, maddened to get the gold, darted forward, twisted his
+limbs round her, and struggled with her for its possession. In the
+struggle he wounded himself upon the steel. His arm bled largely; he
+filled the air with his shrieks; the people, furious, accused her of his
+murder.
+
+Before five minutes had gone by she was seized, overpowered by numbers,
+cuffed, kicked, upbraided with every name of infamy, and dragged as a
+criminal up the little steep stony street in the blaze of the noonday
+sun, whilst on each side the townsfolk looked out from their doorways
+and their balconies and cried out:
+
+"What is it? Oh-hè! A brawling gypsy, who has stolen something, and has
+stabbed poor little Fréki, the blind man's son, because he found her
+out. What is it? _Au violon!--au violon!_"
+
+To which the groups called back again:
+
+"A thief of a gypsy, begging alms while she had stolen gold on her. She
+has stabbed poor little Fréki, the blind cobbler's son, too. We think he
+is dead." And the people above, in horror, lifted their hands and eyes,
+and shouted afresh, "_Au violon!--au violon!_"
+
+Meanwhile the honey-seller ran beside them, crying aloud that she had
+been robbed of five broad golden pieces.
+
+It was a little sunny country-place, very green with trees and grass,
+filled usually with few louder sounds than the cackling of geese and the
+dripping of the well-water.
+
+But its stones were sharp and rough; its voices were shrill and fierce;
+its gossips were cruel and false of tongue; its justice was very small,
+and its credulity was measureless. A girl, barefoot and bareheaded, with
+eyes of the East, and a knife in her girdle, teeth that met in their
+youngsters' wrist, and gold pieces that scattered like dust from her
+bosom,--such a one could have no possible innocence in their eyes, such
+a one was condemned so soon as she was looked at when she was dragged
+among them up their hilly central way.
+
+She had had money on her, and she had asked for food on the plea of
+being starved; that was fraud plain enough, even for those who were free
+to admit that the seller of the honey-pots had never been overtrue of
+speech, and had never owned so much as five gold pieces ever since her
+first bees had sucked their first spray of heath-bells.
+
+No one had any mercy on a creature who had money, and yet asked for
+work; as to her guilt, there could be no question.
+
+She was hurried before the village tribune, and cast with horror into
+the cell where all accused waited their judgment.
+
+It was a dusky, loathsome place, dripping with damp, half underground,
+strongly grilled with iron, and smelling foully from the brandy and
+strong smoke of two drunkards who had been its occupants the previous
+night.
+
+There they left her, taking away her knife and her money.
+
+She did not resist. It was not her nature to rebel futilely; and they
+had fallen on her six to one, and had bound her safely with cords ere
+they had dragged her away to punishment.
+
+The little den was visible to the highway through a square low grating.
+Through this they came and stared, and mouthed, and mocked, and taunted,
+and danced before her. To bait a gypsy was fair pastime.
+
+Everywhere, from door to door, the blind cobbler, with his little son,
+and the woman who sold honey told their tale,--how she had stabbed the
+little lad and stolen the gold that the brave bees had brought their
+mistress, and begged for food when she had had money enough on her to
+buy a rich man's feast. It was a tale to enlist against her all the
+hardest animosities of the poor. The village rose against her in all its
+little homes as though she had borne fire and sword into its midst.
+
+If the arm of the law had not guarded the entrance of her prison-cell,
+the women would have stoned her to death, or dragged her out to drown in
+the pond:--she was worse than a murderess in their sight; and one weak
+man, thinking to shelter her a little from their rage, quoted against
+her her darkest crime when he pleaded for mercy for her because she was
+young and was so handsome.
+
+The long hot day of torment passed slowly by.
+
+Outside there were cool woods, flower-filled paths, broad fields of
+grass, children tossing blow-balls down the wind, lovers counting the
+leaves of yellow-eyed autumn daisies; but within there were only foul
+smells, intense nausea, cruel heats, the stings of a thousand insects,
+the buzz of a hundred carrion-flies, muddy water, and black mouldy
+bread.
+
+She held her silence. She would not let her enemies see that they hurt
+her.
+
+When the day had gone down, and the people had tired of their sport and
+left her a little while, an old feeble man stole timidly to her,
+glancing round lest any should see his charity and quote it as a crime,
+and tendered her through the bars with a gentle hand a little ripe
+autumnal fruit upon a cool green leaf.
+
+The kindness made the tears start to eyes too proud to weep for pain.
+
+She took the peaches and thanked him lovingly and gratefully; cooled her
+aching, burning, dust-drenched throat with their fragrant moisture.
+
+"Hush! it is nothing," he whispered, frightenedly, glancing over his
+shoulder lest any one should see. "But tell me--tell me--why did you say
+you starved when you had all that gold?"
+
+"I did starve," she answered him.
+
+"But why--with all that gold?"
+
+"It was another's."
+
+The old man stared at her, trembling and amazed.
+
+"What--what! die of hunger and keep your hands off money in your
+girdle?"
+
+A dreary smile came on her face.
+
+"What! is that inhuman too?"
+
+"Inhuman?" he murmured. "Oh, child--oh, child, tell any tale you will,
+save such a tale as that!"
+
+And he stole away sorrowful, because sure that for his fruit of charity
+she had given him back a lie.
+
+He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should see the little thing
+which he had done.
+
+She was left alone.
+
+It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, and her head
+throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, and all the agony of thought in
+which she had struggled on her way, had their reaction on her. She
+shivered where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast upon the
+stones; and strange noises sang in her ears, and strange lights
+glimmered and flashed before her eyes. She did not know what ailed her.
+
+The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early robin sang a
+twilight song in an elder-bush near. These were the only things that had
+any pity on her.
+
+By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the grated door and
+thrust in another captive, a vagrant they had found drunk or delirious
+on the highroad, whom they locked up for the night, that on the morrow
+they might determine what to do with him.
+
+He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in by the old soldier
+whose place it was to guard the miserable den.
+
+She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, and crouched there,
+breathing heavily, and staring with dull, dilated eyes.
+
+She thought,--surely they could not mean to leave them there alone, all
+the night through, in the horrible darkness.
+
+The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the old soldier, as he
+turned the rusty key in the lock, grumbled that the world was surely at
+a pretty pass, when two tramps became too coy to roost together. And he
+stumbled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own little
+chamber; and there, smoking and drinking, and playing dominoes with a
+comrade, dismissed his prisoners from his recollection.
+
+Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell was stretched where
+he had fallen, drunk or insensible, and moaning heavily.
+
+She, crouching against the wall, as though praying the stones to yield
+and hold her, gazed at him with horror and pity that together strove in
+the confusion of her dizzy brain, and made her dully wonder whether she
+were wicked thus to shrink in loathing from a creature in distress so
+like her own.
+
+The bright moon rose on the other side of the trees beyond the grating;
+its light fell across the figure of the vagrant whom they had locked in
+with her, as in the wild-beast shows of old they locked a lion with an
+antelope in the same cage--out of sport.
+
+She saw the looming massive shadow of an immense form, couched like a
+crouching beast; she saw the fire of burning, wide-open, sullen eyes;
+she saw the restless, feeble gesture of two lean hands, that clutched at
+the barren stones with the futile action of a chained vulture clutching
+at his rock; she saw that the man suffered horribly, and she tried to
+pity him--tried not to shrink from him--tried to tell herself that he
+might be as guiltless as was herself. But she could not prevail: nature,
+instinct, youth, sex, sickness, exhaustion, all conquered her, and broke
+her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable agony of that horrible
+probation; she sprang to the grated aperture, and seized the iron in her
+hands, and shook it with all her might, and tore at it, and bruised her
+chest and arms against it, and clung to it convulsively, shriek after
+shriek pealing from her lips.
+
+No one heard, or no one answered to her prayer.
+
+A stray dog came and howled in unison; the moon sailed on behind the
+trees; the old soldier above slept over his toss of brandy; at the only
+dwelling near they were dancing at a bridal, and had no ear to hear.
+
+The passionate outcries wailed themselves to silence on her trembling
+mouth; her strained hands gave way from their hold on the irons; she
+grew silent from sheer exhaustion, and dropped in a heap at the foot of
+the iron door, clinging to it, and crushed against it, and turning her
+face to the night without, feeling some little sense of solace in the
+calm clear moon;--some little sense of comfort in the mere presence of
+the dog.
+
+Meanwhile the dusky prostrate form of the man had not stirred.
+
+He had not spoken, save to curse heaven and earth and every living
+thing. He had not ceased to glare at her with eyes that had the red
+light of a tiger's in their pain. He was a man of superb stature and
+frame; he was worn by disease and delirium, but he had in him a wild,
+leonine tawny beauty still. His clothes were of rags, and his whole look
+was of wretchedness; yet there was about him a certain reckless majesty
+and splendor still, as the scattered beams of the white moonlight broke
+themselves upon him.
+
+Of a sudden he spoke aloud, with a glitter of terrible laughter on his
+white teeth and his flashing eyes. He was delirious, and had no
+consciousness of where he was.
+
+"The fourth bull I had killed that Easter-day. Look! do you see? It was
+a red Andalusian. He had wounded three picadors, and ripped the bellies
+of eight horses,--a brave bull, but I was one too many for him. She was
+there. All the winter she had flouted over and taunted me; all the
+winter she had cast her scorn at me--the beautiful brown thing, with her
+cruel eyes. But she was there when I slew the great red bull--straight
+above there, looking over her fan. Do you see? And when my sword went up
+to the hilt in his throat, and the brave blood spouted, she laughed such
+a little sweet laugh, and cast her yellow jasmine flower at me, down in
+the blood and the sand there. And that night, after the red bull died,
+the rope was thrown from the balcony! So--so! Only a year ago; only a
+year ago!"
+
+Then he laughed loud again; and, laughing, sang--
+
+    "Avez-vous vu en Barcelonne
+      Une belle dame, au sein bruni,
+    Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?
+      C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,
+        La Marchesa d'Amaguï."
+
+The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a
+groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it
+with his empty hands.
+
+"Wine!--wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain
+on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old
+feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so
+cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.
+
+Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by
+discord--their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of
+lewd riot and of amorous verse.
+
+Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white
+face of the moon.
+
+After awhile he mocked it--the cold, chaste thing that was the meek
+trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.
+
+Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous
+melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the
+wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague
+memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests
+whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing
+torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows
+flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by
+the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women
+with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled
+anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where
+the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble
+pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the
+wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight
+thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy
+hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire
+of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance
+of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in
+endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the
+ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the
+people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never
+set:--all these memories floated before her and only served to make her
+fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.
+
+There he lay delirious--a madman chained at her feet, so close in the
+little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely
+keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air,
+from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.
+
+And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except
+the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.
+
+She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were the first cries
+that had ever broken from her lips for human aid; and they were vain.
+
+The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a dotard's dreams. The
+village was not aroused. What cared any of its sleepers how these
+outcasts fared?
+
+She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony had spent itself in
+the passion of appeal.
+
+The night--would it ever end?
+
+Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage of her old life
+seemed like peace and freedom.
+
+Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunkard struck her--all
+unconscious of the blow--across her eyes, and fell, contorted and
+senseless, with his head upon her knees.
+
+He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt his lustful
+triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, and babbled with a strange
+sound, low and fast and inarticulate.
+
+"In the little green wood--in the little green wood," he muttered.
+"Hark! do you hear the mill-water run? She looked so white and so cold;
+and they all called her a saint. What could a man do but kill _that_?
+Does she cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie--be you devil
+or god. You sit on a great white throne and judge us all. So they say.
+You can send us to hell?... Well, do. You shall never wring a word from
+her to _my_ hurt. She thinks I killed the child? Nay--that I swear.
+Phratos knew, I think. But he is dead;--so they say. Ask him.... My
+brown queen, who saw me kill the red bull,--are you there too? Ay. How
+the white jewels shine in your breast! Stoop a little, and kiss me. So!
+Your mouth burns; and the yellow jasmine flower--there is a snake in it.
+Look! You love me?--oh-ho!--what does your priest say, and your lord?
+Love!--so many of you swore that. But she,--she, standing next to her
+god there,--I hurt her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, they found the
+sightless face of the dead man lying full in the light of the sun:
+beside him the girl crouched with a senseless stare in the horror of her
+eyes, and on her lips a ghastly laugh.
+
+For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her Father's kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+AT sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a
+smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a
+scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed
+his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery
+sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water's edge.
+
+The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and
+rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the
+basement walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the
+garden palace, where the bird of Hêrê dwelt.
+
+Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peacock swept in
+the light, there was an open casement, a narrow balcony of stone; a
+group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the
+night--the night wet and moonless,--waters a fathom deep,--a bed of sand
+treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be
+save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid
+yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.
+
+On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have
+told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of
+the Brocken.
+
+But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long
+in the breast of the women whom men love.
+
+The Sun came from the east, and passed through the pale stricken faces
+that watched from the casement, and came straight to where the Red Mouse
+sat amidst the poppies.
+
+"Have you let a female soul escape you?" said the Sun.
+
+The Red Mouse answered:
+
+"Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards
+the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch,
+and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to
+me."
+
+Said the Sun:
+
+"That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has told me oftentimes
+that Eros is your pander--always."
+
+"Anteros only," said the Red Mouse.
+
+The Sun, wondering, said again:
+
+"And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into every female soul
+you enter at birth, and dwell there unto death. Is it, then, not so?"
+
+The Red Mouse answered:
+
+"The boast is not mine; it is man's."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she thought, would
+prove her grave; but the waters, with human-like caprice, had cast her
+back upon the land with scarce an effort of her own. Given back thus to
+life, whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled to her
+feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy night through the
+grassy stretches of the unknown gardens and lands in which she found
+herself.
+
+She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with lead, but she was made
+swift by terror and hatred, as though Hermes for once had had pity for
+anything human, and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals.
+
+She ran on and on, not knowing whither; only knowing that she ran from
+the man who had tempted her by the strength of the rod of wealth.
+
+The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the dense mist no
+lights far or near, of the city or planets, of palace or house were
+seen. She did not know where she went; she only ran on away and away,
+anywhere, from the Red Mouse and its master.
+
+When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she paused, and trembling
+crept into a cattle-shed to rest and take breath a little. She shrank
+from every habitation, she quivered at every human voice; she was
+afraid--horribly afraid--in those clinging vapors, those damp deathly
+smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those indistinct and
+unfamiliar creatures of a country strange to her.
+
+That old man with the elf's eyes, who had tempted her, was he a god too,
+she wondered, since he had the rod that metes power and wealth? He might
+stretch his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her.
+
+The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for her, and humbly
+welcomed her. She hid herself among their beds of hay, and in the warmth
+of their breath and their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any
+half-drowned dog; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, and
+hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. She slept from sheer
+exhaustion of mind and body. The cattle could have trodden her to death,
+or tossed her through the open spaces of their byres, but they seemed to
+know, they seemed to pity; and they stirred so that they did not brush a
+limb of her, nor shorten a moment of her slumbers.
+
+When she awoke the sun was high.
+
+A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails,
+kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest
+there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place passively, not
+well knowing what she did.
+
+The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping
+with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a
+delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of
+the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a
+wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.
+
+The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the
+porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf--f--f! get out, you
+drowned rat."
+
+She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force
+to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with
+her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember--and be
+thankful--that in the night that was past she had been strong.
+
+The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint;
+she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with
+weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had
+looked again on the face of Arslàn.
+
+She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept
+into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.
+
+She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and
+rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by
+one, as the death tears of the llama fall.
+
+This was the young year round her; that she knew.
+
+The winter had gone by; its many months had passed over her head whilst
+she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken
+the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary
+season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine
+might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body
+might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot
+fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and
+dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless
+worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to
+serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from
+which a toad would turn. Oh, God! would death never take her likewise?
+Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of
+the dead?
+
+That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so
+full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's
+only friend":--even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned
+her.
+
+Vague memories of things which she had heard in fable and tradition, of
+bodies accursed and condemned to wander forever unresting and wailing;
+of spirits, which for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that
+they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world itself
+endured; creatures that the very elements had denied, and that were too
+vile for fire to burn, or water to drown, or steel to slay, or old age
+to whither, or death to touch and take in any wise. All these memories
+returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered if she were such a
+one as these.
+
+She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great sin; she had done
+none willingly, and yet all people called her vile, and they must know.
+
+Even the old man, mocking her, had said:
+
+"Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, soon or late. And
+your fate is shame; it was your birth-gift, it will be your
+burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? No. But you can make it potent as
+gold, and sweet as honey if you choose, Folle-Farine."
+
+And she had not chosen; yet of any nobility in the resistance she did
+not dream. She had shut her heart to it by the unconscious instinct of
+strength, as she had shut her lips under torture, and shut her hands
+against life.
+
+She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friendless, and every
+human creature was against her. Her tempter had spoken only the bare and
+bleak truth. A dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living
+thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more desolate than
+herself.
+
+The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless sky, but in the
+little wood it was cool and shady, and had the moisture of a heavy
+morning dew. Millions of young leaves had uncurled themselves in the
+warmth. Little butterflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, danced
+in the light. Brown rills of water murmured under the grasses, the
+thrushes sang to one another through the boughs, and the lizard darted
+hither and thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter.
+
+A little distance from her there was a group of joyous singers who
+looked at her from time to time, their laughter hushing a little, and
+their simple carousal under the green boughs broken by a nameless
+chillness and involuntary speculation. She did not note them, her face
+being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the thrushes' song or
+of the human singers' voices rousing her from the stupefaction of
+despair which drugged her senses.
+
+They watched her long; her attitude did not change.
+
+One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a step or two
+forwards; a girl with winking feet, clad gayly in bright colors, though
+the texture of her clothes was poor.
+
+She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly.
+
+"Are you in trouble?"
+
+The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes.
+
+Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver.
+
+"It is no matter, I am only--tired."
+
+"Are you all alone?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the damp and the gloom; we
+are so pleasant and sunny there. Come."
+
+"You are good, but let me be."
+
+The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily rose and came.
+
+"Heaven! she is handsome!" the men muttered to one another.
+
+She looked straight at them all, and let them be.
+
+"You are all alone?" they asked her again.
+
+"Always," she answered them.
+
+"You are going--where?"
+
+"To Paris"
+
+"What to do there?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"You look wet--suffering--what is the matter?"
+
+"I was nearly drowned last night--an accident--it is nothing."
+
+"Where have you slept?"
+
+"In a shed: with some cattle."
+
+"Could you get no shelter in a house?"
+
+"I did not seek any."
+
+"What do you do? What is your work?"
+
+"Anything--nothing."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Folle-Farine."
+
+"That means the chaff;--less than the chaff,--the dust."
+
+"It means me."
+
+They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.
+
+They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock
+had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror
+and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were,
+the very current of the young blood in her veins.
+
+They were silent a little space. Then whispered together.
+
+"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We
+follow art. We will befriend you."
+
+She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing.
+But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their
+bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the
+great city.
+
+In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were
+going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she
+would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with
+them--fearing the Red Mouse.
+
+They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they
+followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and
+alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly
+her step, her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant still
+even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these
+he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless
+value in the world, and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris.
+
+"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next
+town. Will you take a part?"
+
+Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she
+started at his voice.
+
+"I do not know what you mean?"
+
+"I mean--will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It
+will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall
+do shall be to stand and be looked at--you are beautiful, and you know
+it, no doubt?"
+
+She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she
+were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty
+that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory
+to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been
+strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse
+a throb of passion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any
+lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslàn.
+
+He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought,
+who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her
+own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.
+
+That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across
+the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.
+
+It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with
+lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great
+fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded
+cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets
+were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.
+
+As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.
+
+They were well known and well liked there; the people clustered by
+dozens round them, the women greeting them with kisses, the children
+hugging the dogs, the men clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink
+and be merry.
+
+They bade her watch them at their art in a rough wooden house outside
+the wine tavern.
+
+She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, while the mimic
+life of their little stage began and lived its hour.
+
+To the mind which had received its first instincts of art from the cold,
+lofty, passionless creations of Arslàn, from the classic purity and from
+the divine conception of the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage
+could seem but poor and idle mimicry; gaudy and fragrantless as any
+painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem.
+
+The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure idealism of her
+mind and temper revolted in contempt from the visible presentment and
+the vari-colored harlequinade of the actor's art. To her, a note of
+song, a gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were enough to
+unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, a paradise of faith
+and of desire; and for this very cause she shrank away, in amazement and
+disgust, from this realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left
+nothing for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue than
+the common language of human hopes and fears. It could not touch her,
+it could not move her; it filled her--so far as she could bring herself
+to think of it at all--with a cold and wondering contempt.
+
+For to the reed which has once trembled under the melody born of the
+breath divine, the voices of mortal mouths, as they scream in rage, or
+exult in clamor, or contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the
+emptiest of all the sounds under heaven.
+
+"That is your art?" she said wearily to the actors when they came to
+her.
+
+"Well, is it not art; and a noble one?"
+
+A scornful shadow swept across her face.
+
+"It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. There is neither
+heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth."
+
+They were sharply stung.
+
+"What has given you such thoughts as that?" they said, in their
+impatience and mortification.
+
+"I have seen great things," she said simply, and turned away and went
+out into the darkness, and wept,--alone.
+
+She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who had heard the songs
+of Pan amidst the rushes by the river, and had listened to the charmed
+steps of Persephone amidst the flowers of the summer;--could she honor
+lesser gods than these?
+
+"They may forget--they may forsake, and he likewise, but I never," she
+thought.
+
+If only she might live a little longer space to serve and suffer for
+them and for him still; of fate she asked nothing higher.
+
+That night there was much money in the bag. The players pressed a share
+upon her; but she refused.
+
+"Have I begged from you?" she said. "I have earned nothing."
+
+It was with exceeding difficulty that they ended in persuading her even
+to share their simple supper.
+
+She took only bread and water, and sat and watched them curiously.
+
+The players were in high spirits; their chief ordered a stoup of bright
+wine, and made merry over it with gayer songs and louder laughter, and
+more frequent jests than even were his wont.
+
+The men and women of the town came in and out with merry interchange of
+words. The youths of the little bourg chattered light amorous nonsense;
+the young girls smiled and chattered in answer; whilst the actors
+bantered them and made them a hundred love prophecies.
+
+Now and then a dog trotted in to salute the players' poodles; now and
+then the quaint face of a pig looked between the legs of its master.
+
+The door stood open; the balmy air blew in; beyond, the stars shone in a
+cloudless sky.
+
+She sat without in the darkness, where no light fell among the thick
+shroud of one of the blossoming boughs of pear-trees, and now and then
+she looked and watched their laughter and companionship, and their gay
+and airy buffoonery, together there within the winehouse doors.
+
+"All fools enjoy!" she thought; with that bitter wonder, that aching
+disdain, that involuntary injustice, with which the strong sad patience
+of a great nature surveys the mindless merriment of lighter hearts and
+brains more easily lulled into forgetfulness and content.
+
+They came to her and pressed on her a draught of the wine, a share of
+the food, a handful of the honeyed cates of their simple banquet; even a
+portion of their silver and copper pieces with which the little leathern
+sack of their receipts was full,--for once,--to the mouth.
+
+She refused all: the money she threw passionately away.
+
+"Am I a beggar?" she said, in her wrath.
+
+She remained without in the gloom among the cool blossoming branches
+that swayed above-head in the still night, while the carousal broke up
+and the peasants went on their way to their homes, singing along the
+dark streets, and the lights were put out in the winehouse, and the
+trill of the grasshopper chirped in the fields around.
+
+"You will die of damp, roofless in the open air this moonless night,"
+men, as they passed away, said to her in wonder.
+
+"The leaves are roof enough for me," she answered them: and stayed there
+with her head resting on the roll of her sheepskin; wide awake through
+the calm dark hours; for a bed within she knew that she could not pay,
+and she would not let any charity purchase one for her.
+
+At daybreak when the others rose she would only take from them the crust
+that was absolutely needful to keep life in her. Food seemed to choke
+her as it passed her lips,--since how could she tell but what his lips
+were parched dry with hunger or were blue and cold in death?
+
+That morning, as they started, one of the two youths who bore their
+traveling gear and the rude appliances of their little stage upon his
+shoulders from village to village when they journeyed thus--being
+oftentimes too poor to permit themselves any other mode of transit and
+of porterage--fell lame and grew faint and was forced to lay down his
+burden by the roadside.
+
+She raised the weight upon her back and head as she had been wont to do
+the weights of timber and of corn for the mill-house, and bore it
+onward.
+
+In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not yield, but carried the
+wooden framework and the folded canvases all through the heat and
+weariness of the noonday.
+
+"You would have me eat of your supper last night. I will have you accept
+of my payment to-day," she said, stubbornly.
+
+For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and even full of
+honor, whatever men might say: had not Helios himself been bound as a
+slave in Thessaly?
+
+They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit highways, and under
+the shadows of green trees. The fields were green with the young corn
+and the young vines; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs
+nodded in their footsteps; the skies were blue; the earth was fragrant.
+
+At noonday the players halted and threw themselves down beneath a
+poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat their noonday meal of bread
+and a green cress salad.
+
+The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from rain-drops still
+wet upon the grasses, and the budding rose vines. The hedge was full of
+honeysuckle and tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed
+cattle came and looked at them; little redstarts picked up their
+crumbs; from a white vine-hung cottage an old woman brought them salt
+and wished them a fair travel.
+
+But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she asked always,--"Where
+is Paris?"
+
+At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud upon the purple
+haze of the horizon.
+
+She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and thanked the gods that
+they had thus given her to behold the city of his desires.
+
+The chief of the mimes watched her keenly.
+
+"You look at Paris," he said after a time. "There you may be great if
+you will."
+
+"Great? I?"
+
+She echoed the word with weary incredulity. She knew he could but mock
+at her.
+
+"Ay," he made answer seriously. "Even you! Why not? There is no dynasty
+that endures in that golden city save only one--the sovereignty of a
+woman's beauty."
+
+She started and shuddered a little; she thought that she saw the Red
+Mouse stir amidst the grasses.
+
+"I want no greatness," she said, slowly. "What should I do with it?"
+
+For in her heart she thought,--
+
+"What would it serve me to be known to all the world and remembered by
+all the ages of men if he forget--forget quite?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and
+fruitful zone of the city--one of the fragrant and joyous
+pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls
+came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the
+light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened
+violets in each other's breasts.
+
+The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.
+
+"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.
+
+She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslàn had
+declared that fame--or death--should come to him.
+
+The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.
+
+A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its
+gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the
+labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises
+of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of
+her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to
+daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the
+glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush
+of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive,
+with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the
+palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.
+
+The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so
+incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they
+searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of
+bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that
+her eyes never lost that look.
+
+"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest
+of them asked her.
+
+She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which
+it was?--whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she
+would light on at the last?
+
+She was a mystery to them.
+
+She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water
+and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore
+bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to
+care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the
+bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether
+the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored
+aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.
+
+She was silent always, and she never smiled.
+
+"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.
+
+By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient,
+enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne
+that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to
+the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and
+alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never
+ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslàn's was
+not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too
+tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.
+
+So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very
+strange and wondrous to her.
+
+The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which
+the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep
+browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all
+gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise,
+change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun,
+walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs,
+various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and
+discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets,
+and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of
+anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless
+revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.
+
+For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all
+about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from
+it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless
+seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of
+birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence
+and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."
+
+"You are not happy?" one man said to her.
+
+"Happy!"
+
+She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested
+golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a
+showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped
+head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the
+bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.
+
+"Show your beauty once--just once amidst us on the stage, and on the
+morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of
+heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.
+
+But she refused always.
+
+Her beauty--it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or
+death, for him.
+
+The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending
+vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched
+the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of
+the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could
+never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to
+face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more
+unending, than a great city.
+
+She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the
+strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her
+sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no
+other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every
+accent of persuasion or of passion.
+
+When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in
+the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them
+to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in
+the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and
+called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them
+with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold
+mute weariness of contempt.
+
+One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of
+money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you
+will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she
+showed him the edge of her hidden knife.
+
+One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that
+alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and
+watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old
+market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude,
+and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many
+colors.
+
+"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a
+name of power, if only you will come."
+
+"Come whither?" she asked him.
+
+"Come with me--only to my supper-table--for one hour; my horses wait."
+
+She threw the chain of stones at her feet.
+
+"I have no hunger," she said, carelessly. "Go, ask those that have to
+your feast."
+
+And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the many honeyed and
+persuasive words with which in vain he urged her, that night and many
+another night, until he wearied.
+
+One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by under a gilded
+gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, and hung with delicate
+draperies, there looked out the fair head of a woman, with diamonds in
+the ears, and a shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling
+scornful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose; and a woman's voice called to
+her, mockingly:
+
+"Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk barefoot in the
+dust on the stones, and let the sun beat on your head? O fool! there is
+gold in the air, and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here,
+for a woman!"
+
+And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of the gardener's
+wife of the old town by the sea.
+
+She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sorrowful, musing
+eyes, full of startled courage: soon she comprehended; and then her gaze
+gave back scorn for scorn.
+
+"Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the trellised vine?"
+she said, with her voice ascending clear in its disdain. "And are those
+stones in your breast any brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your
+child?"
+
+The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, and withdrew from the
+casement.
+
+She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down in the dust. It
+was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless--an emblem of pleasure and
+wealth. She left it where it lay, and went onward.
+
+The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she might take as
+easily as she could have taken the rose from the dust, had no power to
+allure her.
+
+The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the ears, the purple
+draperies, the ease and the affluence and the joys of the sights and the
+senses, these to her were as powerless to move her envy, these to her
+seemed as idle as the blow-balls that a child's breath floated down the
+current of a summer breeze.
+
+When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the gods by night steal
+through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound
+anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass,
+and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness
+imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.
+
+"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
+smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
+them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
+other?"
+
+There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
+gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
+their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
+in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
+for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.
+
+By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right
+errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal
+it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from
+passion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her
+when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they
+betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable
+reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.
+
+They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his
+soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all
+time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of
+resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or
+the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult
+rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed
+her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and
+of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the
+dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.
+
+It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at
+the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much
+crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous,
+hopeless class that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent--so silent
+that no one notices when death replaces life.
+
+Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a
+high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed
+almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so
+fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close
+about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost
+there.
+
+In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very
+barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of
+dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the
+rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of
+the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar
+sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs.
+And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were
+something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought
+a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of
+it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was
+yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.
+
+She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live
+there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those
+offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer
+than themselves.
+
+They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours'
+toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever
+they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with
+any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long
+as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the
+sparrows in the dark.
+
+She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen,
+roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm
+herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of
+their crust, a little copper piece,--anything that they could afford or
+she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the réveilleuse of the
+quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:--"Her eyes have
+no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.
+
+It was a strange trade--to rise whilst yet for the world it was night,
+and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the
+staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons
+and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew.
+So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the
+bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in
+her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter
+those mercies of the night.
+
+It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in
+the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house,
+from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp
+alone burning.
+
+They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to
+call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty
+of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.
+
+Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them
+also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their
+starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over
+the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up
+in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or
+the potato-fields outside the walls,--she could neither fear them nor
+hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate,
+wondering grief.
+
+She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin,
+suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being
+in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of
+its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and
+that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on
+her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all
+strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It
+was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair
+that had closed around her.
+
+And some of these in turn loved her.
+
+Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued,
+flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark
+stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking
+low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike
+dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
+
+"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she
+always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a
+distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the
+children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that
+had closed about her heart.
+
+It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry
+nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her
+throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the
+thirst of overdriven cattle.
+
+All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the
+while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
+
+She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so
+surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever
+sleep. She sought for him always;--sought the busy crowds of the living;
+sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
+
+As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she
+passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of
+the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories
+that it treasured; it became clearer to her--this thing of his desires,
+this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a
+world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and
+endlessly yearned.
+
+The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible
+and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let
+me only die as the reed died,--what matter,--so that only the world
+speak his name!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons
+had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far
+below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm
+altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great
+silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of
+the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
+
+The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it,
+seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with
+dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on
+the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,--how long?"
+
+Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,--
+
+"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"
+
+Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute
+and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail
+life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips
+the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with
+gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and
+poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is
+but one god now,--that god is gold."
+
+"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance.
+"You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and
+poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden
+pear. It was not wise."
+
+He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced
+her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned
+against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment
+paralyzed.
+
+"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I
+bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for
+naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they
+betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."
+
+She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by
+the snake.
+
+"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"
+
+"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not
+know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me.
+But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very
+weak, of course;--you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you
+on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,--and you will
+plunge after it,--and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you
+cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her
+lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures
+soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and
+are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
+
+"You came--to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.
+
+"Nay--I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I----My
+golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than
+his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags----"
+
+She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under
+enforced composure.
+
+"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's
+quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with
+clean hands."
+
+He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which
+stung her so ruthlessly.
+
+"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may,
+shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You--a thing
+beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be
+innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you
+choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice.
+Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it
+with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue
+will envy you the red robe bitterly then."
+
+Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the
+look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the
+side of the rushing mill-water.
+
+"You came--to say this?"
+
+"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon
+tired, I say; but I----Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he
+motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the
+wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur
+of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night
+air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the
+slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the
+beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin;
+you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while,
+and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy
+and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful
+fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the
+reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most
+bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but
+she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than
+was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels
+for a woman who sells her soul--at a loss. You see?--ah, surely, you
+see, Folle-Farine?"
+
+She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous
+moonlight about her. She saw--she saw now!
+
+And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and,
+by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of
+alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty,
+and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least
+believe--believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and
+her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is
+kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that
+through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and
+merciless gift.
+
+"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's
+voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you
+have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who
+has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you
+last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it--know it, at least,
+enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you
+took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,--to stand homeless
+under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the
+rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace
+gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one
+smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a
+little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired,
+Folle-Farine!"
+
+She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming
+to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights
+shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
+
+Tired!--ah, God!--tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he
+spake.
+
+"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the
+world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as
+your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by
+horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded
+gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of
+flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only
+chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a
+priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring
+you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!--what
+vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the
+swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!--what
+retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and
+magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the
+Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you
+can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance--so
+symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to
+wither at your birth,--a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the
+snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your
+fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed
+out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no
+anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way,
+you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more
+beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is
+the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of
+gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it
+high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will
+find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest
+vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of
+your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men;
+and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in
+triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;--nothing as you
+are, Folle-Farine!"
+
+She heard in silence to the end.
+
+On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam
+close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness,
+in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all
+creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted
+in the spaces of the stones.
+
+As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she
+reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow
+wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the
+void of the darkness.
+
+"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you,
+and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that
+tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."
+
+And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though
+the deed she spake of tempted her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+That night the moon found the Red Mouse, and said,--
+
+"Did I not declare aright? Over every female thing you are
+victorious--soon or late?"
+
+But the Red Mouse answered,--
+
+"Nay, not so. For the soul still is closed against me; and the soul
+still is pure. But this men do not see, and women cannot know;--they are
+so blind."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+Ere another year had been fully born, the world spoke in homage and in
+wonder of two things.
+
+The one, a genius which had suddenly arisen in its midst, and taken
+vengeance for the long neglect of bitter years, and scourged the world
+with pitiless scorn until, before this mighty struggle which it had
+dared once to deride and to deny, it crouched trembling; and wondered
+and did homage; and said in fear, "Truly this man is great, and truth is
+terrible."
+
+The other,--the bodily beauty of a woman; a beauty rarely seen in open
+day, but only in the innermost recesses of a sensualist's palace; a
+creature barefooted, with chains of gold about her ankles, and loose
+white robes which showed each undulation of the perfect limbs, and on
+her breast the fires of a knot of opal; a creature in whose eyes there
+was one changeless look, as of some desert beast taken from the freedom
+of the air and cast to the darkness of some unutterable horror; a
+creature whose lips were forever mute, mute as the tortured lips of
+Læna.
+
+One day the man whom the nations at last had crowned, saw the creature
+whom it was a tyrant's pleasure to place beside him now and then, in the
+public ways, as a tribune of Rome placed in his chariot of triumph the
+vanquished splendor of some imperial thing of Asia made his slave.
+
+Across the clear hot light of noon the eyes of Arslàn fell on hers for
+the first time since they had looked on her amidst the pale poppies, in
+the noonrise, in the fields.
+
+They smiled on her with a cold, serene, ironic scorn.
+
+"So soon?" he murmured, and passed onward, whilst the people made way
+for him in homage.
+
+He had his heart's desire. He was great. He only smiled to think--all
+women were alike.
+
+Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife were thrust into
+her breast.
+
+But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were so strong, they
+were so mute; they did not even once cry out against him, "For thy
+sake!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.
+
+The golden willows blew in the low winds; the waters came and went; the
+moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds sighed in the
+silence. Two winters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer; and all
+the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary already had been
+slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the empty
+casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were
+taking leaf between the square stones of the paven floors; on the
+deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
+of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
+devoured one by one the immortal offspring of Zeus; about the feet of
+the bound sun-king in Phæros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
+smile the gray nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
+around and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
+round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
+from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
+the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
+flooded water, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
+everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in
+hunger or sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gangrened
+and ruined.
+
+The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of eternal night, are
+unharmed and unaltered by any passage of the years of earth,--the only
+gods who never bend beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold
+the nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas
+change places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that
+is told, and the deities that are worshiped in the temples change name
+and attributes and cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them.
+
+In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand in band, looking
+outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished with the
+faith of each age as it changed; other gods, lived by the breath of
+men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice; but they--their
+empire is the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of
+life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every
+creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood
+to the nest-bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a
+sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And
+Thanatos--to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to
+come; beneath his foot all generations lie, and in the hollow of his
+hand he holds the worlds. Though the earth be tenantless, and the
+heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the
+universe be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal
+darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its eternal solitudes he
+alone will wander and he still behold his work.
+
+Deathless as themselves, their shadows stood; and the worm and the
+lizard and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm
+clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their
+lips,--knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the
+worlds shall have perished they still will reign on,--the slow, sure,
+soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal
+oblivion.
+
+A little light strayed in from the gray skies, pale as the
+primrose-flowers that grow among the reeds upon the shore, and found its
+way to them trembling, and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
+unfathomable eyes.
+
+To eyes which spake and said: "Sleep, Dreams, and Death;--we are the
+only gods that answer prayer."
+
+With the faint gleam of the tender evening light there came across the
+threshold a human form, barefooted, bareheaded, with broken links of
+golden chains gleaming here and there upon her limbs, with white robes
+hanging heavily, soaked with dews and rains; with sweet familiar smells
+of night-born blossoms, of wet leaves, of budding palm-boughs, of rich
+dark seed-sown fields, and the white flower-foam of orchards shedding
+their fragrance from about her as she moved.
+
+Her face was bloodless as the faces of the gods; her eyes had a look of
+blindness, her lips were close-locked together; her feet stumbled often,
+yet her path was straight.
+
+She had hidden by day, she had fled by night; all human creatures had
+scattered from her path, in terror of her as of some unearthly thing:
+she had made her way blindly yet surely through the sweet cool air,
+through the shadows and the grasses, through the sighing sounds of
+bells, through the leafy ways, through the pastures where the herds were
+sleeping, through the daffodils blowing in the shallow brooks;--through
+all the things for which her life had been athirst so long and which she
+reached too late,--too late for any coolness of sweet grass beneath her
+limbs to give her rest; too late for any twilight song of missel-thrush
+or merle to touch her dumb dead heart to music; too late for any kiss of
+clustering leaves to heal the blistering shame that burned upon her lips
+and withered all their youth. And yet she loved them,--loved them never
+yet more utterly than now when she came back to them, as Persephone to
+the pomegranate-flowers of hell.
+
+She crossed the threshold, whilst the reeds that grew in the water by
+the steps bathed her feet and blew together softly against her limbs,
+sorrowing for this life so like their own, which had dreamed of the
+songs of the gods and had only heard the hiss of the snakes.
+
+She fell at the feet of Thanatos. The bonds of her silence were
+loosened; the lips dumb so long for love's sake found voice and cried
+out:
+
+"How long?--how long? Wilt thou never take pity, and stoop, and
+say, 'Enough'? I have kept faith, I have kept silence, to the end. The
+gods know. My life for his; my soul for his: so I said. So I have given.
+I would not have it otherwise. Nay,--I am glad, I am content, I am
+strong. See,--I have never spoken. The gods have let me perish in his
+stead. Nay, I suffer nothing. What can it matter--for me? Nay, I thank
+thee that thou hast given my vileness to be the means of his glory. He
+is immortal, and I am less than the dust:--what matter? He must not
+know; he must never know; and one day I might be weak, or mad, and
+speak. Take me whilst still I am strong. A little while agone, in the
+space in the crowds he saw me. 'So soon?' he said,--and smiled. And yet
+I live! Keep faith with me; keep faith--at last. Slay me
+now,--quickly,--for pity's sake! Just once,--I speak."
+
+Thanatos, in answer, laid his hand upon her lips, and sealed them, and
+their secret with them, mute, for evermore.
+
+She had been faithful to the end.
+
+To such a faith there is no recompense, of men or of the gods, save only
+death. On the shores of the river the winds swept through the reeds,
+and, sighing amidst them, mourned, saying, "A thing as free as we are,
+and as fair as the light, has perished; a thing whose joys were made,
+like ours, from song of the birds, from sight of the sun, from sound of
+the waters, from smell of the fields, from the tossing spray of the
+white fruit-boughs, from the play of the grasses at sunrise, from all
+the sweet and innocent liberties of earth and air. She has perished as a
+trampled leaf, as a broken shell, as a rose that falls in the public
+ways, as a star that is cast down on an autumn night. She has died as
+the dust dies, and none sorrow. What matter?--what matter? Men are wise,
+and gods are just,--they say."
+
+The moon shone cold and clear. The breath of the wild thyme was sweet
+upon the air. The leaves blew together murmuring. The shadows of the
+clouds were dark upon the stream. She lay dead at the feet of the Sons
+of Night.
+
+The Red Mouse sat without, and watched, and said, "To the end she hath
+escaped me." The noisome creatures of the place stole away trembling;
+the nameless things begotten by loneliness and gloom glided to their
+holes as though afraid; the blind newts crept into the utter darkness
+afar off; the pure cool winds alone hovered near her, and moved her
+hair, and touched her limbs with all the fragrance of forest and plain,
+of the pure young year and the blossoming woodlands, of the green
+garden-ways and the silvery sea. The lives of the earth and the air and
+the waters alone mourned for this life which was gone from amidst them,
+free even in basest bondage, pure though every hand had cast defilement
+on it, incorrupt through all corruption--for love's sake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+In the springtime of the year three reapers cut to the roots the reeds
+that grew by the river.
+
+They worked at dawn of day: the skies were gray and dark; the still and
+misty current flowed in with a full tide; the air was filled with the
+scent of white fruit-blossoms; in the hush of the daybreak the song of a
+lark thrilled the silence; under the sweep of the steel the reeds fell.
+
+Resting from their labors, with the rushes slain around them, they,
+looking vacantly through the hollow casements, saw her body lying there
+at the feet of the gods of oblivion.
+
+At first they were shaken and afraid. Then the gleam of the gold upon
+her limbs awakened avarice; and avarice was more powerful than fear.
+They waded through the rushes and crossed the threshold, and, venturing
+within, stood looking on her in awe and wonder, then timorously touched
+her, and turned her face to the faint light. Then they said that she was
+dead.
+
+"It is that evil thing come back upon us!" they muttered to one another,
+and stood looking at one another, and at her, afraid.
+
+They spoke in whispers; they were very fearful; it was still twilight.
+
+"It were a righteous act to thrust her in a grave," they murmured to one
+another at the last,--and paused.
+
+"Ay, truly," they agreed. "Otherwise she may break the bonds of the
+tomb, and rise again, and haunt us always: who can say? But the
+gold----"
+
+And then they paused again.
+
+"It were a sin," one murmured,--"it were a sin to bury the pure good
+gold in darkness. Even if it came from hell----"
+
+"The priests will bless it for us," answered the other twain.
+
+Against the reddening skies the lark was singing.
+
+The three reapers waited a little, still afraid, then hastily, as men
+slaughter a thing they dread may rise against them, they stripped the
+white robes from her and drew off the anklets of gold from her feet, and
+the chains of gold that were riven about her breast and limbs. When they
+had stripped her body bare, they were stricken with a terror of the dead
+whom they thus violated with their theft; and, being consumed with
+apprehension lest any, as the day grew lighter, should pass by there and
+see what they had done, they went out in trembling haste, and together
+dug deep down into the wet sands, where the reeds grew, and dragged her
+still warm body unshrouded to the air, and thrust it down there into its
+nameless grave, and covered it, and left it to the rising of the tide.
+
+Then with the gold they hurried to their homes.
+
+The waters rose and washed smooth the displaced soil, and rippled in a
+sheet of silver as the sun rose over the place, and effaced all traces
+of their work, so that no man knew this thing which they had done.
+
+In her death, as in her life, she was friendless and alone; and none
+avenged her.
+
+The reeds blew together by the river, now red in the daybreak, now white
+in the moonrise; and the winds sighed through them wearily, for they
+were songless, and the gods were dead.
+
+The seasons came and went; the waters rose and sank; in the golden
+willows the young birds made music with their wings; the soft-footed
+things of brake and brush stole down through the shade of the leaves and
+drank at the edge of the shore, and fled away; the people passed down
+the slow current of the stream with lily sheaves of the blossoming
+spring, with ruddy fruitage of the summer woods, with yellow harvest of
+the autumn fields,--passed singing, smiting the frail songless as they
+went.
+
+But none paused there.
+
+For Thanatos alone knew,--Thanatos, who watched by day and night the
+slain reeds sigh, fruitless and rootless, on the empty air,--Thanatos,
+who by the cold sad patience of his gaze spoke, saying,--
+
+"I am the only pity of the world. And even I--to every mortal thing I
+come too early or too late."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Note: Hyphen variations left as printed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OUIDA'S WORKS.
+
+
+GRANVILLE DE VIGNE
+
+STRATHMORE
+
+CHANDOS
+
+IDALIA
+
+UNDER TWO FLAGS
+
+TRICOTRIN
+
+PUCK
+
+CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE
+
+RANDOLPH GORDON
+
+BEATRICE BOVILLE
+
+These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most powerful and
+fascinating works of fiction which the present century, so prolific in
+light reading, has produced.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Folle-Farine
+
+Author: Ouida
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2012 [EBook #39745]
+[Last updated: November 24, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLE-FARINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/tp.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h1>FOLLE-FARINE.</h1>
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">By OUIDA</span>,</h2>
+
+<h3>AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "IDALIA," "TRICOTRIN," "PUCK,"
+"GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," "UNDER TWO FLAGS," ETC.</h3>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">"Un gazetier fumeux qui se croit au flambeau<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Dit au pauvre qu'il a noyé dans les ténèbres:<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">Où donc l'aperçois-tu ce Créateur du Beau?<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Ce Rédresseur que tu célèbres!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12"><span class="smcap">Baudelaire.</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="center">PHILADELPHIA<br />
+J. B. LIPPINCOTT &amp; CO.<br />
+1871.</p>
+
+<p class="center">Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by</p>
+
+<p class="center">J. B. LIPPINCOTT &amp; CO.,</p>
+
+<p class="center">In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center">À<br />
+LA MÉMOIRE<br />
+D'INGRES,<br />
+PEINTRE-POËTE.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>FOLLE-FARINE.</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>BOOK I.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from
+the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which
+flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the
+impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment,
+and then is scattered&mdash;on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight,
+down in the mud. What matters? who cares?</p>
+
+<p>Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in
+the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere,
+borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to
+lie in a fetid ditch.</p>
+
+<p>Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones,
+grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself
+Love avers that its God does grind the world.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born;
+it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not
+any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it
+is very like you," said the old miller, watching the millstones.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine heard&mdash;she had heard a hundred times,&mdash;and held her peace.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.</p>
+
+<p>As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The
+dust,&mdash;sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the
+shred husks and the shattered stalks.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine,&mdash;she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from
+between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were
+thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so
+mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.</p>
+
+<p>The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it
+listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it
+died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the
+curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could
+mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with
+it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the
+dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.</p>
+
+<p>In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much
+better dealt with than she was.</p>
+
+<p>"Folle-Farine! Folle&mdash;Folle&mdash;Folle&mdash;Farine!" the other children hooted
+after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her
+bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and
+answered to it as others to their birthnames.</p>
+
+<p>It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, absolutely worthless; the
+very refuse of the winnowings of the flail of fate. But she accepted
+that too, so far as she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a
+dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, the dust had
+its wings while she had none.</p>
+
+<p>All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it liked, through the
+open doors, and among the tossing boughs, and through the fresh cool
+mists, and down the golden shafts of the sunbeams; and all day long she
+stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and then cursed, or
+first cursed and then beaten,&mdash;which was all the change that her life
+knew. For herself, she saw no likeness betwixt her and the dust; for
+that escaped from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode under the
+flail, always.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew.</p>
+
+<p>The great black wheel churned and circled in the brook water, and
+lichens and ferns and mosses made lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent
+place; the red mill roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer
+leaves; the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their holes in
+the wall; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in many orchards filled
+the air; the great grindstones turned and turned and turned, and the
+dust floated forth to dance with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers above the wheel,
+and watched with her thoughtful eyes, and wondered again, after her own
+fashion, why her namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had
+none.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness savagely.</p>
+
+<p>"Little devil!" cried the miller, "go fetch me those sacks, and carry
+them within, and pile them; neatly, do you hear? Like the piles of stone
+in the road."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedience to the command,
+and went to the heap of sacks that lay outside the mill; small sacks,
+most of them; all of last year's flour.</p>
+
+<p>There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the mill-garden, where
+they were; a tall flower all scarlet and gold, and straight as a palm,
+with bees sucking into its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem.
+She stood a moment looking at its beauty; she was scarce any higher than
+its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, something after its
+fashion. She was a child of six or eight years, with limbs moulded like
+sculpture, and brown as the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half
+savage and half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and straight
+dark brows&mdash;the brows of the friezes of Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, knotted around her
+waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure in
+the sun, to a golden-brown color, though in texture it was soft as
+velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep
+grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and purple butterflies
+over her head, an artist would have painted her and called her by a
+score of names, and described for her some mystical or noble fate: as
+Anteros, perhaps, or as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born
+to the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived by
+Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still the earth lay
+black and barren and fruitless, under the ban and curse of a bereaved
+maternity.</p>
+
+<p>But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine; and here she had only to
+labor drearily and stupidly like the cattle of the field; without their
+strength, and with barely so much even as their scanty fare and
+begrudged bed.</p>
+
+<p>The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she had a beauty which
+ripened and grew rich under their warmth, like that of a red flower bud
+or a golden autumn fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes
+that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She was Folle-Farine;
+a little wicked beast that only merited at best a whip and a cruel word,
+a broken crust and a malediction; a thing born of the devil, and out of
+which the devil needed to be scourged incessantly.</p>
+
+<p>The sacks were all small; they were the property of the peasant
+proprietors of the district,&mdash;a district of western Normandy. But though
+small they were heavy in proportion to her age and power. She lifted
+one, although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accustomed
+action; poised it on her back, clasped it tight with her round slender
+arms, and carried it slowly through the open door of the mill. That one
+put down upon the bricks, she came for a second,&mdash;a third,&mdash;a fourth,&mdash;a
+fifth,&mdash;a sixth, working doggedly, patiently and willingly, as a little
+donkey works.</p>
+
+<p>The sacks were in all sixteen; before the seventh she paused.</p>
+
+<p>It was a hot day in mid-August: she was panting and burning with the
+exertion; the bloom in her cheeks had deepened to scarlet; she stood a
+moment, resting, bathing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall
+tuft of lilies.</p>
+
+<p>The miller looked round where he worked, among his beans and cabbages,
+and saw.</p>
+
+<p>"Little mule! Little beast!" he cried. "Would you be lazy&mdash;you!&mdash;who
+have no more right to live at all than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad?"</p>
+
+<p>And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught up a piece of rope
+with which he had been about to tie his tall beans to a stake, and he
+struck the child with it. The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling
+round her bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark.</p>
+
+<p>She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted her head and
+looked at him, and dropped her hands to her sides. Her great eyes glowed
+fiercely; her red curling lips shut tight; her straight brows drew
+together.</p>
+
+<p>"Little devil! Will you work now?" said the miller. "Do you think you
+are to stand in the sun and smell at flowers&mdash;you? Pouf-f-f!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine did not move.</p>
+
+<p>"Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute," said the miller. "If you
+stand still a second before they are all housed, you shall have as many
+stripes as there are sacks left untouched. Oh-hè, do you hear?"</p>
+
+<p>She heard, but she did not move.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you hear?" he pursued. "As many strokes as there are sacks, little
+wretch. Now&mdash;I will give you three moments to choose. One!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head erect, her arms
+crossed on her chest. A small, slender, bronze-hued, half-nude figure
+among the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of
+the lilies.</p>
+
+<p>"Two!"</p>
+
+<p>She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a
+purple-winged butterfly lighting on her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Three!"</p>
+
+<p>She was still mute; still motionless.</p>
+
+<p>He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted
+the rope.</p>
+
+<p>It curled round her breast and back, again and again and again; she
+shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. He struck her the ten
+times; with the same number of strokes as there remained sacks
+uncarried. He did not exert any great strength, for had he used his
+uttermost he would have killed her, and she was of value to him; but he
+scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the execution of his threat,
+and the rope was soon wet with drops of her bright young blood.</p>
+
+<p>The noonday sun fell golden all around; the deep sweet peace of the
+silent country reigned everywhere; the pigeons fled to and fro in and
+out of their little arched homes; the millstream flowed on, singing a
+pleasant song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low sound on
+the turf; close about was all the radiance of summer flowers; of heavy
+rich roses, of yellow lime tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely
+phlox, and all the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the
+warmth the child shuddered under the scourge; against the light the
+black rope curled like a serpent darting to sting; among the sun-fed
+blossoms there fell a crimson stain.</p>
+
+<p>But never a word had she uttered. She endured to the tenth stroke in
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>He flung the cord aside among the grass. "Daughter of devils!&mdash;what
+strength the devil gives!" he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her back bruised and
+lacerated, her eyes still glanced with undaunted scorn and untamed
+passion. Still she said nothing; but, as his hand released her, she
+darted as noiselessly as a lizard to the water's edge, set her foot on
+the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped aloft to the
+highest point, and seated herself astride on that crossbar of black
+timber on which she had been throned when he had summoned her first,
+above the foam of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of
+innumerable leaves.</p>
+
+<p>Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh as the voice of
+a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reckless indifference, a stave of
+song in a language unknown to any of the people of that place; a loud
+fierce air, with broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which
+rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their rebellion, through
+the foliage, and above the sound of the loud mill water.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a chant to the foul fiend," the miller muttered to himself.
+"Well, why does he not come and take his own? he would be welcome to
+it."</p>
+
+<p>And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, and said an ave or two
+over it to exorcise it.</p>
+
+<p>Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed; the stripes on her
+shoulders burned like flame; her little brain was dizzy; her little
+breast was black with bruises; but still she sang on, clutching the
+timber with her hands to keep her from falling into the foam below, and
+flashing her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>"Can one never cut the devil out of her?" muttered the miller, going
+back to his work among the beans.</p>
+
+<p>After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice
+despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the
+shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam
+and eddy below.</p>
+
+<p>The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole
+the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great
+lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper
+chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.</p>
+
+<p>The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the
+water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the
+pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned
+on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat
+aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not&mdash;no
+supper for you to-night."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly,
+her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing
+like the eyes of a wild hawk.</p>
+
+<p>She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through
+the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.</p>
+
+<p>The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean
+as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and
+furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with
+pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of
+saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some
+rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal
+there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old
+serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of
+Normandy.</p>
+
+<p>The miller stayed the child at the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"Little devil&mdash;not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the
+sacks."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food on the board,
+past the images of the saints, past the high lancet window, through
+which the moonlight had begun to stream, and out at the opposite door.</p>
+
+<p>There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to which that door had
+opened, pushed aside a little wooden wicket, entered a loft in the roof,
+loosened the single garment that she wore, shook it off from her, and
+plunged into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard mosses
+which served her as a bed. Covered in these, and curled like a dormouse
+in its nest, she clasped her hands above her head and sought to forget
+in sleep her hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both.</p>
+
+<p>Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon it; there was a
+little rudely-sculptured representation of the Nativity; there was a
+wooden figure of St. Christopher; a portrait of the Madonna, and many
+other symbols of the church. But the child went to her bed without a
+prayer on her lips, and with a curse on her head and bruises on her
+body.</p>
+
+<p>Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too hurt and sore to be
+able to lie without pain; the dried grasses, so soft to her usually,
+were like thorns beneath the skin that still swelled and smarted from
+the stripes of the rope. She was feverish; she tossed and turned in
+vain; she suffered too much to be still; she sat up and stared with her
+passionate wistful eyes at the leaves that were swaying against the
+square casement in the wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and
+bright across her bed.</p>
+
+<p>She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the house. They
+were not many: a cat's mew, a mouse's scratch, the click-clack of the
+old woman's step, the shrill monotony of the old man's voice, these were
+all. After awhile even these ceased; the wooden shoes clattered up the
+wooden stairs, the house became quite still; there was only in the
+silence the endless flowing murmur of the water breaking against the
+motionless wheels of the mill.</p>
+
+<p>Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her anything to eat or
+drink. She had heard them muttering their prayers before they went to
+rest, but no hand unlatched her door. She had no disappointment, because
+she had had no hope.</p>
+
+<p>She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in her; but she went
+no further. She did not know what it was to hope. She was only a young
+wild animal, well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her nest of grass,
+slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her casement&mdash;a small square hole
+in the wall, and merely closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut
+in it scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush of summer
+air met her burning face; a cool cluster of foliage hit her a soft blow
+across the eyes as the wind stirred it. They were enough to allure her.</p>
+
+<p>Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only two instincts&mdash;air
+and liberty.</p>
+
+<p>She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the agility that only
+is born of frequent custom, and got upon the shelving thatch of a shed
+that sloped a foot or so below, slid down the roof, and swung herself by
+the jutting bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The housedog, a
+brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about the mill, growled
+and sprang at her; then, seeing who she was, put up his gaunt head and
+licked her face, and turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant
+patrol.</p>
+
+<p>Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and fervently, without
+a word. The mastiff was the only living thing that did not hate her; she
+was grateful, in a passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took
+to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin of the water,
+and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on whose edge the mill-house
+stood.</p>
+
+<p>Once there she was content.</p>
+
+<p>The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees stood thick, the
+pale quivering luminance of the moon, the mystical eerie sounds that
+fill a woodland by night, all which would have had terror for tamer and
+happier creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced
+delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of fear; and she had
+remained too ignorant to have been ever taught it.</p>
+
+<p>It was still warm with all the balmy breath of midsummer; there were
+heavy dews everywhere; here and there, on the surface of the water,
+there gleamed the white closed cups of the lotos; through the air there
+passed, now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird on the
+wing; the wood, whose trees were pines, and limes, and maples, was full
+of a deep dreamy odor; the mosses that clothed many of the branches
+hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies.</p>
+
+<p>Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as in a trance, the
+stillness only broken by some faint note of a sheep's bell, some distant
+song of a mule-driver passing homeward.</p>
+
+<p>The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly soothed and made
+glad, she knew not why, by all the dimness and the fragrance round her.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that every now and
+then broke up through the grasses; she felt the dews, shaken off the
+leaves above, fall deliciously upon her face and hair; she filled her
+hands with the night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness
+as though it were milk and honey; she crouched down and watched her own
+eyes look back at her from the dark gliding water of the river.</p>
+
+<p>Then she threw herself on her back upon the mosses&mdash;so cool and moist
+that they seemed like balm upon the bruised hot skin&mdash;and lay there
+looking upward at the swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the
+stately flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of the swift
+brown bats, at the soft trembling of the foliage in the breeze, at the
+great clouds slowly sailing across the brightness of the moon. All these
+things were vaguely sweet to her&mdash;with the sweetness of freedom, of
+love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never
+known: so may the young large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the
+forest in the hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer
+has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no more against
+its flank.</p>
+
+<p>She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a sort of voluptuous
+delight, all movements in the air, all changes in the clouds, all
+shadows in the leaves. All the immense multitude of ephemeral life
+which, unheard in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering
+voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb and under every
+bough around her. The silvery ghostlike wing of an owl touched her
+forehead once. A little dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes
+floated across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint things,
+hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the stars. But none of these
+things had terror for her; they were things of the night, with which she
+felt vaguely the instinct of kinship.</p>
+
+<p>She was only a little wild beast, they said, the offspring of darkness,
+and vileness, and rage and disgrace. And yet, in a vague, imperfect way,
+the glories of the night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its
+melancholy and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her dauntless
+eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and stirred the
+half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some nameless ecstasy, that
+were not merely physical.</p>
+
+<p>And then, in her way, being stung by these, and moved, she knew not why,
+to a strange sad sense of loneliness and shame, and knowing no better
+she prayed.</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands upon her chest,
+and prayed after the fashion that she had seen men and women and
+children pray at roadside shrines and crosses; prayed aloud, with a
+little beating, breaking heart, like the young child she was.</p>
+
+<p>"O Devil! if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with me; leave me not alone:
+lend me thy strength and power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give
+me this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee always."</p>
+
+<p>She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, faltering
+language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the
+earth and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, while this
+mighty unknown King of the dominion of darkness, whose child she ever
+heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, and reigned afar in some
+great world, oblivious of her misery.</p>
+
+<p>The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of her own voice. She
+waited breathless for some answer, for some revelation, some reply;
+there only came the pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud
+and striking on the waters.</p>
+
+<p>She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the shining course of the
+stream, through the grasses and the mosses and under the boughs, to her
+little nest under the eaves.</p>
+
+<p>As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into the fuller light,
+her bare feet glistening and her shoulders wet with the showers of dew,
+a large dark shape flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon
+the eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept onward lost in
+shade. At that moment, likewise, a radiant golden globe flashed to her
+sight, dropped to her footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten
+from the skies.</p>
+
+<p>It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey; it was but a great
+meteor fading and falling at its due appointed hour; but to the heated,
+savage, dreamy fancy of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing
+of prophecy, a spirit of air; nay, why not Him himself?</p>
+
+<p>In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had ever heard, it had
+been often told her that he took such shapes as this.</p>
+
+<p>"If he should give me his kingdom!" she thought; and her eyes flashed
+alight; her heart swelled; her cheeks burned. The little dim untutored
+brain could not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or sift,
+or measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable, seemed
+to come to her and bathe her in its heat and color. She was his
+offspring, so they all told her; why not, then, also his heir?</p>
+
+<p>She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in those legends
+she had fed on, who was suddenly called from poverty and toil, from
+hunger and fatigue, from a tireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to
+inherit some fairy empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like
+one of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown imperial power
+smite all his poor pale barren life to splendor, so Folle-Farine,
+standing by the water's side in the light of the moon, desolate,
+ignorant, brutelike, felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men.
+If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter now were stripes
+or wounds or woe?</p>
+
+<p>She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair visions in his
+sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, and swung herself upward
+by the tendrils of ivy, and crouched once more down in her nest of
+mosses.</p>
+
+<p>And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or the influence of
+instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, for she fell asleep in her
+little loft in the roof as though she were a thing cherished of heaven
+and earth, and dreamed happily all through the hours of the
+slowly-rising dawn; her bruised body and her languid brain and her
+aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger and passion and
+pain forgotten; with the night-blooming flowers still clasped in her
+hands, and on her closed mouth a smile.</p>
+
+<p>For she dreamed of her Father's Kingdom, a kingdom which no man denies
+to the creature that has beauty and youth, and is poor and yet proud,
+and is of the sex of its mother.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
+there was a little Norman town, very very old, and beautiful exceedingly
+by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous
+galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and
+its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great cathedral,
+noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds,
+and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day,
+so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through
+them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for
+corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the
+wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the
+carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of
+the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of
+carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her
+lover.</p>
+
+<p>All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
+fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
+the fields of colza, where the white bead-dress of the women workers
+flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west were the
+deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's and
+of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the great dim
+stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
+and, whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with
+poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by
+a little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.</p>
+
+<p>A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place; picturesque everywhere; often
+silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
+bells or the chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
+With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
+with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
+traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
+in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
+cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the fruits and flowers in the
+market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
+under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
+opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
+stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg across to her neighbor in
+the other.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
+uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
+dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
+but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
+hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
+jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.</p>
+
+<p>But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful
+rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
+the straight lithe form of their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb,
+and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
+dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire and
+the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
+the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
+cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
+white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
+painters, and the wondrous flush of color from mellow fruits and flowers
+glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual
+presence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, through frost
+and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst them, and
+beheld the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the scourged mules
+droop their humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth to
+the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and women pass through
+hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and
+the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years
+come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing
+famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said
+to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo! your God is Love."</p>
+
+<p>This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
+frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
+no harbor of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
+made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
+except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
+eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn, to the use of the great
+cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
+of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
+and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm gray
+morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
+in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
+over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
+And she would look back often, often as she went; and when all was lost
+in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire that she still saw
+through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
+trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."</p>
+
+<p>But none such ever did come back.</p>
+
+<p>They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
+that the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city&mdash;to
+gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
+the next morning, withered and dead.</p>
+
+<p>One among the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of whom
+the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through the
+lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller of
+Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>Yprès was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern outskirt of the town,
+a place of orchards and wooded tangle; through which there ran a branch
+of the brimming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught a
+moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by the grim mill-wheels
+that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The mill-house was
+very ancient; its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of
+shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its frontage was
+of quaint pargeted work, black and white, except where the old
+blazonries had been.</p>
+
+<p>It had been handed down from sire to son of the same race through many
+generations&mdash;a race hard, keen, unlearned, superstitious, and
+caustic-tongued&mdash;a race wedded to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste
+of life, cruel of judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race
+holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted virtue even
+than those gold and silver pieces which had ever been its passion,
+hidden away in earthen pipkins under old apple-roots, or in the crannies
+of wall timber, or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, man-begrudging,
+Norman stock, was true to the type and the traditions of his people.</p>
+
+<p>He was too ignorant even to read; but priests do not deem this a fault.
+He was avaricious; but many will honor a miser quicker than a
+spendthrift. He was cruel; but in the market-place he always took heed
+to give his mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay in
+her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no language but that
+of her wistful black eyes; and this is a speech to which men stay but
+little to listen. The shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was
+feared and respected with the respect that fear begets; and in truth he
+had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of it, with scorn for those
+who found it hard to walk less straightly and less circumspectly than
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>He married late; his wife died in childbirth; his daughter grew into the
+perfection of womanhood under the cold, hard, narrow rule of his
+severity and his superstition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love
+as it was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her beyond all
+other things; saved for her, toiled for her, muttered ever that it was
+for her when at confession he related how his measures of flour had
+been falsely weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought by
+the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned: from one to whom
+the good report of his neighbors and the respect of his own conscience
+were as the very breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that
+he could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in his small
+sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips.
+Reprimand, or homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever
+heard from him. She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he
+held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in trembling.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty-two Reine Flamma was the most beautiful woman in Calvados, and
+the most wretched.</p>
+
+<p>She was straight as a pine; cold as snow; graceful as a stem of wheat;
+lovely and silent; with a mute proud face, in which the great blue eyes
+alone glowed with a strange, repressed, speechless passion and
+wishfulness. Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as the lives
+of the many women of her race who, before her, had lived and died in the
+shadow of that water-fed wood had always been. Her father rebuked and
+girded at her, continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the
+spotlessness of this lily, refine even the purity of this virgin gold.</p>
+
+<p>She never answered him anything, nor in anything contradicted his will;
+not one among all the youths and maidens of her birthplace had ever
+heard so much as a murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said
+that such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the
+marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that these dark-blue
+slumbering eyes would have given to any who should have had the skill to
+construe them right. There were none of such skill there; and so, she
+holding her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a curious dumb
+reverence, and said among themselves that the race of Flamma would die
+well and nobly in her.</p>
+
+<p>"A saint!" said the good old gentle bishop of the district, as he
+blessed her one summer evening in her father's house, and rode his mule
+slowly through the pleasant poplar lanes and breeze-blown fields of
+colza back to his little quiet homestead, where he tended his own
+cabbages and garnered his own honey.</p>
+
+<p>Reine Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took his benediction in
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, at daybreak,
+and reciting his paternosters, thanked the Mother of the World that she
+had given him thus strength and power to rear up his motherless daughter
+in purity and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched blouse,
+groped his way down the narrow stair, and went in his daily habit to
+undraw the bolts and unloose the chains of his dwelling.</p>
+
+<p>There was no need that morning for him; the bolts were already back; the
+house-door stood wide open; on the threshold a brown hen perched pluming
+herself; there were the ticking of the clock, the chirming of the birds,
+the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds upon the silence.</p>
+
+<p>He called his daughter's name: there was no answer. He mounted to her
+chamber: it had no tenant. He searched hither and thither, in the house,
+and the stable, and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the
+wood; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he looked in every
+likely and unlikely place: there was no reply.</p>
+
+<p>There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat with his face to the
+south and mourned unceasingly.</p>
+
+<p>And from that day neither he nor any man living there ever heard again
+of Reine Flamma.</p>
+
+<p>Some indeed did notice that at the same time there disappeared from the
+town one who had been there through all that spring and summer. One who
+had lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, and had been
+whispered as an Eastern prince by reason of his scattered gold, his
+unfamiliar tongue, his black-browed, star-eyed, deep-hued beauty, like
+the beauty of the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger
+and Reine Flamma in each other's presence; and the rumor was discredited
+as a foulness absurd and unseemly to be said of a woman whom their
+bishop had called a saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few
+mouths, and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have perished
+in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step on the mill-timber, as
+she went at dawn to feed her doves, or by some strange sad trance of
+sleep-walking, from which she had been known more than once to suffer.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma said little; it was a wound that bled inwardly. He
+toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bargains, and worked early and
+late with his hireling, and took for the household service an old Norman
+peasant woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he suffered.
+All that he ever said was, "She was a saint: God took her;" and in his
+martyrdom he found a hard pride and a dull consolation.</p>
+
+<p>It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. He believed in
+miracles and all manner of divine interposition, and he believed
+likewise that she, his angel, being too pure for earth, had been taken
+by God's own hand up to the bosom of Mary; and this honor which had
+befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor on his
+cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,
+they cleared from his way as from a prince's, and crossed themselves as
+they changed words with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ.</p>
+
+<p>So six years passed away; and the name of Reine Flamma was almost
+forgotten, but embalmed in memories of religious sanctity, as the dead
+heart of a saint is imbedded in amber and myrrh.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the sixth year there happened what many said was a thing
+devil-conceived and wrought out by the devil to the shame of a pure
+name, and to the hinderance of the people of God.</p>
+
+<p>One winter's night Claudis Flamma was seated in his kitchen, having
+recently ridden home his mare from the market in the town. The fire
+burned in ancient fashion on the hearth, and it was so bitter without
+that even his parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some
+wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and glowed, and
+shot flame up the wide black shaft of the chimney. The day's work was
+over; the old woman-servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the
+fire; the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the brick
+floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken presses that had been
+the riches of his race for generations, glimmered in the light; the
+doors were barred, the shutters closed; around the house the winds
+howled, and beneath its walls the fretting water hissed.</p>
+
+<p>The miller, overcome with the past cold and present warmth, nodded in
+his wooden settle and slept, and muttered dreamily in his sleep, "A
+saint&mdash;a saint!&mdash;God took her."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook her head, and
+went on with her spinning with lips that moved inaudibly: she had been
+wont to say, out of her taskmaster's hearing, that no woman who was
+beautiful ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old
+creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable hut on the
+other side of the wood, had known more than she had chosen to tell of
+the true fate of Reine Flamma.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded through the silence.
+The miller, awakened in a moment, started to his feet and grasped his
+ash staff with one hand, and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the
+trestle. The watch-dog arose, but made no hostile sound.</p>
+
+<p>A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed away faintly; there
+was stillness again; the mastiff went to the bolted door, smelt beneath
+it, and scratched at the panels.</p>
+
+<p>On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beating on the wood
+from without; such a slight fluttering noise as a wounded bird might
+make in striving to rise.</p>
+
+<p>"It is nothing evil," muttered Flamma. "If it were evil the beast would
+not want to have the door opened. It may be some one sick or stray."</p>
+
+<p>All this time he was in a manner charitable, often conquering the
+niggardly instincts of his character to try and save his soul by serving
+the wretched. He was a miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give;
+but since his daughter had been taken to the saints he had striven with
+all his might to do good enough to be taken likewise to that Heavenly
+rest.</p>
+
+<p>Any crust bestowed on the starveling, any bed of straw afforded to the
+tramp, caused him a sharp pang; but since his daughter had been taken he
+had tried to please God by this mortification of his own avarice and
+diminution of his own gains. He could not vanquish the nature that was
+ingrained in him. He would rob the widow of an ephah of wheat, and leave
+his mare famished in her stall, because it was his nature to find in all
+such saving a sweet savor; but he would not turn away a beggar or refuse
+a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, he might turn away from him
+an angel unawares.</p>
+
+<p>The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound outside had ceased.</p>
+
+<p>The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped more firmly the
+ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the stout key, and opened the door
+slowly, and with caution. A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against
+his face; a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent
+stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from head to foot,
+there stood a little child.</p>
+
+<p>The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly welcome. Claudis
+Flamma drew her with a rough grasp across the threshold, and went out
+into the air to find whose footsteps had been those which had trodden
+heavily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was falling fast;
+it was a cloudy moonless night. He did not dare to go many yards from
+his own portals, lest he should fall into some ambush set by robbers.
+The mastiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no danger
+near, so the old man returned, closed the door carefully, drew the bolts
+into their places, and came towards the child, whom the woman Pitchou
+had drawn towards the fire.</p>
+
+<p>She was a child of four or five years old; huddled in coarse linen and
+in a little red garment of fox's skin, and blanched from head to foot,
+for the flakes were frozen on her and on the little hood that covered,
+gypsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike
+figure, but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed great
+beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet berry; the radiance
+and the contrast of it were like the glow of holly fruit thrust out
+from a pile of drifted snow.</p>
+
+<p>The miller shook her by the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Who brought you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos," answered the child, with a stifled sob in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"And who is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos," answered the child again.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that a man or a woman?"</p>
+
+<p>The child made no reply; she seemed not to comprehend his meaning. The
+miller shook her again, and some drops of water fell from the ice that
+was dissolving in the warmth.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you come here?" he asked, impatiently.</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head, as though to say none knew so little of herself as
+she.</p>
+
+<p>"You must have a name," he pursued harshly and in perplexity. "What are
+you called? Who are you?"</p>
+
+<p>The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been fastened on the
+leaping flames, and flashed them upon his in a terror of bewildered
+ignorance&mdash;the piteous terror of a stray dog.</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos," she cried once more, and the cry now was half a sigh, half a
+shriek.</p>
+
+<p>Something in that regard pierced him and startled him; he dropped his
+hand off her shoulder, and breathed quickly; the old woman gave a low
+cry, and staring with all her might at the child's small, dark, fierce,
+lovely face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling many
+prayers.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by some unseen snake,
+and willing to wreak his vengeance on the nearest thing that was at
+hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Fool! cease your prating!" he muttered, with a brutal oath. "Take the
+animal and search her. Bring me what you find."</p>
+
+<p>Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced his lips tightly,
+and locked his bony hands upon his knees. He knew what blow awaited him;
+he was no coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any iron
+into his soul and tell none that it hurt him.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner of the chamber, and
+began to despoil her of her coverings. The creature did not resist; the
+freezing cold and long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids
+were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she had not strength,
+because she had not consciousness enough, to oppose whatsoever they
+might choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they
+had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, like those in a
+netted animal's impatient but untamed regard.</p>
+
+<p>Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her of her warm
+fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her little rough hempen shirt,
+which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow.</p>
+
+<p>The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom on it; it had been
+tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent,
+showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,
+but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the
+long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees.</p>
+
+<p>She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of
+homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor,
+either from amazement or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never
+spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and
+who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner
+of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of
+glittering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they
+were, and seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to
+guard them&mdash;fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin
+she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman on her
+side strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched
+out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought&mdash;fought
+with all the breath and the blood that were in her tiny body.</p>
+
+<p>She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip
+of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden
+away in a hole in the wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant
+hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles
+that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes.</p>
+
+<p>They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters,
+chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a
+diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them removed in
+perfect silence; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the
+battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as
+though disdainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in
+her eyes, and smouldered there like a half-stifled fire&mdash;it burned on
+and on for many a long year afterwards, unquenched.</p>
+
+<p>When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would
+neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall,&mdash;mute.</p>
+
+<p>"Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen
+them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the
+stars rose, and as Reine Flamma listened to the voice that wooed her to
+her destruction.</p>
+
+<p>She let the child be, and searched her soaked garments for any written
+word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's
+skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it to
+her master.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the
+light of the lamp.</p>
+
+<p>He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the characters his tough
+frame trembled, and his withered skin grew red with a sickly, feverish
+quickening of the blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had
+been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible
+than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which
+the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her
+being almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a moment,
+watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet
+seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the
+fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden
+swooning sense seized him for the first time in all his life; his limbs
+failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped for breath; he
+needed not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature,
+whom he had believed so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of
+her youth, was&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were
+filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own
+mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and
+glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands
+wildly together in the air, and cried aloud:</p>
+
+<p>"She was a saint, I said&mdash;a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I
+thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!"</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed aloud&mdash;thrice.</p>
+
+<p>The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as
+a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death,
+startled by that horrible mirth, came forward.</p>
+
+<p>The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered
+like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her
+little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking
+its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and
+burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same face ere then in
+Calvados.</p>
+
+<p>She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and
+discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the hearth,
+and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little
+dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not
+what.</p>
+
+<p>He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a
+sound. The blood flowed from her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more.</p>
+
+<p>"She was a saint!&mdash;a saint! And the devil begot in her <i>that</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he went out across the threshold and into the night, with the
+letter still clinched in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered with ice and
+water; he took no heed, but passed through it, his head bare and his
+eyes blind.</p>
+
+<p>The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All night long he was absent.</p>
+
+<p>The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature
+could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised
+the little wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet
+bed; restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she had
+knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly,
+as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even
+pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also
+had guessed the message of that unread letter.</p>
+
+<p>The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and
+was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough
+nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,
+tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually
+on the unknown name of Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known
+the true story of that disappearance which some had called death and
+some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent
+brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves,
+that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.</p>
+
+<p>"She is his sure enough," she muttered. "He was the first with Reine
+Flamma. I wonder has he been the last."</p>
+
+<p>And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at
+any evil thought.</p>
+
+<p>The mastiff stayed beside the child.</p>
+
+<p>She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her
+spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.</p>
+
+<p>She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the
+past which her master and her townfolk had never held, it all seemed
+natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it
+was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.</p>
+
+<p>The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in
+the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman
+slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused
+her.</p>
+
+<p>She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led
+that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which
+the human animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine;
+put to what use she might be&mdash;to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a
+pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a
+prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a
+preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but
+she did not care: all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough to
+eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat
+at night.</p>
+
+<p>The night went on, and passed away: one gleam of dawn shone through a
+round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun
+arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and
+tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She
+drew it slowly open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been
+for some time morning.</p>
+
+<p>The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all
+the branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid
+mill-stream; in one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the
+bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even
+in its famished impatience.</p>
+
+<p>Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her
+master there.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared
+to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting
+wood; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would
+have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly,
+giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod
+ankle deep in snow, and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.</p>
+
+<p>He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and called him by his
+name; he started, and raised his head and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon
+his face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather-beaten always, but it was
+livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage
+look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man
+recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the
+living world.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her old
+blunt, dogged fashion,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Is she to stay?"</p>
+
+<p>Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know
+if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her
+kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.</p>
+
+<p>He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make,
+held fast, yet striving to essay a death-grip; then he checked himself,
+and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and
+went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to
+venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this,
+fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his
+soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atonement.</p>
+
+<p>So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her
+fire, and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to
+boil, and muttered all the while,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."</p>
+
+<p>And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.</p>
+
+<p>Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis
+Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no
+utterance could be ever got.</p>
+
+<p>But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Yprès
+from that time thenceforward.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these
+begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate
+and scorn, which did not cease but rather grew with time.</p>
+
+<p>The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the last that she
+received from him by many; and whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she
+showed it, not as children do, but rather like some chained and untamed
+animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the
+more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the
+people among whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one full of
+round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them.</p>
+
+<p>For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he
+let her lead the same life that was led by the brutes that crawled in
+the timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw.
+The woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals
+as she chose; she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the
+fire warmth reached; she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under
+the roof; so much she could do and no more.</p>
+
+<p>After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest
+had been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had
+never made a moan, nor sought for any solace.</p>
+
+<p>All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with
+her arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest;
+they were both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words
+oftentimes; they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one
+another.</p>
+
+<p>The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that
+was cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body
+almost motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless,
+wounded, frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual
+slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the
+bear, with the spring she awakened.</p>
+
+<p>When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this
+creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked
+limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she
+came. He set his teeth, and answered ever:</p>
+
+<p>"The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma."</p>
+
+<p>The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more;
+and they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to
+press it on him, or even to ask him whether his daughter were with the
+living or the dead.</p>
+
+<p>With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the
+frost-bound waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose
+under the shadows of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did
+hers. For she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the
+silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was
+her teacher, out into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young
+blossoming world, where the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers
+and the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where she could
+stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and
+steep her limbs in the coolness of waters, and bathe her aching feet in
+the moisture of rain-filled grasses.</p>
+
+<p>With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,
+incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the
+earth and the air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant,
+passionate gladness.</p>
+
+<p>She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year
+the people from more distant places who rode their mules down to the
+mill on their various errands stared at this child, and wondered among
+themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.</p>
+
+<p>He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:</p>
+
+<p>"The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a
+saint&mdash;Reine Flamma."</p>
+
+<p>And he never added more. To tell the truth, the horrible, biting,
+burning, loathsome truth, was a penance that he had set to himself, and
+from which he never wavered.</p>
+
+<p>They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors, and all feared
+his scourging tongue. But when they went away, and gossiped among
+themselves by the wayside well or under the awnings of the
+market-stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they had
+thought long ago; the creature had been no better than her kind; and
+they had never credited the fable that God had taken her, though they
+had humored the miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old
+woman, a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from the
+fishing village with a creel upon her back and the smell of the sea
+about her rags, heard, standing in the market-place, and laughed, and
+mocked them, these seers who were so wise after the years had gone, and
+when the truth was clear.</p>
+
+<p>"You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with a grin upon her face.
+"Oh, yes! you were so wise! Who said seven years through that Reine
+Flamma was a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who
+hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said that the devil had
+more to do with her than the good God, and that the black-browed gypsy,
+with jewels for eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to
+whom she gave herself? Oh-hè, you were so wise!"</p>
+
+<p>So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well
+knowing that indeed no creature among them had ever been esteemed so
+pure, so chaste, and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's
+daughter.</p>
+
+<p>Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled eyes," and saw those
+brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face
+of the child whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in
+shame whilst they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be
+said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger had been the fiend
+himself, taking human shape for the destruction of one pure soul, and
+the mocking of all true children of the church.</p>
+
+<p>Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote,
+ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a
+living power, traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not
+seldom triumphing: of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them
+was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at
+will shapes grotesque or awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers
+had beheld him; why not they?</p>
+
+<p>So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers and tanners, the
+fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the peasant proprietors from the
+country round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young
+child at Yprès as a devil-born thing. "She was hell-begotten," they
+would mutter when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and
+avoid her if they could.</p>
+
+<p>The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been
+permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry
+for it; the world, they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed
+like torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such treats were
+forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that, thought within
+themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it was mistaken
+mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth
+by fire of such as she.</p>
+
+<p>In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the
+country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which
+followed there were mildew and sickness everywhere; in the summer there
+was a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and
+great suffering and scarcity.</p>
+
+<p>There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to
+the advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their
+huts and homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this
+offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>Since, however, the time was past when the broad market-place could have
+been filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the gray
+cathedral have grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living
+body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and said these things
+only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding
+their children to consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the
+other side of the road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel,
+they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with her as their
+fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote&mdash;"only."</p>
+
+<p>Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's dulled brain awakened,
+and all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she
+found herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of
+mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the devil!" she heard again and
+again muttered as they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this
+repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her
+imputed origin.</p>
+
+<p>It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-daring, and
+all-enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts,
+her supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health.
+Perfect of shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of
+hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no knowledge, but
+with unerring instinct.</p>
+
+<p>She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their
+mother's arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother,
+and she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a
+young fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to
+starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by
+slaughter.</p>
+
+<p>She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took blows uncomplainingly,
+and as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.</p>
+
+<p>"The child of the devil!" they said. In a dumb, half-unconscious
+fashion, this five-year-old creature wondered sometimes why the devil
+had not been good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and
+veins that would not bleed.</p>
+
+<p>She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here;
+she thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have
+their mother's kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. She was to him a
+thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin;
+but he did what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily; he fed
+her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came
+naturally to his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from
+idleness; he beat her when she did not, and not seldom when she did,
+them. He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a stick to her
+without mercy.</p>
+
+<p>After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to
+fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was
+right to abhor the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of
+utter darkness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul,
+begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal tempter.</p>
+
+<p>He never questioned her as to her past&mdash;that short past, like the span
+of an insect's life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions,
+with instincts, with desires, even with memories,&mdash;in a word, with
+character:&mdash;a character he could neither change nor break; a thing
+formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.</p>
+
+<p>He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set
+her hard tasks of bodily labor which she did not dispute, but
+accomplished so far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged
+patience, half ferocity, half passiveness.</p>
+
+<p>In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle-Farine;
+taking the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most
+despised thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and
+the name adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever
+known.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine!&mdash;as one may say, the Dust.</p>
+
+<p>In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she
+began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled
+her first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French
+about her.</p>
+
+<p>Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a
+certain wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never
+have looked for them, never have believed in them. She was devil-born:
+she was of devil nature: in his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would sometimes gather,
+and receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born
+stainless out of corruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.
+Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into
+his orchard, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out
+sweetness and honey? Fool!&mdash;as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the
+blossom."</p>
+
+<p>And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his sight.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not a blank; it was
+indeed filled to overflowing with pictures that her tongue could not
+have told of, even had she spoken the language of the people amidst whom
+she had been cast.</p>
+
+<p>A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down that bitter
+night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of color,
+broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech
+woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise of
+torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown mountain-streams
+rushing broad and angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful
+by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock; and still
+shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and mules' bells that
+rang drowsily through leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the
+clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes; and high blue
+crests of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to the divinest
+flush of rose and amber with the setting of the sun.</p>
+
+<p>This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as the splendors of a
+dream of Paradise rest on the brain of some young sleeper wakening in
+squalor, cold, and pain. But the people of the place she had been
+brought to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and her
+strange, imperfect trills of song; and she could not tell them that this
+land had been no realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the
+forest region of the Liebana.</p>
+
+<p>Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had made their camp.
+They were a score in all; they held themselves one of the noblest
+branches of their wide family; they were people with pure Eastern blood
+in them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in their
+forms and postures.</p>
+
+<p>They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle; they stopped the mules
+in the passes, and lightened their load of wine-skins: they entered the
+posada, when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil
+question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like a
+threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn out of the
+girdle. They were low thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose
+livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and plundering nights;
+yet they were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of the
+East, and they wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.</p>
+
+<p>They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old three-stringed
+viols; and when their women danced on the sward by moonlight, under the
+broken shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines
+above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining sequins that bound
+their heavy hair, the muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar,
+shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him in his childhood by
+his grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to revelry, at
+midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom.</p>
+
+<p>Among them was a man yet more handsome than the rest, taller and lither
+still; wondrous at leaping and wrestling, and all athletic things;
+surest of any to win a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at
+a blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a single glance of
+his terrible eyes.</p>
+
+<p>His name was Taric.</p>
+
+<p>He had left them often to wander by himself into many countries, and at
+times when, by talent or by terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play
+the fool to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where credulity
+and luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his own
+phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right
+royally whilst his gains lasted.</p>
+
+<p>Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead the common, roving,
+thieving life of his friends and brethren, till the fit of ambition or
+the run of luck were again on him. Then his people would afresh lose
+sight of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in some
+painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome him ragged, famished, and
+footweary, on their own sunburnt sierras.</p>
+
+<p>And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them; and they made him
+welcome whenever he returned, and never quarreled with him for his
+faithlessness; but if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or
+keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always say&mdash;"Let Taric
+lead."</p>
+
+<p>One day their camp was made in a gorge under the great shadows of the
+Picos da Europa, a place that they loved much, and settled in often,
+finding the chestnut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the
+heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for
+feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long absence, suddenly
+standing, dark and mighty, between them and the light, as they lay
+around their soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the great cork-tree,
+against the bridge," he said to them. "Go to her some of you."</p>
+
+<p>And, with a look to the women which singled out two for the errand, he
+stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, and helped himself to the
+soup, and lay quiet, vouchsafing them never a word, but playing
+meaningly with the knife handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw that
+some of the men were about to oppose his share of a common meal which he
+had not earned by a common right.</p>
+
+<p>It was Taric&mdash;a name of some terror came to their fierce souls.</p>
+
+<p>Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored of them all;
+Taric, who had slain the bull that all the matadors had failed to daunt;
+Taric, who had torn up the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a
+flood, as easily as a child plucks up a reed; Taric, who had stopped the
+fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and cut the man's throat
+with no more ado than a butcher slits a lamb's.</p>
+
+<p>So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the fire and of the
+broth, and of the thin red wine.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quità and Zarâ, went on their quest, and
+found things as he had said.</p>
+
+<p>Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long and damp, and the
+wood grew thickly, and an old rude bridge of unhewn blocks of rock
+spanned, with one arch, the river as it rushed downward from its
+limestone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just born.</p>
+
+<p>Quità looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by any chance, any
+gold or jewels might be on her; there were none. There was only an ivory
+cross on her chest, which Quità drew off and hid. Quità covered her with
+a few boughs and left her.</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, and held it warm in
+her breast, and hastened to the camp with it.</p>
+
+<p>"She is dead, Taric," said Quità, meaning the woman she had left.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded his handsome head.</p>
+
+<p>"This is yours, Taric?" said Zarâ, meaning the child she held.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and stretched himself.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall we do with her?" asked Quità.</p>
+
+<p>"Let her lie there," he answered her.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall we do with it?" asked Zarâ.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown throat in a
+significant gesture.</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ said no word to him, but she went away with the child under some
+branches, on which was hung a tattered piece of awning, orange striped,
+that marked her own especial resting-place.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, advanced, and looked
+Taric full in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Has the woman died by foul means?"</p>
+
+<p>Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace him, answered him
+without offense, and with a savage candor,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look at her if
+you like. I loved her well enough while she lived. But what does that
+matter? She is dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries."</p>
+
+<p>"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her body?"</p>
+
+<p>Taric laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her if you choose,
+Phratos."</p>
+
+<p>"I will," the other answered him; and he took his way to the cork-tree
+by the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>The man who spoke was called Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a mutual love for a
+life that wandered always, and was to no man responsible, and needed no
+roof-tree, and wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild
+with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather than to
+eat the good things of the earth in submission and in durance.</p>
+
+<p>He had not their physical perfection: an accident at his birth had made
+his spine misshapen, and his gait halting. His features would have been
+grotesque in their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and
+the gay archness of the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face and form, Phratos
+alone was deformed and unlovely; and yet both deformity and unloveliness
+were in a way poetic and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin garments,
+knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and with his thick tangled
+hair falling down on his shoulders, they were rather the deformity of
+the brake-haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr,
+than those of a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the temper
+of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers, he loved music, and
+could make it, in all its innumerable sighs and songs, give a voice to
+all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and the woodlands;
+and for many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other things
+he forever laughed and was glad.</p>
+
+<p>Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight
+in his wits, yet his kin honored him.</p>
+
+<p>For he could draw music from the rude strings of his old viol that
+surpassed their own melodies as far as the shining of the sun on the
+summits of the Europa surpassed the trembling of the little lamps under
+the painted roadside Cavaries.</p>
+
+<p>He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy moved him, by a bright
+fountain at a noonday halt, under the ruined arches of a Saracenic
+temple, before the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a cool
+shadowy court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a balcony at
+night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for
+a moment from the darkness through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he
+played in suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and dogs
+still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their eyes with their
+hands, and think of old dead times, when they played and prayed at their
+mothers' knees.</p>
+
+<p>And his music had so spoken to himself that, although true to his tribe
+and all their traditions, loving the vagrant life in the open air, and
+being incapable of pursuing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew,
+neither tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and
+candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none could turn
+him; living on such scant gains as were thrown to him for his music from
+balconies and posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and
+towns through which he passed, and making a handful of pulse and a slice
+of melon, a couch of leaves and a draught of water, suffice to him for
+his few and simple wants.</p>
+
+<p>His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning their race by taking
+payment in lieu of making thefts; and they mocked him often, and taunted
+him, though in a manner they all loved him,&mdash;the reckless and
+blood-stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never quarrel
+with them, neither would he give over his strange ways which so incensed
+them, and with time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like
+other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way
+unmolested and without contradiction.</p>
+
+<p>If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they would have missed
+his music sorely; that music which awoke them at break of day soaring up
+through their roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the
+skies.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off the boughs, and looked
+at her. She was quite dead. She had died where she had first sunk down,
+unable to reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green nook on
+the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the entrance of that narrow
+gorge in which the encampment had been made.</p>
+
+<p>The face, which was white and young, lay upward, with the shadows of the
+flickering foliage on it; and the eyes, which Quità had not closed, were
+large and blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had
+got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers and stray golden
+leaves twisted in it.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.</p>
+
+<p>He could imagine her history.</p>
+
+<p>Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought many a one thus to share
+his fierce free life for a little space, and then drift away out of it
+by chance, or be driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken
+away like this one by death.</p>
+
+<p>In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It was written in a
+tongue he did not know. He held it awhile, thinking, then he folded it
+up and put it in his girdle,&mdash;it might be of use, who could tell? There
+was the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke up, and
+Zarâ left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the last butterflies of
+the fading summer, which was in all likelihood all she would do.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had looked long enough at
+the dead creature, he turned to the tools he had brought with him, and
+set patiently to make her grave.</p>
+
+<p>He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, and his infirmity
+made all manual toil painful to him. His task was hard, even though the
+earth was so soft from recent heavy rains.</p>
+
+<p>The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it was quite
+nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. When the grave was ready
+he filled it carefully with the golden leaves that had fallen, and the
+thick many-colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpet.</p>
+
+<p>Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest shroud, and, with
+the moss like a winding-sheet between it and the earth which had to fall
+on it, he committed the dead woman to her resting-place.</p>
+
+<p>It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her there.</p>
+
+<p>He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest-tree and by a
+mountain-stream seemed the most natural rest at last that any creature
+could desire or claim. No rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of
+any neglect, cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in
+her loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of the wild
+roe as a requiem.</p>
+
+<p>Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was on him, bohemian
+though he was, as he took up his mattock and turned away, and went
+backward down the gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain
+and sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and
+the flush of the autumn, and the wildness of the winter, when the
+swollen stream should sweep above her tomb, and the famished beasts of
+the hills would lift up their voices around it.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric.</p>
+
+<p>Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being able to
+understand the character, looked at it and read it through by the light
+of the flaming wood. When he had done so he tossed it behind, in among
+the boughs, in scorn.</p>
+
+<p>"The poor fool's prayer to the brute that she hated!" he said, with a
+scoff.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it.</p>
+
+<p>In a later time he found some one who could decipher it for him.</p>
+
+<p>It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at Yprès, telling him
+the brief story of her fatal passion, and imploring from him mercy to
+her unborn child should it survive her and be ever taken to him.</p>
+
+<p>Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness and the meanness
+of her father's character; she only remembered that he had loved her,
+and had deemed her pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no
+word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred that Claudis
+Flamma had been other than a man much wronged and loving much, patient
+of heart, and without blame in his simple life.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought it might some day
+save her offspring. This old man's vengeance could not, he thought, be
+so cruel to the child as might be the curse and the knife of Taric.</p>
+
+<p>"She must have been beautiful?" said Phratos to him, after awhile, that
+night; "and you care no more for her than that."</p>
+
+<p>Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the flame and made his
+answer:</p>
+
+<p>"There will be as good grapes on the vines next year as any we gathered
+this. What does it signify?&mdash;she was only a woman.</p>
+
+<p>"She loved me; she thought me a god, a devil, a prince, a chief,&mdash;all
+manner of things;&mdash;the people thought so too. She was sick of her life.
+She was sick of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the market.
+She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a saint. When a woman
+is young and has beauty, it is dull to be worshiped&mdash;in that way.</p>
+
+<p>"I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun was setting. I do not
+know why I cared for her&mdash;I did. She was like a tall white lily; these
+women of ours are only great tawny sunflowers.</p>
+
+<p>"She was pure and straight of life; she believed in heaven and hell; she
+was innocent as the child unborn; it was tempting to kill all that. It
+is so easy to kill it when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion
+and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She came with me,&mdash;after
+a struggle, a hard one. I kept her loyally while the gold lasted; that I
+swear. I took her to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and
+silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her; that I swear.</p>
+
+<p>"But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and wept in secret, and
+at times I caught her praying to the white cross which she wore on her
+breast. That made me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said
+anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that made me more mad.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things one by one. Not
+that she minded that, she would have sold her soul for me. We wandered
+north and south; and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking
+a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel off one of their
+dolls in their churches; and I wanted to get rid of her, and I could not
+tell how. I had not the heart to kill her outright.</p>
+
+<p>"But she never said a rough word, you know, and that makes a man mad.
+Maddalena or Kara or Rachel&mdash;any of them&mdash;would have flown and struck a
+knife at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have been blows
+and furious words and bloodshed; and then we should have kissed, and
+been lovers again, fast and fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only
+looks at you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her,&mdash;what is
+one to do?</p>
+
+<p>"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate
+berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk.
+Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway
+or on the plains, and I did not,&mdash;one is so foolish sometimes for sake
+of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,&mdash;I may have said
+so, perhaps; I do not remember.</p>
+
+<p>"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on
+the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I
+thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she
+fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as
+it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who
+would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his
+cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even
+show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone&mdash;for I tried to make
+her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we
+could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw
+her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the
+sun set&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and
+drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat
+of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from
+his heart,&mdash;truthfully.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.</p>
+
+<p>He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and
+of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the
+earth-clogged mosses.</p>
+
+<p>"The child lives?" he said at length.</p>
+
+<p>Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp
+through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.</p>
+
+<p>"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.</p>
+
+<p>And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the
+nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.</p>
+
+<p>That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zarâ,
+who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves,
+strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"The child lives still?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ nodded her head.</p>
+
+<p>"You will try and keep it alive?" he pursued.</p>
+
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the use? Taric would rather it were dead."</p>
+
+<p>"What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it will not hinder him.
+A child more or less with us, what is it? Only a draught of goat's milk
+or a handful of meal. So little; it cannot be felt. You have a child of
+your own, Zarâ; you cared for it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered, with a sudden softening gleam of her bright savage
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his naked limbs on the
+sward with joy at Phratos's music.</p>
+
+<p>"Then have pity on this motherless creature," said Phratos, wooingly. "I
+buried that dead woman; and her eyes, though there was no sight in them,
+still seemed to pray to mine&mdash;and to pray for her child. Be merciful,
+Zarâ. Let the child have the warmth of your arms and the defense of your
+strength. Be merciful, Zarâ; and your seed shall multiply and increase
+tenfold, and shall be stately and strong, and shall spread as the
+branches of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury in vain,
+and beneath which all things of the earth can find refuge. For never was
+a woman's pity fruitless, nor the fair deeds of her days without
+recompense."</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive words stole on
+her ear like music. Like the rest of her people, she half believed in
+him as a seer and prophet; her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile.</p>
+
+<p>"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you
+fancy."</p>
+
+<p>And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn
+night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had
+been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky
+fir-needles.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our
+people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien
+creature to her bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the
+sleeping face of her own son.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and
+soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the
+forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the
+only payment in his power.</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half
+touched, half angered.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played
+once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead
+woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat
+together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.</p>
+
+<p>For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours'
+span was rejected as unworthy and despised.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and
+nevertheless, the child grew and throve.</p>
+
+<p>The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along
+the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely
+losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy
+peaks of the Europa.</p>
+
+<p>He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning
+some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to
+distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the
+woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.</p>
+
+<p>His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the defense
+of Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as
+the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at
+her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the
+weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in
+time to come, she&mdash;who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on
+the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples&mdash;might bring him a
+fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its
+weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his
+leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay
+asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he
+left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the
+Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children.
+Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana;
+for besides them there was Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos never abandoned her.</p>
+
+<p>Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zarâ's tent there was misery very
+often.</p>
+
+<p>Zarâ had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a
+besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and
+blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children,
+brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs,
+and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin
+round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and
+slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in
+another like young bears.</p>
+
+<p>But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of
+their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood,
+was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they
+wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but
+left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to
+wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there
+were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males
+when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern
+bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was
+Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes
+had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.</p>
+
+<p>Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or
+died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in
+the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the
+northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for
+his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as
+she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the
+gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of
+hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in
+gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.</p>
+
+<p>When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he
+who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which
+the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze
+unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry
+and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge
+broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones
+for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and
+the mulberry.</p>
+
+<p>When the sons of Zarâ had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the
+tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew
+thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter
+seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging
+boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard
+from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths
+cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen
+shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the
+steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the
+flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than
+her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half
+pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to
+pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was
+the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his
+tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of
+Taric had entered her sixth year.</p>
+
+<p>She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its
+higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild
+as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the
+postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the
+fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage,
+to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to
+him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given
+her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the
+peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green
+woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they
+took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over
+their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a
+round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.</p>
+
+<p>In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed
+fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the
+children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana
+she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free&mdash;free to lie
+in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things
+of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under
+the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to
+climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the
+snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in
+dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.</p>
+
+<p>One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more
+than two years.</p>
+
+<p>He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and
+form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and
+in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of
+subtle ferocity new to them.</p>
+
+<p>His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence, the passions,
+the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy&mdash;who had retained all
+the vices of his race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living,
+and of endurance under hardship&mdash;the gall of a sharp poverty had become
+unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and wine, and boastful
+brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.</p>
+
+<p>The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liebana; in one of
+its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and coursed
+through by a headlong hill-stream that spread itself into darkling
+breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy
+lilies and a tangled web of water-plants.</p>
+
+<p>He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their camp-fire lit
+beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was welcomed, and fed, and
+plied with such as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and
+incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through all their
+quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle and the
+most faithless, of them all.</p>
+
+<p>He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.</p>
+
+<p>When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in
+the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at
+play.</p>
+
+<p>"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They showed her to
+him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough of ash; the
+pool beneath mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without
+words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced
+above her in the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.</p>
+
+<p>"In her own fashion,&mdash;as a flower in the wind," Phratos answered him,
+with a smile; and, willing to woo for her the good graces of her father,
+he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the
+child.</p>
+
+<p>She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a
+fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if she
+stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of
+liquor.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was, danced.</p>
+
+<p>But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed
+theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide
+her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds
+sing and the young kids gambol.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardor beyond
+her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the fire-glow,
+the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air,
+like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never still, never
+ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet always with
+a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.</p>
+
+<p>Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she
+dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean
+flight.</p>
+
+<p>"She will do," he muttered.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.</p>
+
+<p>Taric laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos said nothing, but he heard.</p>
+
+<p>After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of
+their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if
+they should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood
+partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a
+watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the
+stars were clear in midnight skies, the woman Zarâ stole out of her tent
+to him.</p>
+
+<p>"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice. "You want the child
+killed?"</p>
+
+<p>Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.</p>
+
+<p>"Not I; what should I gain?"</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you want, then, with her?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean to take her, that is all. See here&mdash;a month ago, on the other
+side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was at a wineshop,
+hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with him who danced to his
+music, and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who anticked like
+a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal of silver. We got friends, he
+and I. At the week's end the brat died: some sickness of the throat,
+they said. Her master tore his hair and raved; the little wretch was
+worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he would give twelve
+gold pieces. He shall have her. She will dance for him and me; there is
+plenty to be made in that way. The women are fools over a handsome
+child; they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her away
+before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven days, by starving and
+giving the stick. She will dance while she is a child. Later on&mdash;there
+are the theaters; she will be strong and handsome, and in the great
+cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I shall take
+her away by sunrise."</p>
+
+<p>"To sell her?"</p>
+
+<p>The hard fierce heart of Zarâ rebelled against him; she had no
+tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray
+child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her
+race were roused against him by his words.</p>
+
+<p>Taric laughed again.</p>
+
+<p>"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing-dog of her for the peasants'
+pastime; and in time she will make dancing-dogs of the nobles and the
+princes for her own sport. It is a brave life&mdash;none better."</p>
+
+<p>The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his
+child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less
+offended the instincts and prejudices of her clan.</p>
+
+<p>"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say&mdash;or do? The little
+beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it refuse to
+pipe when we play for it, I will."</p>
+
+<p>The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left
+him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a
+right to do what he chose with his own. So went and lay down among her
+brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.</p>
+
+<p>Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,
+lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with
+fresh boughs of resinous wood.</p>
+
+<p>When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his
+slumber was one not easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and
+threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a
+dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and
+the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a thing
+for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than
+to turn him aside from his purpose.</p>
+
+<p>"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he stood there,
+and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with self-reproach for a
+crime.</p>
+
+<p>He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he
+went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the
+skins of Zarâ's tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams
+slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the woman,
+sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her litter
+of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the
+entrance, the slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric.</p>
+
+<p>She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the stifled cry died
+on her lips.</p>
+
+<p>He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the
+curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.
+Her eyes had closed again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy
+with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing
+that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold
+feared nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a
+half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his dreams
+with the knife that was thrust in his waistband.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of
+the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over which
+the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro
+its chain. No one heard him.</p>
+
+<p>He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,
+carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her
+hair there were still the sequins. They glittered in the white light as
+he went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his
+shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from them.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was content and slept
+again&mdash;the strings of the viol sending a soft whisper in her drowsy ear,
+each time that the breeze arose and swept across them.</p>
+
+<p>When the morning came it found him far on his road, leaving behind him
+the Liebana.</p>
+
+<p>There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as
+she had never been.</p>
+
+<p>They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills
+and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were
+never weary. They rode aloft whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he
+weary, for the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the
+sunshine.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It was late in the year.</p>
+
+<p>The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and
+gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer
+fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been
+gathered in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of
+good humor.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad
+market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper
+coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust
+for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but
+moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.</p>
+
+<p>He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and her feet
+were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of
+hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood
+and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half
+leafless, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid
+in soft gold mists of vapor; and saw all these as in a dream, herself
+borne high in air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar
+fraternity of the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content,
+like a mole or a dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never
+hungry nor cold; no one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was
+nearly always on foot.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some
+straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of vegetables,
+that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the marshy
+lands, or the poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as a rule
+he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and
+shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which
+he traveled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his
+garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced child who ran
+by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of those
+shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.</p>
+
+<p>She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy
+tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance
+that they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter
+Phratos's hand&mdash;half terrified, half triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet
+glories of the south and of the west, their red leafage and purple
+flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level
+pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the
+northerly lands.</p>
+
+<p>The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped
+them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,
+ethereal as vapor; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that
+seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green
+cultivated hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds
+seemed never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed
+with leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow
+and obscure with vapor. These were for what they exchanged the pomp of
+dying foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the
+mistral, the odors of the nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of
+the aloes and olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network
+against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich southwest.</p>
+
+<p>The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, and disquieted; but
+she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.</p>
+
+<p>She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly
+fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild
+shapes of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted
+with age. But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had
+supreme faith in Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and
+hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a
+little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and
+roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the
+poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.</p>
+
+<p>The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice
+choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied
+air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;
+through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and
+the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their
+rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the
+night in a heavy snowstorm.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot
+drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the
+wood and the mill of Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of
+Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.</p>
+
+<p>He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little
+town along a road by the river towards the country.</p>
+
+<p>"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in
+his voice.</p>
+
+<p>The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out
+the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but
+she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."</p>
+
+<p>They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a
+dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the
+mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a
+garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not
+closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked
+to him&mdash;a houseless wanderer from his youth up&mdash;strangely warm and safe
+and still.</p>
+
+<p>An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span,
+on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs
+smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of
+the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves;
+from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of
+onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and
+carved wood.</p>
+
+<p>He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be
+sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell
+that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal
+selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other
+souls in eternal damnation.</p>
+
+<p>He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what
+the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.</p>
+
+<p>"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and
+prosperous, and alone by their fireside."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed that they must be so.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.</p>
+
+<p>His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and
+to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the
+hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who
+was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and
+often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a
+woman-child,&mdash;and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as
+Taric.</p>
+
+<p>To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his
+tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,
+wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found
+him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way
+to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to
+place her with her mother's people.</p>
+
+<p>She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at
+the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.</p>
+
+<p>He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the
+letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant
+fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle,
+and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come
+and see how it fares with thee."</p>
+
+<p>Her small hands tightened upon his.</p>
+
+<p>"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the
+gypsy children.</p>
+
+<p>There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and
+the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos.
+She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being
+thrust into the cage,&mdash;not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid
+of it and rebelling by instinct.</p>
+
+<p>He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the
+first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's
+foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for
+neither caresses nor compassion&mdash;knowing well that to the love-child of
+Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last
+could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.</p>
+
+<p>"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on
+the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the
+child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low
+entrance-place.</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood
+into the gloom and the storm of the night.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her
+evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the
+peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust,
+and disdain.</p>
+
+<p>"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he
+faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with her&mdash;let it be
+well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair
+where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be
+hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a
+far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."</p>
+
+<p>And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to
+him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the
+vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he
+had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the
+future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much
+in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that
+was possible to him.</p>
+
+<p>Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though
+he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the
+clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise
+with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into
+the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for
+evermore.</p>
+
+<p>"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague
+remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.</p>
+
+<p>But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which
+forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in
+all the many years that came.</p>
+
+<p>For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,
+lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and
+wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert,
+on which no single star-ray shone.</p>
+
+<p>The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of
+snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen
+in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All
+lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the
+tempest of the winds.</p>
+
+<p>The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.
+Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow.
+Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a
+strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the
+silence and then died again.</p>
+
+<p>At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in
+the great colorless waste.</p>
+
+<p>But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew
+their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their
+saints that they were safe beneath a roof.</p>
+
+<p>He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the
+blast.</p>
+
+<p>A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a
+hundred times he failed; and moved only round and round vainly, never
+escaping the maze of the endless white fields.</p>
+
+<p>Now the night was long, and he was weakly.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the
+cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered
+on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his
+foot as he passed her.</p>
+
+<p>"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger But the lad lives&mdash;save
+him."</p>
+
+<p>And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat rattled, and she
+died.</p>
+
+<p>The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and
+worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at
+the driving snow.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had
+nearly covered the body of his mother.</p>
+
+<p>All around were the fields. There was no light, except from the lantern
+on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The stillness
+was intense. The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from
+the sound of them.</p>
+
+<p>The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his
+limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,
+struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and then
+he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a shallow
+pool of ice.</p>
+
+<p>At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could
+bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold
+upon the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes
+beating on him.</p>
+
+<p>"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she was a
+beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him. Neither could she ever
+bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.</p>
+
+<p>He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it and
+folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew
+the little body away under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and
+wrapped it closely round, and left it there.</p>
+
+<p>It was all that he could do.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with no defense between him and the driving cold, he strove once
+more to find his road.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite dark; quite still.</p>
+
+<p>The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was patchless as the sea.</p>
+
+<p>He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and bruised yet holds
+its way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience. His veins were
+frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge; a
+sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.</p>
+
+<p>He knew well what it meant.</p>
+
+<p>He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;
+and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose
+laughter he would fain have heard.</p>
+
+<p>He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers
+had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and dumb:
+it only sighed in answer.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and put it
+in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple, and cold to
+the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.</p>
+
+<p>There was no light anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands stretched all around
+him; where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light
+could penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only
+sound that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some
+perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.</p>
+
+<p>But what he saw and what he heard were not these going barefoot and
+blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the
+golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness
+of flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the
+swift feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in
+the desolate courts of old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons
+shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea.</p>
+
+<p>These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know,
+and sleep conquered him; he dropped down on the white earth noiselessly
+and powerlessly as a leaf sinks; the snow fell and covered him.</p>
+
+<p>When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor in the fields,
+while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both
+his body and the child's.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter of the sheepskin:
+Phratos was dead.</p>
+
+<p>The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him so that his life
+was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives
+the stricken deer.</p>
+
+<p>"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there,
+and the snow kept him.</p>
+
+<p>His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their
+children.</p>
+
+<p>But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the
+viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.</p>
+
+<p>And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never
+again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and
+never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the
+tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the
+birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps
+cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK II.</h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.</p>
+
+<p>An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very
+bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by
+one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand
+pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen
+years instead of ninety were at work on them.</p>
+
+<p>When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a
+slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his
+hammer aside, took off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its
+heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black
+crust and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry.</p>
+
+<p>The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no
+rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the
+air, with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds
+were mute and invisible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious
+shadow, swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the
+roofing of broad chestnut leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless
+poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The fields were all ablaze
+around on every side with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the
+scarlet flame of innumerable poppies.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there they were broken by some little house, white or black, or
+painted in bright colors, which lifted up among its leaves a little
+tower like a sugar-loaf, or a black gable, and a pointed arch beneath
+it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless
+in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with fruits ruby red,
+some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.</p>
+
+<p>Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords,
+where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient
+picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.</p>
+
+<p>The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score
+of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all
+long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.</p>
+
+<p>He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread;
+he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the
+dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky,
+the air and the landscape: why not?</p>
+
+<p>They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him,
+and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and
+bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.</p>
+
+<p>He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his
+hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were
+cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the
+gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue
+piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and
+his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.</p>
+
+<p>His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time&mdash;a
+time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p>With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the
+lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to
+kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and
+because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all
+that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a
+thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so
+intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray
+and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in
+its humanity.</p>
+
+<p>For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White
+Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;
+the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"</p>
+
+<p>He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour
+was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;
+when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses, served also
+to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the
+child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the
+juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the
+bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat
+here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of
+the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him,
+because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed
+God and died.</p>
+
+<p>Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering
+sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road
+a girl.</p>
+
+<p>She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight
+and supple as one who passed her life on the open lands and was abroad
+in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless
+measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia;
+she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs
+were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor
+of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country,
+but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket,
+filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a mass of color and of
+blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes,
+blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p>She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that
+were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.
+Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet
+as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one
+another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep
+it&mdash;until death.</p>
+
+<p>As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which
+for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,
+and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.</p>
+
+<p>She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,
+small and even, like rows of cowry shells.</p>
+
+<p>"You are well, Marcellin?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own
+keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and
+absorbed retrospection will lend.</p>
+
+<p>"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know
+that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"</p>
+
+<p>She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a
+voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any
+peasantry.</p>
+
+<p>She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk
+of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.</p>
+
+<p>"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said
+curtly.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.</p>
+
+<p>He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her
+head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk
+that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed
+nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her
+made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was
+fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a
+galley-slave.</p>
+
+<p>The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.</p>
+
+<p>"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not
+understand."</p>
+
+<p>The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.</p>
+
+<p>"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that
+a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may be shot as
+it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to
+grace a rich man's table. You see?"</p>
+
+<p>She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but
+barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy
+track of a metaphorical utterance.</p>
+
+<p>But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face
+again.</p>
+
+<p>"The 'possible,' then, is only&mdash;the worse?" she said slowly.</p>
+
+<p>The old man smiled still grimly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will
+give&mdash;one day&mdash;the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and
+the lark's power to sing <i>Laus Deo</i> in heaven. <i>I</i> do not say&mdash;they do."</p>
+
+<p>"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable
+curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes&mdash;a hate that was
+unfathomable and mute.</p>
+
+<p>"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that
+priests hold the gifts of it?"</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance
+fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have
+beauty: the devil will give you one."</p>
+
+<p>"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of
+the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that
+is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.</p>
+
+<p>"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of
+men."</p>
+
+<p>His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood
+leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless
+and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.</p>
+
+<p>"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do
+they, then, so hate me?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man stroked his beard.</p>
+
+<p>"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe
+him."</p>
+
+<p>She mused over the saying; silent still.</p>
+
+<p>The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air,
+mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against
+the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which
+flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the
+shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"When it means Death," she added.</p>
+
+<p>The old man took his pipe back and smoked.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."</p>
+
+<p>Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the luster of her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"But the lark praised God&mdash;why should it be so dealt with?"</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin smiled grimly.</p>
+
+<p>"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the steel."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons
+born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied
+had been Cain.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and
+through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of
+scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not
+from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that
+burned on the hillside.</p>
+
+<p>There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from
+it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber
+wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew
+larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green
+water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.</p>
+
+<p>It was a procession of the Church.</p>
+
+<p>It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it
+approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his
+head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest
+against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.</p>
+
+<p>The Church passed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and
+the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains
+and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing
+children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of
+the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells
+ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.</p>
+
+<p>The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a
+choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit
+air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and
+pierced through the noonday silence.</p>
+
+<p>It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were
+choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old
+man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting
+eyelids.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.
+"Dust&mdash;terror&mdash;a choked voice&mdash;and blinded eyes."</p>
+
+<p>Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.</p>
+
+<p>The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and
+to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."</p>
+
+<p>The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and
+winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens
+for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the
+priests prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and
+the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the
+grasses and the bright butterfly dead in the dust.</p>
+
+<p>The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids;
+the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a
+little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of
+defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the
+wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.</p>
+
+<p>"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one
+fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little,
+white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the
+sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.</p>
+
+<p>"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a
+handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow
+to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village
+chapel.</p>
+
+<p>And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched
+more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they
+went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of
+darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because
+they had thus passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their
+lips, with the cross as their symbol.</p>
+
+<p>So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of
+sunbeams about them&mdash;through the corn, past the orchards, by the river,
+into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the
+great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then
+rose and sang the "Angelus."</p>
+
+<p>Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under
+the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored
+God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of
+harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.</p>
+
+<p>The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;
+and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears,
+dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:&mdash;"We have had
+no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to
+dwell here;" and answering to one another:&mdash;"We had never such droughts
+as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell
+was among us."</p>
+
+<p>For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the
+earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were
+dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to
+few men to know&mdash;a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and
+delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams;
+a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers
+blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid,
+unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out
+of an air that was death, off an earth that was hell.</p>
+
+<p>When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had
+seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he
+had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had
+been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of
+Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he
+had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had been his
+playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had
+beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within
+king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,
+and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white
+beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats
+that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had
+his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and
+all women martyrs or furies.</p>
+
+<p>And now,&mdash;he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed him
+by cursed him, saying,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"This man slew a king."</p>
+
+<p>For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red
+at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for
+in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so
+deadly as age.</p>
+
+<p>Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the
+Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the
+fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full
+crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all
+around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once
+looked his eyes rested there.</p>
+
+<p>She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among
+the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had
+seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the
+red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as
+the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the
+land.</p>
+
+<p>The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;
+above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple;
+around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as
+gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders,
+blue and black from the marks of a thong.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a
+look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the
+same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he
+hated.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put
+her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be
+hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Those stripes&mdash;they must be painful?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Who beat you?" he pursued.</p>
+
+<p>A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.</p>
+
+<p>"Flamma."</p>
+
+<p>"You were wicked?"</p>
+
+<p>"They said so."</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you do when you are beaten?"</p>
+
+<p>"I shut my mouth."</p>
+
+<p>"For what?"</p>
+
+<p>"For fear they should know it hurt me&mdash;and be glad."</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen,
+passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was
+shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret
+and the ache out of your bruises."</p>
+
+<p>The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first
+creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of
+his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only
+those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on
+their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling
+and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped
+hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and
+passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a
+curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she
+had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading
+cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched
+down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway&mdash;a
+hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old
+republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in
+solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without
+content.</p>
+
+<p>He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with
+water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand
+was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with
+carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh,
+from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his
+only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of
+woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried
+life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with
+greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.</p>
+
+<p>"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold.
+The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and
+timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a
+blow.</p>
+
+<p>"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human
+thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after
+her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the
+poppies.</p>
+
+<p>"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child,
+who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it
+seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom&mdash;which they
+called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises;
+and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red
+poppies.</p>
+
+<p>And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved
+to one another, being outcasts from all others.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to
+wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed
+stillness&mdash;a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand
+sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old
+dead centuries.</p>
+
+<p>On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual
+chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population.
+The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of
+mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt
+smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own
+tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by
+the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers
+had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to
+adhere.</p>
+
+<p>But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the
+peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at
+their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned
+into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place
+was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely
+a dog asleep in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and
+donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily
+avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were
+put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy
+choristers and the little children put their white linen and their
+scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and
+sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to
+their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to
+their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the
+poor flies they killed in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy
+silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places
+about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons
+dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken
+carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of
+lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,
+there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the
+wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.</p>
+
+<p>She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her
+burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched
+out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a
+moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that
+spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall&mdash;an ancient well, with a
+stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone
+running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved
+loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its
+service.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick
+green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain,
+she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it
+again and again thirstily.</p>
+
+<p>The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered
+limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many
+feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket
+which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries,
+melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had
+not taken even one to freshen her dry mouth.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, and drank it, and
+steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone bench,
+with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round limbs
+full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther.</p>
+
+<p>The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing
+movement of water, possess an ineffable charm for natures that are
+passion-tossed, feverish, and full of storm.</p>
+
+<p>There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise
+for her, in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the lichen-grown
+walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the clusters of
+delicate carvings beneath and below; in the sculptured frieze where
+little nests that the birds had made in the spring still rested; in the
+dense brooding thickness of the boughs that brought the sweetness and
+the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled town.</p>
+
+<p>She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,
+a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her guerdon.</p>
+
+<p>As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters
+opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high,
+fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap that are the female
+note of that especial town.</p>
+
+<p>The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,
+shrieked shrilly to her son,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is drinking the
+blest water!"</p>
+
+<p>The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the little garden behind
+his house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of
+the cathedral, that overshadowed it.</p>
+
+<p>He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man, though
+stout and strong.</p>
+
+<p>The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable
+sanctity attached to it.</p>
+
+<p>According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at
+the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St.
+Jerome, who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, and dwelt for awhile near the cathedral, working at the
+honorable trade of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles
+throughout the district.</p>
+
+<p>It was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the
+fountain, and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day in full
+faith and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and
+purified of bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry
+flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and drank; to the
+benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to that of their souls and
+bodies.</p>
+
+<p>Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified spring.</p>
+
+<p>"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child of hell! How durst
+you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God struck water from the
+stone for such as you?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her
+audacious eyes and laughed; then tossed her head again and plunged it
+into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the
+rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.</p>
+
+<p>The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,
+shrieked aloud:</p>
+
+<p>"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint the gift
+of God with lips of the devil!"</p>
+
+<p>And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the
+other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her
+head in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her
+lofty headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, screamed to him
+to show he was a man, and have no mercy.</p>
+
+<p>As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow across her,
+Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her
+beautiful fierce face.</p>
+
+<p>She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift
+movement from its hold, and, catching his head under her left arm,
+rained blows on him from his own weapon, with a sudden gust of
+breathless rage which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular
+limbs the strength and the force of man.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung him from
+her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of the
+court, caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the
+water over him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word,
+walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the
+carriage of her bare limbs and the folds of her ragged garments, bearing
+the empty osier basket on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the
+screams of the sacristan and his mother.</p>
+
+<p>In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were
+sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old
+woman's voice remained unheard.</p>
+
+<p>The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their
+niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog
+aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out
+into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living
+creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open
+country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of
+the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace
+shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little as she saw.</p>
+
+<p>"They will not come after <i>me</i>," she said to herself. "They are too
+afraid of the devil."</p>
+
+<p>She judged rightly; they did not come.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in
+the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat
+prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling
+heap of refuse.</p>
+
+<p>The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed
+like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.</p>
+
+<p>The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed
+motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing
+of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles
+of the cathedral.</p>
+
+<p>Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked
+streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,
+twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its
+only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of
+timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and
+grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing
+beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to
+be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and
+honesty to a noble offspring.</p>
+
+<p>The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound
+that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique
+mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.</p>
+
+<p>In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and
+color.</p>
+
+<p>The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted
+pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow
+casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and
+rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail,
+which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a
+little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the
+sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.</p>
+
+<p>From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the
+rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.</p>
+
+<p>She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her
+amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to
+Folle-Farine,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things
+had a fascination for her.</p>
+
+<p>This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she
+looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down
+through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral
+windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands
+full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the
+laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she
+passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the
+things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had
+no part or likeness.</p>
+
+<p>She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the
+jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above
+in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins
+shaking in her yellow tresses.</p>
+
+<p>"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy
+nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and
+fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your
+father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good
+things?"</p>
+
+<p>"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him
+endlessly with breathless prayer?</p>
+
+<p>"Will he not? Wait a year&mdash;wait a year."</p>
+
+<p>"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.</p>
+
+<p>"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."</p>
+
+<p>"He hears you."</p>
+
+<p>The fair woman above laughed:</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."</p>
+
+<p>And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the
+rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but
+a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.</p>
+
+<p>"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you
+witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if
+you stare so."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart.
+That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a
+time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only
+mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.</p>
+
+<p>The street was dark for her like all the others now.</p>
+
+<p>The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the
+vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.</p>
+
+<p>"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the
+thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head
+dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.</p>
+
+<p>She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and
+usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But
+from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden
+leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of
+light might wander even to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,
+where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts
+and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.</p>
+
+<p>The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,
+the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the
+fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen
+were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the
+scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and
+there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The
+cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers;
+the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.</p>
+
+<p>At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a
+spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty,
+and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins,
+keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.</p>
+
+<p>The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.</p>
+
+<p>A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of
+wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on
+her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from
+under the tower of her high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a
+student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a
+beard yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her
+white wrist as he caught the red flower.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and a
+nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?</p>
+
+<p>Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a
+sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall twisted
+stone chimneys, and a beurré pear covering with branch and bloom its old
+gray walls.</p>
+
+<p>An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and a young one was
+sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing gayly as she
+swept.</p>
+
+<p>"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to look tenderly
+at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the sycamore leaves
+were playing.</p>
+
+<p>The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee-bowl.</p>
+
+<p>"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."</p>
+
+<p>She was happy though she was blind.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of
+honeysuckle.</p>
+
+<p>"How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear your voice like
+that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and the
+corn, half softened, half enraged.</p>
+
+<p>Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or
+take gladness in her life? Or was she greater than they because all
+human delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?</p>
+
+<p>Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between the yellowing seas
+of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, over which a swarm of bees was
+murmuring, there came a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her
+heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails
+as she went to the herds on the hillside.</p>
+
+<p>She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half
+asleep, with his curly head against her breast. As she passed, the woman
+drew her kerchief over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the
+child.</p>
+
+<p>"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered. "Her look
+withered Rémy's little limb."</p>
+
+<p>And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she
+should tread a separate pathway through the clover, and did not brush
+the garments of the one she was compelled to pass.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.</p>
+
+<p>She knew of what the woman was thinking.</p>
+
+<p>In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the
+western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in
+haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,
+hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard
+his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and
+looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.</p>
+
+<p>But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had
+stepped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his
+left leg at the knee. The limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled
+by a tendency to disease, had never been restored, but hung limp,
+crooked, useless, withered from below the knee.</p>
+
+<p>Through all the country side the little cripple, Rémy, creeping out into
+the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out in a passionate pity as the
+object of her sorcery, the victim of her vengeance. When she had heard
+what they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing together her
+straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.</p>
+
+<p>All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant covered the boy's
+face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud and swept on
+through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic
+movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or the
+antelope, singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the
+sigh of the wind, which were all the language that lingered in her
+memory from the land that had seen her birth.</p>
+
+<p>To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of
+even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the
+community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription
+without wonder and without resistance.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth hold?</p>
+
+<p>In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of
+Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
+and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.</p>
+
+<p>Few of the people could read and fewer still could write. They knew
+nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to
+believe. They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock
+crew: they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and
+to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood
+that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the
+best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins.</p>
+
+<p>Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though
+their lives were content and mirthful, and the most part pious. They
+went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to
+pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with
+which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and chanting
+dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty and the faith of the old Mediæval life were with them still;
+and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty
+likewise. They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest,
+and among themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of
+color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless
+communism and characterless monotony of modern cities.</p>
+
+<p>But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their
+beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in
+legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
+superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
+and at their hearths.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable
+against her, and thought that in being so they did their duty.</p>
+
+<p>They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
+Flamma race; the strong poetic veneration of their forefathers, which
+had symbolized itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or
+buttress in their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a
+weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in their blood;
+the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.</p>
+
+<p>Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open
+square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in
+brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the
+cross, and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism
+of the sword in the red days of revolution.</p>
+
+<p>They were the same people still: industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,
+wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of
+heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with
+the brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this
+outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.</p>
+
+<p>When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,
+mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift among
+strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly
+tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends
+with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the
+mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around her in the
+glad green world of summer.</p>
+
+<p>But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;
+at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into
+terror. She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than
+understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her
+own kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures
+of the fields and the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and
+the water.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed the youths in the
+market-place against her as the little child went among them, carrying a
+load for her grandsire heavier than her arms knew how to bear.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the old man himself, as
+she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of his storehouses,
+carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to
+need such convoy.</p>
+
+<p>"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the six-year-old
+infants at play by the river when she waded in amidst them to reach with
+her lither arm the far-off water-flowers they were too timorous to
+pluck, and tender it to the one who had desired it.</p>
+
+<p>"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight after thou hadst
+laid hands on her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick as she went
+near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad dockleaf
+the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.</p>
+
+<p>So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away when she tried to do
+good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute,
+callous, isolated.</p>
+
+<p>There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so tender of
+heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonized, that had
+compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad
+gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the
+noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of the lamb, in
+the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she
+had sympathy and she had example.</p>
+
+<p>She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they were sinless,
+diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of base masters; loving
+greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten, overtasked, slaughtered.</p>
+
+<p>She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter
+hatred.</p>
+
+<p>So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in
+a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.</p>
+
+<p>The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had termed
+heavenward; but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would
+have none of them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had
+availed; she would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they
+would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit
+herself to their religion.</p>
+
+<p>As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned
+her to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the
+whole province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or
+known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an
+exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the bypaths
+of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.</p>
+
+<p>Where had she learnt these?</p>
+
+<p>They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.</p>
+
+<p>Who had he been?</p>
+
+<p>Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in its
+dimness.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,
+nor in what land they had dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on
+her remembrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be known again; a
+life odorous with bursting fruits and budding flowers; full of strangest
+and of sweetest music; spent forever under green leaves and suns that
+had no setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding forests;
+forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the measure of deep winds and
+drifting clouds.</p>
+
+<p>For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the
+old gypsy life of the Liebana remained with her only as some stray
+fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now
+an exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature,
+in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her
+anguish of vain desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds
+than those amidst which she toiled. At times she remembered likewise the
+songs and the melodies of Phratos; remembered them when the moon rays
+swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, or the breath of spring
+stole through the awakening woods; and when she remembered them she
+wept&mdash;wept bitterly, where none could look on her.</p>
+
+<p>She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a
+human form and was now dead in an earthly grave; her memory of him was
+of some nameless creature, half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter
+and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice
+forever singing; clad in goat's hair, and gigantic and gay; a creature
+that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice,
+that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep
+under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft
+sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth,
+or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to
+spare the bare feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an
+empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her
+memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the
+Piræus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of
+mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars,
+to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.</p>
+
+<p>This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the
+priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful
+scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though
+she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.</p>
+
+<p>She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on
+her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert
+women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.</p>
+
+<p>She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily
+tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much
+knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a
+future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words;
+hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.</p>
+
+<p>Yet for all that she sang;&mdash;sang because the vitality in her made her
+dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her
+glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the
+soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly
+cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze,
+the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.</p>
+
+<p>Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was
+breaking stones.</p>
+
+<p>His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and
+hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust
+was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the
+people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet
+to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot
+unbroken azure of the skies.</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one
+another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly;
+when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one
+hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any
+proscription overlong.</p>
+
+<p>The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a
+curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who
+had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to
+believe that he had served hell.</p>
+
+<p>With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people
+had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each
+other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love
+between them.</p>
+
+<p>"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed
+him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.</p>
+
+<p>"The birds in cage sing," she answered him. "But, think you they are
+glad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are they not?"</p>
+
+<p>She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
+and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
+straying over into the corn beyond.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the great south
+road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people, no doubt,
+were gone to labor in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
+wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
+his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
+drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
+torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
+crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall. His song
+was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle
+was glad?"</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a
+monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.</p>
+
+<p>"I took the cage down and opened the door."</p>
+
+<p>"And he?"</p>
+
+<p>"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
+where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running;
+and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
+the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among
+the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"</p>
+
+<p>"And what do you mean by that?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
+herself, but it was beyond her to express it.</p>
+
+<p>All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy
+was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and
+too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into
+metaphor or deduction.</p>
+
+<p>The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he
+had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was
+not gladness, and neither was silence pain.</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also
+knew.</p>
+
+<p>"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the
+cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing
+sound of the falling hammer.</p>
+
+<p>A smile curled her lips.</p>
+
+<p>"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done
+wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their
+thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh
+lean face.</p>
+
+<p>He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and
+left.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept
+over her.</p>
+
+<p>"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could
+not understand it in connection with herself.</p>
+
+<p>A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working
+her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice
+tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the
+open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was
+a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her
+child at her breast.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a
+beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to
+fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope,
+neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious
+hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You
+might be a man worth something; but a woman!&mdash;a thing that has no
+medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the
+hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into
+the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which
+will you do in the future?"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures
+round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their
+peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's
+nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a
+future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant
+to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low
+lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.</p>
+
+<p>She had one desire, indeed&mdash;a desire vague but yet fierce&mdash;the desire
+for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had
+known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind
+was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of
+hope she knew nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He
+smiled with a certain bitter pity.</p>
+
+<p>"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But
+yet&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of
+her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as
+great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew
+that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its
+hand the tender of at least one future&mdash;one election, one kingdom, one
+destiny.</p>
+
+<p>"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin smiled bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>"Many will love you, doubtless&mdash;as the wasp loves the peach that he
+kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in
+the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which
+it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she
+now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.</p>
+
+<p>"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she
+said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves
+the peach?"</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Wait!"</p>
+
+<p>She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her
+thoughts&mdash;strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as
+incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.</p>
+
+<p>"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not,
+and that is to come&mdash;is it so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old
+man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses
+in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and
+yet a thing that one sees always&mdash;sees even when one lies a-dying, they
+say&mdash;for men are fools."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of
+her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching
+a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the
+hot, pale, sickly dust.</p>
+
+<p>"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded
+insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish
+things, called poets, do."</p>
+
+<p>"What is a poet?"</p>
+
+<p>"A foolish thing, I tell you&mdash;mad enough to believe that men will care
+to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who
+never looks and never listens."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others,
+and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the
+simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat
+quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by
+the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most
+often. I seem to remember, when I dream&mdash;so much! so much!"</p>
+
+<p>"Remember&mdash;what should you remember? You were but a baby when they
+brought you hither."</p>
+
+<p>"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdom&mdash;in the
+devil's kingdom. Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all
+through all our lives hanker to get back to it.</p>
+
+<p>"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."</p>
+
+<p>"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a
+woman."</p>
+
+<p>"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no
+fitness with herself.</p>
+
+<p>A woman!&mdash;she!&mdash;a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned,
+and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!</p>
+
+<p>"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and
+wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty
+years. I remember the woman that they say bore you&mdash;Reine Flamma. She
+was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She
+wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot
+of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away
+her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God
+never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard&mdash;and
+replied."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and
+strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.</p>
+
+<p>"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his
+following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.
+That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul,
+striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.
+The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the
+world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like
+the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the
+shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets,
+where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It
+is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is
+perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to
+itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the
+trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor,
+yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in
+distress&mdash;since of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest&mdash;comes to
+the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards
+the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet
+passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in
+its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems
+divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made
+the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its
+weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its
+cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."</p>
+
+<p>He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint
+stones.</p>
+
+<p>She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike
+eyes dilated.</p>
+
+<p>In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he
+had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a
+raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare
+times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the
+unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her,
+but to no other.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to
+the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of
+purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though
+she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb
+unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.</p>
+
+<p>He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now,
+freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove
+in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes,
+and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and
+in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill
+it&mdash;with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soul&mdash;no more."</p>
+
+<p>She freed it from his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much power,
+why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you
+always?"</p>
+
+<p>"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand years&mdash;since the
+world began&mdash;without an answer. Because the law of all creation is
+cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always the breath of
+life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and lives again
+in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little. The worms
+destroy; the grasses nourish. Few great men do more than the first, or
+do as much as the last."</p>
+
+<p>"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his parable; "it is
+two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way you pay for it with
+your body. Begone."</p>
+
+<p>She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and
+yet she knew, in a vague way, that he cared for her; moreover, she
+rejoiced in that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man
+amidst them, held all men.</p>
+
+<p>His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its
+natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of
+knowledge&mdash;something, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from
+sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in
+idiocy or in self-murder.</p>
+
+<p>She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight
+white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her
+home.</p>
+
+<p>There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth had the faint
+light of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it
+never seemed possible to her that her fate could be other than it was,
+since so long the messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had
+been silent and leaden-footed to her call.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two mouths that day
+bidden her "wait"?</p>
+
+<p>She entered at length the little wood of Yprès, and heard that rush and
+music of the deep mill water which was the sole thing she had learned to
+love in all the place.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered
+Claudis Flamma back full recompense for all the toil they cost
+him&mdash;recompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that poverty
+which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on him. Both
+were now rich in all their maturer abundance, since the stream which
+rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long
+drought so severely felt in all other districts.</p>
+
+<p>The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit; the great
+pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny orange heaps; little
+russet-breasted bullfinches beat their wings vainly at the fine network
+that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall apricots; a gray cat was
+stealing among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a
+round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous
+dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown
+and white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny
+summer joys.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower-garden stretched,
+spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of
+lichens; and the earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden
+gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the deep-blue lupins,
+and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green slender stems and the pure
+white cups of the virginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with
+their purple tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites
+drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet glad garden
+world, the butterflies, purple and jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby
+dress, the dainty azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled
+wasp with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his
+pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising,
+praising, rejoicing.</p>
+
+<p>The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow,
+where the river tumbled down in two or three short breaks and leaps
+which broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a
+sheet of dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of
+the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.</p>
+
+<p>The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the old fashion when men
+builded their dwellings slowly and for love; common with all its
+countless carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque
+human likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the
+green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep shelving eaves
+bright with diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day
+with curling swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.</p>
+
+<p>It was beautiful; and the heart of Reine Flamma's young daughter
+doubtless would have clung to it with all a child's instinct of love and
+loyalty to its home had it not been to her only a prison-house wherein
+three bitter jailers forever ruled her with a rod of iron&mdash;bigotry and
+penury and cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the long grass under a
+mulberry-tree, ere she went in to give her account of the fruit sold and
+the moneys brought by her.</p>
+
+<p>She had been on foot since four o'clock in the dawn of that sultry day;
+her only meal had been a bowl of cold milk and a hunch of dry bread
+crushed in her strong small teeth. She had toiled hard at such bodily
+labor as was set to her; to domestic work, to the work of the distaff
+and spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had never been able to
+break her; they had found that she would be beaten black and blue ere
+she would be bound to it; but against open air exertion she had never
+rebelled, and she had in her all the strength and the swiftness of the
+nomadic race of the Liebana, and had not their indolence and their
+dishonesty.</p>
+
+<p>She was very hungry, she was again thirsty; yet she did not break off a
+fruit from any bough about her; she did not steep her hot lips in any
+one of the cool juicy apricots which studded the stones of the wall
+beyond her.</p>
+
+<p>No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in that dim dead time
+when Phratos had closed her small hands in his whenever they had
+stretched out to some forbidden thing, and had said, "Take the goods the
+gods give thee, but steal not from men." And yet honest she was, by
+reason of the fierce proud savage independence in her, and her dim
+memories of that sole friend loved and lost.</p>
+
+<p>She wanted many a thing, many a time&mdash;nay, nearly every hour that she
+lived, she wanted those sheer necessaries which make life endurable; but
+she had taught herself to do without them rather than owe them, by
+prayer or by plunder, to that human race which she hated, and to which
+she always doubted her own kinship.</p>
+
+<p>Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the bodily delights of
+rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet odors; the scent of the fruits and
+flowers was heavy on the air; the fall of the water made a familiar
+tempestuous music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though
+deadened by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by the tender
+tones of the numberless birds that sang about her.</p>
+
+<p>"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
+the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
+birds float from blossom to blossom.</p>
+
+<p>For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pantheistic instinct
+of the divine age, when the world was young, to behold a sentient
+consciousness in every leaf unfolded to the light; to see a soul in
+every created thing the day shines on; to feel the presence of an
+eternal life in every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows; in
+every flame that lifts itself to heaven; in every bell that vibrates on
+the air; in every moth that soars to reach the stars.</p>
+
+<p>Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
+though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
+of burden.</p>
+
+<p>"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sunrays
+pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the
+deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
+scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
+blossoms of the limes.</p>
+
+<p>All birds were her friends.</p>
+
+<p>Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of their various songs,
+and many ways and means of luring them to come and rest upon her
+shoulder and peck the berries in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>She had lived so much in the open fields and among the woods that she
+had made her chief companions of them. She could emulate so deftly all
+their voices, from the call of the wood dove to the chant of the
+blackbird, and from the trill of the nightingale to the twitter of the
+titmouse, that she could summon them all to her at will, and have dozens
+of them fluttering around her head and swaying their pretty bodies on
+her wrist.</p>
+
+<p>It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so weird and
+magical, and they would come home from their fields on a spring daybreak
+and tell their wives in horror how they had seen the devil's daughter in
+the red flush of the sunrise, ankle-deep in violets, and covered with
+birds from head to foot, hearing their whispers, and giving them her
+messages to carry in return.</p>
+
+<p>One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. Francis had done as
+much and it had been accredited to him as a fair action and virtuous
+knowledge, but she was frowned down and chattered down by her louder
+neighbors, who told her that she might look for some sharp judgment of
+heaven for daring to couple together the blessed name of the holy saint
+and the accursed name of this foul spirit.</p>
+
+<p>But all they could say could not break the charmed communion between
+Folle-Farine and her feathered comrades.</p>
+
+<p>She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she had always saved
+some of her scanty meal for them, and in the springtime and the summer
+they always rewarded her with floods of songs and soft caresses from
+their nestling wings.</p>
+
+<p>There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
+cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
+things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of characters.</p>
+
+<p>The robins with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
+real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
+the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
+of finches in their gay apparelings; the plain brown bird that fills the
+night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
+princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
+air; the kingfishers that have hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
+upon the rivers that they have caught the colors of the flowers on their
+wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
+waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
+liberties; all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
+crowds of court or city.</p>
+
+<p>She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
+did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
+peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
+reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
+an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
+pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
+a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle. She rose and looked; a line of
+twine was trembling against the foliage; in its noosed end the throat of
+the mavis had been caught; it hung trembling and clutching at the air
+convulsively with its little drawn up feet. It had flown into the trap
+as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.</p>
+
+<p>There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.</p>
+
+<p>She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
+down upon the ivy; the succor came too late; the little gentle body was
+already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
+soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
+from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.</p>
+
+<p>"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
+the little dead bird in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
+curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
+bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
+air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.</p>
+
+<p>Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
+God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
+rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
+song.</p>
+
+<p>All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
+lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
+trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and
+had fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly
+to the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of
+men; and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a
+human greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper
+coin.</p>
+
+<p>Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
+in his hand and a basket to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
+cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
+Visitation of Mary.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled as he went by to
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
+how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
+grass and the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing; but a darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
+came in sight in the distance.</p>
+
+<p>She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth and laid moss in it and
+put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
+handfuls of fallen rose leaves and with a sprig or two of thyme. Around
+her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries;&mdash;who
+now should wander with him through the sunlight?&mdash;who now should rove
+with him above the blossoming fields?&mdash;who now should sit with him
+beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves?&mdash;who
+now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn
+break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Meanwhile Claudis Flamma cut the lilies for the cathedral altars,
+muttering many holy prayers as he gathered the flowers of Mary.</p>
+
+<p>When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, kept fresh in wet moss
+by the young chorister who had been sent for them, the miller turned to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is the money?"</p>
+
+<p>She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern thong about her
+waist, opened the pouch, and counted out the coins, one by one, on the
+flat stone of a water-tank among the lilies and the ivy.</p>
+
+<p>There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some dozens of copper
+ones. The fruit had been left at various stalls and houses in small
+portions, for it was the custom to supply it fresh each day.</p>
+
+<p>He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, counted them again
+and again, and yet again; after the third enumeration he turned sharply
+on her:</p>
+
+<p>"There are two pieces too little: what have you done with them?"</p>
+
+<p>"There are two sous short," she answered him curtly. "Twelve of the figs
+for the tanner Florian were rotten."</p>
+
+<p>"Rotten!&mdash;they were but overripe."</p>
+
+<p>"It is the same thing."</p>
+
+<p>"You dare to answer me?&mdash;animal! I say they had only tasted a little too
+much of the sun. It only made them the sweeter."</p>
+
+<p>"They were rotten."</p>
+
+<p>"They were not. You dare to speak! If they had been rotten they lay
+under the others; he could not have seen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw! Who are you?&mdash;a beggar&mdash;a beast&mdash;a foul offspring of sin. You
+dared to show them to him, I will warrant?"</p>
+
+<p>"I showed him that they were not good."</p>
+
+<p>"And gave him back the two sous?"</p>
+
+<p>"I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing for the rotten
+ones."</p>
+
+<p>"Wretch! you dare to tell me that!"</p>
+
+<p>A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth; her eyes looked at him
+with all their boldest fiercest luster.</p>
+
+<p>"I never steal&mdash;not even from you, good Flamma."</p>
+
+<p>"You have stolen now!" he shrieked, his thin and feeble voice rising in
+fury at his lost coins and his discovered treachery. "It is a lie that
+the figs were rotten; it is a lie that you took but seven sous. You
+stole the two sous to buy you bread and honey in the streets, or to get
+a drink at the wineshops. I know you; I know you; it is a devil's device
+to please your gluttonous appetite. The figs rotten!&mdash;not so rotten as
+is your soul would they be, though they were black as night and though
+they stunk as river mud! Go back to Denis Florian and bring me the two
+sous, or I will thrash you as a thief."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"You can thrash me; you cannot make me a thief."</p>
+
+<p>"You will not go back to Florian?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will not ask him to pay for what was bad."</p>
+
+<p>"You will not confess that you stole the money?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should lie if I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Then strip."</p>
+
+<p>She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment's hesitation
+unloosened the woolen sash knotted round her waist, and pushed down the
+coarse linen shirt from about her throat.</p>
+
+<p>The white folds fell from off the perfect curves of her brown arms, and
+left bare her shining shoulders beautiful as any sculptured Psyche's.</p>
+
+<p>She was not conscious of degradation in her punishment; she had been
+bidden to bow her head and endure the lash from the earliest years she
+could remember. According to the only creed she knew, silence and
+fortitude and strength were the greatest of all the virtues. She stood
+now in the cross-lights among the lilies as she had stood when a little
+child, erect, unquailing, and ready to suffer, insensible of humiliation
+because unconscious of sin, and because so tutored by severity and
+exposure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and the fugitive
+shrinking of her sex.</p>
+
+<p>She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be silent, which she
+had had when she had stood among the same tall lilies, in the same
+summer radiance, in the years of her helpless infancy.</p>
+
+<p>She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound crouches to it; not
+from inborn cowardice, but simply from the habit of obedience and of
+endurance.</p>
+
+<p>He had ever used her as the Greeks the Helots; he always beat her when
+she was in fault to teach her to be faultless, and when without offense
+beat her to remind her that she was the offspring of humiliation and a
+slave.</p>
+
+<p>He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick rope which lay
+coiled upon the turf ready for the binding of some straying boughs; and
+struck her with it, slowly. His arm had lost somewhat of its strength,
+and his power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss of his
+copper pieces and the sense that she had discovered the fraudulent
+intention of his small knavery lent force to his feebleness; as the
+scourge whistled through the air and descended on her shoulders it left
+bruised swollen marks to stamp its passage, and curling, adder-like, bit
+and drew blood.</p>
+
+<p>Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she had stood in her
+childhood; not a nerve quivered, not a limb flinched; the color rushed
+over her bent face and her bare bosom, but she never made a movement;
+she never gave a sound.</p>
+
+<p>When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she still said not one word;
+she drew tight once more the sash about her waist, and fastened afresh
+the linen of her bodice.</p>
+
+<p>The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and throbbed; but she
+was used to such pain, and bore it as their wounds were borne by the
+women of the Spartan games.</p>
+
+<p>"Thy two sous have borne thee bitterness," he muttered with a smile.
+"Thou wilt scarce find fruit rotten again in haste. There are bread and
+beans within; go get a meal; I want the mule to take flour to
+Barbizène."</p>
+
+<p>She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the burning of her skin
+made her feel sick and weak. She went away and cast herself at full
+length in the shade of the long grasses of the orchard, resting her chin
+upon her hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp moss;
+thinking, thinking, thinking, of what she hardly knew, except indeed
+that she wished that she were dead, like the bird she had covered with
+the rose leaves.</p>
+
+<p>He did not leave her long to even so much peace as this; his shrill
+voice soon called her from her rest; he bade her get ready the mule and
+go.</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>The mule was saddled with his wooden pack; as many sacks as he could
+carry were piled upon the framework; she put her hand upon his bridle,
+and set out to walk to Barbizène, which was two leagues away.</p>
+
+<p>"Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat her out of her,"
+muttered the miller, as he watched the old mule pace down the narrow
+tree-shadowed road that led across the fields: and he believed that he
+did rightly in this treatment of her.</p>
+
+<p>It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, indeed, but he did
+not think that in such self-indulgence he ever erred. He was a bitter,
+cunning, miserly old man, whose solitary tenderness of feeling and
+honesty of pride had been rooted out forever when he had learned the
+dishonor of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In the ten years of
+time which had passed since first the little brown, large-eyed child had
+been sent to seek asylum with him, he had grown harder and keener and
+more severe with each day that rose.</p>
+
+<p>Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept her, partly from a
+savage sense of duty, partly from the persuasion that she had the power
+in her to make the strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned.</p>
+
+<p>For the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that the devil, in some
+witchery of human guise, had polluted his daughter's body and soul, and
+that it was by the foul fiend and by no earthly lover that she had
+conceived and borne the creature that now abode with him.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometimes felt more furious
+against this offspring of hell because ever and again some gleam of
+fantastic inborn honor, some strange savage instinct of honesty, would
+awake in her and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small and
+secret sins of chicanery wherein his soul delighted, and for which he
+compounded with his gods.</p>
+
+<p>He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the body labored
+hardest when the brain was still asleep, which is true; she could not
+read; she could not write; she knew absolutely nothing. Yet there was a
+soul awake in her; yet there were innumerable thoughts and dreams
+brooding in her fathomless eyes; yet there was a desire in her fierce
+and unslacked for some other life than this life of the packhorse and of
+the day laborer which alone she knew.</p>
+
+<p>He had done his best to degrade and to brutalize her, and in much he had
+succeeded; but he had not succeeded wholly. There was a liberty in her
+that escaped his thraldom; there was a soul in her that resisted the
+deadening influence of her existence.</p>
+
+<p>She had none of the shame of her sex; she had none of the timorous
+instincts of womanhood. She had a fierce stubborn courage, and she was
+insensible of the daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to
+his word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and worthless
+to dread the pain of the lash. She would bathe in the woodland pool,
+remembering no more that she might be watched by human eyes than does
+the young tigress that has never beheld the face of man.</p>
+
+<p>In all this she was brutalized and degraded by her tyrant's bondage: in
+other things she was far higher than he and escaped him.</p>
+
+<p>Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of severe physical
+labor, it had still irony and it had still imagination; and under the
+hottest heats of temptation there were two things which by sheer
+instinct she resisted, and resisted so that neither of them had ever
+been forced on her&mdash;they were falsehood and fear.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the infamous strength of the devil!" said Claudis Flamma, when he
+found that he could not force her to deviate from the truth.</p>
+
+<p>The world says the same of those who will not feed it with lies.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>That long dry summer was followed by an autumn of drought and scarcity.</p>
+
+<p>The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring down rain. The
+wooden Christs gazed all day long on parching lands and panting cattle.
+Even the broad deep rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink
+in the long drought. The orchards sickened for lack of moisture, and the
+peasants went about with feverish faces, ague-stricken limbs, and
+trembling hearts. The corn yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and
+when the winter came it was a time of dire scarcity and distress.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma and a few others like him alone prospered.</p>
+
+<p>The mill-house at Yprès served many purposes. It was a granary, a
+market, a baker's shop, an usurer's den, all in one.</p>
+
+<p>It looked a simple and innocent place. In the summertime it was peaceful
+and lovely, green and dark and still, with the blue sky above it, and
+the songs of birds all around; with its old black timbers, its
+many-colored orchards, its leafy gardens, its gray walls washed by the
+hurrying stream.</p>
+
+<p>But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. The water roared,
+and the leafless trees groaned in the wind, and the great leaden clouds
+of rain or fog enveloped it duskily.</p>
+
+<p>To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it with
+aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible; they
+dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master&mdash;the hardest
+and the shrewdest and the closest-fisted Norman of them all.</p>
+
+<p>For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter
+subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with
+their labor or their suffering, with the best of all their wool, or oil,
+or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom
+for five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old
+pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg of their little pet
+daughter's dowry.</p>
+
+<p>And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit
+them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well
+with the good saints and with holy church,&mdash;a wise man, in a word, with
+whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and
+avarice.</p>
+
+<p>For the most part the population around Yprès was thrifty and thriving
+in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and by this portion
+of it the silent old miser was much honored as a man laborious and
+penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must
+have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or
+under the bricks of his kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>By the smaller section of it&mdash;poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools&mdash;who
+belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and
+slow to save, and who so fell into want and famine and had to borrow of
+others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate
+deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe,
+and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.</p>
+
+<p>In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn, these and their
+like fell further in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and
+beg of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living.
+They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible
+extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give
+them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they
+could do no better.</p>
+
+<p>It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and
+being never quit of his hold his debtors never could try for aid
+elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>The weather towards the season of Noël became frightfully severe; the
+mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped
+pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open
+country, and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the higher
+lands.</p>
+
+<p>There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare
+harvests of a district usually so opulent in all riches of the soil
+brought trouble and dearth in their train. Sickness prevailed because
+the old people and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots
+unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, many homes
+were flooded, and some even swept away.</p>
+
+<p>Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never
+stopped work, and famine prices could be asked in this extremity.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after month,
+with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being left
+her that she could claim as her own.</p>
+
+<p>She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in
+frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even
+the young men among them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face
+of hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the
+golden glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness: and
+if they did note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the
+marks of a vagrant and accursed race.</p>
+
+<p>She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never
+dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she
+went by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well
+with the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.</p>
+
+<p>The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her
+head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the fire and
+dreams in her musing eyes&mdash;all these were so unlike themselves that they
+saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.</p>
+
+<p>Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except
+such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her.
+So had every winter gone since she had come there&mdash;a time so long ago
+that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often
+doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.</p>
+
+<p>Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of
+the mule and the bullocks&mdash;indifferent and knowing no better, and only
+staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty
+night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever
+come to her&mdash;those splendid and familiar unknown things that looked on
+all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to
+care.</p>
+
+<p>Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were
+together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor
+suffered immeasurably.</p>
+
+<p>A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and a score
+of times saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog,
+pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire
+deny them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times
+its value for some niggard grant of food.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should I think of it, why should I care?" she said to herself; and
+yet she did both, and could not help it.</p>
+
+<p>There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from
+the mill, by name Manon Dax.</p>
+
+<p>She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled and bent, yet strong,
+with bright eyes like a robin's, and a tough frame, eighty years old.</p>
+
+<p>She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cutter; he had been
+dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their
+offspring die too; and had now left on her hand to rear four young
+great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for
+food as new-born birds cry in their nests.</p>
+
+<p>She washed a little when she could get any linen to wash, and she span,
+and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot
+of ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes
+and herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four
+nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and
+worked in hail and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained,
+but said that God was good to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live
+long&mdash;that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God would
+take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought her
+to do, and was content.</p>
+
+<p>Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of the
+winter fell like a knife. She was only one among thousands.</p>
+
+<p>Nobody noticed her; still it was hard.</p>
+
+<p>All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was
+no well nearer than half a league, and half a league out and half a
+league back every day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two
+heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has
+only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one's withered limbs.</p>
+
+<p>The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her fiercely
+by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a hard time coming in which their
+pigs would be ill fed. The roots in her little garden-plot were all
+black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and
+stewed and eaten.</p>
+
+<p>The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were
+ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by rievers younger and more
+agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.</p>
+
+<p>The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for
+food, and she had none to give them.</p>
+
+<p>"If it were only myself!" she thought, stopping her ears not to hear
+them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to creep
+away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold
+froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and
+tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was
+good, and so to let death come&mdash;content.</p>
+
+<p>But it was not only herself.</p>
+
+<p>The poor are seldom so fortunate&mdash;they themselves would say so
+unhappy&mdash;as to be alone in their homes.</p>
+
+<p>There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish
+things she had loved,&mdash;small lives that had been rosy even on so much
+hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful
+even at the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of
+mouldy crusts, or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been&mdash;until now,
+when even so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay
+were soaked through with snow-water; now&mdash;when they were quite silent,
+except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.</p>
+
+<p>"I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was born asked man
+or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper coin," she thought,
+sitting by her black hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and
+stopping her ears to shut out the children's cries.</p>
+
+<p>She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter living,&mdash;she had
+scores of times in her long years been as famished as this, and as cold,
+and her house had been as desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never
+asked for an alms, being strong and ignorant, and being also in fear of
+the world, and holding a debt a great shame.</p>
+
+<p>But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish;
+being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in
+their strength before her.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle was long and hard with her. She would have to die soon, she
+knew, and she had striven all her lifetime so to live that she might die
+saying, "I have asked nothing of any man."</p>
+
+<p>This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a
+feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten. Any
+way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something; or
+else those four small things, who were like a cluster of red berries on
+a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.</p>
+
+<p>"It is bitter, but I must do it," she thought. "Sure it is strange that
+the good God cares to take any of us to himself through so sharp a way
+as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say, 'Not heaven
+for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.'"</p>
+
+<p>And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on
+which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all
+of them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Be still, my treasures," she said to them, striving to speak cheerily,
+and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born; "I go away for a
+little while to try and get you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care
+of them till I come back."</p>
+
+<p>Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of
+the little black door of the hut on to the white road and into the
+rushing winds.</p>
+
+<p>"I will go to Flamma," she said to herself.</p>
+
+<p>It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this season of midwinter.</p>
+
+<p>The business of the day was done. The people had come and gone, favored
+or denied, according to such sureties as they could offer. The great
+wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill sat
+against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in
+his ledger&mdash;crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to
+understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his
+pen.</p>
+
+<p>All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of
+every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were
+hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had
+saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to
+know that he held all that, and also withheld it. It moved him with a
+certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants
+stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered
+out an entreaty&mdash;which he denied.</p>
+
+<p>It was what he liked; to sit there and count his gains after his
+fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the howling wind and
+driving hail, and chuckle to think how lean and cold and sick they were
+outside&mdash;those fools who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy's
+leman.</p>
+
+<p>To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be
+implored with tears of supplication, and answer with a grim jest; to see
+a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the
+big brass pans full of milk, and say to her "All that makes butter for
+Paris," and then see her go away wailing and moaning that her child
+would die, and tottering feebly through the snow&mdash;all this was sweet to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man,
+yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had
+been aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an
+angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the
+poignancy of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to
+wound, and to see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only
+pleasure life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly,
+according to his light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and
+his God and his child had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had
+turned to gall.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut
+and the water-mill.</p>
+
+<p>They were roads which passed through meadows and along cornfields,
+beside streamlets, and among little belts of woodland, lanes and paths
+green and pleasant in the summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and
+whistled through by northeast winds. She held on her way steadily,
+stumbling often, and often slipping and going slowly, for she was very
+feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity of the cold drove
+through and through her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth
+of the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the weather was so
+wild that the poplar-trees were bent to the earth, and the little light
+in the Calvary lamp by the river blew to and fro, and at last died out.
+Still she held on, a little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her
+lips and a hope in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring,
+in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast gray
+waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times
+to and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she
+groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength,
+or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached
+the mill-house.</p>
+
+<p>Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores
+of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to
+Phratos, a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from
+the inclement night.</p>
+
+<p>She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma,
+who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which
+represented to him his earthly wealth.</p>
+
+<p>She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face
+working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an
+intense anxiety of appeal.</p>
+
+<p>"Flamma," she said simply to him, "we have been neighbors fifty years
+and more&mdash;thou and I, and many have borrowed of thee to their hurt and
+shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked
+anything of man or woman or child. But I come to-night to ask bread of
+you&mdash;bread for the four little children at home. I have heard them cry
+three days, and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two off
+the trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have come to you."</p>
+
+<p>He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbors, as she
+had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the
+same altar, side by side.</p>
+
+<p>"What dost want?" he asked simply.</p>
+
+<p>"Food," she made answer; "food and fuel. They are so cold&mdash;the little
+ones."</p>
+
+<p>"What canst pay for them?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing&mdash;nothing now. There is not a thing in the house except the last
+hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a little&mdash;just a
+little&mdash;while the weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the
+weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash and spin. I will pay
+faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin to any man. But I am
+so old, and the children so young&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. Where he went there
+stood pans of new milk, baskets of eggs, rolls of bread, piles of
+fagots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes
+glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.</p>
+
+<p>He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a
+thorn-tree.</p>
+
+<p>"Give these to thy children's children," he said, with a dark smile.
+"For these&mdash;and for no more&mdash;will they recompense thee when they shall
+grow to maturity."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant
+but a stern jest.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Flamma, you mock me," she murmured, trembling; "the babies are
+little, and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for God's sake! A jest is
+well in season, but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a
+stripe."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating voice,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I give thee the only thing given without payment in this world&mdash;advice.
+Take it or leave it."</p>
+
+<p>She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and
+her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense
+in them.</p>
+
+<p>"You jest, Flamma! You only jest!" she muttered. "The little children
+starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for them? Just a little
+bread? I will pay as soon as the weather breaks."</p>
+
+<p>"I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor," he answered her, with the
+habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again, and went on
+counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his books.</p>
+
+<p>His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease her
+work, nor intercede by a word. The poor can be better to the poor than
+any princes; but the poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any
+slave-drivers.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman's head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and felt
+her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the air. It
+was already dark with the darkness of the descending night.</p>
+
+<p>The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone; all was cold&mdash;cold as
+death.</p>
+
+<p>She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children were
+alone. The winds blew and drove the snowflakes in a white cloud against
+her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the
+roar of the mill-water filled the air.</p>
+
+<p>There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden;
+beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way. She
+fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but lay
+still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the snowstorm
+beating together upon her.</p>
+
+<p>"The children! the children!" she moaned feebly, and then was still; she
+was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not lift herself nor
+see what was around her; she thought that she was in her bed at home,
+and felt as though she would soon sleep.</p>
+
+<p>Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly-moving shape,
+that flew as silently and as quickly as a night-bird, and paused as
+though on wings beside her.</p>
+
+<p>A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to
+her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush, it is I! I&mdash;Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not
+much&mdash;they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what
+you said&mdash;I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you
+pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it."</p>
+
+<p>"Food&mdash;for the children!"</p>
+
+<p>The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a
+little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a
+groan&mdash;her limb was broken.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk's
+through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot get up; you are old," she said abruptly. "See&mdash;let me carry
+you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much;
+but it will serve."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion.
+What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had
+always mocked and hated her.</p>
+
+<p>"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses," she
+thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for
+strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to
+the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.</p>
+
+<p>Why did she do it?</p>
+
+<p>She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this woman,
+so poor and so brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied
+in her extremity.</p>
+
+<p>Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer
+them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot rise," she murmured; "my leg is broken, I think. But it is no
+matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are, you are good, and
+have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my
+life&mdash;anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain&mdash;indeed."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped and lifted the
+old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy burden set
+out on her way in the teeth of the storm.</p>
+
+<p>She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, by sight and name.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart,
+but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbors, had
+drawn the little ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak,
+lest the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner's youngest born, should
+fall on them, and harm them in like manner.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as
+Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through the
+frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the
+sacks of corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a
+packhorse.</p>
+
+<p>Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even strive to speak
+again; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement,
+of a close, soft pressure that sheltered her from the force of the
+winds, of a subtle warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame,
+and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be still.</p>
+
+<p>She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.</p>
+
+<p>Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and listened.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you speak?" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"God is good," she muttered, like one speaking in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow,
+pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a
+reindeer, and sure of eye in the dark as a night-hawk.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in pain?" she asked once of the burden she carried.</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and
+inured to all hardships of the weather; yet short as it was, it cost her
+an hour to travel it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with
+snow-water, blown back continually by the opposing winds, and forced to
+stagger and to pause by the fury of the storm.</p>
+
+<p>At last she reached the hut.</p>
+
+<p>The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children
+echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep,
+cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in
+unchecked; all was quite dark.</p>
+
+<p>She felt her way within, and being used by long custom to see in the
+gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and birds can see, she found the bed
+of hay, and laid her burden gently down on it.</p>
+
+<p>The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest ones crept up
+close to their grandmother, and pressed their cheeks to hers, and
+whispered to her eagerly, with their little famished lips, "Where is
+the food, where is the food?"</p>
+
+<p>But there was still no answer.</p>
+
+<p>The clouds drifted a little from the moon that had been so long
+obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapor of the heavy sky; the
+whitened ground threw back the rays increased tenfold; the pale gleam
+reached the old still face of Manon Dax.</p>
+
+<p>There was a feeble smile upon it&mdash;the smile with which her last words
+had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"</p>
+
+<p>She was quite dead.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.</p>
+
+<p>The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow
+which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been
+too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.</p>
+
+<p>She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of
+its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay
+together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the
+leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors
+and plains; it is a common fate.</p>
+
+<p>She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and
+quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not
+taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter,
+tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of
+it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the
+door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all
+night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the
+clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she
+could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.</p>
+
+<p>"They die of famine&mdash;and they die saying their 'God is good,'" she
+thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and
+melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of
+the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel,
+and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the
+warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a
+nest.</p>
+
+<p>She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner
+of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she
+had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against
+her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single
+gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so
+bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying "God
+is good." She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving
+animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.</p>
+
+<p>She forgave&mdash;because she forgot&mdash;that in other winters this door had
+been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had
+mocked her in their first imperfect speech.</p>
+
+<p>The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter's day came; the storm had lulled,
+but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was
+piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.</p>
+
+<p>She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she
+knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they
+too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had
+no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never
+spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for
+its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.</p>
+
+<p>Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and
+mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common
+humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they
+disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.</p>
+
+<p>At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going
+to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude
+hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and called to him.</p>
+
+<p>He stared and stood still.</p>
+
+<p>She went to the doorway and signed to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are here,
+alone, and they starve."</p>
+
+<p>"Manon Dax dead?" he echoed stupidly: he was her nearest neighbor; he
+had helped her fetch her washing-water sometimes from the well half a
+league away; when his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old
+woman had nursed her carefully and well through many a tedious month.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had broken
+her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one. The
+little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too."</p>
+
+<p>It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that
+addressed him; but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to
+her, he recognized the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight
+brow, the fathomless eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising
+there suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn and
+shadow.</p>
+
+<p>He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the
+darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he
+had gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the
+sleeping children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice
+of the roads would allow.</p>
+
+<p>His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a
+few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop
+made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its
+wide-spreading orchards and their excellence of fruits.</p>
+
+<p>Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the
+people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds;
+women were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the
+sleepy-eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers
+played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost.</p>
+
+<p>The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the
+ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins
+flew to and fro songless.</p>
+
+<p>His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.</p>
+
+<p>"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>"What of that?" said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had
+died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine
+themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.</p>
+
+<p>"This of that," said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of
+his own terrors. "The young devil of Yprès has killed her, that I am
+sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like
+coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe;
+while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the
+women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange
+news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day
+was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it
+than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse
+had fared with the swelling in the throat.</p>
+
+<p>They were very dull there from year's end to year's end; once a month,
+maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a
+peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from
+the outer world;&mdash;beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing,
+and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone
+crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.</p>
+
+<p>This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be
+challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil
+omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true
+an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly
+matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears
+and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his
+listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had
+encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been
+slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.</p>
+
+<p>Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be
+accredited of the begotten of the fiend:&mdash;a fiend, whom all the grown
+men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come
+to ruin poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels,
+and his strength passing the strength of all men.</p>
+
+<p>The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the
+bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials
+of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily
+labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who
+had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.</p>
+
+<p>A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the
+village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and
+deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his
+tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two
+hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.</p>
+
+<p>"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been
+struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are
+there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We&mdash;good Christians and
+true&mdash;should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the
+young ones hither."</p>
+
+<p>Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be
+driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.</p>
+
+<p>"That is as it should be," assented the other women. "Go, Flandrin, and
+we&mdash;we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to
+the public charity; better cannot be done. Go."</p>
+
+<p>"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply,"
+cried his wife.</p>
+
+<p>"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee," said
+another.</p>
+
+<p>"Not she," grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. "One day my
+blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his
+cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said
+'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you
+are to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed and went on. What
+are you to do with a witch like that,&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus. "Go! Every minute you
+waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!"</p>
+
+<p>"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly. "I will not go
+after those infants, it is not a man's work."</p>
+
+<p>In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him,
+of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly
+down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black,
+fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused,
+that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the devil's prey, than those,
+his choicest, swine.</p>
+
+<p>The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But
+vainly&mdash;he would not move alone. He had become possessed with the
+terrors that his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for
+all their imprecations.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go ourselves, then!" screamed his wife at length, flourishing
+above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow. "Men are
+forever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes
+to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the fire!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to
+emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a
+broom, a pegstick, each whatever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin
+in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe of
+poplars. They were not very sure in their own minds why they went, nor
+for what they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and
+pious, and they had a great hate in their hearts against her.</p>
+
+<p>They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them, and their
+tongues flew still faster than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made
+them sharp and keen on their prey; they screamed themselves hoarse,
+their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the
+creaking of the trees; and they inflamed each other with ferocious
+belief in the sorcery they were to punish.</p>
+
+<p>They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little, they
+toiled hard from their birth to their grave, they were most of them
+chaste wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they
+slaved in fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were
+narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, where
+they thought themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable. They
+were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for
+another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the
+priests and lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that
+it is a creed holy and honorable&mdash;how can the people know that it is at
+once idiotic and hellish?</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof, and
+watched the open door.</p>
+
+<p>The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned
+and caught her hand, and held it.</p>
+
+<p>She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the
+woodstack, or their grandam's skirts, a hundred times when they had seen
+her on the road or in the orchard. But she was sorry for them; almost as
+sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when their nests were
+scattered on the ground in a tempest, or for the little starveling
+rabbits when they screamed in their holes for the soft, white mother
+that was lying, tortured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap.</p>
+
+<p>She was sorry for them&mdash;half roughly, half tenderly&mdash;with some shame at
+her own weakness, and yet too sincerely sorry to be able to persuade
+herself to leave them to their fate there, all alone with their dead.</p>
+
+<p>For in the savage heart of Taric's daughter there was an innermost
+corner wherein her mother's nature slept.</p>
+
+<p>She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and listening for
+footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds; the dense fog of
+the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the
+trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard by there
+wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin's cattle, deserted
+of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds.</p>
+
+<p>She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet, she had
+resolved not to leave the children all alone; though Flamma should come
+and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So
+she sat still and waited.</p>
+
+<p>After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen
+snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused
+clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter
+morning.</p>
+
+<p>The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little
+passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the
+hill with Flandrin in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and looked out at them quietly.</p>
+
+<p>For a minute they paused&mdash;irresolute, silent, perplexed: at the sight of
+her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the crime they
+came to bring against her.</p>
+
+<p>The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the
+onslaught.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" she screamed, "nine good Christians fearful of one daughter of
+hell? Fie! for shame! Look; my leaden Peter is round my neck! Is he not
+stronger than she any day?"</p>
+
+<p>In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the same time, they were
+through the door and on the mud floor of the hearth, close to her,
+casting hasty glances at the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires
+they had left to die out all through that bitter winter. They came about
+her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop, flourishing their
+sticks in her eyes, and casting at her a thousand charges in one breath.</p>
+
+<p>Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the threshold, wishing he
+had never said a word of the death of Manon Dax to his good wife and
+neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>"You met that poor saint and killed her in the snow with your
+witcheries!" one cried.</p>
+
+<p>"You have stifled that poor babe where it lay!" cried another.</p>
+
+<p>"A good woman like that!" shrieked a third, "who was well and blithe and
+praising God only a day ago, for I saw her myself come down the hill for
+our well water!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is as you did with the dear little Rémy, who will be lame all his
+life through you," hissed a fourth. "You are not fit to live; you spit
+venom like a toad."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you alive, my angels?" said a fifth, waking the three children
+noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. "Are you alive after that
+witch has gazed on you? It is a miracle! The saints be praised!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not comprehending why
+they thus with one accord fell upon her. She pointed to the bodies on
+the hearth, with one of those grave and dignified gestures which were
+her birthright.</p>
+
+<p>"She was cold and hungry," she said curtly, her mellow accent softening
+and enriching the provincial tongue which she had learned from those
+amidst whom she dwelt. "She had fallen, and was dying. I brought her
+here. The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with the rest
+because they were frightened, and alone. There is no more to tell. What
+of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thou hadst better come away. What canst thou prove?" whispered Flandrin
+to his wife.</p>
+
+<p>He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would fain have stilled
+it. But that was beyond his power. The women had not come forth half a
+league in the howling winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with
+a mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken.</p>
+
+<p>They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused
+her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a
+thousand tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their
+sticks; and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of
+Manon Dax lay upward in the dim light.</p>
+
+<p>The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had
+seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him
+and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long
+and dreary night.</p>
+
+<p>The woman covered his eyes with a scream.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child is bewitched! It is
+horrible!"</p>
+
+<p>"Look on that;&mdash;oh, infernal thing!" cried Flandrin's wife, lifting up
+her treasured figure of Peter. "You dare not face that blessed image.
+See&mdash;see all of you&mdash;how she winces, and turns white!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called her. Its
+gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her in
+any human thing.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw
+it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She
+stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it
+through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then
+she folded her arms, and waited for them.</p>
+
+<p>There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed
+on her.</p>
+
+<p>They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted
+hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were
+strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and
+they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked
+alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and
+the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.</p>
+
+<p>They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her,
+they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the
+malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and
+its own security.</p>
+
+<p>Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power
+against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her
+backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their
+worst on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, nor lift
+herself to wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of
+wringing from her a single cry, and that she did. She was mute while the
+rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were
+driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched at her hair,
+and twisted and tore it,&mdash;she was quite mute throughout.</p>
+
+<p>"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I have
+heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried Flandrin's
+wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.</p>
+
+<p>Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in
+their midst, and a dozen eager, violent hands seized a closer grip upon
+her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud
+floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell. The
+smooth, soft skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without
+spot or blemish.</p>
+
+<p>"What matter,&mdash;what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin. "When our fathers
+hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for that? Draw blood, and
+you will see."</p>
+
+<p>She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her
+prey.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she cried, with a
+laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.</p>
+
+<p>Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. She was powerless,
+defenseless, flung on her back amidst her tormentors, fastened down by
+treading feet and clinching hands; she could resist in nothing, she
+could not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud eyes looked
+unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.</p>
+
+<p>The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her
+chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a
+wounded bird,&mdash;not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these
+women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their hands.</p>
+
+<p>The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak. Except for
+her eyes, which glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to and fro,
+seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down
+by ruffians to make a bonfire.</p>
+
+<p>"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried
+the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to
+that uttermost test.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:</p>
+
+<p>"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come
+out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to
+try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick&mdash;as you love your
+lives&mdash;quick!"</p>
+
+<p>The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a
+name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.</p>
+
+<p>They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the
+hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing
+sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.</p>
+
+<p>The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the
+little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.</p>
+
+<p>"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his
+gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.</p>
+
+<p>The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest
+infant likewise&mdash;of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to
+say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of
+charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were
+quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see
+their work.</p>
+
+<p>"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told
+us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little
+Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken
+the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them
+food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and
+do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."</p>
+
+<p>"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who
+liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's
+births, and who was a good old man, though stern.</p>
+
+<p>He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by
+the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged
+his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed
+in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be
+beforehand with him there.</p>
+
+<p>"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough
+for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange
+mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues
+sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.</p>
+
+<p>The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a
+sullen impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Yprès!" they
+muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get
+over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That
+will teach her to leave honest folk alone."</p>
+
+<p>And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.</p>
+
+<p>"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing
+Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you
+in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy
+great-grandmother."</p>
+
+<p>But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into
+silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly
+withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old
+kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at
+twilight by the bright wood fire.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery
+slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village,
+and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.</p>
+
+<p>For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and
+blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.</p>
+
+<p>Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily
+and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the
+sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they
+have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter
+will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his
+outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in
+the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease
+from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.</p>
+
+<p>When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon
+Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they
+should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in
+accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest,
+a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could
+gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side;
+but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts
+that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily
+justified to the law.</p>
+
+<p>"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of
+all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a
+bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil&mdash;anything,&mdash;except now and then an
+honest woman."</p>
+
+<p>But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered
+it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old
+grandam and the year-old infant.</p>
+
+<p>When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her
+tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to
+raise herself from the floor, and had failed.</p>
+
+<p>She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that
+her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first
+sharp moment of the persecution.</p>
+
+<p>As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the
+blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what
+had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and
+lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.</p>
+
+<p>It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and
+outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.</p>
+
+<p>She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.</p>
+
+<p>"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known
+how they pay any good done to them."</p>
+
+<p>She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course
+of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid
+with.</p>
+
+<p>She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she
+hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and
+pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed
+and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without
+her vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she
+thought&mdash;this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its
+teaching.</p>
+
+<p>She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into
+the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or
+token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the
+ashes of the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that
+her God was good!"</p>
+
+<p>She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff
+and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin
+deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her
+ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been
+flung backward on her head.</p>
+
+<p>She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had
+done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The
+sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled
+through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and
+grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through
+the woods and pastures.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull
+red ray here and there above the woods in the east.</p>
+
+<p>It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still
+rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over
+the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the
+snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.</p>
+
+<p>She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when
+he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then
+tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any
+creature that might need one.</p>
+
+<p>That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence
+was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour
+more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown
+her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that
+she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow,
+beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her
+eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all
+for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland
+meadows, starved and stiff.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know;&mdash;and had she known, wretched though existence was to
+her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be
+slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again&mdash;a
+change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and
+no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.</p>
+
+<p>By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of
+the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her
+eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.</p>
+
+<p>She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first
+morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and
+for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which
+the sheds and storehouses ran.</p>
+
+<p>She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy
+or remission of her labors.</p>
+
+<p>She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had
+brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.</p>
+
+<p>She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass; and
+she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there
+leaning her head on her hands.</p>
+
+<p>The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal
+flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty
+fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly
+against her, purring all the while.</p>
+
+<p>The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her
+master,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."</p>
+
+<p>The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the
+courtyard.</p>
+
+<p>"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not
+lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.</p>
+
+<p>"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth;
+enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than
+himself.</p>
+
+<p>A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its
+stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief
+phrases,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the
+road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed
+there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told
+him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed
+old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is
+no matter. But it made me late."</p>
+
+<p>In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an
+unconscious glimmer of appeal,&mdash;a vague fancy that for once she might,
+perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and
+contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any
+compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once
+he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.</p>
+
+<p>But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since
+first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.</p>
+
+<p>Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost
+ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it
+would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so
+mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it
+infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have
+had pity and charity where he had lacked them.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue
+with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her
+bosom had been stained with blood.</p>
+
+<p>"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer
+to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal
+rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them
+of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them
+that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for
+a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able
+to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be
+the worse for thee."</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him.</p>
+
+<p>There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with
+her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead
+thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.</p>
+
+<p>But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness,
+without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the
+dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake
+her with the kisses of his rough tongue.</p>
+
+<p>She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once
+spoke to her.</p>
+
+<p>"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good
+Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon,
+and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his
+neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl
+maddened my dame,&mdash;spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image
+away in a ditch."</p>
+
+<p>"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward
+through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or
+were displeased.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very
+spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should
+also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair
+offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too
+ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use;
+they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all
+rousing of their sticks, or of their words.</p>
+
+<p>They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay
+in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in
+pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually,
+thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold
+spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the
+hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana,
+and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended,
+shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned
+to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise
+little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol
+ringing always through her brain.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.</p>
+
+<p>There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked
+fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned,
+and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare,
+and rioted over by furious cross winds.</p>
+
+<p>Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked
+up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,&mdash;for the first time since
+they had had to do with her,&mdash;she had committed, for the millionth time,
+a crime.</p>
+
+<p>There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a
+spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens
+straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping,
+and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the
+intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.</p>
+
+<p>There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the
+woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless
+house.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white
+roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering
+in its light.</p>
+
+<p>There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought
+their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.</p>
+
+<p>She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,&mdash;a
+yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside
+the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged
+him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those
+bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a
+sentinel slain at his post&mdash;frozen to death in his old age after a life
+of faithfulness repaid with blows.</p>
+
+<p>She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had
+loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of
+the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to
+sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round
+her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.</p>
+
+<p>She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead,
+lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so
+that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should
+be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well
+to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of
+summer liberty and leisure.</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow
+above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and
+she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another
+for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can
+exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone,
+and love and trust each other only out of all the world.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept
+forever in the old gray orchard, she had but one left. She went to seek
+this one.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart ached for a kind glance&mdash;for a word that should be neither of
+hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to know such
+a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that
+despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die hard, without murmur
+or appeal.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to all save
+herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin, who to all save
+herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.</p>
+
+<p>He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way; they had the kinship
+of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent,
+savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might
+love each other in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter
+and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.</p>
+
+<p>She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold, and
+alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by
+his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous
+time when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream
+which was never to come true upon earth.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed ever in it.</p>
+
+<p>She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the insults
+of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place; but each
+one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and
+killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts that had
+survived in her through all the brutalizing debasement of her life.</p>
+
+<p>She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood,
+and, being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of
+it, as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and
+now and then the thought crossed her&mdash;why not take a flint and a bit of
+tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow
+at the foot of the hill?</p>
+
+<p>She thought of it often&mdash;would she ever do it?</p>
+
+<p>She did not know.</p>
+
+<p>It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired
+a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had
+lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also?
+They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried
+to do good to one of them the others had set on her as a witch.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through
+their hamlet to seek Marcellin.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows
+and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a
+solitary tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the
+snowdrifts; here and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of
+ice that covered all the streams and pools.</p>
+
+<p>The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with
+all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her
+scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her shirt,
+and it gripped fast the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which
+the reward for her charity had taught her&mdash;a lesson not lightly to be
+forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.</p>
+
+<p>In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbors, kept
+high festival for a fresh year begun.</p>
+
+<p>Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and
+many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood
+cracking and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many
+of their interiors as she went by in the shadow without.</p>
+
+<p>In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, roasting chestnuts
+in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another they romped with
+their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.</p>
+
+<p>In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that
+was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung round with dried herbs and fruits,
+an old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for
+a short glad hour.</p>
+
+<p>In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savory odor, and
+the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she watched her
+youngest-born playing with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors,
+and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.</p>
+
+<p>In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a wife that day, kept
+open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing to the music of
+a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with
+many-hued ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in the
+noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still woods, and in the
+midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height of the hill, the
+little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on her knife.</p>
+
+<p>"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation that
+possessed her&mdash;"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a bonfire they
+would have for their feasting!"</p>
+
+<p>The thought was sweet to her.</p>
+
+<p>Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do
+well and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil
+sorcery.</p>
+
+<p>She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to
+see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them
+with a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives,
+"Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"</p>
+
+<p>Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint and
+tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to
+pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.</p>
+
+<p>She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet
+to her&mdash;so sweet because so horrible.</p>
+
+<p>How soon their mirth would be stilled!</p>
+
+<p>As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the red glare that
+would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid
+flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the children's
+shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, with
+a halo of light round its head: the thing was little Bernardou, and the
+halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.</p>
+
+<p>He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>"I know you&mdash;you were good that night. The people all say you are
+wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back to
+gran'mère&mdash;oh, take me back!"</p>
+
+<p>She was startled and bewildered. This child had never mocked her, but he
+had screamed and run from her in terror, and had been told a score of
+stories that she was a devil, who could kill his body and soul.</p>
+
+<p>"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice was troubled,
+and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time to a child
+without being derided or screamed at in fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff and cold, I know,
+and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know she would, if
+she only heard <i>us</i>. We never cried in the night but she heard in her
+sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell her&mdash;do, do tell her!"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness
+of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and held her mute.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him suddenly,
+glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins' house, through
+which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the
+gilded bells.</p>
+
+<p>"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want gran'mère," he
+said, with a sob. "They beat me often, and oh! if she knew, she would
+wake and come. Do tell her&mdash;do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex
+her, if only she will come back!"</p>
+
+<p>His piteous voice was drowned in tears.</p>
+
+<p>His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs
+had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him,
+clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in the
+cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first daisy
+of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to
+sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.</p>
+
+<p>It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he
+wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in
+another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they expected
+him to be.</p>
+
+<p>It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and
+they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary
+softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and
+fierce temper. "I wish I could."</p>
+
+<p>For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds,
+and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away
+and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which
+she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the
+snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither
+where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too
+dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the
+world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and
+dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing
+be hostile to her.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that
+eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.</p>
+
+<p>As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts,
+a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside
+Flandrin's house,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out
+there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."</p>
+
+<p>The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she
+was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place
+and the children in order.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch
+that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine
+whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst
+bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."</p>
+
+<p>She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above
+the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the
+tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them
+a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then
+she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and
+carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.</p>
+
+<p>She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's words
+had touched and softened her, she remembered the long patient bitter
+life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second
+year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last, "God is good."</p>
+
+<p>"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for Him, and He seems to care
+nothing for them whether they be old or young."</p>
+
+<p>Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the house in which
+little Bernardou was sheltered.</p>
+
+<p>His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet
+to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveler upon the
+highest Alpine summits&mdash;a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste.</p>
+
+<p>The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the
+fields that were in summer all one scarlet group of poppies.</p>
+
+<p>The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells
+in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was
+still.</p>
+
+<p>On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in
+the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in
+the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and
+a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.</p>
+
+<p>In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten&mdash;the
+dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her
+enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had
+turned.</p>
+
+<p>But she walked on steadily.</p>
+
+<p>At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one
+welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that
+would look on her without a frown.</p>
+
+<p>It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail
+drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of
+her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and
+give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each
+other, and want no other cheer or comrade.</p>
+
+<p>It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the
+poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year's-night she
+had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had
+loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad,
+though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the
+hearth had been cold.</p>
+
+<p>She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her
+spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its
+door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached
+the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without
+derision or told her woes without condemnation.</p>
+
+<p>His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the
+side of a stream.</p>
+
+<p>A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of
+its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel
+rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only
+sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on
+the rarefied sharp air.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night,
+and went to the door and pushed against it to open it&mdash;it was locked.</p>
+
+<p>She struck it with her hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Open, Marcellin&mdash;open quickly. It is only I."</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer.</p>
+
+<p>She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.</p>
+
+<p>A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull
+light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is
+there?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an
+hour with you. Is anything amiss?"</p>
+
+<p>The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her,
+peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire,
+and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Marcellin, yes&mdash;where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my
+place."</p>
+
+<p>"Died!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her
+limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich
+and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that God
+would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never
+thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years
+for him&mdash;you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger
+than the saints&mdash;somehow. You are that thing of Yprès, are you not? Get
+you gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.</p>
+
+<p>Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set
+on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.</p>
+
+<p>"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he
+dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole
+day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what
+can one do?&mdash;&mdash;and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest
+has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe
+nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take
+your foot from my door!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood motionless.</p>
+
+<p>"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night
+from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet
+dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do
+not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer&mdash;anyways he
+was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with
+the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch
+him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last
+they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He
+died just under the great Calvary&mdash;it was like his blasphemy. They have
+put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a
+saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God,
+and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you
+gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul
+fiend for him&mdash;they are surely together now."</p>
+
+<p>And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.</p>
+
+<p>"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she muttered, as
+she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way
+through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.</p>
+
+<p>"He died alone&mdash;he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she
+crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate
+was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one
+friend on earth.</p>
+
+<p>The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness
+to all the maledictions of men.</p>
+
+<p>The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing
+glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with
+the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,&mdash;these which were
+so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on
+soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell
+as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.</p>
+
+<p>For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her
+strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower
+in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the
+public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a
+hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her
+life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK III.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
+itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and
+many sighs of shuddering breezes.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
+the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
+the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
+the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.</p>
+
+<p>Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
+black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
+blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
+driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither
+and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the
+winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops
+and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.</p>
+
+<p>The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
+life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
+the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
+boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
+went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
+early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
+face.</p>
+
+<p>A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
+sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and,
+striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing
+wall within.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a
+prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged
+slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an
+old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood
+among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.</p>
+
+<p>A man watched the spider as it went.</p>
+
+<p>It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
+glow of the sunken sun.</p>
+
+<p>It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
+on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
+breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
+troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
+for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
+and multiplied.</p>
+
+<p>It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
+whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
+who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.</p>
+
+<p>This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
+also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.</p>
+
+<p>He had been unwise&mdash;always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun
+die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.</p>
+
+<p>For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
+northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
+been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
+twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his
+trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.</p>
+
+<p>He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst
+the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
+bitter to the rich.</p>
+
+<p>But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart
+in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his
+yielding to their torments.</p>
+
+<p>He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what
+they gained, would have held him accursed&mdash;the madness that starves and
+is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
+For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the
+future who cares,&mdash;save the madmen themselves?</p>
+
+<p>He watched the spider as it went.</p>
+
+<p>It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
+story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
+kingdom&mdash;if only in dreams.</p>
+
+<p>This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth;
+and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and
+power and worth.</p>
+
+<p>The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the
+vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the
+floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon
+the dull rugged surface of stone.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.</p>
+
+<p>It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at
+length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
+swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast
+about.</p>
+
+<p>Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm,
+in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
+begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
+tropic flower.</p>
+
+<p>It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a
+gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones&mdash;a moth that should have
+been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
+Night's Dream.</p>
+
+<p>A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
+lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.</p>
+
+<p>A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow
+chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
+that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that
+glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
+dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
+sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a
+lotus-leaf.</p>
+
+<p>A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells
+to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.</p>
+
+<p>The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread
+out their pale gold on the level of the floor.</p>
+
+<p>It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
+wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
+the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the
+night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
+yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.</p>
+
+<p>It lived before its time,&mdash;and it was like the human soul, which, being
+born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering
+in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
+wretchedness.</p>
+
+<p>It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
+life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
+flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
+the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent
+wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.</p>
+
+<p>There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
+shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.</p>
+
+<p>The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
+the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead
+violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
+forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
+teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
+plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its
+hoard.</p>
+
+<p>He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth.
+Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
+of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
+which perishes of divine desire.</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand
+and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.</p>
+
+<p>His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his
+breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured
+indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even
+this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to
+die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows
+of winter hid all offal from its fangs.</p>
+
+<p>It was horrible.</p>
+
+<p>He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels
+of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all&mdash;the
+sheer animal need of food. "<i>J'avais quelque chose là!</i>" was, perhaps,
+the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the
+guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was
+the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with
+it.</p>
+
+<p>When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and
+sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in
+his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave
+life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights,
+because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
+yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is
+the agony of Prometheus.</p>
+
+<p>With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which
+moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which
+compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
+worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.</p>
+
+<p>Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety,
+of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs
+that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly
+fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and
+made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will
+be that in him greater than himself, which he knows&mdash;and cannot know
+without some fierce wrench and pang&mdash;will be numbed and made impotent,
+and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all
+that men behold of death.</p>
+
+<p>It was so with this man now.</p>
+
+<p>Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of
+obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he
+believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a
+purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his
+power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die;
+it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any
+toothless snake would perish in its swamp.</p>
+
+<p>He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had
+spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of
+the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the
+title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.</p>
+
+<p>For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly
+as he looked:</p>
+
+<p>"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my
+body in a ditch," he thought.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he
+instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and
+took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of
+the lamp behind him.</p>
+
+<p>They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some
+housewife's kitchen-stove.</p>
+
+<p>What matter?</p>
+
+<p>He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his
+soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as
+his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had
+power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.</p>
+
+<p>Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire
+seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and
+choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his
+naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more
+torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and
+manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this
+slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.</p>
+
+<p>He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that
+uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of
+release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.</p>
+
+<p>He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its
+throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn&mdash;it might be
+before midnight&mdash;this agony would grow so great that it would conquer
+him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of
+besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a
+knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any
+other thing than of the passion that ruled him.</p>
+
+<p>Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a
+sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some
+broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed
+lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a
+dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;&mdash;all these he gazed on and
+touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or
+deepened line of his chalk stylus.</p>
+
+<p>All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely
+sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to
+him,&mdash;"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave <i>us</i> alone?"</p>
+
+<p>And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and
+wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the
+night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon
+him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed
+the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased,
+confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men
+wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards
+senseless on his hearth.</p>
+
+<p>The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in
+through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by,
+uttering weary cries against the storm.</p>
+
+<p>On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its
+filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the
+hearth, and saying in its heart,&mdash;"Thou Fool!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water
+through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and
+where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black
+timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin,
+of fiend and of martyr.</p>
+
+<p>She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with
+her foot.</p>
+
+<p>The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river
+inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were
+seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she
+glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily,
+dreamily.</p>
+
+<p>She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and
+grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at
+the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with
+their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce
+sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats
+of the land.</p>
+
+<p>Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free
+effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the
+water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some
+lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement
+arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old
+creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of
+some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year
+fragrant in her boddice.</p>
+
+<p>The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the
+dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely
+interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which
+brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and
+leaning on their swords.</p>
+
+<p>In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round
+the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the
+kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at
+soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire had worn in
+the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned
+glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her
+fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous
+laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved
+ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high
+oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face,
+bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping
+on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had
+charge of, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her
+own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,&mdash;only&mdash;and
+therefore hopeless.</p>
+
+<p>All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the
+water below.</p>
+
+<p>She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned
+them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures
+of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned
+bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.</p>
+
+<p>Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt,
+these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and
+enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always
+together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people,
+whose god on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who
+toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and
+scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and
+content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling
+to one another, and in a way be glad.</p>
+
+<p>Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted
+with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it
+was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of
+ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.</p>
+
+<p>As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw that it stood
+open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the
+broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open
+beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within;
+there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the
+hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp
+night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected
+and thrice-welcome guest.</p>
+
+<p>She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white
+cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her
+blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her,
+a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind
+her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was
+there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with
+pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and
+shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within
+shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped,
+she was stirred with a vague, passionate, contemptuous wonder: what was
+this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no
+share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the
+wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the
+water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that
+severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day
+was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists
+were setting in from the sea as the night descended.</p>
+
+<p>She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the
+rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray
+upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the
+melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved
+the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in
+round her with the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other
+place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy
+with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was
+the window of the gardener's wife.</p>
+
+<p>At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but
+some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced
+them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.</p>
+
+<p>The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown
+shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror
+before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both
+hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells
+brought to her from the sea.</p>
+
+<p>"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine,
+looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water
+with envy at her heart.</p>
+
+<p>She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more
+like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and
+hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked
+her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They
+cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as
+she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road
+with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or
+twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.</p>
+
+<p>For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had
+killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious
+people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry,
+through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and
+the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on
+her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for
+the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking
+chestnuts.</p>
+
+<p>It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a
+desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten
+by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so
+stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark
+repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way,
+with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories
+that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed,
+when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or
+sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to
+arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of
+hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was
+alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.</p>
+
+<p>She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more
+despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any
+creature.</p>
+
+<p>To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone;
+by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge
+and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her
+brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that
+consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people
+who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted
+him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some
+noxious beast.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance;
+a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her.
+The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage
+into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood
+upon a crime.</p>
+
+<p>It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within
+her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be;
+but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and
+tow-horse,&mdash;something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and
+the dog for their services.</p>
+
+<p>The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury
+inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime
+could have made her free she would have seized it.</p>
+
+<p>She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked
+out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without
+one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike
+waste.</p>
+
+<p>The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong
+in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by
+ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief
+for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the
+public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was
+too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the
+desert and the forest was too hot.</p>
+
+<p>What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she
+had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
+mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew
+whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
+stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
+its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
+where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the
+air; and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so
+vanished;&mdash;a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of
+freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a
+thing of heaven and of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.</p>
+
+<p>There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.
+She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness
+of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the
+storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer
+over a bridge.</p>
+
+<p>There was no other light.</p>
+
+<p>The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe
+behind her in the still sad air.</p>
+
+<p>There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong
+tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many
+tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong.
+Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned
+it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river
+had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because
+legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men
+who haunted it.</p>
+
+<p>No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after
+nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry
+grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his
+market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one
+trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.</p>
+
+<p>To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.</p>
+
+<p>The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts,
+with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and
+always wondrous beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and
+with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold
+in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream
+that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that
+wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.</p>
+
+<p>For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life
+or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created
+thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.</p>
+
+<p>As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with
+fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew
+wilder yet.</p>
+
+<p>There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of
+tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom.
+The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the
+boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were
+submerged.</p>
+
+<p>She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all
+that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it
+should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the
+river reeds.</p>
+
+<p>For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her
+own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to
+Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it
+would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.</p>
+
+<p>As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the
+darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been
+placed so low down against the shore, that its front walls, strong of
+hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the
+dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and
+brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of
+one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square
+casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted
+by a sickly glimmer of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by
+a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes
+entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of
+setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the
+land, and use her force to push it off into the current.</p>
+
+<p>She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her
+kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the
+sand, and stood to her waist in the water.</p>
+
+<p>But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it
+lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked
+and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her
+boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.</p>
+
+<p>She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had
+time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window
+behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird
+had come.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp
+within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she
+paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.</p>
+
+<p>The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays
+of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level
+with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain
+fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this
+legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone;
+dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to
+and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in
+the capitals of its columns.</p>
+
+<p>No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its
+way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.</p>
+
+<p>She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had
+gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had
+never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors
+in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.</p>
+
+<p>Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed&mdash;believed that the
+dead lived and gathered there.</p>
+
+<p>White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all
+motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible
+loveliness of death.</p>
+
+<p>In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the
+tombs of the kings of the East.</p>
+
+<p>Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a
+leaf; yet she was not afraid.</p>
+
+<p>A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her
+life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she
+had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in
+the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and
+only told that it was day by blows.</p>
+
+<p>She had no fear of them&mdash;these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the
+lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the
+sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture
+and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if
+these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal
+homes&mdash;whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?</p>
+
+<p>It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.</p>
+
+<p>She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself
+lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the
+floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world&mdash;stood
+motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw
+breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven
+from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected
+back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy
+light on all the forms around her.</p>
+
+<p>"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and
+she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its
+beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower
+than the dust&mdash;a mortal amidst this great immortal host.</p>
+
+<p>The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with
+a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and
+impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge
+of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.</p>
+
+<p>They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her
+they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they
+seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of
+silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which
+she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to
+the skies at night from a sleepless bed.</p>
+
+<p>They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth
+was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were
+not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in
+every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the
+west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar
+groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by
+the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were
+felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.</p>
+
+<p>They were indeed the dead: the dead who&mdash;dying earliest, whilst yet the
+earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to
+remember them, and to count them worthy of lament&mdash;perished in their
+bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.</p>
+
+<p>From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her
+through the mist.</p>
+
+<p>Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of
+the dark sea-gates.</p>
+
+<p>Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on
+by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.</p>
+
+<p>Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight,
+on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds
+of daffodils and asphodel.</p>
+
+<p>Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless,
+bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of
+the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe
+increase.</p>
+
+<p>Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless
+nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that
+heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.</p>
+
+<p>Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest
+wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the
+kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which
+empty air could make in a hollow reed.</p>
+
+<p>Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos;
+their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering
+fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the
+old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the
+same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their
+coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,&mdash;the gods of the
+Night and of the Grave.</p>
+
+<p>These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the
+halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from
+the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor
+story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them;
+she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the
+eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of
+Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten
+love.</p>
+
+<p>Just so had he looked so long ago&mdash;so long!&mdash;in the deep woods at
+moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping
+waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.</p>
+
+<p>They had called him an outcast,&mdash;and lo!&mdash;she found him a god.</p>
+
+<p>She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,&mdash;wept
+with grief for the living lost forever,&mdash;wept with joy that the dead
+forever lived.</p>
+
+<p>Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them
+human things,&mdash;things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back
+and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain,
+rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for
+once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with
+her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain,
+and looked around her fearfully.</p>
+
+<p>She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as
+mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.</p>
+
+<p>As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body
+of a man.</p>
+
+<p>It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare;
+upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs
+were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the
+moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.</p>
+
+<p>In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a
+statue, in that passionless rest,&mdash;that dread repose.</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent
+forward and looked closer on his face.</p>
+
+<p>He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,&mdash;not as they
+were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and
+with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,&mdash;but
+dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath
+frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the
+burden of their sin and woe.</p>
+
+<p>She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,&mdash;sorrowful,
+because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had
+the shadow of mortality upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as
+though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and
+wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a
+divine, but a human form,&mdash;dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a
+man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love
+to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of
+their own faults and follies.</p>
+
+<p>Had the gods slain him&mdash;being a mortal&mdash;for his entrance there?</p>
+
+<p>Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.</p>
+
+<p>He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden,
+full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very
+strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and
+rugged faces of the populace around her.</p>
+
+<p>That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of
+that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest
+beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some
+murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its
+fall.</p>
+
+<p>"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she
+thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,&mdash;he,&mdash;only a man, and
+dead?"</p>
+
+<p>The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time
+or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies
+seem possible to her as truth.</p>
+
+<p>Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the
+immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an
+infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet,
+having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.</p>
+
+<p>She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she
+stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe,
+but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with
+the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and
+gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide
+of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the
+lily.</p>
+
+<p>A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved
+her,&mdash;for he was beautiful, and he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for
+the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he
+who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's
+face no more.</p>
+
+<p>The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the
+flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw
+nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence
+to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that
+dead man&mdash;perish."</p>
+
+<p>She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an
+irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the
+delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.</p>
+
+<p>She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods,
+if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned;
+whilst he who lay dead&mdash;though so still and so white, and so mute and so
+powerless,&mdash;he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring
+had killed him.</p>
+
+<p>"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,&mdash;I am nothing&mdash;nothing. Let
+me die as the Dust dies&mdash;what matter?"</p>
+
+<p>The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone
+through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.</p>
+
+<p>He alone heard. He&mdash;the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone
+remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods&mdash;for this
+man's sake&mdash;she chose.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her
+tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the
+form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the
+hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.</p>
+
+<p>He was dead still;&mdash;or so she thought;&mdash;she watched him with dim
+dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.</p>
+
+<p>She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the
+closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his
+heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had
+brought back to him.</p>
+
+<p>It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a
+stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a
+nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given
+back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the
+gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of
+love; but hers&mdash;hers&mdash;shared only with the greatness she had bought for
+him.</p>
+
+<p>Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart;
+she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster
+in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.</p>
+
+<p>"To die&mdash;of hunger&mdash;like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat,
+and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the
+stones.</p>
+
+<p>She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his
+cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of
+all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain,
+as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from
+altar fires of sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of
+her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.</p>
+
+<p>"To die&mdash;of hunger!"</p>
+
+<p>She muttered the phrase after him&mdash;shaken from her stupor by its gaunt
+and common truth.</p>
+
+<p>It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart
+rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in
+wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had
+killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had
+gathered there as to a festival to see him die.</p>
+
+<p>As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous
+odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has
+long fasted, almost unto death.</p>
+
+<p>She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon
+Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds
+of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against
+alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all
+that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had
+often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and
+wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad
+to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to
+quiet the gnawing of their entrails.</p>
+
+<p>She stood still beside him, and thought.</p>
+
+<p>All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes
+were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of
+the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head;
+this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the
+feebly beating heart;&mdash;these she saw as she would have seen the white
+outlines of a statue in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>He moved a little with a hollow sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"Bread&mdash;bread&mdash;bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"</p>
+
+<p>At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard
+life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the
+dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her
+poetic ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she
+had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for
+him&mdash;that was well&mdash;if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it?
+The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone,
+she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.</p>
+
+<p>In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread.
+It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in
+scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch;
+she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some
+jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.</p>
+
+<p>That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing
+towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched
+teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand
+gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood,
+which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and
+full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that
+hour drenched with water.</p>
+
+<p>She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air,
+the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the
+reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had
+seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of
+that fell disease.</p>
+
+<p>There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so
+much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever
+dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human
+hand&mdash;to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child&mdash;was always
+clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot
+of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged
+mercy or aid at any human hearth.</p>
+
+<p>She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such
+need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men,
+women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the
+land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work
+hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst
+multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to
+which appeal could in such straits be made.</p>
+
+<p>If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of
+it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of
+fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.</p>
+
+<p>What could she do? she pondered.</p>
+
+<p>Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she
+stood irresolute.</p>
+
+<p>To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft
+to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.</p>
+
+<p>In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.</p>
+
+<p>All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued
+with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most
+harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to
+her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood
+her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her
+continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to
+see the children and the maidens&mdash;those who held her accursed, and were
+themselves held so innocent and just&mdash;steal the ripe cherries from the
+stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls,
+pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie
+softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a
+soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at,
+despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless
+and her lips untouched.</p>
+
+<p>It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they,"
+when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on
+their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which
+she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have
+reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and
+her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone,
+though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with
+which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths
+of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all
+other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for
+sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never
+sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose
+face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to
+the thing which she abhorred.</p>
+
+<p>She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of
+passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens
+around her were haunted;&mdash;so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless
+arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and
+taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of
+their vengeful and indolent masters.</p>
+
+<p>She had been so proud!&mdash;and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this
+immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had
+worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her
+as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure
+she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.</p>
+
+<p>It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she
+had offered for his to the gods.</p>
+
+<p>She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn
+with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her
+straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the
+darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that
+burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.</p>
+
+<p>"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to
+swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in
+the delirium of his brain.</p>
+
+<p>The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung
+her to action as the spur stings a horse.</p>
+
+<p>She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open
+portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water;
+she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and
+climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched
+into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and
+the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by
+her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in
+water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot
+deep.</p>
+
+<p>She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue,
+of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the
+black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking
+strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran
+hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of
+was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her
+the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of
+lead,&mdash;the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the
+watch of the cruel gods.</p>
+
+<p>She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog
+does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the
+driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for
+even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts
+had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.</p>
+
+<p>As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard,
+stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom,
+with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as
+familiar by night as day.</p>
+
+<p>The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The
+shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma
+and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might
+save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.</p>
+
+<p>She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network
+of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her
+own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the
+body of the house.</p>
+
+<p>Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the
+staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses
+to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near
+at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.</p>
+
+<p>She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She
+did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done,
+that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor,
+she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue.
+She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she
+had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to
+execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred
+in her, blood and bone.</p>
+
+<p>Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly
+found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were
+wanted in the house were stored.</p>
+
+<p>The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly,
+but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It
+had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all
+communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper
+casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents;
+the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter
+in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats
+floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to
+sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint
+gray glimmer from the clearing skies.</p>
+
+<p>A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters
+fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the
+chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a
+twittering outcry.</p>
+
+<p>She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly
+forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket
+that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food
+as was to be found there&mdash;loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a
+flask of the richest wine&mdash;wine of the south, of the hue of the violet,
+sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.</p>
+
+<p>That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of
+fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square,
+and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and
+lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the
+agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.</p>
+
+<p>She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then
+threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the
+osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.</p>
+
+<p>She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.</p>
+
+<p>She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to
+walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets
+roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she
+felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her
+limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and
+unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the
+reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the
+darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were
+blowing with a sound like the sea.</p>
+
+<p>She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet,
+holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.</p>
+
+<p>Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow
+against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her.
+It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes
+as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the
+outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of
+the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the
+boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.</p>
+
+<p>The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays
+upon the path she followed.</p>
+
+<p>At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy;
+the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and
+gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little
+creek.</p>
+
+<p>She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.</p>
+
+<p>"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was
+the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who
+flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of
+their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her;
+it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the
+dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had
+avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in
+Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten
+figs for sweet.</p>
+
+<p>For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who
+cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres
+a nation for a throne.</p>
+
+<p>She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on
+through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load:&mdash;in Christ's name
+they would have seized her as a thief.</p>
+
+<p>The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight
+was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower,
+and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the
+basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below,
+then again followed them herself.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart thrilled as she entered.</p>
+
+<p>Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her
+absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with
+her, they had not raised him from the dead.</p>
+
+<p>"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet
+yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.</p>
+
+<p>She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on
+fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a
+little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop
+through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.</p>
+
+<p>The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a
+rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker
+movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his
+mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made
+nestless by the hurricane.</p>
+
+<p>He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without
+knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a
+strong shudder shook him.</p>
+
+<p>His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.</p>
+
+<p>"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice
+rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.</p>
+
+<p>"J'avais quelque chose là!" and with a sigh he fell back once more&mdash;his
+head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.</p>
+
+<p>Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with
+him&mdash;that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died
+like a dog, powerless to save them.</p>
+
+<p>The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath&mdash;the one
+bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp
+out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs&mdash;stayed on the
+blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its
+helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create&mdash;that
+once it had been clear to record&mdash;that once it had dreamed the dreams
+which save men from the life of the swine&mdash;that once it had told to the
+world the truth divested of lies,&mdash;and that none had seen, none had
+listened, none had believed.</p>
+
+<p>There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
+brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
+reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these
+have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent;
+like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a
+swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon
+ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all
+joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of
+the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
+theft of the parasite.</p>
+
+<p>She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
+reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
+but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
+agony.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor
+and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:</p>
+
+<p>"I am <i>yours</i>! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the
+light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of
+negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones
+that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on
+the winds? Shall I die so? I?&mdash;the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"</p>
+
+<p>Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the
+darkness over the expanse of the flood.</p>
+
+<p>The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and
+moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, awakened and afraid,
+came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation
+of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge
+from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of
+the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the
+granaries above.</p>
+
+<p>She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard
+was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the
+human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing
+eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the
+Lykegènés toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to
+grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.</p>
+
+<p>But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human
+form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half
+sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of
+the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the
+day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the
+beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.</p>
+
+<p>He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times
+of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious,
+words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament
+for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.</p>
+
+<p>After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less
+frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire,
+and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer
+time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he
+grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he
+sank to a deep sleep.</p>
+
+<p>The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed
+creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an
+instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in
+this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of
+Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and
+visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all
+thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act
+like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less
+dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that
+unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and
+unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.</p>
+
+<p>To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and
+he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as
+she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have
+found frozen in the woods of winter.</p>
+
+<p>His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture
+that gave him easiest rest.</p>
+
+<p>With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the
+lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the
+inaudible beating of his heart.</p>
+
+<p>Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like
+the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses
+and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from
+off her ear she was happy.</p>
+
+<p>She did not ask wherefore,&mdash;neither of herself or of the gods did she
+question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.</p>
+
+<p>She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he
+slept, and was content.</p>
+
+<p>So the hours passed.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of
+waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.</p>
+
+<p>Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen
+world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.</p>
+
+<p>He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as
+it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too
+great sweetness of a summer shower.</p>
+
+<p>It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted
+with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close
+in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been
+conscious;&mdash;under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill
+stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming
+of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly
+human.</p>
+
+<p>A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly
+from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.</p>
+
+<p>She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows
+it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and
+market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all
+aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious,
+thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and
+dared not, because her teeth were strong.</p>
+
+<p>She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as
+she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed
+amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and
+unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine
+back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.</p>
+
+<p>Now,&mdash;as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the
+hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun
+was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot
+shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.</p>
+
+<p>She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted
+above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the
+boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water,
+and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the
+shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her
+arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin
+and the curves of her shining shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as
+she was;&mdash;wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes,
+outcast and ashamed.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even
+as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in
+theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their
+water-world in tempest.</p>
+
+<p>She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more
+conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the
+earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those
+eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in
+abhorrence and in scorn;&mdash;and that he could have any other look, for
+her, she had no thought.</p>
+
+<p>She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any
+human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every
+tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in
+welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.</p>
+
+<p>For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;&mdash;that
+she had known when she had offered it.</p>
+
+<p>She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall,
+through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was
+flushed as with some great guilt.</p>
+
+<p>With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.</p>
+
+<p>With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy
+and shame.</p>
+
+<p>The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on
+her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the
+creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men
+had made her.</p>
+
+<p>At the casement, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon
+him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky
+and watery mists of the cold dawn.</p>
+
+<p>She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her
+flight.</p>
+
+<p>The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness
+and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.</p>
+
+<p>He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a
+fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like
+an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with
+water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with
+mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the
+half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him
+all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of
+honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms
+tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed,
+fair and free.</p>
+
+<p>But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened
+they had passed.</p>
+
+<p>Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she
+went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the
+sighing rushes.</p>
+
+<p>The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road
+was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the
+ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in
+any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the
+half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all
+the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but
+the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats
+went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the
+night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse
+had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.</p>
+
+<p>From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the
+fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its
+fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and
+with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.</p>
+
+<p>Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the
+wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns
+sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a
+sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath
+of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken
+primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.</p>
+
+<p>A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh
+moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin
+had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the
+wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill
+notes of woe.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine saw nothing.</p>
+
+<p>She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of
+long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or
+cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the
+place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any
+other thing than blows.</p>
+
+<p>As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it,
+though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in
+the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of
+honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion
+fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same
+she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he
+had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly;
+and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and
+thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or
+not.</p>
+
+<p>It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all
+creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her
+right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be
+beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.</p>
+
+<p>The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.</p>
+
+<p>Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he
+was weighing corn for the grinding.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.</p>
+
+<p>She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.</p>
+
+<p>He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the
+same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is the boat?&mdash;that is worth more than your body. And soul you
+have none."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head and looked upward.</p>
+
+<p>"I have lost the boat."</p>
+
+<p>She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she
+had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel,
+he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for
+many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes
+and the cheerless grassy ways.</p>
+
+<p>That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but
+this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from
+the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the
+confusion of the saints God.</p>
+
+<p>"Drifted where?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know&mdash;on the face of the flood,&mdash;with the tide."</p>
+
+<p>"You had left it loose."</p>
+
+<p>"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It
+went adrift."</p>
+
+<p>"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"</p>
+
+<p>"You can."</p>
+
+<p>"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat&mdash;find it above
+or below water&mdash;or to the town prison you go as a thief."</p>
+
+<p>The word smote her with a sudden pang.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in
+silence at his bidding.</p>
+
+<p>In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets,
+she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely
+less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon
+the cross worked no miracles for her;&mdash;a child of sin.</p>
+
+<p>For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to
+drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink
+upon the road. She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in
+their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might
+have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the
+few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.</p>
+
+<p>She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she
+could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do
+for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze,
+she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being
+blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and
+fast as in a net.</p>
+
+<p>At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the
+entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her
+homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against
+the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar,
+away to the northward, in the full sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Yprès,
+brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their
+boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy
+breaths of charity.</p>
+
+<p>She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and
+delving in the red and chilly day.</p>
+
+<p>She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river
+weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.</p>
+
+<p>"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was
+faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for
+once was bowed.</p>
+
+<p>He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at
+his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed
+such weakness neither in his eye nor words.</p>
+
+<p>"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will
+spare you half the stripes:&mdash;strip."</p>
+
+<p>Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow
+of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough
+garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness,
+drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.</p>
+
+<p>"I am guilty&mdash;this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:&mdash;she was
+thinking of her theft.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager
+and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with
+fervent and rapturous oratory.</p>
+
+<p>It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter
+world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding
+leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning
+the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to
+blossom.</p>
+
+<p>The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of
+fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the
+mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty
+subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a
+manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a
+mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great
+sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed
+them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it
+stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself,
+but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic
+and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land,
+raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and
+who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned
+and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a
+genius heaven-sent.</p>
+
+<p>When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the
+mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any
+sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way
+beautiful, had come upon him.</p>
+
+<p>He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations;
+and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never
+assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never
+tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village;
+mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the
+dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which
+thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times,
+the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.</p>
+
+<p>He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and
+very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on
+the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its
+sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under
+the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.</p>
+
+<p>Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast
+green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye
+could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and
+foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the
+force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to
+princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great
+cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness
+and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of
+men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the
+nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high
+endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And
+his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them,
+telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had
+gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of
+the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening
+with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the
+purple pines:</p>
+
+<p>"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among
+the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.</p>
+
+<p>"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
+people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves,
+'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
+or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for
+him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
+dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
+were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
+he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended upon him as
+wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and
+with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept
+it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble
+palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart
+was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury,
+with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to
+gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in
+other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury
+overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in
+the short space of a single summer-day.</p>
+
+<p>"But it was bought with a price.</p>
+
+<p>"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
+path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
+called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words
+across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
+metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the
+red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
+pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at
+eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here
+at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his
+best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into
+his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met
+his own.</p>
+
+<p>"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
+agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
+was wealth.</p>
+
+<p>"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
+barter its life away.</p>
+
+<p>"Look you,&mdash;this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish,
+even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
+own fulfilled desire.</p>
+
+<p>"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
+men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.</p>
+
+<p>"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's lust
+of gain:&mdash;when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of
+wood and iron:&mdash;when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
+falls:&mdash;when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with
+poison:&mdash;when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
+green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:&mdash;when every
+gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed,
+because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:&mdash;when the earth is one
+vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field,
+nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
+know no music but the roar of the furnace:&mdash;when the old sweet silence
+of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
+old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough,
+and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and
+cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead,
+and remembered of no man:&mdash;then the world, like the Eastern king, will
+perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
+hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:&mdash;gold that
+the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
+but mocks them horribly:&mdash;gold for which their fathers sold peace and
+health, holiness and liberty:&mdash;gold that is one vast grave."</p>
+
+<p>His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the
+sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on the
+shore.</p>
+
+<p>The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had
+spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were the words of truth.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang, clear,
+scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of youth:</p>
+
+<p>"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or bird, or
+rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and mass my
+armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered? You are
+mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you know
+not, and that never has smiled upon you."</p>
+
+<p>The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his hand; he
+was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that curled
+loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like
+steel in their scorn.</p>
+
+<p>The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which
+blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash
+doubter from that sacred audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their
+hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it thee, Arslàn? Dost thou praise gold?&mdash;I thought thou hadst
+greater gods."</p>
+
+<p>The boy hung his head and his face flushed.</p>
+
+<p>"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And without power what is
+life?"</p>
+
+<p>And he went on his way out from the people, with the dead bird, which he
+had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mysteries of
+its silvery hues.</p>
+
+<p>The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured. "For there is
+that in him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it, if he
+would."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>And the words of the Preacher had come true; so true that the boy Arslàn
+grown to manhood, had dreamed of fame, and following the genius in him,
+and having failed to force the world to faith in him, had dropped down
+dying on a cold hearth, for sheer lack of bread, under the eyes of the
+gods.</p>
+
+<p>It had long been day when he awoke.</p>
+
+<p>The wood smouldered, still warming the stone chamber. The owls that
+nested in the ceiling of the hall were beating their wings impatiently
+against the closed casements, blind with the light and unable to return
+to their haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside him on the
+floor; the fire had scared the rats from theft.</p>
+
+<p>He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate and drank with the
+avidity of long fast. Then he stared around him blankly, blinded like
+the owls.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him that he had been dead; and had risen from the grave.</p>
+
+<p>"It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space," he muttered
+dully.</p>
+
+<p>His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weariness. He did not
+reason. He only felt.</p>
+
+<p>His mind was a blank.</p>
+
+<p>Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered
+that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, endured much
+torment of the body, had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness.
+This was all he could recall.</p>
+
+<p>He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of
+brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked
+at the gray closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There
+was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood
+and the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs to render the
+place different from what it had been when he last had seen it.</p>
+
+<p>He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had
+suffered, and must have slept.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to
+him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold
+and hunger; that some one must have seen and succored his necessity; and
+that the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been
+the food of alms.</p>
+
+<p>His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought stole on him.</p>
+
+<p>To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking
+aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in
+all the vigor of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be
+saved by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the
+travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be called back
+to life by aid that was degradation!</p>
+
+<p>He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes
+must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent
+over him in his misery. Some other human form must have been near his in
+this hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have
+been; he would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in
+its swamp or a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him
+tenfold preferable to a life restored to him by such a means as this.</p>
+
+<p>Death before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal may be great; but
+life paved by alms is a failure, and a failure forever inglorious.</p>
+
+<p>So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed with him the
+benefit.</p>
+
+<p>"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul against those
+unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation.
+"Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was
+passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"</p>
+
+<p>And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only
+birthright&mdash;freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would soon
+have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his
+wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some miser
+at prayers, for a bag of gold&mdash;rather crime than the debt of a beggar.</p>
+
+<p>So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced
+humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal
+craving, he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad
+only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against
+this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease and
+ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes in
+his teeth so long as his life should last.</p>
+
+<p>He arose slowly and staggered to the casement.</p>
+
+<p>He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so
+long desired. He knew that he had been starving long&mdash;how long? Long
+enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively
+he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine cask,
+the wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life;
+they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.</p>
+
+<p>That was his only thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon
+the rising day&mdash;a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness,
+after the deluge of the rains.</p>
+
+<p>The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed
+over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists floated
+before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave back, as
+in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries, and
+the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.</p>
+
+<p>On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to
+drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes, the
+great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pursuing
+their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in the
+twilight of the damp gray vapor; a world half seen, half shrouded,
+lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden
+powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its visions
+of the future.</p>
+
+<p>"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled wearily as he
+said it.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague light; in
+that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met heaven.</p>
+
+<p>Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of
+moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It
+was beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no
+sound except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor,
+whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery
+air; this colorless transparent exhalation, breathing up from the land
+to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every
+common and familiar form became transfigured.</p>
+
+<p>It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely
+by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.</p>
+
+<p>Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and
+things full of anguish, had their being:&mdash;the cattle in the
+slaughter-houses; the drunkard in the hovels; disease and debauch and
+famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the
+hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the
+inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent,
+cramped, and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured,
+forever blameless, yet forever accursed;&mdash;all these were there beneath
+that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender
+shafts of spires and the chimes of half-heard bells.</p>
+
+<p>He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the
+vapors shifted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a
+disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and casement answered
+casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved
+daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at
+their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went
+forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Then he turned away.</p>
+
+<p>The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven
+out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple
+truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in
+his necessity and succored.</p>
+
+<p>He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the
+refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his
+shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.</p>
+
+<p>He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labor, this
+abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being
+derided for his pains, while other men prostituted their powers to base
+use and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and applause; he had
+grown tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew
+them not when it beheld them.</p>
+
+<p>He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had
+passion, and had manhood. Tired&mdash;utterly, because he was destitute of
+all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any worth." It does
+not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be lying dying in old
+age to know thus much in all truth and all bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart, as he turned
+aside from the risen sun.</p>
+
+<p>He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of
+existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by
+death ere we can set it straight.</p>
+
+<p>He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling
+greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been
+fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had
+been never reached.</p>
+
+<p>As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream that rushed
+beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the opposite wall, where the
+white shapes of his cartoons were caught by the awakening sun.</p>
+
+<p>The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
+at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
+yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.</p>
+
+<p>Among them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its
+full radiance.</p>
+
+<p>This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic
+symmetrical supple form of a man who was also a god.</p>
+
+<p>In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
+divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
+that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
+tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
+corn-mill he labored, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that
+toiled beside him.</p>
+
+<p>For it was the great Apollo in Pheræ.</p>
+
+<p>The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
+with murder; the beauty which had the light and luster of the sun had
+been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
+earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
+of Zeus.</p>
+
+<p>He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
+with fruitfulness and gladness,&mdash;he whose prophetic sight beheld all
+things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
+doom of all unspent ages,&mdash;he, the Far-Striking King, labored here
+beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.</p>
+
+<p>In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io pæan sounded still.</p>
+
+<p>Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
+sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
+Lètô's son.</p>
+
+<p>The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of
+Delphinios.</p>
+
+<p>At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
+breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
+still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him
+wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding
+from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly
+to bear his yoke in Thessaly.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his
+bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow
+mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen
+eyes, even as though he cried:</p>
+
+<p>"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
+me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and
+the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell&mdash;for a melody not even
+thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine
+empire to me! Will human ears give heed to thy song, now thy scepter has
+passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision
+foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit
+thee now?"</p>
+
+<p>Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
+of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
+and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pheræ.</p>
+
+<p>For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
+the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
+to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
+Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds,
+and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
+no ear, dully mortal, can hear.</p>
+
+<p>And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
+calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
+and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslàn buried
+his face in his hands and wept.</p>
+
+<p>He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
+chained god in Pheræ bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
+carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
+mill to grind for bread.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK IV.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by
+the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds;
+dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the
+bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other
+end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which
+the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in
+the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of
+the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster above a sea of
+phosphorescent fire; those were Arslàn's earliest memories&mdash;those had
+made him what he was.</p>
+
+<p>In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a
+few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with
+torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed
+by more than a day's journey from any other of the habitations of men.</p>
+
+<p>There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely
+springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the
+white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and
+glorious summers, when the children's eyes saw the elves kiss the roses,
+and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair
+hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the
+long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all
+things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the
+wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed
+over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood
+fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told
+strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep,
+prayed God to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen
+in the snow.</p>
+
+<p>In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of
+stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there
+was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to
+the church. It was the house of the pastor.</p>
+
+<p>The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of
+his life,&mdash;save a few that he had passed in a town as a student,&mdash;and he
+had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than
+this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of
+tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open
+weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his
+herb-garden, and his few sheep.</p>
+
+<p>On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself
+believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the
+young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he
+was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he
+loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to
+torture the innocent.</p>
+
+<p>It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like
+music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own
+blue skies on a summer night.</p>
+
+<p>She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the
+old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her
+with an intense power; she desired passionately without knowing what she
+desired.</p>
+
+<p>The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls'
+garland of alpine flowers, the youths' singing in the brief rose
+twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep
+midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old
+Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to
+her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly;
+beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one
+day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her,
+and she went&mdash;whither?</p>
+
+<p>They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their
+mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a
+prison. They could not tell.</p>
+
+<p>They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did
+not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.</p>
+
+<p>After awhile they heard of her.</p>
+
+<p>She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud,
+she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice
+which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the
+nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief
+words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever
+ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon&mdash;pardon
+for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.</p>
+
+<p>The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the
+heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself;
+but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does
+not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was
+a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the
+old man was left alone.</p>
+
+<p>The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice,
+severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the
+letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he
+chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between
+them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking
+up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing
+with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the
+red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain
+grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing
+down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling
+the maidens to the dance.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining
+above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with
+the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a
+lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a
+half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of
+the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell
+at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned
+she had given birth to a male child and was dead.</p>
+
+<p>Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury,
+malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her
+even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement,
+she had no strength.</p>
+
+<p>She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no
+name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with
+her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a
+mask of marble, the old pastor knew little&mdash;nothing&mdash;of what her life
+through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a
+word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had
+triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw.
+Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had
+lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been
+eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she
+had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world
+to be able to learn.</p>
+
+<p>That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native
+mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he
+knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.</p>
+
+<p>In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that
+strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the
+crown of them nor the root.</p>
+
+<p>The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and
+stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom
+their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the multitude: and
+who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled
+fearlessly at the noonday sun.</p>
+
+<p>The child had his mother's Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble
+statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his
+free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide,
+wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection.
+The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad
+was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained
+their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was
+never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke
+with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them
+extraordinary in one so young.</p>
+
+<p>But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged
+with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and
+braced him with a scholar's lore and by a mountaineer's exposure; so
+that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken
+old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his
+age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to
+guide it justly.</p>
+
+<p>The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the
+spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape
+the dire perils of that world in which his mother's life had been caught
+and consumed like a moth's in flame. But Arslàn's eyes looked ever
+across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother's;
+and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was
+silent.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, he&mdash;who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of
+pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and
+lindens,&mdash;he had the gift of art in him.</p>
+
+<p>He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and
+unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of
+his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he
+drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn
+granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at
+liberty for his usage.</p>
+
+<p>When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little.
+"I will never leave the old man," he made answer; and he kept his word.
+Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply,
+after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were passed in the open
+air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst
+the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely
+forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or
+away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great
+arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the shore
+as a panther its prey.</p>
+
+<p>On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his
+mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life
+of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with
+the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the
+arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circumstance thus
+held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full
+shape and full stature.</p>
+
+<p>Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the
+patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to
+be lost again.</p>
+
+<p>In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's
+house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a
+mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers
+withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above
+their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there
+were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and
+the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or
+fuel, or any ray of light.</p>
+
+<p>The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by
+in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising
+God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his
+strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the
+dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day
+had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and
+still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and
+recompensed his service with agony.</p>
+
+<p>For two more days and nights Arslàn remained in his living tomb,
+enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his
+hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without
+companionship.</p>
+
+<p>On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had
+labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the
+mountains, seeking a new world.</p>
+
+<p>His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it
+save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall
+stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it
+had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried
+freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he
+went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's
+between the hills.</p>
+
+<p>He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of
+triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of
+old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs,
+had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves
+and in the teeth of an adverse wind.</p>
+
+<p>He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless;
+he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those
+still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest
+possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm
+and cattle to Arslàn; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and
+vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslàn, when he
+became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he
+went without care for the future on this score into the world of men;
+his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper
+compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism;
+his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but
+half savage in its intensity.</p>
+
+<p>From that spring, when he had passed away from his birthplace as the
+winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain
+flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs,
+until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before
+the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and
+all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.</p>
+
+<p>Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds,
+and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his
+country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were
+in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure&mdash;as yet.</p>
+
+<p>In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme
+north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with
+Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their
+miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw;&mdash;the
+pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white,
+snow-world, the red moon fantastic and horrible in a sky of steel, the
+horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of
+the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had passed many
+seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal
+desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has
+either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often
+weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its
+inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men's wants and
+weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the
+works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the
+voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything
+he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill,
+and being for the other half too sensual.</p>
+
+<p>The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height
+and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not
+one man in a million knew his name.</p>
+
+<p>During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an
+undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity
+in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it
+requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath
+the sun; he had studied the passions in all their deformities, as well
+as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in
+pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries,
+he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned
+back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight
+into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare
+himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his
+brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held
+needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling
+beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore
+of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors
+of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and
+purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl's cheek, the
+rottenness of corruption on a dead man's limbs, the hellish tint of a
+brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he
+studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save
+for one end,&mdash;knowledge and art.</p>
+
+<p>So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that it seemed to have
+left him without other passions; even as the surgeon dissects the fair
+lifeless body of some woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex,
+only intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, which he
+seeks therein, so did he study the physical beauty of women and their
+mortal corruption, without other memories than those of art. He would
+see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a goddess,
+and would think only to himself,&mdash;"How shall I render this so that on my
+canvas it shall live once more?"</p>
+
+<p>One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man was stabbed,&mdash;a
+young Maronite,&mdash;who lay dying in the roadway, without sign or sound,
+whilst his assassins fled; the silver Syrian moon shining full on his
+white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted
+on the dagger he had been spared no time to use; a famished street dog
+smelling at his blood. Arslàn, passing through the city, saw and paused
+beside him; stood still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched
+figure; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, rigid face,
+the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the
+wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, following on his steps,
+joined him a little later, and started from his side in horror.</p>
+
+<p>"My God! what do you do there?" he cried. "Do you not see?&mdash;the man is
+dying."</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn looked up&mdash;"I had not thought of that," he answered.</p>
+
+<p>It was thus always with him.</p>
+
+<p>He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to
+women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him,
+and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they
+had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of
+noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike fiercely what comes
+before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.</p>
+
+<p>But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet
+recompensed him nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
+they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.</p>
+
+<p>His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
+impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
+forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
+acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
+and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
+were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world,
+which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every
+art, would have none of them.</p>
+
+<p>So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts
+been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;&mdash;travel,
+study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends,
+utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in
+peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their
+common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though
+it had appeared inexhaustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors
+also were costly, and they brought him no return.</p>
+
+<p>The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the
+world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to
+find himself face to face with beggary.</p>
+
+<p>His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.</p>
+
+<p>All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other
+painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations
+themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his
+compeers and the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him the
+old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain;
+and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own
+cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike
+obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and
+they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it
+without remorse, and even with contentment.</p>
+
+<p>He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he
+possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute,
+if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it
+cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused
+utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty
+to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he
+refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.</p>
+
+<p>"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always
+hooted against him.</p>
+
+<p>It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in
+its unwilling ears.</p>
+
+<p>So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seashores came to
+pass; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he
+perished for want of bread.</p>
+
+<p>For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which
+he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell
+through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he
+disputed with the rats.</p>
+
+<p>The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized
+without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner
+than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for
+many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and
+had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that
+pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in
+which he dwelt.</p>
+
+<p>He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort,
+because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in
+a contemptuous despair.</p>
+
+<p>He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing
+pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not
+have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these
+worse than itself.</p>
+
+<p>There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above;
+but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men
+to fetch some from the store, Arslàn let the boat be moored against the
+wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current,
+without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"</p>
+
+<p>And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst
+the noble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his
+hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any
+other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest
+days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights
+glow above the winter seas.</p>
+
+<p>Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion&mdash;all
+that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
+and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.</p>
+
+<p>It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
+its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
+it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
+creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
+existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
+merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
+was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
+was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
+for immortality:&mdash;that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
+great minds.</p>
+
+<p>Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
+desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the
+food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
+give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
+mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
+joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
+bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
+soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
+discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circumstance; he did his
+best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the
+child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
+refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
+the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
+ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as
+her own.</p>
+
+<p>Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his
+veins, the old passion, the old worship, returned to him.</p>
+
+<p>The momentary weakness which had assailed him passed away. He shook
+himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he
+had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to
+the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous
+still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have
+cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which
+he saw must surely have been his own.</p>
+
+<p>Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for
+several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to
+gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather
+the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for
+many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame
+which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had
+enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be
+charity!</p>
+
+<p>Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the
+white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and
+smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.</p>
+
+<p>His was the old old story;&mdash;the rod of wealth bartered for the empty
+shell that gave forth music.</p>
+
+<p>Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.</p>
+
+<p>Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive god
+who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the
+mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind;
+Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice
+and cry to him:&mdash;"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the
+spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear&mdash;the
+melody of gold!"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn turned from the great cartoon of the gods in Pheræ, and went out
+into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent
+stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves
+and cleared his brain.</p>
+
+<p>When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its
+gods upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since
+life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon
+his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not
+accept the labor of his brain.</p>
+
+<p>Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body
+and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion
+which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance.
+In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud
+to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But
+now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the
+foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like
+a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his
+daily bread.</p>
+
+<p>So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.</p>
+
+<p>The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had
+come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full
+a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad
+slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads,
+these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to
+all that his life had known.</p>
+
+<p>These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed
+with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight
+slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that
+stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,&mdash;all these had had a certain
+charm for him.</p>
+
+<p>He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible
+to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and
+unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands
+and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further
+effort.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted
+innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and
+autumnal landscapes. And of late&mdash;through the bitter winter&mdash;of late it
+had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common
+ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead
+brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside
+poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the
+ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.</p>
+
+<p>He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for
+any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and
+to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this
+world, and so he found it.</p>
+
+<p>They repulsed him everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>They had their own people in plenty, they had their sturdy, tough,
+weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm,
+for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their
+field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of
+arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as
+the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their
+tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that
+lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.</p>
+
+<p>They would have none of him.</p>
+
+<p>"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have
+none of him.</p>
+
+<p>He had an evil name with them.</p>
+
+<p>They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been
+seen since he had come to the granary by the river.</p>
+
+<p>Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the
+fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son;
+the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with
+carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead&mdash;dead like the
+flowers that were still among his curls.</p>
+
+<p>Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton,
+half a singer and half a gypsy&mdash;handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous:
+the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden
+bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a
+fantoccini player who accompanied her.</p>
+
+<p>Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a
+rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier
+of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that
+date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined
+until it died.</p>
+
+<p>The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills
+of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to
+the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had
+arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds;
+all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circumstance.
+But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry
+always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it
+became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living
+thing should be painted by the artist Arslàn would assuredly never
+survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.</p>
+
+<p>In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman,
+nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage
+of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long
+repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.</p>
+
+<p>At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early
+habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he
+would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood,
+or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one
+with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and
+bitter there as gall.</p>
+
+<p>He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn
+had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from
+the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on
+the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.</p>
+
+<p>The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that
+reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only
+breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a
+sudden passion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the
+clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were
+it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than
+here.</p>
+
+<p>He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the
+strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun
+as it leapt at dawn from the waters.</p>
+
+<p>The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests
+filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean
+ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies,
+the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these
+came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by
+him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for
+their freedom.</p>
+
+<p>As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and looked out upon
+the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a
+flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose
+with a hiss from the sedges.</p>
+
+<p>The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who
+steered by a string wound round her foot.</p>
+
+<p>She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her
+bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke;
+her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he
+saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of
+the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine
+bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of
+the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their
+color struck him with a sudden surprise.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers,
+treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of
+countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen
+water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such
+limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky,
+upon the desert's edge. But here!&mdash;a face of Asia among the cornlands of
+Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with
+wonder.</p>
+
+<p>The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving
+the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of
+the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the
+clouds of river-mist.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a skiff full of corn
+down a sluggish stream. There was nothing to tell him that he was
+looking upon the savior of his body from the thralls of death; if there
+had been,&mdash;in his mood then,&mdash;he would have cursed her.</p>
+
+<p>The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a flock of
+water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted at some floating kernels
+of wheat that had fallen over the vessel's side; they fought and hissed,
+and flapped and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder; a large
+rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their exultation, and seized
+their leader and bore him struggling and beating the air with
+blood-stained wings away to a hole in the bank; a mongrel dog, prowling
+on the shore, hearing the wild duck's cries, splashed into the sedges,
+and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold sharp fangs, and
+bore both rat and bird, bleeding and dying, to the land; the owner of
+the mongrel, a peasant, making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying
+fields, snatched the duck from the dog to bear it home for his own
+eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for having ventured to
+stray without leave and to do him service without permission. "The
+dulcet harmony of the world's benignant law," thought Arslàn, as he
+turned aside to enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling.
+"To live one must slaughter&mdash;what life can I take?"</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil of the vapor, and
+glowed through the fog.</p>
+
+<p>The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the ruddy haze, and was
+visible; the water around it, like a lake of flame, the white steam
+above it like the smoke of a sacrifice fire.</p>
+
+<p>Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once more, all light
+faded, and the day was dead.</p>
+
+<p>He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along the reedy shore
+towards his dreary home. He wondered dully why his life would not end:
+since the world would have none of him, neither the work of his brain
+nor the work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it.</p>
+
+<p>He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, among the reeds,
+and let it flow over his face and breast, and kiss him softly and coldly
+into the sleep of death. He had desired this many times; what held him
+back from its indulgence was not "the child within us that fears death,"
+of which Plato speaks; he had no such misgiving in him, and he believed
+death to be a simple rupture and end of all things, such as any man had
+right to seek and summon for himself; it was rather that the passion of
+his art was too strong in him, that the power to create was too intense
+in him, so that he could not willingly consign the forces and the
+fantasies of his brain to that assimilation to which he would, without
+thought or pause, have flung his body.</p>
+
+<p>As he entered the haunted hall which served him as his painting-room, he
+saw a fresh fire of logs upon the hearth; whose leaping flames lighted
+the place with cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food,
+sufficient to last several days, and a brass flagon filled with wine.</p>
+
+<p>A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. It was less
+surprise at the fact, for his senses told him that it was the work of
+some charity which chose to hide itself, than it was wonder as to who,
+in this strange land, where none would even let him earn his daily
+bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his necessities thus. And
+with this there arose the same intolerant bitterness of the degradation
+of alms, the same ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to class
+him among beggars, which had moved him when he had awakened with the
+dawn.</p>
+
+<p>He felt neither tenderness nor gratitude, he was only conscious of
+humiliation.</p>
+
+<p>There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to
+sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his
+callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find
+themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their
+forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But
+it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which,
+wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.</p>
+
+<p>There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was
+the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had
+drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have
+borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been
+indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the
+art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.</p>
+
+<p>He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
+world would cherish.</p>
+
+<p>Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to
+give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene
+that was to guard the Piræus in eternal liberty has long been leveled
+with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame,
+still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"</p>
+
+<p>It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler
+emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This
+food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet&mdash;by means of
+this sheer bodily subsistence&mdash;it would be possible for him to keep
+alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him
+to compel his fame from men.</p>
+
+<p>He stood before the Phoebus in Pheræ, thinking; it stung him with a
+bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden&mdash;this debt which
+came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And
+yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which
+thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into
+his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.</p>
+
+<p>He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and
+ate and drank of the red wine:&mdash;he did not thank God or man as he broke
+his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his
+heart:</p>
+
+<p>"Since I must live, I will triumph."</p>
+
+<p>And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the
+generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well
+how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their
+bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe,
+for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Hermes&mdash;Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise&mdash;knew how men's oaths were
+kept.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered that he had been
+robbed&mdash;robbed more than once: he swore and raved and tore his hair for
+loss of a little bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He did
+not suspect his granddaughter; accusing her perpetually of sins of which
+she was innocent, he did not once associate her in thought with the one
+offense which she had committed. He thought that the window of his
+storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made no doubt that his
+spoiler was some vagabond from one of the river barges. Through such
+tramps his henhouse and his apple-lofts had often previously been
+invaded.</p>
+
+<p>She heard his lamentations and imprecations in unbroken silence; he did
+not question her; and without a lie she was able to keep her secret.</p>
+
+<p>In her own sight she had done a foul thing&mdash;a thing that her own hunger
+had never induced her to do. She did not seek to reconcile herself to
+her action by any reflection that she had only taken what she had really
+earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind was not
+sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a mould to be capable
+of the deft plea of a sophistry. She could dare the thing; and do it,
+and hold her peace about it, though she should be scourged to speak; but
+she could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself; for this she had
+neither the cunning nor the cowardice.</p>
+
+<p>Why had she done it?&mdash;done for a stranger what no pressure of need had
+made her do for her own wants? She did not ask herself; she followed her
+instinct. He allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was like
+nothing else her eyes had ever seen; and she was drawn by an
+irresistible attraction to this life which she had bought at the price
+of her own from the gods. Yet stronger even than this sudden human
+passion which had entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had
+ransomed from his death should he know his debt to her.</p>
+
+<p>Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any one on this thing
+which she had done. Silence was natural to her; she spoke so rarely,
+that many in the province believed her to be dumb; no sympathy had ever
+been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the passions that burned
+latent in her veins, or the tenderness that trembled stifled in her
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water-tower undetected,
+both by the man whom she robbed, and the man whom she succored. Thrice
+again did she find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner's
+absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the cold blank
+hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma note the diminution of his
+stores, and burnish afresh his old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half
+the night on his dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of
+poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he placed, with a
+cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the eyes of his spoilers.</p>
+
+<p>But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this trap set, and was
+aware of it.</p>
+
+<p>In a week or two the need for these acts which she hated ceased. She
+learned that the stranger for whom she thus risked her body and soul,
+had found a boatman's work upon the water, which, although a toil rough
+and rude, and but poorly paid, still sufficed to give him bread. Though
+she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a time, that as she went
+through the meadows and hedge-rows she was glad to crush in her teeth
+the tender shoots of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she
+never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy crust thrown out to
+be eaten by the poultry.</p>
+
+<p>Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the
+saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the
+poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever
+flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the
+earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their
+glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in
+death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.</p>
+
+<p>For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise God.</p>
+
+<p>She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.</p>
+
+<p>"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished,"
+she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches
+turned upward in death on the turf.</p>
+
+<p>She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.</p>
+
+<p>The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of
+the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice.
+Their God was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed
+the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.</p>
+
+<p>"How shall a God be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute
+young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong passion for justice,
+a strong instinct towards what was righteous.</p>
+
+<p>As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer
+instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through
+crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until
+they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature
+strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards
+those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no
+matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even
+like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its
+leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke
+and fetid odors of a city.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as
+vaguely sought it.</p>
+
+<p>With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town,
+fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as
+this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each passage up and down the
+river, she passed by the dwelling of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her;
+she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly
+on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when
+she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes
+wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes
+that were shadowed forth upon the walls.</p>
+
+<p>The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and
+took him often leagues away&mdash;simple hardy toil, among fishers and
+canal-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his
+nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his
+fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more
+splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he
+labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.</p>
+
+<p>"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the
+gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of
+the palace can ever beget.</p>
+
+<p>Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere
+his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works
+conceived.</p>
+
+<p>The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the flesh, the
+deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the
+indolences,&mdash;all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go
+to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them;
+but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.</p>
+
+<p>The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and
+the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the
+aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen
+pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the
+caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that
+glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,&mdash;the grass holds
+and feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the
+roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full
+odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.</p>
+
+<p>Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
+its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
+through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
+poison&mdash;that one deathless serpent which is Memory.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies,
+and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect
+utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was
+absolute,&mdash;when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife
+with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,&mdash;when he kept his body
+alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the
+fields,&mdash;when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,&mdash;when
+only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking
+his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,&mdash;when it
+seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous
+was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull
+bleaching white on the sand.</p>
+
+<p>Yet he had never done greater things,&mdash;never in the long years through
+which he had pursued and studied art.</p>
+
+<p>With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the
+tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and
+simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and
+color the imaginations of his brain.</p>
+
+<p>And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of
+Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when
+she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing,
+scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute
+and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness
+her brief youth had ever known.</p>
+
+<p>Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord,
+there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the
+imaginative senses latent in her,&mdash;enough of the old mediæval fancy, of
+the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a
+consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.</p>
+
+<p>Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of
+a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in
+which she dwelt.</p>
+
+<p>Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,&mdash;where the
+common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a
+thousand fashions,&mdash;where the graceful and the grotesque and the
+terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite,
+confusion,&mdash;where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the
+jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking
+sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on
+which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some
+trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead hand,&mdash;where all these
+were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any
+poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely
+ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic
+incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that
+intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.</p>
+
+<p>Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of
+forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore
+them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds
+of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude,
+lying waste, bearing no harvest.</p>
+
+<p>Of these visits Arslàn himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild
+temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.</p>
+
+<p>She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole
+in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the
+stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals,
+which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.</p>
+
+<p>And this secret&mdash;in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times
+blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face
+and frame&mdash;changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless,
+passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into
+desires.</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she
+became human.</p>
+
+<p>All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows
+stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only
+with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days
+of his leisure.</p>
+
+<p>Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and
+stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and
+watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of
+the oil-lamp burning behind him.</p>
+
+<p>She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes
+created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget
+worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a
+little dust.</p>
+
+<p>The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he
+wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found
+him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like
+nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command
+like this, yet perish for a crust!&mdash;that fusion of omnipotence and
+powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad
+strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.</p>
+
+<p>She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed
+spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took
+no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.</p>
+
+<p>She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take
+form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or
+on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike
+such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile,
+the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the
+temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command,
+and beneath his touch.</p>
+
+<p>She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon
+him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him;
+and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his
+generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant
+failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness
+which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful
+service, and would not let him do as other men did&mdash;tell the world lies,
+and take its payment out in gold.</p>
+
+<p>Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it
+were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a
+trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.</p>
+
+<p>But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human
+sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter
+unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at
+him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of
+his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often
+past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like
+the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to
+his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.</p>
+
+<p>She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young
+and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this
+love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and
+savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of
+the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his
+easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she
+knew not why, into the deepest shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself
+atonement for her fault&mdash;the fault through which those tender little
+bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the
+year.</p>
+
+<p>She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied
+herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set
+aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those
+learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his
+revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she
+toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had
+taken.</p>
+
+<p>Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil
+origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute;
+she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands
+pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.</p>
+
+<p>So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath
+of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the
+boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses&mdash;a
+spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the
+past winter.</p>
+
+<p>It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the
+other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire,
+that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast
+fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.</p>
+
+<p>The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
+the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.</p>
+
+<p>It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.</p>
+
+<p>Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
+women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
+their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
+their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
+knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
+boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of
+toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all
+together in competition but in amity.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
+a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a
+soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom
+amidst tufts of thyme.</p>
+
+<p>The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
+copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging
+the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.</p>
+
+<p>The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses
+or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of
+the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their
+baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of
+their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they
+had garnered through all the winter.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the
+wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest,
+of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of
+the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of
+the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly
+budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of
+velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of
+lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the
+homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.</p>
+
+<p>It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the
+music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill
+paddles.</p>
+
+<p>In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a
+favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of
+large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her
+pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and
+a little ruddy wild strawberry.</p>
+
+<p>Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood
+surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms
+a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping
+as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof
+above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she passed with her
+wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment
+the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I
+saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have
+gone this very night to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"Thou art not alone, Edmée," groaned an old woman, tottering from her
+egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up
+in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen&mdash;the best sitter I
+have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noël&mdash;just cackled
+and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog
+rushed in and killed the blessed bird&mdash;killed her in her basket! A great
+yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again
+into the earth, like lightning."</p>
+
+<p>"Not worse than she did to my precious Rémy," said a tanner's wife, who
+drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen,
+querulous child.</p>
+
+<p>"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the
+days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh
+lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.</p>
+
+<p>"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three
+Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a
+living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like
+nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's
+curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce
+have known him. You remember?"</p>
+
+<p>"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken
+almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by
+her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would
+never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"</p>
+
+<p>"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little
+Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her
+eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."</p>
+
+<p>"A <i>jettatrice</i> ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of
+Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.</p>
+
+<p>"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not
+for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with
+which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed
+sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my
+son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she
+went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood
+from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken
+carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he
+slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:&mdash;she is a witch; there is no
+question but she is a witch."</p>
+
+<p>"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the
+youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.</p>
+
+<p>"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time,
+and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is
+blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of
+water.</p>
+
+<p>"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from
+me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron
+instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit
+the tongue of a quivering starling.</p>
+
+<p>"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried
+a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.</p>
+
+<p>"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman
+who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping
+green herbs together for salads.</p>
+
+<p>And all the while the girl Edmée clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over
+it.</p>
+
+<p>"If she were only here," swore Edmée's lover, under his breath.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.</p>
+
+<p>She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for
+one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the
+flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.</p>
+
+<p>Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither
+hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free,
+firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.</p>
+
+<p>She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a
+little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But
+the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of
+her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added
+impulse to their rage.</p>
+
+<p>They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing
+hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them.
+They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor
+chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to
+her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they
+had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a
+selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech
+and act.</p>
+
+<p>The lover of Edmée loosened his hand from the silver beads about her
+throat, and caught up instead a stone.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of
+her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her
+course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.</p>
+
+<p>"Who lamed my Rémy?" screamed the cripple's mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.</p>
+
+<p>"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.</p>
+
+<p>"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with
+the starling.</p>
+
+<p>"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.</p>
+
+<p>"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?"
+shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is a witch?&mdash;who dances naked?&mdash;who bathes with devils at the full
+moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he
+stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at
+her as she came.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured
+the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no
+echo.</p>
+
+<p>The old soldier even rebuked her. "A <i>jettatrice</i> should be killed for
+the good of the people," he mumbled.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon
+the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps
+into their midst; unfaltering.</p>
+
+<p>The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a
+thing that was devil-begotten.</p>
+
+<p>"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!"
+cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his
+small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and
+nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling
+them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly,
+steadily, with her face set against the light.</p>
+
+<p>Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the
+stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her&mdash;a
+jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest.
+It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced
+with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty
+and their own savage hate.</p>
+
+<p>"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only
+laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they
+arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once
+losing their luminous calm scorn.</p>
+
+<p>The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to
+see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his
+laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"</p>
+
+<p>One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while
+the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering
+in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so
+rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her
+clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then,
+swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking
+out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered
+from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way
+across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed
+against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her
+invulnerable and possessed.</p>
+
+<p>She moved calmly with a firm tread backward&mdash;backward&mdash;backward; holding
+her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the
+sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps.
+They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the
+rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great
+square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth
+curled in contemptuous laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Strike <i>now</i>!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood
+still.</p>
+
+<p>But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not
+so much as a word that answered her.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the
+tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them
+stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and
+was still.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung
+above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and
+their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of
+tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had
+they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she
+had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give
+freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow
+birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?</p>
+
+<p>She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and
+went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe
+through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side.
+There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly
+down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the
+shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to
+keep out the sun.</p>
+
+<p>A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse
+dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no
+one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his
+little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all
+there were here to look on her.</p>
+
+<p>She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the
+town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her
+shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still
+bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it,
+and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to
+her to be but little. She had passed through similar scenes before,
+though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her,
+except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.</p>
+
+<p>The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.</p>
+
+<p>The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of
+peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In
+the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there
+were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes
+of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid
+breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open casement,
+some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the
+people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were
+made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.</p>
+
+<p>The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all
+the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible
+at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past
+the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone
+walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the
+poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with
+the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and
+the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt
+giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.</p>
+
+<p>When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks
+and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift
+in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through
+the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the casement
+into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly
+apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.</p>
+
+<p>It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things
+that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his
+bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted
+except at earliest dawn.</p>
+
+<p>The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and
+shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were
+free to her; she had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek
+them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its
+coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after
+the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless
+sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her
+more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad,
+cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from
+without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the gods of Oblivion.</p>
+
+
+<p>Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
+most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
+beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had
+repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the
+same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance;
+like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For
+Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his
+mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his
+golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was
+a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were
+welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand
+of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery
+nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and
+colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an
+unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden
+with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and
+the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things,
+had learned that there was but one good possible in all the
+universe,&mdash;that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their
+blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there
+was a great darkness.</p>
+
+<p>So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
+brethren, masters, friends&mdash;these three immortals who looked down on her
+in their mute majesty.</p>
+
+<p>They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,&mdash;they
+are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,&mdash;who stay with the
+exile and flee from the king,&mdash;who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe
+in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a
+beggar child,&mdash;who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and lust, and
+brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the
+loneliest nights for genius and youth,&mdash;they are the gods of consolation
+and of compensation,&mdash;the gods of the orphan, of the outcast, of the
+poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs
+of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of
+all who hunger with the body or with the soul.</p>
+
+<p>And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her only friends,&mdash;as
+the only rulers who ever could loose the bands of her fate and let her
+forth to freedom&mdash;Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.</p>
+
+<p>They were above her where she sank upon the stone floor; the shadows
+were dark upon the ground; but the sunrays striking through the distant
+window against the opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy
+Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet.</p>
+
+<p>She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, the populace that
+had hooted her abroad, the stripes that awaited her at home. The
+answering gaze of the gods magnetized her; the poetic virus which had
+stirred dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered brain.
+Without knowing what she wanted, she longed for freedom, for light, for
+passion, for peace, for love.</p>
+
+<p>Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultuous pageantry; the higher
+instincts of her nature rose and struggled to burst the bonds in which
+slavery and ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew nothing,
+knew no more than the grass knew that blew in the wind, than the
+passion-flower knew that slept unborn in the uncurled leaf; and yet
+withal she felt, saw, trembled, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all
+blindly, all in confusion and in pain.</p>
+
+<p>The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, that had never
+quailed before the fury of any living thing; her head fell on her chest;
+she wept bitterly,&mdash;not because the people had injured her,&mdash;not because
+her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore,&mdash;but because a distance
+so immeasurable, so unalterable, severed her from all of which these
+gods told her without speech.</p>
+
+<p>The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst the stones on
+which she sat and her own form were dark in shadow; and as though the
+bright boy Hypnos pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had
+compassion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb
+violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion with it.</p>
+
+<p>The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness of fasting, the
+fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences of the place, had their
+weight on her. Crouching there half on her knees, looking up ever in the
+faces of the three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her and
+stilled her; its languor stole through her veins; its gentle pressure
+closed her eyelids; gradually her rigid limbs and her bent body relaxed
+and unnerved; she sank forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms,
+and the stillness of a profound sleep encompassed her.</p>
+
+<p>Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, delirious dreams
+floated through her brain, and peopled her slumber with fairer things
+than the earth holds, and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were
+wet.</p>
+
+<p>Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her with his dark sad
+eyes, and held his finger on his close-pressed lips, as though he
+said&mdash;"Not yet."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Her sleep remained unbroken; there was no sound to disturb it. The caw
+of a rook in the top of the poplar-tree, the rushing babble of the
+water, the cry of a field-mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the
+far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern road that ran
+broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing of the rats in the
+network of timbers which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the
+noises that reached this solitary place, and these were both too faint
+and too familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slumber heavy,
+and the forms on which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full of
+dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows lengthened, the day
+advanced: nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell rang
+over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria from the cathedral in
+the town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned around.</p>
+
+<p>As the chimes died, Arslàn crossed the threshold of the granary and
+entered the desolate place where he had made his home. For once his
+labor had been early completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare
+and precious moments of the remaining light.</p>
+
+<p>He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying beneath his
+cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused and looked down.</p>
+
+<p>Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all the abandonment of
+youth and of sleep; her face was turned upward, with quick silent
+breathings parting the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the
+linen of her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back
+from her right arm and shoulder; the whole supple grace and force that
+were mingled in her form were visible under the light folds of her
+simple garments. The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of
+Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor where she was
+stretched.</p>
+
+<p>As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.</p>
+
+<p>But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he
+recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen
+rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for
+her strange unlikeness to all around her.</p>
+
+<p>He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep
+overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.</p>
+
+<p>He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which,
+at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet
+beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in
+her for his art.</p>
+
+<p>A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the
+light fell, he began to sketch her attitude, rapidly, in black and
+white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such
+transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which
+color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and
+slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins;
+the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red
+carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the
+eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming;
+while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in
+full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;&mdash;these gave a picture which
+required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.</p>
+
+<p>He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with
+something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown
+out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their
+mere outline.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as
+though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold
+and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But
+she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every
+curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as
+little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as that with which the vivisector
+tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist
+plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to
+examine.</p>
+
+<p>The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see
+them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand
+tremble a moment in such translation.</p>
+
+<p>To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from the female
+corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and
+to Arslàn the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as
+sexless, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the
+tools for his art: no more.</p>
+
+<p>When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside
+the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the
+deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight
+the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he
+had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude
+than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had
+recorded in his works.</p>
+
+<p>He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; and he had sought
+women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of
+contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative
+affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle aux trois crayons."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so hotly for an
+instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or
+satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance
+of chastity.</p>
+
+<p>He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness
+of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which
+tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who
+looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily
+blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.</p>
+
+<p>She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled
+there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He
+painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep
+in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him
+than these would have been.</p>
+
+<p>The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the
+boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from
+the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children
+going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips
+of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air
+through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.</p>
+
+<p>The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they
+pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up
+suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood
+fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves
+strained to listen and striving to combat.</p>
+
+<p>For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that
+she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were
+from the clamor of her late tormentors.</p>
+
+<p>He turned and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of the country.</p>
+
+<p>She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew her disordered
+dress together, and stood mute, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and
+the blood coming and going under her transparent skin.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you fear?" he asked again.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> fear?"</p>
+
+<p>She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous defiance; the heroism
+of her nature, which an hour earlier had been lashed to its fullest
+strength, cast back the question as an insult; but her voice was low and
+husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>For she feared him; and for the moment she had forgotten how she had
+come there and all that had passed, except that some instinct of the
+long-hunted animal was astir in her to hide herself and fly.</p>
+
+<p>But he stood between her and the passage outward, and pride and shame
+held her motionless. Moreover, she still listened intently: the confused
+voices of the children still seemed to her like those of the multitude
+by whom she had been chased; and she was ready to leap tiger-like upon
+them, rather than let them degrade her in his sight.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with some touch of interest: she was to him only some
+stray beggar-girl, who had trespassed into his solitude; yet her untamed
+regard, her wide-open eyes, the staglike grace of her attitude, the
+sullen strength which spoke in her reply,&mdash;all attracted him to closer
+notice of these.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly. "You were asleep here
+when I came, more than an hour ago."</p>
+
+<p>The color burned in her face: she said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from
+beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy
+these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to
+return to the attitude sketched out upon his easel.</p>
+
+<p>She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined
+with the apprehensiveness of chastisement which becomes second nature to
+every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every
+real or imagined fault.</p>
+
+<p>"I came to see <i>those</i>," she answered him, with a backward movement of
+her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the
+gods above her.</p>
+
+<p>The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as
+this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom,
+throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had
+never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this
+outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent
+of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he
+be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his
+works.</p>
+
+<p>"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be to <i>you</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her
+head drooped; she knew that they were much to her&mdash;friends, masters,
+teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to
+tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been
+ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was
+ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts,
+and it locked her lips to silence.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind
+and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the
+half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape
+and cannot.</p>
+
+<p>Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of
+blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in
+her linen left it bare.</p>
+
+<p>"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"It is nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"</p>
+
+<p>"The people struck me."</p>
+
+<p>"Struck you? With what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Stones."</p>
+
+<p>"And why?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient
+reply.</p>
+
+<p>But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the
+populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to
+have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had
+never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence.
+To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost
+that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.</p>
+
+<p>"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a gesture of assent.</p>
+
+<p>"And you hate them in return?"</p>
+
+<p>She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a
+trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.</p>
+
+<p>"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in
+my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I
+have never killed one yet."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed
+passion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn
+which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands
+clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was
+a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that
+conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its
+exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he
+moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence
+against you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything
+else.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you no other name?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"But you must have a home? You live&mdash;where?"</p>
+
+<p>"At the mill with Flamma."</p>
+
+<p>"Does he also ill use you?"</p>
+
+<p>"He beats me."</p>
+
+<p>"When you do wrong?"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Wrong?" "Right?"</p>
+
+<p>They were but words to her&mdash;empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat
+her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught
+that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her
+to return to the attitude necessary to the completion of his picture.</p>
+
+<p>He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At
+all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was
+afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to
+her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a fear as though, in
+lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some
+crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it
+seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had
+wearied of, and might have wished to lose.</p>
+
+<p>"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.</p>
+
+<p>She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's
+face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made
+her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of
+this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift,
+which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a
+burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.</p>
+
+<p>"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does
+the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could
+ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever
+touch.</p>
+
+<p>By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as
+she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned,
+had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature
+beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him
+one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel.
+Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study
+on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same
+watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in
+her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished
+to turn to the purpose of his art&mdash;like a flower that he plucked on his
+way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some
+vacant nook in a mountain foreground.</p>
+
+<p>"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him,
+flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarrassed, with her hands
+nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her
+sad, lustrous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered
+fear.</p>
+
+<p>"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."</p>
+
+<p>"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care
+to come?"</p>
+
+<p>Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was
+burning.</p>
+
+<p>"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a
+pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a little; bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your
+way. Has no one ever told you so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly; she thought that
+he spoke in derision of her.</p>
+
+<p>"You," he answered. "Why not? Look at yourself here: all imperfect as it
+is, you can see something of what you are."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused waves of dull
+color, out of whose depths her own face arose, like some fair drowned
+thing tossed upward on a murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had
+wounded her, and stood still, trembling.</p>
+
+<p>She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque water of the
+bathing pool, with a certain sense of their beauty wakening in her; she
+had tossed the soft, thick, gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her
+bare shoulder, with a certain languor and delight; she had held a knot
+of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast with her own
+white skin;&mdash;but she had never imagined that she had beauty.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus taught her creep with
+all its poison into her veins.</p>
+
+<p>He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before in Nubian girls
+with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, who had never thought that they
+had loveliness,&mdash;though they had seen their forms in the clear water of
+the wells every time that they had brought their pitchers thither,&mdash;and
+who had only awakened to that sweet supreme sense of power and
+possession, when first they had beheld themselves live again upon his
+canvas.</p>
+
+<p>"You are glad?" he asked her at length.</p>
+
+<p>She covered her face with her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"I am frightened!"</p>
+
+<p>Frightened she knew not why, and utterly ashamed, to have lain thus in
+his sight, to have slept thus under his eyes; and yet filled with an
+ecstasy, to think that she was lovely enough to be raised amidst those
+marvelous dreams that peopled and made heaven of his solitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then,&mdash;let me paint you there," he said, after a pause. "I am
+too poor to offer you reward for it. I have nothing&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I want nothing," she interrupted him, quickly, while a dark shadow,
+half wrath, half sorrow, swept across her face.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled a little.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot boast the same. But, since you care for all these hapless
+things that are imprisoned here, do me, their painter, this one grace.
+Lie there, in the shadow again, as you were when you slept, and let me
+go on with this study of you till the sun sets."</p>
+
+<p>A glory beamed over all her face. Her mouth trembled, her whole frame
+shook like a reed in the wind.</p>
+
+<p>"If you care!" she said, brokenly, and paused. It seemed to her
+impossible that this form of hers, which had been only deemed fit for
+the whip, for the rope, for the shower of stones, could have any grace
+or excellence in his sight; it seemed to her impossible that this face
+of hers, which nothing had ever kissed except the rough tongue of some
+honest dog, and which had been blown on by every storm-wind, beaten on
+by every summer sun, could have color, or shape, or aspect that could
+ever please him!</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly I care. Go yonder and lie as you were lying a few moments
+ago&mdash;there in the shadow, under these gods."</p>
+
+<p>She was used to give obedience&mdash;the dumb unquestioning obedience of the
+packhorse or the sheepdog, and she had no idea for an instant of
+refusal. It was a great terror to her to hear his voice and feel his
+eyes on her, and be so near to him; yet it was equally a joy sweeter and
+deeper than she had ever dreamed of as possible. He still seemed to her
+like a god, this man under whose hand flowers bloomed, and sunrays
+smiled, and waters flowed, and human forms arose, and the gracious
+shapes of a thousand dreams grew into substance. And yet, in herself,
+this man saw beauty!</p>
+
+<p>He motioned her with a careless, gentle gesture, as a man motions a
+timid dog, to the spot over which the three brethren watched hand in
+hand; and she stretched herself down passively and humbly, meekly as the
+dog stretches himself to rest at his master's command. Over all her
+body the blood was leaping; her limbs shuddered; her breath came and
+went in broken murmurs; her bright-hued skin grew dark and white by
+turns; she was filled with a passionate delight that he had found
+anything in her to desire or deem fair; and she quivered with a
+tumultuous fear that made her nervous as any panting hare. Her heart
+beat as it had never done when the people had raged in their fury around
+her. One living creature had found beauty in her; one human voice had
+spoken to her gently and without a curse; one man had thought her a
+thing to be entreated and not scorned;&mdash;a change so marvelous in her
+fate transfigured all the world for her, as though the gods above had
+touched her lips with fire.</p>
+
+<p>But she was mute and motionless; the habit of silence and of repression
+had become her second nature; no statue of marble could have been
+stiller, or in semblance more lifeless, than she was where she rested on
+the stones.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn noticed nothing of this; he was intent upon his work. The sun was
+very near its setting, and every second of its light was precious to
+him. The world indeed he knew would in all likelihood never be the wiser
+or the richer for anything he did; in all likelihood he knew all these
+things that he created were destined to moulder away undisturbed save by
+the rats that might gnaw, and the newts that might traverse, them. He
+was buried here in the grave of a hopeless penury, of an endless
+oblivion. They were buried with him; and the world wanted neither him
+nor them. Still, having the madness of genius, he was as much the slave
+of his art as though an universal fame had waited his lowliest and
+lightest effort.</p>
+
+<p>With a deep breath that had half a sigh in it he threw down his brushes
+when the darkness fell. While he wrought, he forgot the abject
+bitterness of his life; when he ceased work, he remembered how hateful a
+thing it is to live when life means only deprivation, obscurity, and
+failure.</p>
+
+<p>He thanked her with a few words of gratitude to her for her patience,
+and released her from the strain of the attitude. She rose slowly with
+an odd dazzled look upon her face, like one coming out of great darkness
+into the full blaze of day. Her eyes sought the portrait of her own
+form, which was still hazy and unformed, amidst a mist of varying hues:
+that she should be elected to have a part with those glorious things
+which were the companions of his loneliness seemed to her a wonder so
+strange and so immeasurable that her mind still could not grasp it.</p>
+
+<p>For it was greatness to her: a greatness absolute and incredible. The
+men had stoned, the women cursed, the children hooted her; but he
+selected her&mdash;and her alone&mdash;for that supreme honor which his hand could
+give.</p>
+
+<p>Not noticing the look upon her face he placed before her on the rude
+bench, which served in that place for a table, some score of small
+studies in color, trifles brilliant as the rainbow, birds, flowers,
+insects, a leaf of fern, an orchid in full bloom, a nest with a blue
+warbler in it, a few peasants by a wayside cross, a child at a well, a
+mule laden with autumn fruit&mdash;anything which in the district had caught
+his sight or stirred his fancy. He bade her choose from them.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing else here," he added. "But since you care for such
+things, take as many of them as you will as recompense."</p>
+
+<p>Her face flushed up to the fringes of her hair; her eyes looked at the
+sketches in thirsty longing. Except the scarlet scarf of Marcellin, this
+was the only gift she had ever had offered her. And all these
+reproductions of the world around her were to her like so much sorcery.
+Owning one, she would have worshiped it, revered it, caressed it,
+treasured it; her life was so desolate and barren that such a gift
+seemed to her as handfuls of gold and silver would seem to a beggar were
+he bidden to take them and be rich.</p>
+
+<p>She stretched her arms out in one quick longing gesture; then as
+suddenly withdrew them, folding them on her chest, whilst her face grew
+very pale. Something of its old dark proud ferocity gathered on it.</p>
+
+<p>"I want no payment," she said, huskily, and she turned to the threshold
+and crossed it.</p>
+
+<p>He stayed her with his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait. I did not mean to hurt you. Will you not take them as reward?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke almost sullenly; there was a certain sharpness and dullness of
+disappointment at her heart. She wanted, she wished, she knew not what.
+But not that he should offer her payment.</p>
+
+<p>"Can you return to-morrow? or any other day?" he asked her, thinking of
+the sketch unfinished on the sheet of pinewood. He did not notice the
+beating of her heart under her folded arms, the quick gasp of her
+breath, the change of the rich color in her face.</p>
+
+<p>"If you wish," she answered him below her breath.</p>
+
+<p>"I do wish, surely. The sketch is all unfinished yet."</p>
+
+<p>"I will come, then."</p>
+
+<p>She moved away from him across the threshold as she spoke; she was not
+afraid of the people, but she was afraid of this strange, passionate
+sweetness, which seemed to fill her veins with fire and make her drunk
+and blind.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I go with you homeward?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"But the people who struck you?&mdash;they may attack you again?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little; low in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"I showed them a knife!&mdash;they are timid as hares."</p>
+
+<p>"You are always by yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Always."</p>
+
+<p>She drew herself with a rapid movement from him and sprang into her boat
+where it rocked amidst the rushes against the steps; in another instant
+she had thrust it from its entanglement in the reeds, and pulled with
+swift, steady strokes down the stream into the falling shadows of the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>"You will come back?" he called to her, as the first stroke parted the
+water.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she answered him; and the boat shot forward into the shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars
+sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.</p>
+
+<p>There was little need to exact the promise from her.</p>
+
+<p>Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which,
+whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth,
+and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime
+world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that hell which
+none,&mdash;once having entered it,&mdash;can ever more forsake.</p>
+
+<p>She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from
+the shore and the stream into the gloom of the night.</p>
+
+<p>He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted
+shadows.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where
+it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the
+night.</p>
+
+<p>"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I
+have nearly enough for remembrance there."</p>
+
+<p>And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to
+those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for
+whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of
+the dead.</p>
+
+<p>From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she
+was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its
+home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its
+grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up
+into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom,
+or to fall into the fowler's snare;&mdash;what matter which?</p>
+
+<p>The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the
+great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the
+gloom.</p>
+
+<p>She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her
+as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.</p>
+
+<p>She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the
+silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a
+fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into
+little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or
+a smith's forge.</p>
+
+<p>By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge
+betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical,
+silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings
+and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless
+whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the city whither it goes.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just
+rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was
+moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to
+and fro in his wood-yard.</p>
+
+<p>At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches,
+and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the
+minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted,
+and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud
+reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest
+terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.</p>
+
+<p>In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and
+dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered,
+puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle;
+there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that
+made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and
+fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter;
+under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a
+nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring;
+on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a
+gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap
+in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.</p>
+
+<p>The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and
+unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with
+a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold
+of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the
+gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp
+earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on
+her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of
+dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night air
+lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of
+rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had
+brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance
+at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up
+the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray
+bent brows.</p>
+
+<p>"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth.
+"Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"</p>
+
+<p>The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the
+softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.</p>
+
+<p>"I say nothing," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to
+make thee speak. Nothing!&mdash;when three of the clock should have seen thee
+back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without
+account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure&mdash;in shame and
+iniquity&mdash;in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"</p>
+
+<p>"Since you know, why ask?"</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge
+from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought
+her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they
+had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.</p>
+
+<p>"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left
+undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to
+name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell,
+or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have done as I chose."</p>
+
+<p>She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own
+that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.</p>
+
+<p>"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak&mdash;<i>you!</i>&mdash;a thing
+less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose&mdash;you!&mdash;who have not a
+rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat,
+not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine&mdash;mine&mdash;mine. As you
+choose. <i>You!</i>&mdash;you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you
+sloth! You are nothing&mdash;nothing&mdash;less than the blind worm that crawls in
+the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it
+shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break
+your will."</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an
+oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he
+raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that
+dumb, passive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted
+whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.</p>
+
+<p>But the creature, silent and stirless, who before had stood to receive
+his lashes as though her body were of bronze or wood, that felt not, was
+changed. A leonine and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She
+started out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure as a
+willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs back, released, into
+the air.</p>
+
+<p>She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by a sudden gesture
+from him, and flung it away to the farther end of the chamber; then she
+turned on him as a hart turns brought to bay.</p>
+
+<p>Her supple body was erect like a young pine; her eyes flashed with a
+luster he had never seen in them; the breath came hard and fast through
+her dilated nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>"Touch me again!" she cried aloud, while her voice rang full and
+imperious through the stillness. "Touch me again; and by the heaven and
+hell you prate of, I will kill you!"</p>
+
+<p>So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the old man dropped
+his hands and stood and gazed at her aghast and staring; not recognizing
+the mute, patient, doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this
+stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him in all the
+royalty of wrath, in all the passion of insurrection.</p>
+
+<p>He could not tell what had altered her, what had wrought this
+transformation, what had changed her as by sorcery; he could not tell
+that what had aroused a human soul in her had been the first human voice
+that she had listened to in love; he could not tell that her body had
+grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her beautiful, and
+that her life for the first time had acquired a worth and dignity in her
+sight because one man had deemed it fair.</p>
+
+<p>He could not tell; he could only see that for the first time his slave
+had learned somewhere, and in somewise, what freedom meant; and had
+escaped him. This alone he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid.</p>
+
+<p>She waited, watching him some moments, with cold eyes of disdain, in
+which a smouldering fire slept, ready to burst into an all-devouring
+flame.</p>
+
+<p>There was not a sound in the place; the woman spinning stopped her
+wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, savage fashion; the lean cat ceased
+its cries; there was only the continual swish of the water in the
+sluices under the wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black
+Forest clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in its
+cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the thyme, and the sage,
+and the onions hung among the twisted rafters.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her hip, her lips
+curved scornfully and close, her face full of passion, which she kept
+still as the dead birds hanging on the wall; whilst all the time the
+tawny smoky hues of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic
+play over her head and limbs.</p>
+
+<p>Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently,
+without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the
+horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble
+fortitude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as
+was the daily bread she broke.</p>
+
+<p>But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the gods upon her, now
+she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she
+would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her
+body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the
+water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath
+the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held
+motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.</p>
+
+<p>Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the
+moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily
+in him; some vague remembrance passed over him, that, whatsoever else
+she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and
+kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will,
+with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.</p>
+
+<p>He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard
+at her in the dusky lamp-light.</p>
+
+<p>He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and
+groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant
+life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would
+have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and
+trample it under foot, and spit on it.</p>
+
+<p>He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his
+path, while he struck out the light with his staff.</p>
+
+<p>"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late.
+To-morrow I will deal with thee."</p>
+
+<p>She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like
+stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her
+nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew
+that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslàn
+had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to
+preserve it by death from that indignity.</p>
+
+<p>From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been used to bare her
+shoulders to the lash, and take the stripes as food and wages; she had
+no more thought to resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on
+earth, has to resist his master's blows; the dull habits of a soulless
+bondage had been too strong on her to be lightly broken, and the
+resignation of the loyal beasts that were her comrades, had been the one
+virtue that she had seen to follow.</p>
+
+<p>But now at length she had burst her bonds, and had claimed her freedom.</p>
+
+<p>She had tasted the freshness of liberty, and the blood burned like fire
+in her face as she remembered the patience and the shame of the years of
+her slavery.</p>
+
+<p>There was no mirror in her little room in the gabled eaves; all the
+mirror she had ever known had been that which she had shared with the
+water-lilies, when together she and they had leaned over the smooth dark
+surface of the mill-pond. But the moon streamed clearly through the one
+unshuttered window, a moon full and clear, and still cold; the
+springtide moon, from which the pale primroses borrow those tender hues
+of theirs, which never warm or grow deeper, however golden be the sun
+that may shine.</p>
+
+<p>Its clear colorless crescent went sailing past the little square lattice
+hole in the wall; masses of gorgeous cloud, white and black, swept by in
+a fresh west wind; the fresh breath of a spring night chased away the
+heat and languor of the day; the smell of all the blossoms of the spring
+rose up from wood and orchard; the cool, drowsy murmuring of the
+mill-stream beneath was the only sound on the stillness, except when now
+and then there came the wild cry of a mating owl.</p>
+
+<p>The moonbeams fell about her where she stood; and she looked down on her
+smooth skin, her glistening shoulders, her lustrous and abundant hair,
+on which the wavering light played and undulated. The most delicious
+gladness that a woman's life can know was in tumult in her, conflicting
+with the new and deadly sense of shame and ignorance. She learned that
+she was beautiful, at the same time that she awoke to the knowledge of
+her dumb, lifeless slavish inferiority to all other human things.</p>
+
+<p>"Beautiful!" she muttered to herself, "only as a poppy, as a snake, as a
+night-moth are beautiful&mdash;beautiful and without fragrance, or sweetness,
+or worth!"</p>
+
+<p>And her heart was heavy, even amidst all its pleasure and triumph, heavy
+with a sense of utter ignorance and utter worthlessness.</p>
+
+<p>The poppy was snapped asunder as a weed, the snake was shunned and
+cursed for his poison, the night-moth was killed because his nature had
+made him dwell in the darkness; none of the three might have any fault
+in truth in them; all of the three might have only the livery of evil,
+and no more; might be innocent, and ask only to breathe and live for a
+little brief space in their world, which men called God's world. Yet
+were they condemned by men, and slain, being what they were, although
+God made them.</p>
+
+<p>Even so she felt, without reasoning, had it been and would it be, with
+herself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the room below, the old Norman woman, who did not fear her
+taskmaster, unbarred the shutter to let the moon shine in the room, and
+by its light put away her wheel and work, and cut a halved lettuce up
+upon a platter, with some dry bread, and ate them for her supper.</p>
+
+<p>The old man knelt down before the leaden image, and joined his knotted
+hands, and prayed in a low, fierce, eager voice, while the heavy
+pendulum of the clock swung wearily to and fro.</p>
+
+<p>The clock kept fitful and uncertain time; it had been so long imprisoned
+in the gloom there among the beams and cobwebs, and in this place life
+was so dull, so colorless, so torpid, that it seemed to have forgotten
+how time truly went, and to wake up now and then with a shudder of
+remembrance, in which its works ran madly down.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman ended her supper, munching the lettuce-leaves thirstily in
+her toothless mouth, and not casting so much as a crumb of the crusts to
+the cat, who pitifully watched, and mutely implored, with great ravenous
+amber-circled eyes. Then she took her stick and crept out of the
+kitchen, her wooden shoes clacking loud on the bare red bricks.</p>
+
+<p>"Prayer did little to keep holy the other one," she muttered. "Unless,
+indeed, the devil heard and answered."</p>
+
+<p>But Claudis Flamma for all that prayed on, entreating the mercy and
+guidance of Heaven, whilst the gore dripped from the dead rabbit, and
+the silent song-birds hung stiff upon the nail.</p>
+
+<p>"Thou hast a good laborer," said the old woman Pitchou, with curt
+significance, to her master, meeting him in the raw of the dawn of the
+morrow, as he drew the bolts from his house-door. "Take heed that thou
+dost not drive her away, Flamma. One may beat a saddled mule safely, but
+hardly so a wolf's cub."</p>
+
+<p>She passed out of the door as she spoke with mop and pail to wash down
+the paved court outside; but her words abode with her master.</p>
+
+<p>He meddled no more with the wolf's cub.</p>
+
+<p>When Folle-Farine came down the stairs in the crisp, cool,
+sweet-smelling spring morning that was breaking through the mists over
+the land and water, he motioned to her to break her fast with the cold
+porridge left from overnight, and looking at her from under his bent
+brows with a glance that had some apprehension underneath its anger,
+apportioned her a task for the early day with a few bitter words of
+command; but he molested her no further, nor referred ever so faintly to
+the scene of the past night.</p>
+
+<p>She ate her poor and tasteless meal in silence, and set about her
+appointed labor without protest. So long as she should eat his bread, so
+long she said to herself would she serve him. Thus much the pride and
+honesty of her nature taught her was his due.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her furtively under his shaggy eyebrows. His instinct told
+him that this nameless, dumb, captive, desert animal, which he had bound
+as a beast of burden to his mill-wheels, had in some manner learned her
+strength, and would not long remain content to be thus yoked and driven.
+He had blinded her with the blindness of ignorance, and goaded her with
+the goad of ignominy; but for all that, some way her bandaged eyes had
+sought and found the light, some way her numbed hide had thrilled and
+swerved beneath the barb.</p>
+
+<p>"She also is a saint; let God take her!" said the old man to himself in
+savage irony, as he toiled among his mill-gear and his sacks.</p>
+
+<p>His heart was ever sore and in agony because his God had cheated him,
+letting him hold as purest and holiest among women the daughter who had
+betrayed him. In his way he prayed still; but chiefly his prayer was a
+passionate upbraiding, a cynical reproach. She&mdash;his beloved, his marvel,
+his choicest of maidens, his fairest and coldest of virgins&mdash;had escaped
+him and duped him, and been a thing of passion and of foulness, of
+treachery and of lust, all the while that he had worshiped her.
+Therefore he hated every breathing thing; therefore he slew the birds in
+their song, the insects in their summer bravery, the lamb in its
+gambols, the rabbit in its play amidst the primroses. Therefore he cried
+to the God whom he still believed in, "Thou lettest that which was pure
+escape me to be defiled and be slaughtered, and now Thou lettest that
+which is vile escape me to become beautiful and free and strong!" And
+now and then, in this woe of his which was so pitiful and yet so brutal,
+he glanced at her where she labored among the unbudded vines and
+leafless fruit trees, and whetted a sickle on the whirling grindstone,
+and felt its edge, and thought to himself. "She was devil-begotten.
+Would it not be well once and for all to rid men of her?" For, he
+reasoned, being thus conceived in infamy and branded from her birth
+upward, how should she be ever otherwise than to men a curse?</p>
+
+<p>Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the bushes and by the
+glancing water, she saw the steel hook and caught his sideway gaze, and
+read his meditation.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, "He shall not do it
+till I have been back <i>there</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Before the day was done, thither she went.</p>
+
+<p>He had kept her close since the sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the country, which
+had a certain pleasure to her, because she gained by them liberty and
+air, and the contentment of swift movement against fresh blowing winds.
+Nor did he send her to the town. He employed her through ten whole hours
+in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and carrying from his yard to
+his lofts, always within sight of his own quick eye, and within call of
+his harsh voice.</p>
+
+<p>She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do swiftly and well. There
+was no fault to find in any of her labors.</p>
+
+<p>When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, the last burden
+borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her roughly go indoors and winnow
+last year's wheat in the store chambers till he should bid her cease.</p>
+
+<p>She came and stood before him, her eyes very quiet in their look of
+patient strength.</p>
+
+<p>"I have worked from daybreak through to sunset," she said, slowly, to
+him. "It is enough for man and beast. The rest I claim."</p>
+
+<p>Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone wall that parted the
+timber-yard from the orchard, and was out of sight, flying far and fast
+through the twilight of the boughs.</p>
+
+<p>He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped on his breast, his
+hands worked restlessly on the stone coping of the wall, his withered
+lips muttered in wrath.</p>
+
+<p>"There is hell in her," he said to himself. "Let her go to her rightful
+home. There is one thing&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There is one thing?" echoed the old woman, hanging washed linen out to
+dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed almond-shrubs.</p>
+
+<p>He gave a dreary, greedy, miser's chuckle:</p>
+
+<p>"One thing;&mdash;I have made the devil work for me hard and well ten whole
+years through!"</p>
+
+<p>"The devil!" mumbled the woman Pitchou, in contemptuous iteration. "Dost
+think the devil was ever such a fool as to work for thy wage of blows
+and of black bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how should he
+rule unless he paid his people well?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, through the pastures
+where the leek herds dreamed their days away, through the young wheat
+and the springing colza, and the little fields all bright with promise
+of the spring, and all the sunset's wealth of golden light.</p>
+
+<p>The league was but as a step to her, trained as her muscles were to
+speed and strength until her feet were as fleet as are the doe's. When
+she had gained her goal then only she paused, stricken with a sudden
+shyness and terror of what she hardly knew.</p>
+
+<p>An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards a little
+grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose water never stirred, save by
+a pigeon's rosy foot, or by a timid plover's beak, was motionless and
+clear as any mirror.</p>
+
+<p>Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, and taught her
+eyes to seek her own reflection. It had a certain wonder in it to her
+now that fascinated her with a curious indefinable attraction. For the
+first time in her life she had thought of it, and done such slight
+things as she could to make it greater. They were but few,&mdash;linen a
+little whiter and less coarse&mdash;the dust shaken from her scarlet sash;
+her bronze-hued hair burnished to richer darkness; a knot of wild
+narcissi in her bosom gathered with the dew on them as she came through
+the wood.</p>
+
+<p>This was all; yet this was something; something that showed the dawn of
+human impulses, of womanly desires. As she looked, she blushed for her
+own foolishness; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood-flowers
+into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, though only a moment
+earlier she had gathered them, so senseless and so idle to have decked
+herself with their borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these
+he cared!</p>
+
+<p>Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle
+of wood.</p>
+
+<p>He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and
+looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she
+saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face,
+closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand
+moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his
+hold like lead.</p>
+
+<p>She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and
+incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty
+nor terror.</p>
+
+<p>It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He
+started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and
+threw a black cloth over the trestle.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not look there," he said to her. "I had forgotten you.
+Otherwise&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I have looked there. It is only a dead woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Only! What makes you say that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know. There are many&mdash;are there not?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or
+curiosity was true and not assumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread,
+and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory
+of death were wholly absent from her.</p>
+
+<p>"There are many indeed," he made answer, slowly. "Just there is the
+toughest problem&mdash;it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds
+of human ephemeræ, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the
+millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be
+choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is the
+<i>numbers</i> that kill one's dreams of immortality!"</p>
+
+<p>She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had
+spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere
+cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl
+young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.</p>
+
+<p>"It is Fortis, the ragpicker's daughter," she said, indifferently, and
+dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she
+envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode
+there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its
+calm limbs.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he answered her. "It is his daughter. She died twenty hours
+ago,&mdash;of low fever, they say&mdash;famine, no doubt."</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you have her here?" She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the
+girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born;
+she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.</p>
+
+<p>"The dead sit to me often," he said, with a certain smile that had
+sadness and yet coldness in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+
+<p>"That they may tell me the secrets of life."</p>
+
+<p>"Do they tell them?"</p>
+
+<p>"A few;&mdash;most they keep. See,&mdash;I paint death; I must watch it to paint
+it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks
+his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the
+riverside last night. He said to me, 'You like studying the dead, they
+say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving;&mdash;and it cannot hurt
+her.' So I gave him the coin&mdash;though I am as poor as he&mdash;and I took the
+dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl
+shall go to her grave when I have done with her."</p>
+
+<p>She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled
+her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious
+pain.</p>
+
+<p>She did not care for the body lying there&mdash;it had been but the other day
+that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called
+her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past
+it; but there passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she,
+likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than
+this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.</p>
+
+<p>The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to
+lay her down in the cool water and let it take her to long sleep and to
+complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of
+value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb
+still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner,
+she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her
+absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his
+art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never
+occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak
+shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of
+life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond
+measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.</p>
+
+<p>She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his
+service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the
+sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple
+altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;&mdash;this seemed to her the
+most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's
+daughter lying there in such calm content.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no
+harm; if I did, what would she know?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain
+perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to
+you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for
+that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often
+thought of it lately."</p>
+
+<p>He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken
+steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the
+district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being
+offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face
+with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they
+gained from their study but little.</p>
+
+<p>For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed
+there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He
+could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the
+bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were
+only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical
+development, but mindless as any clod of earth.</p>
+
+<p>He did not know how to answer her.</p>
+
+<p>"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so
+bitter to you?"</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him.</p>
+
+<p>"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"</p>
+
+<p>"But you are so young,&mdash;and you are handsome, and a woman?"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little.</p>
+
+<p>"A woman! Marcellin said that."</p>
+
+<p>"Well! What is there strange in saying it?"</p>
+
+<p>She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till
+the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a woman&mdash;a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow
+hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her
+lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I
+am a devil, they say."</p>
+
+<p>His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and
+whose irony escaped her.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call
+you so?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.</p>
+
+<p>"You do not believe that I am a devil?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should I tell? If you covet the title claim it,&mdash;you have a
+right,&mdash;you are a woman!"</p>
+
+<p>"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.</p>
+
+<p>"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. "And there
+is your creator."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>He!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words
+out of the empty wind. Hephæstus made her heart, fusing for it brass and
+iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages.
+But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night,
+and tell me your story while I work."</p>
+
+<p>She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had
+motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of
+Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.</p>
+
+<p>The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough
+to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a
+likeness to his own.</p>
+
+<p>It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely
+moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so
+little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and
+so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very
+slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to
+self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body
+and of the senses.</p>
+
+<p>As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing
+people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the
+night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his
+senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of
+the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests,
+and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn
+strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion:
+these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in
+the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?</p>
+
+<p>And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
+soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
+eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
+of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
+and stirs in the strange <i>loves</i> of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
+song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
+with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
+every bead of water that ripples in a brook&mdash;to these the mortal life of
+man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
+thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
+tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence
+pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual
+torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking
+creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all
+creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured,
+at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly
+assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of
+inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus
+universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he
+pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:&mdash;the horse staggering
+beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age;
+the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through
+the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the
+slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under
+the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector
+while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable
+hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures
+dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of
+men,&mdash;these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was
+the softest thing in all his nature.</p>
+
+<p>But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased.
+It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such
+simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast
+broadcast.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her&mdash;that
+she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal
+in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights
+and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange
+kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid attitudes, in her curt,
+unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides,
+although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two
+years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship of
+boors, with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme
+poverty in which the latter months of his life had been passed, had
+excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none
+without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man
+even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who
+had brought the dead girl to him for a few brass coins, had been the
+only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made
+such change in it worse than its continuance.</p>
+
+<p>In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless,
+hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his
+curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his
+mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a
+wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if
+aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in
+quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance,
+he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.</p>
+
+<p>He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long
+imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with
+the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an
+intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the
+stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.</p>
+
+<p>The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once streaming across the
+darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out
+again among his fellows, then&mdash;the spider is left to miss the human love
+that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue
+flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom
+alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still
+locked they are much.</p>
+
+<p>Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world's neglect, and
+they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible
+dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining
+to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.</p>
+
+<p>And in these, in their bondage, there were little patience, or sympathy,
+or softness, and to them, even nature itself at times looked horrible,
+though never so horrible, because never so despicable, as humanity.
+Yet, still even in these an instinct of companionship abided; and this
+creature, with a woman's beauty, and an animal's fierceness and
+innocence, was in a manner welcome.</p>
+
+<p>"Why were women ever made, then?" she said, after awhile, following,
+though imperfectly, the drift of his last words, where she lay stretched
+obedient to his will, under the shadow of the wall.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he has heard from the
+raving lips of some friend fever-stricken.</p>
+
+<p>"Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in the desert. He
+was content in his solitude: he was holy and at peace: the honey of the
+wild bee and the fruit of the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him;
+the lions were his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves; the eagle
+flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms were his
+messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and the soul alone had
+dominion; and day and night, upon the lonely air, he breathed the praise
+of God.</p>
+
+<p>"Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he said to himself, 'I
+have lived content; so shall I die purified, and ready for the kingdom
+of heaven.' For it was in the day when that wooden god, who hangs on the
+black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but had a name of
+power and of might, adjuring which, his people smiled under torture, and
+died in the flame, dreaming of a land where the sun never set, and the
+song never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest.</p>
+
+<p>"So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was glad and at peace.</p>
+
+<p>"One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain torrents fell, to the
+door of his cave there came a wayfarer, fainting, sickly, lame,
+trembling with terror of the desert, and beseeching him to save her from
+the panthers.</p>
+
+<p>"He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, for he said,
+'Wheresoever a woman enters, there the content of a man is dead.' But
+she was in dire distress, and entreated him with tears and supplications
+not to turn her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and he
+felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened the door to her,
+and bade her enter and be at sanctuary there in God's name.</p>
+
+<p>"But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and want fell from off
+her, her eyes grew as two stars, her lips were sweet as the rose of the
+desert, her limbs had the grace of the cheetah, her body had the
+radiance and the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And she
+laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, 'Thou thinkest thou hast lived,
+and yet thou hast not loved! Oh, sage! oh, saint! oh, fool, fool, fool!'
+Then into his veins there rushed youth, and into his brain there came
+madness; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity loathsome
+since passionless; and he stretched his arms to her and sought to
+embrace her, crying, 'Stay with me, though I buy thee with hell.' And
+she stayed.</p>
+
+<p>"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a
+phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the
+desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she
+beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the
+noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the
+rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.</p>
+
+<p>"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he
+searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to
+die."</p>
+
+<p>He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters,
+the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of
+passionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness
+of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the
+Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the
+phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed
+in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial,
+with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts
+in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning
+women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but
+when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into
+picture-like formations.</p>
+
+<p>She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire
+brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy
+allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.</p>
+
+<p>No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and
+beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed
+to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung
+as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.</p>
+
+<p>"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.</p>
+
+<p>"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."</p>
+
+<p>Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with
+the new light that broke in on her.</p>
+
+<p>"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic
+smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's
+kingdom of heaven!"</p>
+
+<p>She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had
+understood the parable of his narrative, yet the passion of it had
+passed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.</p>
+
+<p>"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who
+remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse
+through which he has walked&mdash;himself sane&mdash;in a bygone time.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong,
+half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want&mdash;I want to
+have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and
+they pray."</p>
+
+<p>"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his god. "Who does
+not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever
+you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."</p>
+
+<p>A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly
+faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not,
+since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the
+passion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power
+might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all
+men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her
+to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.</p>
+
+<p>"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she
+muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has
+none."</p>
+
+<p>"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech
+him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but
+it is your god only whom in their hearts they worship. See how the
+Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."</p>
+
+<p>"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none
+to the devil?"</p>
+
+<p>"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret god. Look you: I will tell you
+another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to
+all the various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under the sun.
+There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of
+ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before
+all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense
+before its divinity.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, no nation would look at the god of another; and each people
+clustered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying
+out, 'There is no god but this god.'</p>
+
+<p>"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king,
+whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and
+very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal
+peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought
+nothing but discord and war.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and
+he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be
+not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar
+whereat all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.'</p>
+
+<p>"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on
+it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with
+a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man,
+but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.</p>
+
+<p>"And each man forsook his god, and came and kneeled before this nameless
+altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in
+solitude. The poor forsaken gods stood naked and alone; there was not
+one man left to worship one of them."</p>
+
+<p>She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy
+fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled
+through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and
+every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.</p>
+
+<p>She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken
+God on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since
+she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of
+hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities
+alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that worship them.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had a god," she said, suddenly, "if a god cared to claim me&mdash;I
+would be proud of his worship everywhere."</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"All women have a god; that is why they are at once so much weaker and
+so much happier than men."</p>
+
+<p>"Who are their gods?"</p>
+
+<p>"Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods of their offspring, of
+their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as
+tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples.
+Others&mdash;less innocent&mdash;make gods of their own forms and faces; of bright
+stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and
+fine linen, of passions, and vanities, and desires; gods that they
+consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat,
+and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these gods will be
+yours?"</p>
+
+<p>She thought awhile.</p>
+
+<p>"None of them," she said at last.</p>
+
+<p>"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"</p>
+
+<p>She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and
+even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations
+naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for
+her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that God is deaf. He
+must be deaf&mdash;or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no
+God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would&mdash;if I were He.
+Look&mdash;at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a
+little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing,
+quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been
+screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
+the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
+scream&mdash;scream&mdash;scream. All in vain. Its God never heard. When I got it
+free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had
+bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much
+blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it
+down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could;
+but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun
+rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed
+any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a
+little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a
+god since all gods let these things be?"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn smiled as he heard.</p>
+
+<p>"Child,&mdash;men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
+heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
+life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
+You do not understand that,&mdash;tut! You are not human, then. If you were
+human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
+yourself a lease of immortality."</p>
+
+<p>She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him,
+and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity.
+It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been
+flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed
+little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of
+all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the
+field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were
+hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to
+gratify the appetites or the avarice of humanity&mdash;these sufferings were
+horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,&mdash;a crime
+for which she hated God and Man.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no god pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no god&mdash;not one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three
+brethren that watched above her.</p>
+
+<p>"Are they your gods?"</p>
+
+<p>A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed a moment over his
+mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"My gods?&mdash;No. They are the gods of youth and of age&mdash;not of manhood."</p>
+
+<p>"What is yours, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mine?&mdash;a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen
+hands I have put them and myself&mdash;forever."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest
+of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he passed his years
+in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous
+shapes that rose and bloomed around him.</p>
+
+<p>"Those are gentler gods?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the
+brethren above her. "Do you never&mdash;will you never&mdash;worship them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have ceased to worship them. In time&mdash;when the world has utterly
+beaten me&mdash;no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one,
+see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."</p>
+
+<p>"And that god is&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Death!"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent.</p>
+
+<p>Was this god not her god also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest
+and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?</p>
+
+<p>"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.</p>
+
+<p>And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the
+secrets of men,&mdash;he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's
+souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the
+braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling
+what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds
+silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all
+things fall at last.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and
+returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the
+ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave
+any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know&mdash;and had he
+known would not have heeded&mdash;that instead of going on her straight path
+back to Yprès she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the
+bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the
+riverside.</p>
+
+<p>It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and
+then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some
+night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went
+slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of
+the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the
+fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a
+republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The
+young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of
+the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in
+which all their metal tongues joined musically.</p>
+
+<p>She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of
+the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale
+rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black
+shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the
+strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead
+body, and the bending figure of Arslàn as he stooped above the corpse
+and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of
+death.</p>
+
+<p>To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil
+thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make
+death&mdash;men's conqueror&mdash;his servant and his slave; she only begrudged
+every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid
+limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with
+a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and
+lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.</p>
+
+<p>He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any
+bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night
+breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the
+darkness.</p>
+
+<p>He worked more than half the night&mdash;worked until the small store of oil
+he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of
+a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and
+rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His
+hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his
+breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon
+his lungs.</p>
+
+<p>The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth
+that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever
+on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever
+on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that
+must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should
+have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For
+these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had
+neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death
+too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain
+glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the
+flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in
+his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of
+poverty and of obscurity.</p>
+
+<p>The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his
+manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to
+make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life
+by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the
+morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work
+of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.</p>
+
+<p>Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is
+Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to
+aim wildly and weakly?"</p>
+
+<p>He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again
+and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only
+that one dead woman shared.</p>
+
+<p>He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in
+search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be
+in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not
+in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to
+honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought,
+until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for
+once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once
+despairs of itself as self-deception.</p>
+
+<p>Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his
+fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him
+and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told
+himself, it must be so.</p>
+
+<p>He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing
+what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp
+exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few
+stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the
+silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon
+him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men
+that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the
+strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead
+also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave
+where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands
+powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices
+and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world
+above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of
+which paused by his tomb.</p>
+
+<p>It grew horrible to him&mdash;this death in life, to which in the freshness
+of manhood he found himself condemned.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be
+without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long&mdash;let me
+be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days.
+Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men
+cannot, if they wish, let die."</p>
+
+<p>Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say?
+Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human
+creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and
+asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all
+the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to
+perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim
+exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"</p>
+
+<p>One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow sighing rushes,
+bathed in the moonlight and the mists; and the impersonal passion which
+absorbed him found echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just
+wakened in its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life
+as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of its
+involuntary cry.</p>
+
+<p>She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and yet her heart ached
+with his desire, and shared the bitterness of his denial. What kind of
+life he craved in the ages to come; what manner of remembrance he
+yearned for from unborn races of man; what thing it was that he
+besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, all peace, all
+personal woes and physical delights, she did not know; the future to her
+had no meaning; and the immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god,
+of whose worship she had no comprehension; and yet she vaguely felt that
+what he sought was that his genius still should live when his body
+should be destroyed, and that those mute, motionless, majestic shapes
+which arose at his bidding should become characters and speak for him to
+all the generations of men when his own mouth should be sealed dumb in
+death.</p>
+
+<p>This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured him, though the
+famine of the flesh had had no power to move him, thrilled her with the
+instinct of its greatness. This thirst of the mind, which could not
+slake itself in common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and
+pleasure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that dim
+instinct which had made her nerves throb at the glories of the changing
+skies, and her eyes fill with tears at the sound of a bird's singing in
+the darkness of dawn, and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as
+for some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant hush of
+earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she suffered; and a sweet
+newborn sense of unity and of likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter
+pity of her soul. To her he was as a king: and yet he was powerless. To
+give him power she would have died a thousand deaths.</p>
+
+<p>"The gods gave me life for him," she thought. "His life instead of mine.
+Will they forget?&mdash;Will they forget?"</p>
+
+<p>And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bulrushes she flung
+herself down prostrate in supplication, her face buried in the long damp
+river-grass.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Immortals," she implored, in benighted, wistful, passionate faith,
+"remember to give me his life and take mine. Do what you choose with me;
+forsake me, kill me; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind; let
+me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the chaff; let me be
+bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always; let me always suffer and
+always be scorned; but grant me this one thing&mdash;to give him his desire!"</p>
+
+<p>Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that vain would be the gift
+of life&mdash;the gift of mere length of years which she had bought for him.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its solitude dreams
+had sprung forth windsown, like wayside grasses, and vague desires
+wandered like wild doves: but although blank, the soil was rich and deep
+and virgin.</p>
+
+<p>Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she had learned no evil: a
+stainless though savage innocence had remained with her. She had been
+reared in hardship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to her
+scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if they had been borne
+with courage and without murmur. On her, profoundly unconscious of the
+meaning of any common luxury or any common comfort, the passions of
+natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the empire of gold, had
+no hold at any moment. To toil dully and be hungry and thirsty, and
+fatigued and footsore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of
+the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich command. She knew
+scarcely of the existence of the simplest forms of civilization:
+therefore she knew nothing of all that he missed through poverty; she
+only perceived, by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he
+gained through genius.</p>
+
+<p>Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character trained by cruelty only
+to endurance: yet the soil was not rank but only untilled, not barren
+but only unsown; nature had made it generous, though fate had left it
+untilled; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to it and
+held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold.</p>
+
+<p>The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in
+her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the
+defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as
+they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and
+imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good
+things of which no man had taught her in anywise.</p>
+
+<p>Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by
+it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters,
+the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed
+into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless
+freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though
+she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the
+sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her
+which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.</p>
+
+<p>He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual
+delight, but only this one thing&mdash;a name that should not perish from
+among the memories of men.</p>
+
+<p>And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she
+yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on
+a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty
+pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's
+sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with
+every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works
+of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his
+body should be destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
+when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
+blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
+though weakened.</p>
+
+<p>The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
+an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
+darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
+he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
+pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
+life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
+at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
+and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the
+forest-land and water-world are audible.</p>
+
+<p>He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
+impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
+lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
+thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
+which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never
+will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will
+drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
+oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
+devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
+when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.</p>
+
+<p>Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to
+feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have
+told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered
+to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a
+greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had
+known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a
+half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his
+life, and honored it without doubt or question.</p>
+
+<p>No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours
+under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.</p>
+
+<p>She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the
+first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But
+when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not
+dare to say her nay.</p>
+
+<p>A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly opening to her; the
+life of the imagination.</p>
+
+<p>All these many years since the last song of Phratos had died off her
+ear, never again to be heard, she had spent with no more culture and
+with no more pleasure than the mule had that she led with his load along
+the miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through that utter
+neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, some wild natural fancy
+had been awake in her, some vague sense stir that brought to her in the
+rustle of leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists,
+the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the open-air
+world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did not bear for any of
+those around her.</p>
+
+<p>Now in the words that Arslàn cast to her&mdash;often as idly and
+indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds on snow, birds that
+he pities and yet cares nothing for&mdash;the old religions, the old beliefs,
+became to her living truths and divine companions. The perplexities of
+the world grew little clearer to her, indeed; and the miseries of the
+animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion of all things
+was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might be, they deepened and grew
+more entangled. He could imbue her with neither credulity nor
+contentment; for he possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool's
+paradise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that they have
+ascended Zion.</p>
+
+<p>The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of such a mind as
+his can furnish anodynes neither to itself nor any other. But such
+possessions and consolations&mdash;and these are limitless&mdash;as the
+imagination can create, he placed within her reach. Before she had
+dreamed&mdash;dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of
+tyranny; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon a mist-swept hill,
+by the western seas, while all the earth is dark, and only its dim
+fugitive waking sounds steal dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through
+the myths and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed
+almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting sun on the
+wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which all common things of daily
+life grow glorious, and through whose rosy hues the only sound that
+comes is some rich dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and
+melody of prayer.</p>
+
+<p>The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel place of labor and
+butchery, in which all creatures suffered and were slain. All things
+rose to have their story and their symbol for her; Nature remaining to
+her that one sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had feebly
+felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer to her, and made
+fuller of compassion. All the forms and voices of the fair dead years of
+the world seemed to grow visible and audible to her, with those
+marvelous tales of the old heroic age which little by little he
+unfolded to her.</p>
+
+<p>In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had no belief; she
+wanted a faith, and found one in all these strange sweet stories of a
+perished time.</p>
+
+<p>She had never thought that there had been any other generation before
+that which was present on earth with her; any other existence than this
+narrow and sordid one which encircled her. That men had lived who had
+fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, and stained
+those vivid hues in its ancient casements, had been a fact too remote to
+be known to her, though for twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in
+reverence of their loveliness.</p>
+
+<p>Through Arslàn the exhaustless annals of the world's history opened
+before her, the present ceased to matter to her in its penury and pain;
+for the treasury-houses of the golden past were opened to her sight.
+Most of all she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages; and
+every humble and homely thing became ennobled to her and enriched,
+beholding it through the halo of poetry and tradition.</p>
+
+<p>When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two sparrows pecked and
+screamed and spent the pleasant summer hours above in the flower-scented
+air in shrill dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard
+in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and Cyx. When
+the wild hyacinths made the ground purple beneath the poplars and the
+pines, she saw in them the transformed loveliness of one who had died in
+the fullness of youth, at play in a summer's noon, and died content
+because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest of all gods,
+the god that loved him best. As the cattle, with their sleek red hides
+and curling horns, came through the fogs of the daybreak, across the
+level meadows, and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no
+more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the milk-white
+herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures of Pieria.</p>
+
+<p>All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song of the
+nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer for her a little
+brown bird that sang to the budding fruit and the closed daisies, but
+was the voice of Ædon bewailing her son through the ages, or the woe of
+Philomela crying through the wilderness. When through the white hard
+brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down the beams of light,
+she saw no longer in it an insect-hunter, a house-nesting creature, but
+saw the shape of Procne, slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding
+none. And when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing water,
+bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the mules to the
+mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she had heard the old glad story
+of the children of Zeus who dwelt so long within a herdsman's hut,
+nameless and dishonored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see
+the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise up and obey
+the magic of their song.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn in his day had given many evil gifts, but this one gift that he
+gave was pure and full of solace: this gift of the beauty of the past.
+Imperfect, obscure, broken in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance,
+it was indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory that time
+could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance could not impair.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>"What has come to that evil one? She walks the land as though she were a
+queen," the people of Yprès said to one another, watching the creature
+they abhorred as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the
+market-stall.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed to them transfigured.</p>
+
+<p>A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her eyes; a proud
+elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance of her carriage: her face
+had a sweet musing mystery and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her
+smile was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair tidings
+in her heart unspoken.</p>
+
+<p>Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, absorbed in their
+small trades or in their continual field labor, were struck by the
+change in her, and looked after her, and listened in a stupid wonder to
+the sonorous songs in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips
+as she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden mules through
+the fords.</p>
+
+<p>They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, that she had thrown
+off their yoke, and had escaped from their narrow world, and was happy
+with some rich, mute, nameless happiness that they could neither evade
+nor understand.</p>
+
+<p>The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding
+a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that
+fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance
+which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and
+so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with
+indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than
+she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast
+that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure
+in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing
+the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful,
+clouded, fierce face.</p>
+
+<p>As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and
+to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came
+naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for
+some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest
+for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious
+sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed
+in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of
+ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden
+with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and
+the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free
+forest animal, was in a way welcome.</p>
+
+<p>All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was
+so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so
+unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift
+a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him
+when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another
+planet than his own.</p>
+
+<p>He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to
+inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without
+passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked
+in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured
+sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again
+with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful
+tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the
+tyranny of a human love.</p>
+
+<p>She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told
+himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows,
+and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious
+sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was
+a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of
+a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet
+appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake
+what slumbered there.</p>
+
+<p>But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she
+listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.</p>
+
+<p>The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created
+was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the
+peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.</p>
+
+<p>He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had
+flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of
+those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the
+walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself;
+despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the
+souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing&mdash;a
+thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of
+it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who
+was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the
+breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed
+at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,&mdash;these
+were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he
+was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a
+worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this
+new shame which they could cast at her.</p>
+
+<p>"She has found a lover,&mdash;oh-ho!&mdash;that brown wicked thing! A lover meet
+for her;&mdash;a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the
+mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own
+likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"&mdash;so the women
+screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or
+heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.</p>
+
+<p>At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a
+deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was
+only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and
+whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.</p>
+
+<p>In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated
+might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body
+or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy
+itself in its own darkness:&mdash;he had never stretched a finger to hold it
+back.</p>
+
+<p>The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of
+this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to
+him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should
+live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside
+he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first
+day, breathed a word to Arslàn of the treatment that she received at
+Yprès. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his
+pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her
+how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well
+enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.</p>
+
+<p>And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did
+not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire,
+and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her
+teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to
+revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.</p>
+
+<p>So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslàn's
+tower she spent in acquiring another art,&mdash;she learned to read.</p>
+
+<p>There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to
+her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly
+word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was
+better educated than most, and could even write a little.</p>
+
+<p>To her Folle-Farine went.</p>
+
+<p>"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every
+nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never
+find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you
+will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have
+you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still&mdash;&mdash;" The wish for
+the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared
+to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She
+consented.</p>
+
+<p>Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and
+scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little
+brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those
+green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no
+one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and
+despair of all the market-place.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping
+under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green
+bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in
+rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the
+Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder,
+and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible
+things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.</p>
+
+<p>Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night
+and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings;
+the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing
+against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle
+and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their
+folded white lilies,&mdash;these were all things he cared to study.</p>
+
+<p>The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
+artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then
+break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and
+revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much
+deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and
+the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to
+move abroad.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her
+shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule
+seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them
+together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of
+all honest folk, were after some unholy work&mdash;coming from the orgy of
+some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them
+the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.</p>
+
+<p>For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and
+whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.</p>
+
+<p>Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the
+dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages
+she could for learning the art of letters.</p>
+
+<p>The acquisition was hard and hateful&mdash;a dull plodding task that she
+detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the
+lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with
+the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant
+was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen
+in communion with the wicked thing of Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of
+the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from
+that belonged to the herb-seller&mdash;a rude old tattered pamphlet
+recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she
+had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the
+thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know
+these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you
+were not so ignorant!"&mdash;and since that day she had set herself to clear
+away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood
+with her hatchet.</p>
+
+<p>It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand
+before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles
+to me."</p>
+
+<p>He praised her; and she was glad and proud.</p>
+
+<p>It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full
+of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;&mdash;a love that
+unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her,
+and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.</p>
+
+<p>He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.</p>
+
+<p>A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman
+woods,&mdash;what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the
+desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he
+gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his
+exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission,
+was welcome to him.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of
+her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes
+dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow
+dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.</p>
+
+<p>She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or
+the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would
+have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them
+more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at
+the blue-rock on the wing.</p>
+
+<p>This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit&mdash;habit, and the
+callousness begotten by his own continual pain.</p>
+
+<p>The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever
+knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty
+of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to
+change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind
+into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.</p>
+
+<p>He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his
+fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.</p>
+
+<p>His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition&mdash;a passion pure as
+crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his
+name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be
+his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into
+oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of
+his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into
+the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on
+the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.</p>
+
+<p>"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his
+paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so
+much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of
+hours&mdash;waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so
+many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly.
+It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes
+to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to
+do with you, go and hang yourself&mdash;or if you fear to do that, dig a
+ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows
+what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs
+to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what
+your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before
+you, Hosannah."</p>
+
+<p>So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his
+cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and
+which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that
+flew over them.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the
+wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
+aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere
+on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and
+nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to
+have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to
+make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a
+thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?&mdash;if the world's choice were
+wrong once, why not twice?"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
+than the ice floes of his native seas.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
+sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas&mdash;the trickster in talent,
+the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
+of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
+elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
+Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
+every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
+its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."</p>
+
+<p>She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
+roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.</p>
+
+<p>"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
+round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they
+bow when they pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
+with Barabbas&mdash;what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
+him?"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn laughed a little.</p>
+
+<p>"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
+whitening on the plains&mdash;those times were primitive, the world was
+young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb
+that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
+who run may read. In our day Barabbas&mdash;the Barabbas of money greeds and
+delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the
+assassination that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that
+deals moral death and not material death&mdash;our Barabbas, who is crowned
+Fraud in the place of mailed Force,&mdash;lives always in purple and fine
+linen, and ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over
+his corpse."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
+thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
+others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
+more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
+where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
+his hand.</p>
+
+<p>She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly. "I have thought of
+something."</p>
+
+<p>And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
+surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
+a vision had arisen before him.</p>
+
+<p>The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone
+walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the
+level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded
+away as though they had existed only in a dream.</p>
+
+<p>All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes
+that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed
+before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he
+saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble
+palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of
+Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a
+city at high festival.</p>
+
+<p>And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had
+rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.</p>
+
+<p>A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
+womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
+in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
+a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow streamed; a sun which
+parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which
+it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the
+myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose gleaming marble walls the
+silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling
+cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple
+plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had
+scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they
+had one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes
+were filled with a god's pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned,
+and lashed, and hooted.</p>
+
+<p>And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
+men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
+brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
+eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of
+brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed,
+rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
+victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with
+wide-open throats and brazen lungs,&mdash;"Barabbas!"</p>
+
+<p>There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a
+terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or
+of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.</p>
+
+<p>One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
+stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.</p>
+
+<p>A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and
+shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and
+fled.</p>
+
+<p>A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
+rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
+on him.</p>
+
+<p>A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he
+stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
+captive.</p>
+
+<p>A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
+dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
+sacrifice.</p>
+
+<p>A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
+sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
+her in Barabbas' train.</p>
+
+<p>On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
+looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
+boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
+beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion
+of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to
+the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.</p>
+
+<p>And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above
+all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one
+faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure
+ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close,
+and tearing at each other's breasts.</p>
+
+<p>Six nights the conception occupied him&mdash;his days were not his own, he
+spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while
+his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the
+end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
+could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
+many of the greatest works the world has seen;&mdash;oaks sprung from the
+acorn that a careless child has let fall.</p>
+
+<p>When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood
+motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his
+sleepless eyes.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that his work was good.</p>
+
+<p>The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god
+when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne
+their full fruit.</p>
+
+<p>It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will
+discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the
+feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor
+of his ideal; the more surely will he&mdash;though the world ring with
+applause of him&mdash;be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.</p>
+
+<p>But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense,
+surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with
+a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain
+and of his hand contents him,&mdash;it is the purest joy on earth.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he
+had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger
+and thirst and the passage of time.</p>
+
+<p>He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him.
+He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed
+with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had
+worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived
+there, recorded for the world that denied him.</p>
+
+<p>As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith
+in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what
+other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation
+remained with him.</p>
+
+<p>His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of
+the passing night.</p>
+
+<p>The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and
+plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the
+light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his
+fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.</p>
+
+<p>He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the
+best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the
+genius in him had ever conceived and put forth;&mdash;and he knew too that he
+was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he
+were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed
+whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame,
+unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken
+with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.</p>
+
+<p>There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in
+him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future
+generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were
+none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful
+things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their
+scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his
+mind and his hand&mdash;and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving
+one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for
+their meaning.</p>
+
+<p>To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few
+coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the
+bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.</p>
+
+<p>A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent
+life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle
+with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.</p>
+
+<p>"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to
+be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on
+it."</p>
+
+<p>All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he
+doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on
+canvas.</p>
+
+<p>If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to
+leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with
+each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the
+wing of the owl and the flittermouse.</p>
+
+<p>The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.</p>
+
+<p>Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.</p>
+
+<p>She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of
+his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then
+she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and
+bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts
+of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had
+brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have
+remembered.</p>
+
+<p>She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him
+and looked;&mdash;looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of
+radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there
+was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.</p>
+
+<p>She stood and gazed at it.</p>
+
+<p>She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of
+dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the
+dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was
+darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a
+thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its
+unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have been more
+marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch
+wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But
+now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the
+pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the
+creation, its creator.</p>
+
+<p>All she saw was the face of the Christ,&mdash;the pale bent face, in whose
+eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach
+that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the
+people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ
+moved her strangely&mdash;there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken
+while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.</p>
+
+<p>Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated
+her with their ironies and with their woe&mdash;the parable of the genius
+rejected and the thief exalted.</p>
+
+<p>She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.</p>
+
+<p>"They have talked of their God&mdash;often&mdash;so often," she muttered. "But I
+never knew till now what they meant."</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well&mdash;the world refuses me fame; but I do
+not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your
+admiration."</p>
+
+<p>"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the
+Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You
+care for the world&mdash;you?&mdash;who have painted <i>that</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.</p>
+
+<p>He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless
+truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the
+painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a
+worldly success.</p>
+
+<p>Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?</p>
+
+<p>It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this
+untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious
+and mature intellect of the man of genius.</p>
+
+<p>He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.</p>
+
+<p>"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters,
+can see the truth and can tell it,&mdash;we are prophets so far,&mdash;but when we
+come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the
+dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no
+better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set
+to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."</p>
+
+<p>She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks
+faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the
+wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the
+child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the
+soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there
+kneeled and prayed.</p>
+
+<p>Without looking at her, Arslàn went out to his daily labor on the
+waters.</p>
+
+<p>The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed
+in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and
+voices of innumerable birds.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and
+die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."</p>
+
+<p>Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire
+with a child's desire, the stars.</p>
+
+<p>For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and
+fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy;
+and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and
+his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will
+dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have
+closed on him and shut him forever from sight.</p>
+
+<p>When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its
+recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
+fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or
+left down-trodden.</p>
+
+<p>But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
+it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
+nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
+count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
+under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
+moved, and swift&mdash;terribly swift&mdash;to forget.</p>
+
+<p>Why should it not be?</p>
+
+<p>It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.</p>
+
+<p>And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from
+his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same
+old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound
+of the wind, and forever&mdash;forever unanswered!</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats
+of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere
+the sun set.</p>
+
+<p>"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You
+who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it
+is."</p>
+
+<p>"The man has never yet lived who could tell&mdash;in fit language. Poseidon
+is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and
+reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."</p>
+
+<p>So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the
+osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet
+the swift salt waves.</p>
+
+<p>It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her
+errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the
+town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people
+of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that
+took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought
+the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself
+she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always
+in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran,
+spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a
+broad estuary.</p>
+
+<p>She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on
+which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something
+unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as
+probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull
+pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy
+burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of
+the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the
+sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in
+human nature.</p>
+
+<p>A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in
+by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little
+fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy
+with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded
+with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of
+the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of
+great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome
+cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the
+death-screams of scalded shellfish.</p>
+
+<p>He did not take her thither.</p>
+
+<p>He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily
+beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of
+silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some
+apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the
+water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with
+that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known
+restraint.</p>
+
+<p>Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road
+to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an
+old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for
+her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his
+clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing
+birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet
+hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and
+there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage;
+all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and
+the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze,
+for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.</p>
+
+<p>"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly
+as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and
+over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale
+crescent of a week-old moon.</p>
+
+<p>"To live apart?"&mdash;she did not understand.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man
+exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing&mdash;not
+so much as a fair word. That is well."</p>
+
+<p>"I think it is well&mdash;if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."</p>
+
+<p>"I am strong."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force,
+which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.</p>
+
+<p>"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered.
+"I know what you mean&mdash;now. It is well&mdash;it was well with those men you
+tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to
+live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm,
+and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"</p>
+
+<p>"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such
+worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and
+he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool.
+And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild
+dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and
+despised?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and
+fierce as she answered him:</p>
+
+<p>"See here.&mdash;There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town
+who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says
+to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother
+Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are
+twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of God
+in Paradise.'</p>
+
+<p>"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is
+dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to
+go near by a league.</p>
+
+<p>"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the
+fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pass.
+He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they
+are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like
+betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need
+sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay,
+greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in
+each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the
+fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the
+priests honor her, and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind
+mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall,
+and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on
+the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a
+night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now&mdash;is it well or no to be
+hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have
+become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the
+caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and classing the
+kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a
+theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true
+instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any
+creature.</p>
+
+<p>She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of
+which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a
+passion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in
+common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as
+free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and
+gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He
+answered her merely, with a smile:</p>
+
+<p>"You are only a barbarian; how should you understand that the seductions
+of civilization lie in its multiplications of the forms of vice? Men
+would not bear its yoke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their
+sins. You are an outcast from it;&mdash;so you have kept your hands honest
+and your lips pure. You may be right to be thankful&mdash;I would not pretend
+to decide."</p>
+
+<p>"At least&mdash;I would not be as they are," she answered him with a curl of
+the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes: the pride of the old nomadic tribes,
+whose blood was in her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority
+of the tamed and hearth-bound races&mdash;blood that ran free and fearless to
+the measure of boundless winds and rushing waters; that made the forest
+and the plain, the dawn and the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and
+the hiding-place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, sweeter
+than any nuptial bed.</p>
+
+<p>She had left the old life so long&mdash;so long that even her memories of it
+were dim as dreams, and its language had died off her lips in all save
+the broken catches of her songs; but the impulses of it were in her,
+vivid and ineradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid
+races of hearth and of homestead regarded her, she, the daughter of
+Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure.</p>
+
+<p>"I would not be as they are!" she repeated, her eyes glancing through
+the sunshine of the cloudless day. "To sit and spin; to watch their
+soup-pot boil; to spend their days under a close roof; to shut the stars
+out, and cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their straw
+in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, fearing to do what they
+will, lest the tongue of their neighbor wag evil of it; to cheat a
+little and steal a little, and lie always when the false word serves
+them, and to mutter to themselves, 'God will wash us free of our sins,'
+and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will not see and
+sure that their God will give them a quittance;&mdash;that is their life. I
+would not be as they are."</p>
+
+<p>And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana seemed to
+flash on her for one moment clear and bright through the veil of the
+weary years, and she walked erect and swiftly through the gorse, singing
+by his side the bold burden of one of the old sweet songs.</p>
+
+<p>And for the first time the thought passed over Arslàn:</p>
+
+<p>"This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, and be yoked as a
+beast of burden,&mdash;if I chose."</p>
+
+<p>Whether or no he chose he was not sure.</p>
+
+<p>She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he
+cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to
+seek love from her he did not care.</p>
+
+<p>And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert
+mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared
+for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the
+gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.</p>
+
+<p>There was so little passion left in him.</p>
+
+<p>He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and
+the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its
+own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more
+than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses
+were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so,
+he had taught himself to desire it; and yet&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the
+summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing
+creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a
+yellowhammer.</p>
+
+<p>Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the
+interior was visible. It was very poor&mdash;a floor of mud, a couch of
+rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls
+lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and
+trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that
+hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who
+was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple
+as herself.</p>
+
+<p>In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted
+her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks,
+he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white
+lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let
+the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head
+against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslàn glanced at them
+as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to
+be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a
+woman's lips."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled
+suddenly, and walked on in silence.</p>
+
+<p>A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made her afraid: this
+forest-born creature, who had never known what fear was.</p>
+
+<p>The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
+wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
+the fire of the late afternoon sun. The slope was too gradual to break
+their monotony.</p>
+
+<p>Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
+parched green; other color there was none; one little dusky panting bird
+flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.</p>
+
+<p>She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
+she hated the dull heat, the colorless waste, the hard scorch of the
+air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
+had chosen to come to them.</p>
+
+<p>A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
+covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the
+stunted bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the
+slope grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and
+them, steep and barren as a house-roof.</p>
+
+<p>Once he asked her,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Are you tired?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
+in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
+dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
+weakness.</p>
+
+<p>He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
+air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
+them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
+their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them.
+He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
+and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and
+prickly from the stunted growth of furze.</p>
+
+<p>On the summit he stood still and released her.</p>
+
+<p>"Now look."</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led
+out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
+laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
+dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.</p>
+
+<p>For what she saw was the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
+waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
+of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
+it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
+rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent
+air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the
+cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch
+and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown
+curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that
+gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still,
+still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift
+wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher
+sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.</p>
+
+<p>The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the
+earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again
+in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed
+away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn watched her in silence.</p>
+
+<p>He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
+thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the
+northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's
+work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through
+all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the
+stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep
+through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the
+grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the
+corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take
+the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it
+claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the
+first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt
+small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to
+see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own
+conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters
+over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.</p>
+
+<p>Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
+almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
+would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
+death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous; a death on which no
+woman should look and in which no man should have share.</p>
+
+<p>He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
+paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
+figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
+breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching the wondrous
+brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
+Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
+who for the first time hears of God.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
+but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings,
+with little heed whether he thus added to either.</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
+answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"It has been there always&mdash;always&mdash;so near me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Before the land, the sea was."</p>
+
+<p>"And I never knew!"</p>
+
+<p>Her head drooped on her breast; tears rolled silently down her checks;
+her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She knew all
+she had lost&mdash;this is the greatest grief that life holds.</p>
+
+<p>"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
+you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
+climb theirs all their lives long."</p>
+
+<p>The words and their meaning escaped her.</p>
+
+<p>She had for once no remembrance of him; nor any other sense save of this
+surpassing wonder which had thus burst on her&mdash;this miracle that had
+been near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
+dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
+straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
+where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
+circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
+gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
+behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
+the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears
+gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
+was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.</p>
+
+<p>He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:</p>
+
+<p>"Since it pains you come away."</p>
+
+<p>A great sob shuddered through her.</p>
+
+<p>"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?&mdash;it
+is life, heaven, liberty!"</p>
+
+<p>For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
+which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the
+dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them
+unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all
+the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and
+passions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now
+in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn looked at her, and let her be.</p>
+
+<p>Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the passions of
+this untrained and intense nature had interest for him&mdash;the cold
+interest of analysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed
+her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of
+mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with
+little pity and little tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
+into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
+westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
+edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
+cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
+and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still
+that look of one who worships with intense honor and passionate faith an
+unknown God.</p>
+
+<p>The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
+the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
+the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
+in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
+rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
+the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
+fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
+faint and weirdlike.</p>
+
+<p>Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and
+draw her to it with some unseen power.</p>
+
+<p>She started again as Arslàn spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had
+seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic
+world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the
+twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a heavy stifled sigh.</p>
+
+<p>"It looks so free. And I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only
+exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of
+ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more
+binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived
+the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and
+yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her
+to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a
+slave&mdash;since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its
+weight was upon her.</p>
+
+<p>He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of
+poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much
+poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that
+govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty,
+but obedience&mdash;just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when
+it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in
+its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of
+the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it,
+but nature has never accorded it."</p>
+
+<p>The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the
+radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that
+trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from
+off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a
+rose.</p>
+
+<p>"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only
+known&mdash;I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on
+it&mdash;as that bird floats&mdash;it would be so quiet there and it would not
+fling me back, I think. It would have pity."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire
+was in it.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his
+words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"</p>
+
+<p>"You live," she said, simply.</p>
+
+<p>He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so
+clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had
+gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed
+was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."</p>
+
+<p>With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in
+a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the
+shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and
+fled at the human footsteps.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little
+scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she
+obeyed.</p>
+
+<p>With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the
+purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might
+be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.</p>
+
+<p>It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the
+callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the
+dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed
+people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these
+things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of
+thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.</p>
+
+<p>But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would
+have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed
+thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his
+bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to
+cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.</p>
+
+<p>He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her
+the center of innumerable stories.</p>
+
+<p>He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after
+Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on
+the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty
+burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg.
+He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her
+streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed
+her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into
+the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the
+fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being
+purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's
+sake spoke not.</p>
+
+<p>He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking
+her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her
+beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind
+and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in
+other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell,
+the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by
+its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the studies he made from her&mdash;he all the while cold to her as any
+priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of
+sacrifice,&mdash;those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him
+best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and
+unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as
+with a knife into the humanity he dissected.</p>
+
+<p>In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating
+slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant
+blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the
+intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath,
+around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon
+her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in
+her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the
+sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep
+curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her
+with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken&mdash;the one touch of
+pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through
+the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.</p>
+
+<p>In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the
+same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of
+white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and
+twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same
+loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the
+face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and
+the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone
+there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips
+the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was
+left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,&mdash;ready for the
+mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,&mdash;ready for the
+feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in
+dust.</p>
+
+<p>And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all
+the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they
+were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so
+unsparing and unfaltering a hand.</p>
+
+<p>Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power,
+because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder,
+which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to
+which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it
+pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her
+beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his
+bidding.</p>
+
+<p>She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.</p>
+
+<p>She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would.
+That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her
+all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslàn seemed sweet
+as the south wind.</p>
+
+<p>To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was
+to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life
+sublime to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from
+the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Yprès went down
+the water-street beneath.</p>
+
+<p>"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no
+better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are&mdash;the little
+mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they
+say&mdash;sooner or later&mdash;to every creature that lives again for him in his
+art?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers
+of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they
+had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton
+temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.</p>
+
+<p>"And you have no fear?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have no fear."</p>
+
+<p>The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow
+tresses.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for
+the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you&mdash;his daughter&mdash;to lend
+yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the
+market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that
+for you&mdash;his own-begotten&mdash;I will cleave close to the saints and the
+angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the
+lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."</p>
+
+<p>The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision
+which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the
+fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around
+which they beat with their wings the empty air.</p>
+
+<p>The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched.
+If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught
+it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of
+pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing,
+she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her
+eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.</p>
+
+<p>Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.</p>
+
+<p>The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they
+were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling
+eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky
+orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen
+down,&mdash;she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her
+treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a
+human joy.</p>
+
+<p>Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely,
+with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the
+country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all
+unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep
+speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal
+tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her&mdash;nay, unfelt&mdash;went on her
+daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes,
+and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and
+entered into a heritage of grace.</p>
+
+<p>She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity;
+proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance
+made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in
+his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a
+thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed
+to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God
+for it&mdash;that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom
+she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the
+setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries
+of the starlit skies.</p>
+
+<p>Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in
+its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him,
+and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have
+crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave;
+she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of
+resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his
+hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be
+broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the
+greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to
+see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had
+any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could
+befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the
+wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then
+casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to
+this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and
+sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from
+the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was
+unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would
+have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the
+fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.</p>
+
+<p>To be of use to him,&mdash;to be held of any worth to him,&mdash;to have his eyes
+find any loveliness to study in her,&mdash;to be to him only as a flower that
+he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out
+on the land to wither as it would,&mdash;this, even this, seemed to her the
+noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.</p>
+
+<p>That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her
+limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of
+the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of
+the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never
+touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme,
+passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated
+all that they consumed.</p>
+
+<p>"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live
+forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself
+perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin
+first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.</p>
+
+<p>The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
+she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
+her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
+feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
+behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
+sky of Spain.</p>
+
+<p>He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.</p>
+
+<p>She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
+his art:&mdash;a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is
+always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
+the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
+passion.</p>
+
+<p>Art is so vast; and human life is so little.</p>
+
+<p>It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be
+sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the
+heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It
+might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance and submission to
+his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make
+these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good
+was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they
+decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of
+the Mexican nation.</p>
+
+<p>The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
+face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
+opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
+enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
+the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
+perished frozen in perpetual night.</p>
+
+<p>So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice
+that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which
+perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?</p>
+
+<p>The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
+ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
+of its priests.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
+the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
+tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.</p>
+
+<p>"I was thinking,&mdash;I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of,&mdash;the
+one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
+down to make into a flute."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah?&mdash;you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are
+only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the
+market."</p>
+
+<p>"That is not the fault of the reeds?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not that I know; it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink
+of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do
+you think the reed felt then?&mdash;pain to be so sharply severed from its
+fellows?"</p>
+
+<p>"No&mdash;or the god would not have chosen it"</p>
+
+<p>"What, then?"</p>
+
+<p>A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
+her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
+the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
+into the little life of a day.</p>
+
+<p>"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
+forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
+among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
+the toads and the newts,&mdash;there is not a note of music in them
+all&mdash;except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
+remember that long&mdash;long&mdash;ago, the breath of a great god was in them."</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds,
+and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about
+her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the
+thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden
+butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.</p>
+
+<p>He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
+comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
+you, he would think you mad."</p>
+
+<p>"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing at all;&mdash;that I know. But you seem to envy that reed&mdash;so long
+ago&mdash;that was chosen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who would not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;&mdash;dancing
+there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
+the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
+the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay;&mdash;how do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather it was born in the sands, among
+the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,&mdash;no one asking, no
+one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad&mdash;no one caring
+where it dropped. Rather,&mdash;it grew there by the river, and such millions
+of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a
+thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out
+despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn.
+And then&mdash;I think I see!&mdash;the great god walked by the edge of the river,
+and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the
+earth forever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme
+that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange
+flame of the tall sand-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the
+sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed
+pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then
+he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;&mdash;killed it as a
+reed,&mdash;but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears
+of men. Was that death to the reed?&mdash;or life? Would a thousand summers
+of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a
+god first spoke through it?"</p>
+
+<p>Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
+pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
+the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
+planets through the rain.</p>
+
+<p>She spoke of the reed and the god:&mdash;she thought of herself and of him.</p>
+
+<p>He was silent.</p>
+
+<p>The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze of the evening, and
+cast a malignant eye upon them, and bent his back and drew the curve of
+his hook through the rushes.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn watched the sweep of the steel.</p>
+
+<p>"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was
+cruel. "And the gods are all dead&mdash;Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her
+lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild
+strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.</p>
+
+<p>The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies
+grew dark.</p>
+
+<p>He looked, and let her go;&mdash;alone.</p>
+
+<p>In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which
+all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes,
+when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to
+make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslàn, his reed was but a
+reed as the rest were&mdash;a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve&mdash;a thing of
+the stagnant water and drifting sand&mdash;a thing that lived by the breath
+of the wind&mdash;a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for
+a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any
+wise remember&mdash;a reed of the river, as the rest were.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK V.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the
+Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the
+dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I
+should be free; and with me <i>these</i>."</p>
+
+<p>The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he
+thought himself alone.</p>
+
+<p>This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this
+aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent
+in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as
+well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he
+despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him
+might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which
+he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his
+fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his
+brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.</p>
+
+<p>So little!&mdash;just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons,
+fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with
+which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;&mdash;and
+having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and
+arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still
+continue to deny him other victories.</p>
+
+<p>It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His
+boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a
+strong and hardy mountain-people.</p>
+
+<p>It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger
+unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes
+of wild weather.</p>
+
+<p>In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a
+salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had passed a
+winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the
+seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.</p>
+
+<p>None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its
+imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the
+impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual
+narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these
+were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his
+wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.</p>
+
+<p>"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so
+little&mdash;ever so little!"</p>
+
+<p>For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier
+times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at
+Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try
+once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the
+highest tributes that the multitude can give to the genius that arises
+amidst it.</p>
+
+<p>There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that
+wove in the darkness among the timbers.</p>
+
+<p>It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of
+the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes,
+and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the
+shore; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were
+wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Otherwise it was intensely silent.</p>
+
+<p>In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of
+the tower, the market-boat of Yprès glided by, and the soft splash of
+the passing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.</p>
+
+<p>But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up
+at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and
+listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through
+the open casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his
+heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.</p>
+
+<p>She heard and understood.</p>
+
+<p>Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.</p>
+
+<p>"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the
+bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone
+tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down
+with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his
+sake.</p>
+
+<p>She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past&mdash;of
+all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their
+joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and
+the habits of the world&mdash;nothing of the world's pleasures and the
+world's triumphs.</p>
+
+<p>To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than
+this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the
+simplicity of it, seemed noble, and all that the heart of a man could
+desire from fate.</p>
+
+<p>Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of
+the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea,
+and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the
+pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the
+turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud,
+the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the
+leaves; or to lie still on the grass or the sand by the shore, and see
+the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb
+of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness
+of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams
+of worlds beyond the stars;&mdash;such a life as this seemed to her beyond
+any other beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound
+of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between
+him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a
+street&mdash;a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and
+thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,&mdash;it seemed to
+her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was
+freest, simplest, and highest.</p>
+
+<p>She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the
+ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is
+doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the
+hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter
+and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.</p>
+
+<p>Of these she knew nothing.</p>
+
+<p>She had no conception of them&mdash;of the weakness and the force that twine
+one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and
+beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly
+disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could
+stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.</p>
+
+<p>But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that
+escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one
+that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her
+years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the
+twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.</p>
+
+<p>Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper
+pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a
+stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities
+would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads
+and cabins which had been her only world.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold!&mdash;a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went
+on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase
+any pleasure for his appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever
+whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse
+circumstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the
+caged eagle.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted
+on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the
+baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold!"</p>
+
+<p>It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to
+stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought
+to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den
+still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary
+for him as she went.</p>
+
+<p>"What use for the gods to have given him back life," she thought, "if
+they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless
+desire?"</p>
+
+<p>It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality
+which they had given to Tithonus.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.</p>
+
+<p>Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it
+as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to
+her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslàn now. No gifts would she
+give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered
+and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding
+under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.</p>
+
+<p>When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had
+cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and
+glad in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>A thought had come to her.</p>
+
+<p>In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together,
+under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden
+produce.</p>
+
+<p>"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find
+those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's
+and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one
+ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to
+dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms,
+and he wanted to plant a young cherry."</p>
+
+<p>"There must have been a mass of coin?"</p>
+
+<p>"No,&mdash;only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up
+to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he
+sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found
+were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time&mdash;whatever he might mean by
+that."</p>
+
+<p>"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if
+one buried a brass button only long enough, he would give one a
+bank-note for it."</p>
+
+<p>"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would
+dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know
+about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the
+hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture
+he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a god. To
+worship old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like
+that,&mdash;how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the
+edge of the road."</p>
+
+<p>"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."</p>
+
+<p>"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"</p>
+
+<p>The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite
+horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the
+mill of Yprès.</p>
+
+<p>"He is a great noble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.</p>
+
+<p>"And where is his dwelling?"</p>
+
+<p>"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with
+a glow at her heart.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the
+Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that
+they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse
+with the devil's daughter.</p>
+
+<p>An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces
+than for old coins; and&mdash;how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"</p>
+
+<p>She had passed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.</p>
+
+<p>"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and
+her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with
+a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope,
+that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not
+wholly hatred.</p>
+
+<p>That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell
+through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors,
+she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the
+steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a casement that was
+never unclosed.</p>
+
+<p>On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's
+working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of
+leaden beads.</p>
+
+<p>On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the
+labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces,
+muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the
+sweet sins of her life and of her master's.</p>
+
+<p>She cared for her soul&mdash;cared very much, and tried to save it; but
+cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the
+fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and
+wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the
+tenth of a cherry.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the
+sleeper.</p>
+
+<p>"Wake! I want a word with you."</p>
+
+<p>Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in
+horrible fear.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head.
+Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."</p>
+
+<p>The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her
+knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.</p>
+
+<p>Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and
+swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise
+against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and
+tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with
+terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of
+the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.</p>
+
+<p>It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable
+value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night
+and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master
+should discover and claim it.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed&mdash;a quiet cold
+laugh&mdash;at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her
+in her infancy.</p>
+
+<p>"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?"
+she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you
+choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am
+strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst
+of the reckoning."</p>
+
+<p>And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing
+well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.</p>
+
+<p>It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.</p>
+
+<p>She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of
+hay in the loft.</p>
+
+<p>There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds
+that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity
+could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern
+clouds.</p>
+
+<p>She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon
+them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased
+to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never
+occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she
+had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.</p>
+
+<p>As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a
+strong emotion came over her.</p>
+
+<p>The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from
+the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment
+revived for her.</p>
+
+<p>The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of
+the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music,
+the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the
+hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,&mdash;all arose to
+her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile
+had buried them.</p>
+
+<p>The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins,
+she thought of Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>She had never known his fate.</p>
+
+<p>The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by
+the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted
+at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.</p>
+
+<p>Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her
+life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.</p>
+
+<p>All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father's race
+had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern
+seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made
+no plunder.</p>
+
+<p>The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among
+her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and
+tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the
+smile and the voice of Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>"I would never part with them for myself," she thought; "I would die of
+hunger first&mdash;were it only myself."</p>
+
+<p>And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little
+treasure&mdash;the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her,
+even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.</p>
+
+<p>The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded
+daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their
+golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.</p>
+
+<p>At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslàn, she spoke to him,
+timidly,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for
+Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I
+might do there&mdash;for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do? What should you do?" he answered her, with inattention and almost
+impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of
+inaction.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as
+though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her
+lips.</p>
+
+<p>She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.</p>
+
+<p>"If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps," she said to
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>So she kept silence.</p>
+
+<p>On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the
+two mules, to Rioz.</p>
+
+<p>It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both
+the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she
+could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in
+either hand.</p>
+
+<p>The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some
+twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her
+own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new
+waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of
+a pastoral country in late summer.</p>
+
+<p>She met few people; a market-woman or two on their asses, a walking
+peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd&mdash;these were all.</p>
+
+<p>The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet
+roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only
+sound in the silence.</p>
+
+<p>It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell,
+surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a
+quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its
+roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble
+and the gorse grew wild.</p>
+
+<p>But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the
+roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore;
+she herself grew tired and fevered.</p>
+
+<p>She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway,
+where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a
+scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her
+brass pails on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great
+bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a
+shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her
+bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered
+them.</p>
+
+<p>The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky,
+half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at
+their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great
+walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs
+was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept
+the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she
+would bring her food and drink.</p>
+
+<p>But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches,
+refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.</p>
+
+<p>The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the
+market-women had said, "What does the like of you want with the Prince?"</p>
+
+<p>"I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will," she
+answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over
+the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed
+the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?" she muttered,
+watching the form of the girl as it passed up the steep sunshiny street.</p>
+
+<p>"Some evil, no doubt," answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was
+skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to
+founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb, <i>bon plaisir</i>, and the
+philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a <i>cajote</i>."</p>
+
+<p>Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the
+mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:</p>
+
+<p>"No one would ask the road <i>there</i> for any good; that is sure. No doubt
+she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all
+the Arts!"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.</p>
+
+<p>In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he
+had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things&mdash;girls' faces, coils of
+foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming
+on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown
+waters;&mdash;things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been
+transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of
+genius.</p>
+
+<p>She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and
+grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded
+slopes,&mdash;those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince
+Sartorian.</p>
+
+<p>One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry,
+looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his
+wife:</p>
+
+<p>"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his
+velvet-lined cupboards."</p>
+
+<p>And the wife laughed in answer,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."</p>
+
+<p>The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could
+mean; but she would not turn back to ask.</p>
+
+<p>Her feet were weary, like her mules'; the sun scorched her; she felt
+feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp
+ascent that rose in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river
+ran.</p>
+
+<p>At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all
+brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and shields. She pushed one
+open&mdash;there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the
+domain which they guarded.</p>
+
+<p>At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were
+green, the grass long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by
+she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous
+flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of
+water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver
+breasts of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood
+here and there amidst the leavy darkness.</p>
+
+<p>She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.</p>
+
+<p>She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great,
+fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was
+beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it,
+wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.</p>
+
+<p>A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it,
+thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it
+changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted,
+silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer's
+kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while,
+always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these
+cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.</p>
+
+<p>At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush
+and the lotos, and the white pampas-grass, and the flamelike flowering
+reed, of the East and of the West.</p>
+
+<p>All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets
+of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her
+to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a
+maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace.
+A door stood open near. She entered it.</p>
+
+<p>She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear
+in her whole temper.</p>
+
+<p>Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an
+endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the
+wonders that are gathered together by the world's luxury were for the
+first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the
+rich lived.</p>
+
+<p>She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.</p>
+
+<p>On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on
+the moss of the orchard at Yprès. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as
+fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups,
+the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were
+folded.</p>
+
+<p>It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by the dazzle of mere
+wealth. She walked through the splendid and lonely rooms wondering,
+indeed, and eager to see more; but there was no spell here such as the
+gardens had flung over her. To the creature free born in the Liebana no
+life beneath a roof could seem beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>She met no one.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, she paused before
+a great picture in a heavy golden frame; it was the seizure of
+Persephone. She knew the story, for Arslàn had told her of it.</p>
+
+<p>She saw for the first time how the pictures that men called great were
+installed in princely splendor; this was the fate which he wanted for
+his own.</p>
+
+<p>A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, stood before it:
+she recalled the words of the woman in the market-place; in her
+ignorance, she thought the picture was worshiped as a divinity, as the
+people worshiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned
+incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with something of gloomy
+contempt in her eyes, at the painting which was mantled in massive gold,
+with purple draperies opening to display it; for it was the chief
+masterpiece upon those walls.</p>
+
+<p>"And he cares for <i>that</i>!" she thought, with a sigh half of wonder, half
+of sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his works were
+greater hanging on their bare walls where the spiders wove.</p>
+
+<p>"Who is 'he'?" a voice asked behind her.</p>
+
+<p>She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, humorous eyes, and
+an elfin face, delicate in its form, malicious in its meaning.</p>
+
+<p>She stood silent, regarding him; herself a strange figure in that lordly
+place, with her brown limbs, her bare head and feet, her linen tunic,
+her red knotted girdle.</p>
+
+<p>"Who are you?" she asked him curtly, in counter-question.</p>
+
+<p>The little old man laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I have the honor to be your host."</p>
+
+<p>A disappointed astonishment clouded her face.</p>
+
+<p>"You! are you Sartorian?" she muttered&mdash;"the Sartorian whom they call a
+prince?"</p>
+
+<p>"Even I!" he said with a smile. "I regret that I please you no more. May
+I ask to what I am indebted for your presence? You seem a fastidious
+critic."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuff whilst he looked at the
+lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, as he thought her, whom he had
+found thus astray in his magnificent chambers.</p>
+
+<p>She amused him; finding her silent, he sought to make her speak.</p>
+
+<p>"How did you come in hither? You care for pictures, perhaps, since you
+seem to feed on them like some wood-pigeons on a sheaf of corn?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know of finer than yours," she answered him coldly, chilled by the
+amused and malicious ridicule of his tone into a sullen repose. "I did
+not come to see anything you have. I came to sell you these: they say in
+Yprès that you care for such bits of coin."</p>
+
+<p>She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and tendered them to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no sort of value;
+such things as he could buy for a few coins in any bazaar of Africa or
+Asia. But he did not say so.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her keenly, as he asked:</p>
+
+<p>"Whose were these?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked in return at him with haughty defiance.</p>
+
+<p>"They are mine. If you want such things, as they say you do, take them
+and give me their value&mdash;that is all."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you come here to sell them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman from near Rioz say
+that you liked such things. Take them, or leave them."</p>
+
+<p>"Who gave them to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still loved the memory of
+Phratos.</p>
+
+<p>"And who may Phratos be?"</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning.</p>
+
+<p>"That is none of your business. If you think that I stole them, say so.
+If you want them, buy them. One or the other."</p>
+
+<p>The old man watched her amusedly.</p>
+
+<p>"You can be very fierce," he said to her. "Be gentle a little, and tell
+me whence you came, and what story you have."</p>
+
+<p>But she would not.</p>
+
+<p>"I have not come here to speak of myself," she said obstinately. "Will
+you take the coins, or leave them?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will take them," he said; and he went to a cabinet in another room
+and brought out with him several shining gold pieces.</p>
+
+<p>She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily.</p>
+
+<p>"Here is payment," he said to her, holding them to her.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes fastened on the money entranced; she touched it with a light,
+half-fearful touch, and then drew back and gazed at it amazed.</p>
+
+<p>"All that&mdash;all that?" she muttered. "Is it their worth? Are you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite sure," he said with a smile. He offered her in them some thirty
+times their value.</p>
+
+<p>She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good fortune, then
+darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and took them and put them to her
+lips, and laughed a sweet glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her
+bosom.</p>
+
+<p>"I am grateful," she said simply; but the radiance in her eyes, the
+laughter on her mouth, the quivering excitement in all her face and
+form, said the same thing for her far better than her words.</p>
+
+<p>The old man watched her narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>"They are not for yourself?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"That is my affair," she answered him, all her pride rising in arms.
+"What concerned you was their value."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled and bent his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for? Wherever you came
+from, is this all that brought you here?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought the sketches
+from their hiding-place. She placed them before him.</p>
+
+<p>"Look at those."</p>
+
+<p>He took them to the light and scanned them slowly and critically; he
+knew all the mysteries and intricacies of art, and he recognized in
+these slight things the hand and the color of a master. He did not say
+so, but held them for some time in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"These also are for sale?" he asked at length.</p>
+
+<p>She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense expectation, her
+longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips quivering with eagerness. That he
+was a stranger and a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth;
+she saw he had perception.</p>
+
+<p>"See here!" she said, swiftly, the music of her voice rising and falling
+in breathless, eloquent intonation. "Those things are to the great works
+of his hand as a broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a
+thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a breadth of sand, a
+woman's face, and under his hand it grows glorious and gracious. He
+dreams things that are strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods,
+and he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he works for his
+bread, and in the gray night he wanders where none can follow him; and
+he brings back marvels and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories
+that are like the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees the
+things of his hand; and he is sick of his life, because the days go by
+and bring no message to him, and men will have nothing of him; and he
+has hunger of body and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he
+does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. But to him it is
+bitter that it is only seen by the newt, and the beetle, and the
+night-hawk. It wears his soul away, because he is denied of men. 'If I
+had gold, if I had gold!' he says always, when he thinks that none can
+hear him."</p>
+
+<p>Her voice trembled and was still for a second; she struggled with
+herself and kept it clear and strong.</p>
+
+<p>The old man never interrupted her.</p>
+
+<p>"He must not know: he would kill himself if he knew; he would sooner die
+than tell any man. But, look you, you drape your pictures here with gold
+and with purple, you place them high in the light; you make idols of
+them, and burn your incense before them. That is what he wants for his:
+they are the life of his life. If they could be honored, he would not
+care, though you should slay him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you
+idols of his: they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart is
+sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I would not care; but
+he cares, so that he perishes."</p>
+
+<p>She shivered as she spoke; in her earnestness and eagerness, she laid
+her hand on the stranger's arm, and held it there; she prayed, with more
+passion than she would have cast into any prayer to save her own life.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is he; and what do you call him?" the old man asked her quietly.</p>
+
+<p>He understood the meaning that ran beneath the unconscious extravagance
+of her fanciful and impassioned language.</p>
+
+<p>"He is called Arslàn; he lives in the granary-tower, by the river,
+between the town and Yprès. He comes from the north, far away&mdash;very,
+very far, where the seas are all ice and the sun shines at midnight.
+Will you make the things that he does to be known to the people?
+You have gold; and gold, he says, is the compeller of men."</p>
+
+<p>"Arslàn?" he echoed.</p>
+
+<p>The name was not utterly unknown to him; he had seen works signed with
+it at Paris and at Rome&mdash;strange things of a singular power, of a union
+of cynicism and idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world,
+and too pure for the other half.</p>
+
+<p>"Arslàn?&mdash;I think I remember. I will see what I can do."</p>
+
+<p>"You will say nothing to him of me."</p>
+
+<p>"I could not say much. Who are you? Whence do you come?"</p>
+
+<p>"I live at the water-mill of Yprès. They say that Reine Flamma was my
+mother. I do not know: it does not matter."</p>
+
+<p>"What is your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust."</p>
+
+<p>"A strange namesake."</p>
+
+<p>"What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff of breath&mdash;less
+than the dust, anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it? I see, you are a Communist."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"A Communist&mdash;a Socialist. You know what that is. You would like to
+level my house to the ashes, I fancy, by the look on your face."</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, "I do not care to do
+that. If I had cared to burn anything it would have been the Flandrins'
+village. It is odd that you should live in a palace and he should want
+for bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So
+it is even, perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>The old man smiled, amused.</p>
+
+<p>"You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. Come in another
+chamber and take some wine, and break your fast. There will be many
+things here that you never saw or tasted."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"The thought is good of you," she said, more gently than she had before
+spoken. "But I never took a crust out of charity, and I will not begin."</p>
+
+
+<p>"Charity! Do you call an invitation a charity?"</p>
+
+<p>"When the rich ask the poor&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>He looked in her eyes with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is young and beautiful,
+on which side lies the charity then?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not favor fine phrases," she answered curtly, returning his look
+with a steady indifference.</p>
+
+<p>"You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. Well, come hither, a
+moment at least."</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated; then, thinking to herself that to refuse would seem like
+fear, she followed him through several chambers into one where his own
+mid-day breakfast was set forth.</p>
+
+<p>She moved through all the magnificence of the place with fearless steps,
+and meditative glances, and a grave measured easy grace, as tranquil and
+as unimpressed as though she walked through the tall ranks of the
+seeding grasses on a meadow slope.</p>
+
+<p>It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice adornment, the
+unnumbered treasures, and the familiar luxuries of a great noble's
+residence; but such things as these had no awe for her.</p>
+
+<p>The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations of luxury, could
+not impress her for an instant; she passed through them indifferent and
+undaunted, thinking to herself, "However they may gild their roofs, the
+roofs shut out the sky no less."</p>
+
+<p>Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet cast in the visible
+shape of sculpture or of painting, did her glance grow reverent and
+humid; only when she recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured
+stories, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith as pure and
+true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian child, did she falter and
+pause a little to gaze there with a tender homage in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>The old man watched her with a musing studious glance from time to time.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me tempt you," he said to her when they reached the
+breakfast-chamber. "Sit down with me and eat and drink. No? Taste these
+sweetmeats at the least. To refuse to break bread with me is churlish."</p>
+
+
+<p>"I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin now," she answered
+obstinately, indifferent to the blaze of gold and silver before her, to
+the rare fruits and flowers, to the wines in their quaint flagons, to
+the numerous attendants who waited motionless around her.</p>
+
+<p>She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and
+the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits
+assailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.</p>
+
+<p>She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby glass, rimmed
+with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as
+indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained
+among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.</p>
+
+<p>"Your denial is very churlish," he said, after many a honeyed entreaty,
+which had met with no other answer from her. "How shall you bind me to
+keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of
+snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the
+golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"A word that needs compelling," she answered him curtly, "is broken by
+the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root,
+to put faith in a man that needs a bond."</p>
+
+<p>He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you got all your wisdom?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not wisdom; it is truth."</p>
+
+<p>"And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.</p>
+
+<p>"I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen."</p>
+
+<p>"And that is&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain,
+so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round,&mdash;and I knew its birth
+was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false
+thing that would poison all that should eat of it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the
+toadstool that springs from their breath?"</p>
+
+<p>"Who taught you so much suspicion?"</p>
+
+<p>Her face darkened in anger.</p>
+
+<p>"Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am
+afraid of nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"So it would seem."</p>
+
+<p>He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a
+gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them
+because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He
+tried to tempt her otherwise.</p>
+
+<p>She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta.
+She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color
+and for grace. There was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom.
+She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with
+such passion for another.</p>
+
+<p>He had various treasures shown to her,&mdash;treasures of jewels, of gold and
+silver, of fine workmanship, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as
+the wing of a butterfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her
+eyes had rested on such things all her days.</p>
+
+<p>"They are beautiful, no doubt," she said simply. "But I marvel that
+you&mdash;being a man&mdash;care for such things as these."</p>
+
+<p>"Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me,&mdash;as
+one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at
+least out of these to keep in remembrance of me."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes burned in anger.</p>
+
+<p>"If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think
+to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are very perverse," he said, relinquishing his efforts with regret.</p>
+
+<p>He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of
+temptation: gold was a forcing-heat&mdash;slow, but sure.</p>
+
+<p>She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and
+yet a vague apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you the Red Mouse?" she said suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he
+laughed&mdash;his little low cynical laugh.</p>
+
+<p>"What makes you think that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know. You look like it&mdash;that is all. He has made one sketch of
+me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and
+it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant
+by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same
+triumph in your eye."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.</p>
+
+<p>"He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I
+shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead&mdash;if I am indeed,
+the Red Mouse."</p>
+
+<p>She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of
+aversion.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go," she said abruptly. "The mules wait. Remember him, and I
+will remember you."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when
+it unlocks your eagle's cage and unbinds his wings?"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no
+memory of her own fate had retarded or hastened her footsteps.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?"</p>
+
+<p>A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes!" she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb
+triumph in her eyes. "He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live
+as the rose lives, on his canvas&mdash;a thing of a day that he can make
+immortal!"</p>
+
+<p>The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had
+found what he wanted&mdash;as he thought.</p>
+
+<p>"And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the
+world's sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can
+understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of
+the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra."</p>
+
+<p>"Farnarina? What is that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day's life of a rose, and who
+got eternal life for it,&mdash;as you think to do."</p>
+
+<p>She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over the dauntless
+brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.</p>
+
+<p>"I?" she murmured. "Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a
+little place&mdash;anywhere&mdash;wherever my life can live with his on the
+canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each
+other, 'See, it is true&mdash;he thought her worthy of <i>that</i>, though she was
+less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,' it will be
+enough for me&mdash;more than enough."</p>
+
+<p>The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his
+eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.</p>
+
+<p>She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite
+yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph
+which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.</p>
+
+<p>She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly,
+as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.</p>
+
+<p>He waited awhile; then he spoke:</p>
+
+<p>"But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if
+you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would
+lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter
+yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one
+wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast
+as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that
+his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me
+turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?"</p>
+
+<p>She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a
+smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of
+memory, so pitiful of his doubt.</p>
+
+<p>She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had
+bought his life back for him, with her own, from the gods. For the pact
+was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.</p>
+
+<p>But of it her lips never spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will
+see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty,
+and I will give you gratitude. Farewell."</p>
+
+<p>Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side,
+and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the
+gardens without.</p>
+
+<p>He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but
+vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades
+in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native
+forest.</p>
+
+<p>The old man sat silent.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+
+<p>When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to
+slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded
+lands.</p>
+
+<p>She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters
+had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for
+her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight
+for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought
+left&mdash;the gold that she had gained.</p>
+
+<p>The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen
+words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her
+for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be
+not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the
+grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed.
+The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her
+long a prey to any thought of her own fate.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.</p>
+
+<p>"What will it matter how or when the gods take my life, so only they
+keep their faith and give me his?" she thought.</p>
+
+<p>And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart
+content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.</p>
+
+<p>She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the
+human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those
+nine gold pieces.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold," he had said; and here she had it&mdash;honest, clean, worthy
+of his touch and usage.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth
+which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden
+haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as
+young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the
+shade of angels above their heads.</p>
+
+<p>When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been
+sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye
+bread that she had carried in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that
+she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink
+there.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their
+own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the
+house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk
+of the falling night.</p>
+
+<p>She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only
+a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings,
+and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which
+flew by her over the fields.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold," he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green
+chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering
+pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love,
+all honor, all peace, and all fealty?</p>
+
+<p>"Phratos would have wished his gift to go so," she thought to herself,
+with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their
+hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed
+them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood
+alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the grass, and
+the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold!&mdash;a little gold!" she murmured, and she laughed aloud in
+her great joy, and blessed the gods that they had given her to hear the
+voice of his desire.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold," he had said, only; and here she had so much!</p>
+
+<p>No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed
+on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma's eyes she had
+seen glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of an
+emperor's treasury.</p>
+
+<p>She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds
+silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air,
+past the dark Christ who would not look,&mdash;who had never looked, or she
+had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved
+Thanatos.</p>
+
+<p>Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and
+lightly as a swallow on the wing passed through the dreary portals into
+Arslàn's chamber.</p>
+
+<p>His lamp was lighted.</p>
+
+<p>He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there
+with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces,
+with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as
+soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the
+yellow sunshine of her first-born's curls.</p>
+
+<p>His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, with a sadness
+sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes
+those dreams which went so far&mdash;so far&mdash;into worlds whose glories his
+hand could portray for no human sight.</p>
+
+<p>He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.</p>
+
+<p>"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the
+squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the
+fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end&mdash;since
+you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to
+bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not,
+and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of
+his ideals,&mdash;save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms
+to it vainly, and die?"</p>
+
+<p>There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some
+eager bird.</p>
+
+<p>She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a
+radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous
+and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had
+been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.</p>
+
+<p>"Here is the gold!" she cried.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.</p>
+
+<p>"Gold?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her
+sudden presence there.</p>
+
+<p>"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and
+full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A
+little gold,' you said, you remember?&mdash;'only a little.' And this is
+much. Take it&mdash;take it! Do you not hear?"</p>
+
+<p>"Gold?" he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and
+comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had
+spoken in his solitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes! It is mine," she said, her voice broken in its tumult of
+ecstasy&mdash;"it is mine&mdash;all mine. It is no charity, no gift to me. The
+chain was worth it, and I would only take what it was worth. A little
+gold, you said; and now you can make the Barabbas live forever upon
+canvas, and compel men to say that it is great."</p>
+
+<p>As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, she drew the green
+leaf with the coins in it from her bosom, and thrust it into his hand,
+eager, exultant, laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of
+her nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy possessing
+her.</p>
+
+<p>The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands stung him to
+comprehension; his face flushed over all its pallor; he thrust it away
+with a gesture of abhorrence and rejection.</p>
+
+<p>"Money!" he muttered. "What money?&mdash;yours?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, mine entirely; mine indeed!" she answered, with a sweet, glad ring
+of victory in her rejoicing voice. "It is true, quite true. They were
+the chains of sequins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his
+music in the mountains; and I have sold them. 'A little gold,' you said;
+'and the Barabbas can live forever.' Why do you look so? It is all mine;
+all yours&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, and sank low,
+with a dull startled wonder in it.</p>
+
+<p>Why did he look so?</p>
+
+<p>His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the language his glance
+spoke was one plain to her. It terrified her, amazed her, struck her
+chill and dumb.</p>
+
+<p>In it there were disgust, anger, loathing,&mdash;even horror; and yet there
+was in it also an unwonted softness, which in a woman's would have shown
+itself by a rush of sudden tears.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think that I have done?" she murmured under her breath.
+"The gold is mine&mdash;mine honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I
+got it as I say. Why will you not take it? Why do you look at me so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?"</p>
+
+<p>She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her
+innocent rapture frozen into terror.</p>
+
+<p>"I have done nothing wrong," she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and
+wonder&mdash;"nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not
+take it&mdash;for their sake?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned on her with severity almost savage:</p>
+
+<p>"It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you
+think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?"</p>
+
+<p>His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt
+her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible
+to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own
+abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he
+had difficulty to control&mdash;being touched by her ignorance and by her
+gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.</p>
+
+<p>She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light
+had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated
+strangely.</p>
+
+<p>For some moments there was silence between them.</p>
+
+<p>"You will not take it?" she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice,
+like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes
+all quiet around it.</p>
+
+<p>"Take it!" he echoed. "I could sooner kill a man out yonder and rob him.
+Can you not understand? Greater shame could never come to me. You do not
+know what you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no doubt,
+but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I frightened you? I did not
+mean to frighten you. You mean well and nobly, no doubt&mdash;no doubt. You
+do not know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter,
+and sap the strength of the receiver; but from woman to man they are&mdash;to
+the man shameful. Can you not understand?"</p>
+
+<p>Her face burned duskily; she moved with a troubled, confused effort to
+get away from his gaze.</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said in her shut teeth. "I do not know what you mean. Flamma
+takes all the gold I make. Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?"</p>
+
+<p>"Flamma is your grandsire&mdash;your keeper&mdash;your master. He has a right to
+do as he chooses. He gives you food and shelter, and in return he takes
+the gains of your labor. But I,&mdash;what have I ever given you? I am a
+stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I could be base
+enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. I make no disguise with
+you,&mdash;you know too well how I live. But can you not see?&mdash;if I were mean
+enough to take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more worthy
+of the very name of man. It is for the man to give to the woman. You
+see?"</p>
+
+<p>She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the confused pain on
+it of one who has fallen or been struck upon the head, and half forgets
+and half remembers.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not see," she muttered. "Whoever has, gives: what does it matter?
+The folly in me was its littleness: it could not be of use. But it was
+all I had."</p>
+
+<p>"Little or great,&mdash;the riches of empires, or a beggar's dole,&mdash;there
+could be no difference in the infamy to me. Have I seemed to you a
+creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put such shame
+upon me?"</p>
+
+<p>Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel than he had
+consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped to speech, and stung her as
+scorpions sting.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing; her teeth clinched, her face changed as it had used to
+do when Flamma had beaten her.</p>
+
+<p>She said nothing, but turned away; and with one twist of her hand she
+flung the pieces through the open casement into the river that flowed
+below.</p>
+
+<p>They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.</p>
+
+<p>He caught her wrist a second too late.</p>
+
+<p>"What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the
+river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay
+you back in their stead! I did not mean to hurt you; it was only the
+truth,&mdash;you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity
+that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me
+with debts that I cannot pay&mdash;with gifts that I would die sooner than
+receive. But, then, how should you know?&mdash;how should you know? If I
+wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong."</p>
+
+<p>There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he
+spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not
+change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to
+her throat as though she choked.</p>
+
+<p>"You cannot do wrong&mdash;to me," she muttered, true, even in such a moment,
+to the absolute adoration which possessed her.</p>
+
+<p>Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled
+out from his presence into the dusk of the night.</p>
+
+<p>The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside
+above the sands where the gold had sunk.</p>
+
+<p>A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for
+it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust,
+from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might
+desire, a thing that a breeze might break.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In
+the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground,
+while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild
+flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits
+filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the
+fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled
+down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples
+down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on
+the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The
+chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed
+in the rolling woods.</p>
+
+<p>An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow
+of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She
+was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her
+eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips
+murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven
+palpitating breaths.</p>
+
+<p>It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing,
+and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather.
+The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and
+autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus
+of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy
+wooden shoe on his right foot.</p>
+
+<p>"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at
+day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle
+feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."</p>
+
+<p>She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and
+looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and
+rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience
+begotten by long slavery.</p>
+
+<p>There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had
+wandered sleepless all night long.</p>
+
+<p>"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at
+her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall
+have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver
+bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not
+mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only
+thing worth a rush in the house."</p>
+
+<p>She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats
+against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy
+dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she
+went, "A little gold! a little gold!"</p>
+
+<p>"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant,
+shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut
+ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say
+the devil-begotten never bleed."</p>
+
+<p>The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it
+was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any
+should blame the slayer.</p>
+
+<p>The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy
+warmth of the early morning.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among
+his fellows&mdash;and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest
+shame that his life had ever known.</p>
+
+<p>"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out
+against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked,
+she had laid on him the debt of life.</p>
+
+<p>If ever he should know&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the
+night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn
+of his reproaches.</p>
+
+<p>He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in
+intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the
+old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves,
+to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter
+end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as
+Adrastus upon Atys.</p>
+
+<p>On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the
+water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms
+of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in
+waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth,
+chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian
+skies.</p>
+
+<p>She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on
+the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the
+scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of
+herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies
+asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of
+a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the
+willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great
+guilt was on her soul.</p>
+
+<p>Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of
+the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat.
+She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and
+luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who
+had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes
+of death as children in their mother's.</p>
+
+<p>The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like
+fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange
+mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing
+apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed
+from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her
+and beyond her.</p>
+
+<p>All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its
+pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the
+passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was
+buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as
+the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel,
+broke the silence.</p>
+
+<p>The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky
+woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the
+gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which
+her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those
+beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her&mdash;mysterious,
+unreal.</p>
+
+<p>She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead.
+And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide
+from his and every eye.</p>
+
+<p>She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.</p>
+
+<p>The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her
+with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the
+barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the
+frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say
+hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things
+of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music
+arisen,"&mdash;and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.</p>
+
+<p>Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets
+of elder and thorn&mdash;where she had made her bed in her childhood many a
+summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the
+mill-house;&mdash;there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to
+her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to
+slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out
+of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars
+throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.</p>
+
+<p>In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that
+she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt
+the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.</p>
+
+<p>Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early
+day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and
+muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed
+when the sun breaks?"</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled
+in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her;
+her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with
+music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.</p>
+
+<p>Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad
+dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.</p>
+
+<p>She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she
+obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Yprès
+by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which
+takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways
+to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and
+unbidden.</p>
+
+<p>Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing
+in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver
+wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!" she said bitterly in her
+heart, "but I am not worthy&mdash;even to die."</p>
+
+<p>For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this&mdash;to be cut
+down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world
+might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.</p>
+
+<p>She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old
+mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head;
+the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the
+wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then
+fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from
+the high towers and spires of the town.</p>
+
+<p>At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had
+arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was
+still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the
+casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers
+under the roof.</p>
+
+<p>The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and
+fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees.
+The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with
+wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands
+to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A
+dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of
+timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle
+down above his head upon the breeze.</p>
+
+<p>The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no
+noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around
+stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as
+though it were still night.</p>
+
+<p>She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.</p>
+
+<p>"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned,
+and answered on his hands, "Flamma is <i>almost</i> dead, they say."</p>
+
+<p>And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural
+noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the
+stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant
+in unison.</p>
+
+<p>He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for
+generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so
+callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her&mdash;and to the country
+round&mdash;that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with
+him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the
+latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a
+little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the
+sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even
+by age or death?&mdash;it seemed to her impossible.</p>
+
+<p>All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the
+morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a
+strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the
+mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those
+wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.</p>
+
+<p>She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat
+mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the
+bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered
+with a scared face out from her master's chamber.</p>
+
+<p>"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy
+grandsire lies a-dying."</p>
+
+<p>"Dying?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he
+came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as
+good as dead. You are glad."</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost
+step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for;
+and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her
+and hurt her.</p>
+
+<p>She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of
+the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor
+coming&mdash;coming&mdash;coming&mdash;through so many winters to beg bread, and going
+away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this
+death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.</p>
+
+<p>Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Will he leave her the gold or no?" she questioned in herself; musing
+whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit
+all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world&mdash;who could say
+which?</p>
+
+<p>After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went
+into the room.</p>
+
+<p>It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and
+a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The
+square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro;
+a linnet sang.</p>
+
+<p>On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of
+his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to
+life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon
+her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible
+effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone
+had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:</p>
+
+<p>"She was a saint&mdash;a saint: God took her. So I said:&mdash;and was proud.
+While all the while man begot on her <i>that</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed
+again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking&mdash;awfully.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean&mdash;my mother?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice
+lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.</p>
+
+<p>He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for
+the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.</p>
+
+<p>She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"Try and speak to me of my mother&mdash;once&mdash;once," she murmured, with a
+pathetic longing in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on
+her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief,
+memory, fear&mdash;she could not tell.</p>
+
+<p>Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from
+its hole.</p>
+
+<p>"Ask where the money is hid," she hissed in a shrill whisper.
+"Ask&mdash;ask&mdash;while he can yet understand."</p>
+
+<p>He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine did not hear.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me of my mother;&mdash;tell me, tell me," she muttered. Since a human
+love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother
+whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.</p>
+
+<p>His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay
+silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment
+remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.</p>
+
+<p>It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell,
+mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.</p>
+
+<p>A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear
+voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet;
+there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the
+dying man.</p>
+
+<p>They turned her from the chamber.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.</p>
+
+<p>She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she
+went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on
+her hands.</p>
+
+<p>The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the
+murmurs of the priest's words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism.
+A great bitterness came on her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"One crust in love&mdash;to them&mdash;in the deadly winters, had been better
+worth than all this oil and prayer," she thought. And she could see
+nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the
+moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, "God is good."</p>
+
+<p>The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a
+stillness as of cold.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I loved her! Oh, God!&mdash;<i>Thou</i> knowest!"</p>
+
+<p>She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the
+death-chamber.</p>
+
+<p>He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the
+gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal
+agony, a passion of reproach.</p>
+
+<p>With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests
+had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it,
+and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"Even <i>Thou</i> art a liar!" he cried,&mdash;it was the cry of the soul leaving
+the body,&mdash;with the next moment he fell back&mdash;dead.</p>
+
+<p>In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had
+shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had
+broken and shown no wound.</p>
+
+<p>For what agony had been like unto his?</p>
+
+<p>Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure
+white soul he had believed in once? Yea&mdash;who? Not man; not even God.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore had he suffered without hope.</p>
+
+<p>She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy
+noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down
+upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.</p>
+
+<p>From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of
+the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the
+pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit
+harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.</p>
+
+<p>Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof,
+had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on
+bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore
+for him; and judged him without hatred.</p>
+
+<p>All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her;
+and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became
+sanctified in her sight.</p>
+
+<p>She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only
+that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his
+faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the
+darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every
+other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, "O
+Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"</p>
+
+<p>And now he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>What did it matter?</p>
+
+<p>Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died
+forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?&mdash;the little
+fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved
+in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for
+some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their
+famine by his greed and gain?</p>
+
+<p>It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the
+hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe
+to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his
+heart would never soften.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had
+let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and
+lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his
+death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.</p>
+
+<p>"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry
+eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.</p>
+
+<p>And she had reason.</p>
+
+<p>For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;&mdash;the Faith, whatever
+its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one
+narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh,
+drowns him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the
+precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness
+seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth,
+lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired
+watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned
+beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was
+closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the
+scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People
+came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Yprès
+was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not
+lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in
+the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead&mdash;at
+last."</p>
+
+<p>No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down
+by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the
+good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.</p>
+
+<p>The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she
+sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of
+the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and
+varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.</p>
+
+<p>No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left
+in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear
+is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at
+noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some
+simple meal of crusts and eggs.</p>
+
+<p>"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to
+herself,&mdash;"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if
+so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to
+seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."</p>
+
+<p>For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for
+pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.</p>
+
+<p>"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant
+muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at
+noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.</p>
+
+<p>"The wealth,&mdash;whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She
+had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft,
+and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible
+inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been
+too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his
+heir.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with
+her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious
+eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always
+done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his
+wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot
+for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he
+has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass
+of gold hid away somewhere or another&mdash;the notary knows, I suppose&mdash;it
+is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money
+far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with
+never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the
+thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And,
+maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so
+near. Where think you it will go?"</p>
+
+<p>A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.</p>
+
+<p>"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of
+their hearts and their bodies."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you have no hope for yourself:&mdash;you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I?"</p>
+
+<p>She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and
+stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of
+Pitchou.</p>
+
+<p>"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away
+through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of
+hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other
+hope than the hope of the gold! Well,&mdash;as for me,&mdash;I never pretend to
+lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the
+gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's
+mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."</p>
+
+<p>She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet
+shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to
+her with the woman's words of greed.</p>
+
+<p>Before another day had sped, it was possible,&mdash;so even said one who
+hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at
+the miser's board,&mdash;possible that she would enter into the heritage of
+all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered
+together.</p>
+
+<p>One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her
+with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslàn, and
+there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would
+have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do
+as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I
+will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer
+than kings!"</p>
+
+<p>But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She
+would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with
+her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."</p>
+
+<p>She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen,
+unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said,
+"You have no right to burden me with debt"?</p>
+
+<p>Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great
+mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface
+that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the
+day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been
+set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her
+sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.</p>
+
+<p>If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought,
+to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of
+his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for
+the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped
+gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind
+and hand.</p>
+
+<p>And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to
+rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in
+its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held
+it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love,
+she submitted without question to its cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little.
+The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time
+willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,&mdash;"who can say?
+She may yet get it all, who knows?"</p>
+
+<p>At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought
+was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal.
+She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it
+would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.</p>
+
+<p>With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood.
+She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming
+and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and
+none sought her.</p>
+
+<p>All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash
+of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white
+robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the
+little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden
+bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the
+people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had
+stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the
+living a fair savor.</p>
+
+<p>No one came to her. What had they to do with her,&mdash;a creature
+unbaptized, and an outcast?</p>
+
+<p>She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory
+of the fields.</p>
+
+<p>She did not think of herself&mdash;since Arslàn had looked at her, in his
+merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.</p>
+
+<p>It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no
+longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to
+the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could
+not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and
+fortune.</p>
+
+<p>She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be
+free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could
+not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was
+like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that
+when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds
+uncompanioned.</p>
+
+<p>She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds;
+she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they
+were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached&mdash;she thought
+always:</p>
+
+<p>"If only I might die for him,&mdash;as the reed for the god."</p>
+
+<p>The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they
+and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude
+had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.</p>
+
+<p>The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the
+waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was
+a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown,
+and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.</p>
+
+<p>From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to
+her ear in the shadow of the solitude.</p>
+
+<p>"Folle-Farine,&mdash;I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to
+stay me. Say&mdash;do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave
+of the Snakes?"</p>
+
+<p>She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw
+shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the
+eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they
+noted the change in her since the last sun had set.</p>
+
+<p>"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.</p>
+
+<p>She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face;
+she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price
+for her chain of coins.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a little softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to
+sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!&mdash;female things, with
+eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"</p>
+
+<p>She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her
+head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her
+intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's
+probe.</p>
+
+<p>"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but
+one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:</p>
+
+<p>"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the
+river."</p>
+
+<p>She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its
+degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him
+strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery
+to any debt or burden of a service done.</p>
+
+<p>The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves,
+looked at her long and thoughtfully.</p>
+
+<p>"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"</p>
+
+<p>She gave a sign of assent.</p>
+
+<p>"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and
+shut together.</p>
+
+<p>"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."</p>
+
+<p>"You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold
+because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."</p>
+
+<p>"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then&mdash;this god of yours?"</p>
+
+<p>She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her
+faith would not be turned.</p>
+
+<p>"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth;
+"because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."</p>
+
+<p>"You are very truthful."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.</p>
+
+<p>The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have
+watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of
+wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which
+made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never
+allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her
+limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the
+cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young
+desert mare.</p>
+
+<p>"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the
+same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of
+scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on
+the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my
+many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen
+sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is
+Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?"</p>
+
+<p>But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the
+prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight
+of the curled lasso.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for
+your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons?
+It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will
+bleed many a day."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I complained?&mdash;have I asked your pity, or any man's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's
+wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."</p>
+
+<p>"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him
+for that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you
+still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What, still?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be
+shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken
+yourself, is shaken from his feet!"</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt."</p>
+
+<p>She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood
+unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her
+eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still
+upon the reaches of the river.</p>
+
+<p>"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man
+is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye
+and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always;
+he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will
+be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give
+this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which
+shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you
+be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him?
+Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that
+you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on
+to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so
+much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage,
+or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form
+to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women
+have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her
+charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will
+displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free&mdash;to
+forget you?"</p>
+
+<p>She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other
+days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her
+master.</p>
+
+<p>"He shall be free&mdash;to forget me."</p>
+
+<p>The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were
+echoed through her locked teeth.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet
+he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the
+torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a
+female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs
+quiver, and those bare nerves heave.</p>
+
+<p>"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong
+though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's sex,
+Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than
+your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are
+beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with
+a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If
+his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be
+yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without
+some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your
+Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by
+poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness
+on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at
+least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and
+who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light
+beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be
+the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach
+of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of
+any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you
+doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I
+have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against
+it to withstand it&mdash;this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily
+beauty of a woman."</p>
+
+<p>His voice ceased softly in the twilight&mdash;this voice of
+Mephistopheles&mdash;which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of
+straining this strength to see if it should break&mdash;of deriding this
+faith to see if it would bend&mdash;of alluring this soul to see if it would
+fall.</p>
+
+<p>She stood abased in a piteous shame&mdash;the shame that any man should thus
+read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all
+innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased
+to bear the gaze of any human eyes,&mdash;to bear the light of any noonday
+sun.</p>
+
+<p>And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle
+force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood&mdash;the
+ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with
+her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved
+for one single day,&mdash;to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms
+hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a
+hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned,
+and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I have lived: it is enough!"</p>
+
+<p>He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled
+through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.</p>
+
+<p>He might be hers&mdash;all her own&mdash;each pulse of his heart echoing hers,
+each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!&mdash;she hid her
+face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her
+and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.</p>
+
+<p>She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one
+idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she
+would have given her body and her soul. Her soul&mdash;if the gods and man
+allowed her one&mdash;her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one
+single day of Arslàn's love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they
+would&mdash;but his?</p>
+
+<p>Not for this had she sold her life to the gods&mdash;not for this; not for
+the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.</p>
+
+<p>What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in
+him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in
+his stead to die.</p>
+
+<p>"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze
+smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in
+solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the
+cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by
+the river?"</p>
+
+<p>The reeds by the river.</p>
+
+<p>The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the
+bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the
+river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life
+might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her
+faith,&mdash;to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius
+perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know
+delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man
+heart-sick and heart-broken?</p>
+
+<p>She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would
+have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was
+once more strong.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce
+glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your
+word; set him free. His freedom let him use&mdash;as he will."</p>
+
+<p>Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of
+the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.</p>
+
+<p>Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully
+and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood,
+along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people
+waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime
+unreason&mdash;that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold,
+as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe
+yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it
+drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that
+though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh,
+at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was
+twisting.</p>
+
+<p>He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the
+public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and
+fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had
+once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill
+scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.</p>
+
+<p>It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from
+the porch.</p>
+
+<p>In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily
+through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the
+house.</p>
+
+<p>She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance
+of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a
+man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought
+ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?&mdash;forget
+quite&mdash;when he is free?"</p>
+
+<p>The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat
+rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under
+the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of
+the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her
+eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet,
+leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind
+her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its
+wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.</p>
+
+<p>She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated
+for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the
+pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke
+so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through
+the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and
+stupor.</p>
+
+<p>"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told,
+and her heart breaks for the gold."</p>
+
+<p>The thought was sweet to her&mdash;precious with the preciousness of
+vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give
+thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a
+Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no
+longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that
+she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude
+coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now;
+and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they
+eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do
+for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all
+men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn
+as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending;
+scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength
+spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had
+assailed her.</p>
+
+<p>"You mean," she muttered, "you mean&mdash;&mdash;What would you tell me? I do not
+know."</p>
+
+<p>The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the
+carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof
+seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate
+of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."</p>
+
+<p>All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth
+shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:&mdash;&mdash;and Pitchou,
+looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's
+treasure!</p>
+
+<p>She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose
+crushed brain there was only one thought&mdash;"Will he forget&mdash;forget
+quite&mdash;when he is free?"</p>
+
+<p>The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager,
+hissing, tumultuous words:</p>
+
+<p>"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for,
+but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the
+love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all
+his land and household things. God rest his soul! He was a man. He
+forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all
+that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle
+boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money
+go&mdash;eh, eh? Canst guess?"</p>
+
+<p>"Go?"</p>
+
+<p>Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did
+ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the
+lands, and the things&mdash;every coin, every inch, every crumb&mdash;is willed
+away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for
+the will of God and the glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said
+for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as
+good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is
+old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and
+manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney
+corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night,
+but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church
+will scarce go to roost together."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not
+understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in
+the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its
+familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.</p>
+
+<p>"Go!"&mdash;she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a
+vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the
+creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I
+serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it
+fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed
+as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night&mdash;I would not be
+overharsh&mdash;but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost
+hear?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away
+down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and
+vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and
+of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in
+her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured
+her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for
+the loss of the sequins.</p>
+
+<p>"How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint's-day!" she
+thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church
+and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her
+sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments
+which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and
+went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across
+the bridge into the woods.</p>
+
+<p>She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a
+tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse,
+like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the
+trance of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any
+sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty
+fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were,
+yet been all the difference between home and homelessness&mdash;between
+existence and starvation.</p>
+
+<p>She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.</p>
+
+<p>She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the
+mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables
+and its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and
+wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet
+chestnut woods.</p>
+
+<p>She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded
+them.</p>
+
+<p>She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only
+pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself
+was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its
+dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and
+feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,&mdash;these had been
+her consolations often,&mdash;these, in a way, she loved.</p>
+
+<p>Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its
+cool pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart
+clove to it in this moment when she left it&mdash;forever. She looked once at
+it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her way.</p>
+
+<p>She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds
+fluttered about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that
+had befallen her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no
+canopy but the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the ripe
+wheat-ears.</p>
+
+<p>The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe
+of the lonely death that she had witnessed, wore on her too heavily, and
+with too dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her
+thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.</p>
+
+<p>Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on
+her. She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though
+she walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as
+through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she
+meant to do, or whither she desired to go.</p>
+
+<p>The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and
+their day at the town-market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of
+them cast some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all
+the countryside that Flamma's treasure was gone to Holy Church.</p>
+
+<p>They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless
+arrows of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and
+laughed, and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so
+much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she,
+nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and her heart hardened, and
+her blood burned.</p>
+
+<p>Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they marched by
+through the purpling leaves or the tall seed-grasses. Not one of them,
+mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember
+that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay her head that night
+than any sick hart driven from its kind.</p>
+
+<p>She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in the fruit-hung
+ways, along the edge of the meadows: fathers with their little children
+running by them, laden with plumes of meadow-sweet; mothers bearing
+their youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young
+lovers talking together as they drove the old cow to her byre; old
+people counting their market gains cheerily; children paddling knee-deep
+in the brooks for cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for
+her;&mdash;all had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her so much
+as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much as a brief
+good-night.</p>
+
+<p>"She will quit the country now; that is one good thing," she heard many
+of them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying,
+how pure as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God!</p>
+
+<p>The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating
+sought its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came
+out under the lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the
+distance there came the sound of voices singing together; now and then
+there fell across her path two shadows turning one to the other.</p>
+
+<p>She only was alone.</p>
+
+<p>What did she seek to do?</p>
+
+<p>She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water
+in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream.
+None desired her&mdash;none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a
+little, for love's sake."</p>
+
+<p>"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she
+thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against
+them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her
+with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The
+visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the
+thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking
+world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had
+been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him&mdash;she
+felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a
+thousand deaths.</p>
+
+<p>What was she to him?&mdash;a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose
+very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.</p>
+
+<p>"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be
+fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of
+horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one
+religion, this&mdash;her love.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an
+old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.</p>
+
+<p>The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the
+plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All
+was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and
+of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were
+but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night.
+White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim
+world.</p>
+
+<p>She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.</p>
+
+<p>She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had
+no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.</p>
+
+<p>Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the
+gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a
+human hand; Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.</p>
+
+<p>With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by
+passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from
+the only eyes she loved.</p>
+
+<p>Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their
+blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud
+and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the
+midnight of calamity.</p>
+
+<p>Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown
+limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red
+girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.</p>
+
+<p>Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses,
+caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A
+tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps
+failed her. She faltered and fell.</p>
+
+<p>Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was
+in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the
+stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the
+night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the
+moon shone.</p>
+
+<p>She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor
+of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks,
+from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was
+beautiful with the beauty of women.</p>
+
+<p>"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the
+song of the reed by the river!</p>
+
+<p>But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that
+was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on
+a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a
+thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on
+his way.</p>
+
+<p>He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake
+to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of
+her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had
+scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all
+that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the
+passion of love in a man to a woman.</p>
+
+<p>So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no
+light in his own eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Do not fly from me," he said to her. "I have sought you, to ask your
+forgiveness, and&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest
+in the posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was hidden in
+the shadow; her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and
+was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of her homelessness he had
+heard nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"I was harsh to you," he said, gently. "I spoke, in the bitterness of
+my heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;&mdash;I forgot that you
+could not know. Can you forgive?"</p>
+
+<p>"The madness was mine," she muttered. "It was I, who forgot&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not
+look up; she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young
+tree which has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She
+knew well what his words would say.</p>
+
+<p>"You are generous, and you shame me&mdash;indeed&mdash;thus," he said with a
+certain softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its
+coldness and serenity.</p>
+
+<p>This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this
+silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to
+utter one reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but
+see that this nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any
+common nobility of any human thing.</p>
+
+<p>"I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much," he
+said slowly. "I feel base and unworthy; for&mdash;I have sought you to bid
+you farewell."</p>
+
+<p>She had awaited her death-blow; she received its stroke without a sound.</p>
+
+<p>She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing
+there her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all
+her beauty changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.</p>
+
+<p>She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands
+crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.</p>
+
+<p>His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love
+for her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude
+savage women who had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined
+Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and plain,
+who had come on here before him in the light of the East, and had passed
+as the shadows passed, and, like them, were forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think&mdash;all this
+mighty love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy
+loveliness would die out here, as the evening colors had died out of the
+skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that he had but to say to her, "Come!" and she would go beside
+him, whether to shame or ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and
+rejoicing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them
+the gates of paradise.</p>
+
+<p>He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could
+make her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he
+could bid her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he
+knew that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death
+he told her; he knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his
+side would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or
+heaven. And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice
+with such love as this.</p>
+
+<p>Yet,&mdash;he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the
+death-stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet
+surely home&mdash;to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>"A stranger came to me an hour or more ago," he said to her; and it
+seemed even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and
+stronger than his own,&mdash;"an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his
+face&mdash;far away, long ago&mdash;I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He
+seemed a man of knowledge, and a man critical and keen. That study of
+you&mdash;the one among the poppies&mdash;you remember&mdash;took his eyes and pleased
+him. He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of paper
+money&mdash;money enough to take me back among men&mdash;to set me free for a
+little space. Oh child! you have seen&mdash;this hell on earth kills me. It
+is a death in life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I
+must hurt something, or go mad."</p>
+
+<p>She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was
+like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored,
+broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.</p>
+
+<p>He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this
+creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,&mdash;it was wearying to
+him; all he desired was power among men.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded
+you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my
+foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"</p>
+
+<p>"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor
+did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh
+metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.</p>
+
+<p>He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were
+pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been
+pitiless to her&mdash;with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is
+born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the
+senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne
+to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he
+himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and
+so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe
+music through its shattered grace again.</p>
+
+<p>"When do you go?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift
+the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;&mdash;all the
+ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field
+where men have fought and died.</p>
+
+<p>He answered her, "At dawn."</p>
+
+<p>"And where?"</p>
+
+<p>"To Paris. I will find fame&mdash;or a grave."</p>
+
+<p>A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the
+darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the
+poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The
+purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken;
+but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in
+silence.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.</p>
+
+<p>He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the
+dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all
+warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him,
+to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot&mdash;as he chose.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base
+to you,&mdash;brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;&mdash;yet I would have
+loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all
+the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is
+dead in me, I think, otherwise&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain
+reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under
+the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms
+about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that
+strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss
+the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they
+never again will rest.</p>
+
+<p>Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields,
+and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows
+it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.</p>
+
+<p>He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was
+tender. He had no love for her; and yet&mdash;now that he had thrown her from
+him forever&mdash;he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again
+in their terrible eloquence upon his own.</p>
+
+<p>But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.</p>
+
+<p>He went back to his home alone.</p>
+
+<p>"It is best so," he said to himself.</p>
+
+<p>For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his
+coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing&mdash;a reed of
+the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.</p>
+
+<p>He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the
+creations that alone he loved.</p>
+
+<p>"They shall live&mdash;or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war
+to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?</p>
+
+<p>That night Hermes had no voice for him.</p>
+
+<p>Else might the wise god have said, "Many reeds grow together by the
+river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one
+reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that
+reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long,&mdash;yea, all the years
+of his life."</p>
+
+<p>But Hermes that night spake not.</p>
+
+<p>And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+
+<p>When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by
+the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither
+she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had
+dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in
+its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little
+from her mouth.</p>
+
+<p>It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl
+on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving
+things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green
+and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light
+anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.</p>
+
+<p>No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole
+frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of
+the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many
+hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the
+grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and
+wondered what had chanced to her.</p>
+
+<p>The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon.
+She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick
+and dull.</p>
+
+<p>A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of
+the river-shore; her eyes vacantly followed the insect's aimless
+circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly
+and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his
+maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of
+it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She
+shivered and was cold.</p>
+
+<p>The sun rose&mdash;a globe of flame above the edge of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Memory flashed on her with its light.</p>
+
+<p>She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of
+blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains
+from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent,
+flowing water.</p>
+
+<p>Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and thought, and
+thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that
+it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even
+when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.</p>
+
+<p>She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by
+weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through
+it as with tongues of flame.</p>
+
+<p>The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand.
+He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and
+trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile;
+then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had
+fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth&mdash;that in his last embrace
+he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof
+he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.</p>
+
+<p>Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would
+have suffered far less if he had killed her.</p>
+
+<p>He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed
+her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other
+driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.</p>
+
+<p>The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.</p>
+
+<p>Gold!&mdash;such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the
+corners of the streets!</p>
+
+<p>The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself.
+Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not
+have cast this shame upon her.</p>
+
+<p>She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching
+eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart was breaking.</p>
+
+<p>Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword,
+and killed forever.</p>
+
+<p>She did not reason&mdash;all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who
+loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there
+long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring
+instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as
+eternally as though his grave had closed on him.</p>
+
+<p>She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too
+perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right
+to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best
+might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had
+deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.</p>
+
+<p>She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went
+along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as
+she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning
+air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her
+slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have
+sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet
+orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge
+than the lizard at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all
+youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them
+was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the
+summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was
+resolute to follow him,&mdash;to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his
+footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across
+his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and
+by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to
+share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.</p>
+
+<p>To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as
+it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.</p>
+
+<p>She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she
+hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would
+have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn
+asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor
+by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a
+thing that was vile.</p>
+
+<p>But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to
+her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at
+once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as
+the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands,
+but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.</p>
+
+<p>She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.</p>
+
+<p>He had said that he would leave at dawn.</p>
+
+<p>In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast
+ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some
+league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the
+river where he dwelt.</p>
+
+<p>She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too,
+she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She
+wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his
+eyes would kill her.</p>
+
+<p>It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and
+feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the
+ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the
+stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that
+the place was desolate.</p>
+
+<p>The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the
+pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the
+figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light
+fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the
+stone.</p>
+
+<p>She entered and looked at them.</p>
+
+<p>She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there&mdash;alone.</p>
+
+<p>The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute
+and content;&mdash;and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread
+winged King,&mdash;the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden
+apples in their hands,&mdash;the women dancing upon Cithæron in the
+moonlight,&mdash;the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,&mdash;all the
+familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old
+sweet life of the heroic times, were there&mdash;left to the rat and the
+spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no
+heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.</p>
+
+<p>The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights
+would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the
+skies, and they would be there&mdash;alone.</p>
+
+<p>To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up
+with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one
+brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as
+the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.</p>
+
+<p>She held them in a passionate tenderness&mdash;these, the first creatures who
+had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness
+of her life.</p>
+
+<p>She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them
+in an agony of prayer&mdash;prayed for them that the hour might come, and
+come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would
+remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in
+worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to
+whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart,
+towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and
+consolation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving
+them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To
+have them live, she would have given her own life.</p>
+
+<p>Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first
+time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the
+floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.</p>
+
+<p>When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and
+Thanatos&mdash;the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.</p>
+
+<p>They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet
+their look struck coldly to her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Sleep, Dreams, and Death,&mdash;were these the only gifts with which the
+gods, being merciful, could answer prayer?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>At the little quay in the town many boats were lading and unlading, and
+many setting their sails to go southward with their loads of eggs, or of
+birds, of flowers, of fruit, or of herbage; all smelling of summer rain,
+and the odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest of the
+lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and learned what she
+needed without any asking, in turn, question of her.</p>
+
+<p>Arslàn had sailed at sunrise.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded with Russian
+violets from a flower-farm. The old man was angered and in trouble: the
+lad who steered for him had failed him, and the young men and boys on
+the canals were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage for the
+wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and leaned towards him.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you go the way to Paris?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I will steer for you, then," she said to him; and leaped down among his
+fragrant freight. He was a stranger to her, and let her be. She did for
+him as well as another, since she said that she knew those waters well.</p>
+
+<p>He was in haste, and, without more words, he loosened his sail, and cut
+his moor-rope, and set his little vessel adrift down the water-ways of
+the town, the violets filling the air with their odors and blue as the
+eyes of a child that wakes smiling.</p>
+
+<p>All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and dim passages,
+all the ropes on which the lanterns and the linen hung, all the wide
+carved stairways water-washed, all the dim windows that the women filled
+with pots of ivy and the song of birds,&mdash;she was drifting from them with
+every pulse of the tide, never again to return; but she looked at them
+without seeing them, indifferent, and having no memory of them; her
+brain, and her heart, and her soul were with the boat that she followed.</p>
+
+<p>It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat-bottomed boats were
+coming in at sunrise, in each some cargo of green food or of farm
+produce; a strong girl rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the
+white glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds' eggs,
+children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, old women nursing a
+wicker cage of cackling hens or hissing geese, mules and asses, shaking
+their bells and worsted tassels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin
+saddles,&mdash;these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, or
+on the broad highroad that ran for a space by the water's edge.</p>
+
+<p>All of these knew her well; all of these some time or another had jeered
+her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled from her. But no one stopped her.
+No one cared enough for her to care even to wonder whither she went.</p>
+
+<p>She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew so well, along the
+line of the wood and the orchards of Yprès. But what at another time
+would have had pain for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad
+familiarity, now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great
+passion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all slighter memories.</p>
+
+<p>All day long they sailed.</p>
+
+<p>At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust as part of her
+wage; she tried to eat them, knowing she would want all her strength.</p>
+
+<p>They left the course of the stream that she knew, and sailed farther
+than she had ever sailed; passed towns whose bells were ringing, and
+noble bridges gleaming in the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome,
+and bright orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. She
+knew none of them. There were only the water flowing under the keel, and
+the blue sky above, with the rooks circling in it, which had the look of
+friends to her.</p>
+
+<p>The twilight fell; still the wind served, and still they held on; the
+mists came, white and thick, and stars rose, and the voices from the
+shores sounded strangely, with here and there a note of music or the
+deep roll of a drum.</p>
+
+<p>So she drifted out of the old life into an unknown world. But she never
+once looked back. Why should she?&mdash;He had gone before.</p>
+
+<p>When it was quite night, they drew near to a busy town, whose lights
+glittered by hundreds and thousands on the bank. There were many barges
+and small boats at anchor in its wharves, banging out lanterns at their
+mast-heads. The old man bade her steer his boat among them, and with a
+cord he made it fast.</p>
+
+<p>"This is Paris?" she asked breathlessly</p>
+
+<p>The old man laughed:</p>
+
+<p>"Paris is days' sail away."</p>
+
+<p>"I asked you if you went to Paris?"</p>
+
+<p>The old man laughed again:</p>
+
+<p>"I said I came the Paris way. So I have done. Land."</p>
+
+<p>Her face set with an anger that made him wince, dull though his
+conscience was.</p>
+
+<p>"You cheated me," she said, briefly; and she climbed the boat's side,
+and, shaking the violets off her, set her foot upon the pier, not
+stopping to waste more words.</p>
+
+<p>But a great terror fell on her.</p>
+
+<p>She had thought that the boat would bring her straight to Paris; and,
+once in Paris, she had thought that it would be as easy to trace his
+steps there as it had been in the little town that she had left. She had
+had no sense of distance&mdash;no knowledge of the size of cities; the width,
+and noise, and hurry, and confusion of this one waterside town made her
+helpless and stupid.</p>
+
+<p>She stood like a young lost dog upon the flags of the landing-place, not
+knowing whither to go, nor what to do.</p>
+
+<p>The old man, busied in unlading his violets into the wicker creels of
+the women waiting for them, took no notice of her; why should he? He had
+used her so long as he had wanted her.</p>
+
+<p>There were incessant turmoil, outcry, and uproar round the
+landing-stairs, where large cargoes of beetroot, cabbages, and fish were
+being put on shore. The buyers and the sellers screamed and swore; the
+tawny light of oil-lamps flickered over their furious faces; the people
+jostled her, pushed her, cursed her, for being in the way. She shrank
+back in bewilderment and disgust, and walked feebly away from the edge
+of the river, trying to think, trying to get back her old health and her
+old force.</p>
+
+<p>The people of the streets were too occupied to take any heed of her.
+Only one little ragged boy danced before her a moment, shrieking, "The
+gypsy! the gypsy! Good little fathers, look to your pockets!"</p>
+
+<p>But she was too used to the language of abuse to be moved by it. She
+went on, as though she were deaf, through the yelling of the children
+and the chattering and chaffering of the trading multitude.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little street leading off the quay, picturesque and ancient,
+with parquetted houses and quaint painted signs; at the corner of it sat
+an old woman on a wooden stool, with a huge fan of linen on her head
+like a mushroom. She was selling roasted chestnuts by the glare of a
+little horn lantern.</p>
+
+<p>By this woman she paused, and asked the way to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>"Paris! This is a long way from Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"How far&mdash;to walk?"</p>
+
+<p>"That depends. My boy went up there on foot last summer; he is a young
+fool, blotting and messing with ink and paper, while he talks of being a
+great man, and sups with the rats in the sewers! He, I think, was a week
+walking it. It is pleasant enough in fair weather. But you&mdash;you are a
+gypsy. Where are your people?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have no people."</p>
+
+<p>She did not know even what this epithet of gypsy, which they so often
+cast at her, really meant. She remembered the old life of the Liebana,
+but she did not know what manner of life it had been; and since Phratos
+had left her there, no one of his tribe or of his kind had been seen in
+the little Norman town among the orchards.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman grinned, trimming her lantern.</p>
+
+<p>"If you are too bad for them, you must be bad indeed! You will do very
+well for Paris, no doubt."</p>
+
+<p>And she began to count her chestnuts, lest this stranger should steal
+any of them.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine took no notice of the words.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you show me which is the road to take?" she asked. Meanwhile the
+street-boy had brought three or four of his comrades to stare at her;
+and they were dancing round her with grotesque grimace, and singing,
+"Houpe là, Houpe là! Burn her for a witch!"</p>
+
+<p>The woman directed her which road to go as well as she could for the
+falling darkness, and she thanked the woman and went. The
+street-children ran at her heels like little curs, yelling and hissing
+foul language; but she ran too, and was swifter than they, and
+outstripped them, the hardy training of her limbs standing her in good
+service.</p>
+
+<p>How far she ran, or what streets she traversed, she could not tell; the
+chestnut-seller had said "Leave the pole-star behind you," and the star
+was shining behind her always, and she ran south steadily.</p>
+
+<p>Great buildings, lighted casements, high stone walls, groups of people,
+troopers drinking, girls laughing, men playing dominoes in the taverns,
+women chattering in the coffee-houses, a line of priests going to a
+death-bed with the bell ringing before the Host, a line of soldiers
+filing through great doors as the drums rolled the <i>rentrée au
+caserne</i>,&mdash;thousands of these pictures glowed in her path a moment, with
+the next to fade and give place to others. But she looked neither to the
+right nor left, and held on straightly for the south.</p>
+
+<p>Once or twice a man halloed after her, or a soldier tried to stop her.
+Once, going through the gateway in the southern wall, a sentinel
+challenged her, and leveled his bayonet only a second too late. But she
+eluded them all by the swiftness of her flight and the suddenness of her
+apparition, and she got out safe beyond the barriers of the town, and on
+to the road that led to the country,&mdash;a road quiet and white in the
+moonlight, and bordered on either side with the tall poplars and the dim
+bare reapen fields which looked to her like dear familiar friends.</p>
+
+<p>It was lonely, and she sat down on a stone by the wayside and rested.
+She had no hesitation in what she was doing. He had gone south, and she
+would go likewise; that she might fail to find him there, never occurred
+to her. Of what a city was she had not yet any conception; her sole
+measurement of one was by the little towns whither she had driven the
+mules to sell the fruits and the fowls.</p>
+
+<p>To have been cheated of Paris, and to find herself thus far distant from
+it, appalled her, and made her heart sink.</p>
+
+<p>But it had no power to make her hesitate in the course she took. She had
+no fear and no doubt: the worst thing that could have come to her had
+come already; the silence and the strength of absolute despair were on
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Besides, a certain thrill of liberty was on her. For the first time in
+all her life she was absolutely free, with the freedom of the will and
+of the body both.</p>
+
+<p>She was no longer captive to one place, bond-slave to one tyranny; she
+was no longer driven with curses and commands, and yoked and harnessed
+every moment of her days. To her, with the blood of a tameless race in
+her, there was a certain force and elasticity in this deliverance from
+bondage, that lifted some measure of her great woe off her. She could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open sky was above her, and
+the smell of the fields about her, and on her face the breath of the
+blowing winds.</p>
+
+<p>She had that love which is as the bezoar stone of fable&mdash;an amulet that
+makes all wounds unfelt, and death a thing to smile at in derision.</p>
+
+<p>Without some strong impulsion from without, she might never have cut
+herself adrift from the tyranny that had held her down from childhood;
+and even the one happiness she had known had been but little more than
+the exchange of one manner of slavery for another.</p>
+
+<p>But now she was free&mdash;absolutely free; and in the calm, cool night&mdash;in
+the dusk and the solitude, with the smell of the fields around her, and
+above her the stars, she knew it and was glad,&mdash;glad even amidst the woe
+of loneliness and the agony of abandonment. The daughter of Taric could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open air was about her, and
+the world was before her wherein to roam.</p>
+
+<p>She sat awhile by the roadside and counted his gold by the gleam of the
+stars, and put it away securely in her girdle, and drank from a brook
+beside her, and tried to eat a little of the bread which the old boatman
+had given her as her wages, with three pieces of copper money.</p>
+
+<p>But the crust choked her; she felt hot with fever, and her throat was
+parched and full of pain.</p>
+
+<p>The moon was full upon her where she sat; the red and white of her dress
+bore a strange look; her face was colorless, and her eyes looked but the
+larger and more lustrous for the black shadows beneath them, and the
+weary swollen droop of their lids.</p>
+
+<p>She sat there, and pondered on the next step she had best take.</p>
+
+<p>A woman came past her, and stopped and looked.</p>
+
+<p>The moonlight was strong upon her face.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a handsome wench," said the wayfarer, who was elderly and of
+pleasant visage; "too handsome, a vast deal, to be sitting alone like
+one lost. What is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>The old reserve clung to her and fenced her secret in, as the prickles
+of a cactus-hedge may fence in the magnolia's flowers of snow.</p>
+
+<p>"What, then? Have you a home?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Eh! You must have a lover?"</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine's lips grew whiter, and she shrunk a little; but she
+answered steadily,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"No! And at your age; and handsome as a ripe, red apple,&mdash;with your skin
+of satin, and your tangle of hair! Fie, for shame! Are the men blind?
+Where do you rest to-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am going on&mdash;south."</p>
+
+<p>"And mean to walk all night? Pooh! Come home with me, and sup and sleep.
+I live hard by, just inside the walls."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine opened her great eyes wide. It was the first creature who
+had ever offered her hospitality. It was an old woman, too; there could
+be nothing but kindness in the offer, she thought; and kindness was so
+strange to her, that it troubled her more than did cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>"You are good," she said, gratefully,&mdash;"very good; but I cannot come."</p>
+
+<p>"Cannot come? Why, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I must go on to Paris; I cannot lose an hour. Nevertheless, it
+is good of you."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman laughed roughly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh-ho! the red apple must go to Paris. No other market grand enough! Is
+that it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know what you mean."</p>
+
+<p>"But stay with me to-night. The roads are dangerous. There are vagrants
+and ill-livers about. There are great fogs, too, in this district; and
+you will meet drunken soldiers and beggars who will rob you. Come home
+with me. I have a pretty little place, though poor; and you shall have
+such fare as I give my own daughters. And maybe you will see two or
+three of the young nobles. They look in for a laugh and a song&mdash;all
+innocent: my girls are favorites. Come, it is not a stone's throw
+through the south gate."</p>
+
+<p>"You are good; but I cannot come. As for the road, I am not afraid. I
+have a good knife, and I am strong."</p>
+
+<p>She spoke in all unconsciousness, in her heart thankful to this, the
+first human creature that had ever offered her shelter or good nature.</p>
+
+<p>The woman darted one sharp look at her, venomous as an adder's bite;
+then bade her a short good-night, and went on her way to the gates of
+the town.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine rose up and walked on, taking her own southward road.</p>
+
+<p>She was ignorant of any peril that she had escaped. She did not know
+that the only animals which prey upon the young of their own sex and
+kind are women.</p>
+
+<p>She was very tired; long want of sleep, anguish, and bodily fatigue made
+her dull, and too exhausted to keep long upon her feet. She looked about
+her for some place of rest; and she knew that if she did not husband her
+strength, it might fail her ere she reached him, and stretch her on a
+sick-bed in some hospital of the poor.</p>
+
+<p>She passed two or three cottages standing by the roadside, with light
+gleaming through their shutters; but she did not knock at any one of
+them. She was afraid of spending her three copper coins; and she was too
+proud to seek food or lodging as an alms.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by she came to a little shed, standing where no house was. She
+looked into it, and saw it full of the last season's hay, dry and
+sweet-smelling, tenanted only by a cat rolled round in slumber.</p>
+
+<p>She crept into it, and laid herself down and slept, the bright starry
+skies shining on her through the open space that served for entrance,
+the clatter of a little brook under the poplar-trees the only sound upon
+the quiet air.</p>
+
+<p>Footsteps went past twice or thrice, and once a wagon rolled lumbering
+by; but no one came thither to disturb her, and she sank into a fitful
+heavy sleep.</p>
+
+<p>At daybreak she was again afoot, always on the broad road to the
+southwest.</p>
+
+<p>With one of her coins she bought a loaf and a draught of milk, at a
+hamlet through which she went. She was surprised to find that people
+spoke to her without a curse or taunt, and dealt with her as with any
+other human being.</p>
+
+<p>Insensibly with the change of treatment, and with the fresh, sweet air,
+and with the brisk movement that bore her on her way, her heart grew
+lighter, and her old dauntless spirit rose again.</p>
+
+<p>She would find him, she thought, as soon as ever she entered Paris; and
+she would watch over him, and only go near him if he needed her. And
+then, and then&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>But her thoughts went no further. She shut the future out from her; it
+appalled her. Only one thing was clear before her&mdash;that she would get
+him the greatness that he thirsted for, if any payment of her body or
+her soul, her life or her death, could purchase it.</p>
+
+<p>A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no personal terrors
+can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. Hunger, thirst, fatigue,
+hardship, danger,&mdash;these were all in her path, and she had each in turn;
+but not one of them unnerved her.</p>
+
+<p>To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked through flames, or
+fasted forty days.</p>
+
+<p>For two days and nights she went on&mdash;days cloudless, nights fine and
+mild; then came a day of storm&mdash;sharp hail and loud thunder. She went on
+through it all the same; the agony in her heart made the glare of
+lightning and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an April
+breeze over a primrose bank.</p>
+
+<p>She had various fortunes on her way.</p>
+
+<p>A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and tried to insult her;
+she showed them her knife, and, with the blade bare against her throat,
+made them fall back, and scattered them.</p>
+
+<p>A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry ditch under a
+tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join with them and share their
+broken food. She eluded them with disgust; they were not like the
+gitanos of the Liebana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as,
+indeed, they were.</p>
+
+<p>At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy face, spoke softly
+and cheerily to her, and bade her rest awhile on the bench in the porch
+under the vines; and brought out some white pigeons to show her; and
+asked her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her fierceness
+and her shyness, was touched, and wondered greatly that any female thing
+could be thus good.</p>
+
+<p>She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a monkey on his
+shoulder. He was old and infirm. She carried his organ for him awhile,
+as they went along the same road; and he was gentle and kind in return,
+and made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, with a
+shake of his head, that Paris would be either hell or heaven to such as
+she. And she, hearing, smiled a little, for the first time since she had
+left Yprès, and thought&mdash;heaven or hell, what would it matter which, so
+long as she found Arslàn?</p>
+
+<p>Of Dante she had never heard; but the spirit of the "<i>questi chi mai da
+me non piu diviso</i>" dwells untaught in every great love.</p>
+
+<p>Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having watched her count the
+gold and notes which she carried in her girdle. He dragged her to a
+lonely place, and snatched at the red sash, grasping the money with it;
+but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a fashion that
+he slunk away limping, and told his fellows to beware of her; for she
+had the spring of a cat, and the stroke of a swan's wing.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it had done: the men
+were seldom insolent, taking warning from the look in her flashing eyes
+and the straight carriage of her flexile frame; and the women more than
+once were kind.</p>
+
+<p>Many peasants passed her on their market-mules, and many carriers' carts
+and farm-wagons went by along the sunny roads.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and gave her a lift of
+a league or two on their piles of grass, of straw, or among their crates
+of cackling poultry, as they made their slow way between the lines of
+the trees, with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of their
+uncouth harness.</p>
+
+<p>All this while she never touched the gold that he had given her. Very
+little food sufficed to her: she had been hardily reared; and for the
+little she had she worked always, on her way.</p>
+
+<p>A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood hewn and stacked, a
+crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug or watered, these got her the
+simple fare which she fed on; and for lodging she was to none indebted,
+preferring to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or under
+a stack against some little blossoming garden.</p>
+
+<p>The people had no prejudice against her: she found few foes, when she
+had left the district that knew the story of Reine Flamma; they were, on
+the contrary, amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with
+the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it chanced to her to
+get no tasks of any sort to do, and at these times she went without
+food: touch his gold she would not. On the road she did what good she
+could; she walked a needless league to carry home a child who had broken
+his leg in a lonely lane; she sought, in a foggy night, for the straying
+goat of a wretched old woman; she saved an infant from the flames in a
+little cabin burning in the midst of the green fields: she did what came
+in her path to do. For her heart was half broken; and this was her way
+of prayer.</p>
+
+<p>So, by tedious endeavor, she won her passage wearily towards Paris.</p>
+
+<p>She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at times, and having
+often wearily to retrace her steps.</p>
+
+<p>On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a green hollow
+amidst woods.</p>
+
+<p>It had an ancient church; the old sweet bells were ringing their last
+mid-day mass, <i>Salutaris hostia</i>; a crumbling fortress of the Angevine
+kings gave it majesty and shadow; it was full of flowers and of trees,
+and had quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made her
+think of the streets round about the cathedral of her mother's
+birthplace, away northwestward in the white sea-mists.</p>
+
+<p>When she entered it, noon had just sounded from all its many clocks and
+chimes. The weather was hot, and she was very tired. She had not eaten
+any food, save some berries and green leaves, for more than forty hours.
+She had been refused anything to do in all places; and she had no
+money&mdash;except that gold of his.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little tavern, vine-shaded and bright with a Quatre Saisons
+rose that hid its casements. She asked there, timidly, if there were any
+task she might do,&mdash;to fetch water, to sweep, to break wood, to drive or
+to stable a mule or a horse.</p>
+
+<p>They took her to be a gypsy; they ordered her roughly to be gone.</p>
+
+<p>Through the square window she could see food&mdash;a big juicy melon cut in
+halves, sweet yellow cakes, warm and crisp from the oven, a white
+chicken, cold and dressed with cresses, a jug of milk, an abundance of
+bread. And her hunger was very great.</p>
+
+<p>Nine days of sharper privation than even that to which she had been
+inured in the penury of Yprès had made her cheeks hollow and her limbs
+fleshless; and a continual consuming heat and pain gnawed at her chest.</p>
+
+<p>She sat on a bench that was free to all wayfarers, and looked at the
+food in the tavern kitchen. It tempted her with the terrible animal
+ravenousness begotten by long fast. She wanted to fly at it as a starved
+dog flies. A rosy-faced woman cut up the chicken on a china dish,
+singing.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine, outside, looked at her, and took courage from her smiling
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you give me a little work?" she murmured. "Anything&mdash;anything&mdash;so
+that I may get bread."</p>
+
+<p>"You are a gypsy," answered the woman, ceasing to smile. "Go to your own
+folk."</p>
+
+<p>And she would not offer her even a plate of broken victuals.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine rose and walked wearily away. She could not bear the sight
+of the food; she felt that if she looked at it longer she would spring
+on it like a wolf. But to use his gold never occurred to her. She would
+have bitten her tongue through in famine ere she would have taken one
+coin of it.</p>
+
+<p>As she went, being weak from long hunger and the stroke of the sunrays,
+she stumbled and fell. She recovered herself quickly; but in the fall
+the money had shaken itself from her sash, and been scattered with a
+ringing sound upon the stones.</p>
+
+<p>The woman in the tavern window raised a loud cry!</p>
+
+<p>"Oh-hè! the wicked liar!&mdash;to beg bread while her waistband is stuffed
+with gold like a turkey with chestnuts! What a rogue to try and dupe
+poor honest people like us! Take her to prison."</p>
+
+<p>The woman cried loud; there were half a dozen stout serving-wenches and
+stable-lads about in the little street, with several boys and children.
+Indignant at the thought of an attempted fraud upon their charity, and
+amazed at the flash and the fall of the money, they rushed on her with
+shrieks of rage and scorn, with missiles of turf and stone, with their
+brooms raised aloft, or their dogs set to rage at her.</p>
+
+<p>She had not time to gather up the coins and notes; she could only stand
+over and defend them. Two beggar-boys made a snatch at the tempting
+heap; she drew her knife to daunt them with the sight of it. The people
+shrieked at sight of the bare blade; a woman selling honeycomb and pots
+of honey at a bench under a lime-tree raised a cry that she had been
+robbed. It was not true; but a street crowd always loves a lie, and
+never risks spoiling, by sifting, it.</p>
+
+<p>The beggar-lads and the two serving-wenches and an old virago from a
+cottage door near set upon her, and scrambled together to drive her away
+from the gold and share it. Resolute to defend it at any peril, she set
+her heel down on it, and, with her back against the tree, stood firm;
+not striking, but with the point of the knife outward.</p>
+
+<p>One of the boys, maddened to get the gold, darted forward, twisted his
+limbs round her, and struggled with her for its possession. In the
+struggle he wounded himself upon the steel. His arm bled largely; he
+filled the air with his shrieks; the people, furious, accused her of his
+murder.</p>
+
+<p>Before five minutes had gone by she was seized, overpowered by numbers,
+cuffed, kicked, upbraided with every name of infamy, and dragged as a
+criminal up the little steep stony street in the blaze of the noonday
+sun, whilst on each side the townsfolk looked out from their doorways
+and their balconies and cried out:</p>
+
+<p>"What is it? Oh-hè! A brawling gypsy, who has stolen something, and has
+stabbed poor little Fréki, the blind man's son, because he found her
+out. What is it? <i>Au violon!&mdash;au violon!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>To which the groups called back again:</p>
+
+<p>"A thief of a gypsy, begging alms while she had stolen gold on her. She
+has stabbed poor little Fréki, the blind cobbler's son, too. We think he
+is dead." And the people above, in horror, lifted their hands and eyes,
+and shouted afresh, "<i>Au violon!&mdash;au violon!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the honey-seller ran beside them, crying aloud that she had
+been robbed of five broad golden pieces.</p>
+
+<p>It was a little sunny country-place, very green with trees and grass,
+filled usually with few louder sounds than the cackling of geese and the
+dripping of the well-water.</p>
+
+<p>But its stones were sharp and rough; its voices were shrill and fierce;
+its gossips were cruel and false of tongue; its justice was very small,
+and its credulity was measureless. A girl, barefoot and bareheaded, with
+eyes of the East, and a knife in her girdle, teeth that met in their
+youngsters' wrist, and gold pieces that scattered like dust from her
+bosom,&mdash;such a one could have no possible innocence in their eyes, such
+a one was condemned so soon as she was looked at when she was dragged
+among them up their hilly central way.</p>
+
+<p>She had had money on her, and she had asked for food on the plea of
+being starved; that was fraud plain enough, even for those who were free
+to admit that the seller of the honey-pots had never been overtrue of
+speech, and had never owned so much as five gold pieces ever since her
+first bees had sucked their first spray of heath-bells.</p>
+
+<p>No one had any mercy on a creature who had money, and yet asked for
+work; as to her guilt, there could be no question.</p>
+
+<p>She was hurried before the village tribune, and cast with horror into
+the cell where all accused waited their judgment.</p>
+
+<p>It was a dusky, loathsome place, dripping with damp, half underground,
+strongly grilled with iron, and smelling foully from the brandy and
+strong smoke of two drunkards who had been its occupants the previous
+night.</p>
+
+<p>There they left her, taking away her knife and her money.</p>
+
+<p>She did not resist. It was not her nature to rebel futilely; and they
+had fallen on her six to one, and had bound her safely with cords ere
+they had dragged her away to punishment.</p>
+
+<p>The little den was visible to the highway through a square low grating.
+Through this they came and stared, and mouthed, and mocked, and taunted,
+and danced before her. To bait a gypsy was fair pastime.</p>
+
+<p>Everywhere, from door to door, the blind cobbler, with his little son,
+and the woman who sold honey told their tale,&mdash;how she had stabbed the
+little lad and stolen the gold that the brave bees had brought their
+mistress, and begged for food when she had had money enough on her to
+buy a rich man's feast. It was a tale to enlist against her all the
+hardest animosities of the poor. The village rose against her in all its
+little homes as though she had borne fire and sword into its midst.</p>
+
+<p>If the arm of the law had not guarded the entrance of her prison-cell,
+the women would have stoned her to death, or dragged her out to drown in
+the pond:&mdash;she was worse than a murderess in their sight; and one weak
+man, thinking to shelter her a little from their rage, quoted against
+her her darkest crime when he pleaded for mercy for her because she was
+young and was so handsome.</p>
+
+<p>The long hot day of torment passed slowly by.</p>
+
+<p>Outside there were cool woods, flower-filled paths, broad fields of
+grass, children tossing blow-balls down the wind, lovers counting the
+leaves of yellow-eyed autumn daisies; but within there were only foul
+smells, intense nausea, cruel heats, the stings of a thousand insects,
+the buzz of a hundred carrion-flies, muddy water, and black mouldy
+bread.</p>
+
+<p>She held her silence. She would not let her enemies see that they hurt
+her.</p>
+
+<p>When the day had gone down, and the people had tired of their sport and
+left her a little while, an old feeble man stole timidly to her,
+glancing round lest any should see his charity and quote it as a crime,
+and tendered her through the bars with a gentle hand a little ripe
+autumnal fruit upon a cool green leaf.</p>
+
+<p>The kindness made the tears start to eyes too proud to weep for pain.</p>
+
+<p>She took the peaches and thanked him lovingly and gratefully; cooled her
+aching, burning, dust-drenched throat with their fragrant moisture.</p>
+
+<p>"Hush! it is nothing," he whispered, frightenedly, glancing over his
+shoulder lest any one should see. "But tell me&mdash;tell me&mdash;why did you say
+you starved when you had all that gold?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did starve," she answered him.</p>
+
+<p>"But why&mdash;with all that gold?"</p>
+
+<p>"It was another's."</p>
+
+<p>The old man stared at her, trembling and amazed.</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;what! die of hunger and keep your hands off money in your
+girdle?"</p>
+
+<p>A dreary smile came on her face.</p>
+
+<p>"What! is that inhuman too?"</p>
+
+<p>"Inhuman?" he murmured. "Oh, child&mdash;oh, child, tell any tale you will,
+save such a tale as that!"</p>
+
+<p>And he stole away sorrowful, because sure that for his fruit of charity
+she had given him back a lie.</p>
+
+<p>He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should see the little thing
+which he had done.</p>
+
+<p>She was left alone.</p>
+
+<p>It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, and her head
+throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, and all the agony of thought in
+which she had struggled on her way, had their reaction on her. She
+shivered where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast upon the
+stones; and strange noises sang in her ears, and strange lights
+glimmered and flashed before her eyes. She did not know what ailed her.</p>
+
+<p>The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early robin sang a
+twilight song in an elder-bush near. These were the only things that had
+any pity on her.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the grated door and
+thrust in another captive, a vagrant they had found drunk or delirious
+on the highroad, whom they locked up for the night, that on the morrow
+they might determine what to do with him.</p>
+
+<p>He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in by the old soldier
+whose place it was to guard the miserable den.</p>
+
+<p>She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, and crouched there,
+breathing heavily, and staring with dull, dilated eyes.</p>
+
+<p>She thought,&mdash;surely they could not mean to leave them there alone, all
+the night through, in the horrible darkness.</p>
+
+<p>The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the old soldier, as he
+turned the rusty key in the lock, grumbled that the world was surely at
+a pretty pass, when two tramps became too coy to roost together. And he
+stumbled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own little
+chamber; and there, smoking and drinking, and playing dominoes with a
+comrade, dismissed his prisoners from his recollection.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell was stretched where
+he had fallen, drunk or insensible, and moaning heavily.</p>
+
+<p>She, crouching against the wall, as though praying the stones to yield
+and hold her, gazed at him with horror and pity that together strove in
+the confusion of her dizzy brain, and made her dully wonder whether she
+were wicked thus to shrink in loathing from a creature in distress so
+like her own.</p>
+
+<p>The bright moon rose on the other side of the trees beyond the grating;
+its light fell across the figure of the vagrant whom they had locked in
+with her, as in the wild-beast shows of old they locked a lion with an
+antelope in the same cage&mdash;out of sport.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the looming massive shadow of an immense form, couched like a
+crouching beast; she saw the fire of burning, wide-open, sullen eyes;
+she saw the restless, feeble gesture of two lean hands, that clutched at
+the barren stones with the futile action of a chained vulture clutching
+at his rock; she saw that the man suffered horribly, and she tried to
+pity him&mdash;tried not to shrink from him&mdash;tried to tell herself that he
+might be as guiltless as was herself. But she could not prevail: nature,
+instinct, youth, sex, sickness, exhaustion, all conquered her, and broke
+her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable agony of that horrible
+probation; she sprang to the grated aperture, and seized the iron in her
+hands, and shook it with all her might, and tore at it, and bruised her
+chest and arms against it, and clung to it convulsively, shriek after
+shriek pealing from her lips.</p>
+
+<p>No one heard, or no one answered to her prayer.</p>
+
+<p>A stray dog came and howled in unison; the moon sailed on behind the
+trees; the old soldier above slept over his toss of brandy; at the only
+dwelling near they were dancing at a bridal, and had no ear to hear.</p>
+
+<p>The passionate outcries wailed themselves to silence on her trembling
+mouth; her strained hands gave way from their hold on the irons; she
+grew silent from sheer exhaustion, and dropped in a heap at the foot of
+the iron door, clinging to it, and crushed against it, and turning her
+face to the night without, feeling some little sense of solace in the
+calm clear moon;&mdash;some little sense of comfort in the mere presence of
+the dog.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the dusky prostrate form of the man had not stirred.</p>
+
+<p>He had not spoken, save to curse heaven and earth and every living
+thing. He had not ceased to glare at her with eyes that had the red
+light of a tiger's in their pain. He was a man of superb stature and
+frame; he was worn by disease and delirium, but he had in him a wild,
+leonine tawny beauty still. His clothes were of rags, and his whole look
+was of wretchedness; yet there was about him a certain reckless majesty
+and splendor still, as the scattered beams of the white moonlight broke
+themselves upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Of a sudden he spoke aloud, with a glitter of terrible laughter on his
+white teeth and his flashing eyes. He was delirious, and had no
+consciousness of where he was.</p>
+
+<p>"The fourth bull I had killed that Easter-day. Look! do you see? It was
+a red Andalusian. He had wounded three picadors, and ripped the bellies
+of eight horses,&mdash;a brave bull, but I was one too many for him. She was
+there. All the winter she had flouted over and taunted me; all the
+winter she had cast her scorn at me&mdash;the beautiful brown thing, with her
+cruel eyes. But she was there when I slew the great red bull&mdash;straight
+above there, looking over her fan. Do you see? And when my sword went up
+to the hilt in his throat, and the brave blood spouted, she laughed such
+a little sweet laugh, and cast her yellow jasmine flower at me, down in
+the blood and the sand there. And that night, after the red bull died,
+the rope was thrown from the balcony! So&mdash;so! Only a year ago; only a
+year ago!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he laughed loud again; and, laughing, sang&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Avez-vous vu en Barcelonne<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Une belle dame, au sein bruni,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">La Marchesa d'Amaguï."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a
+groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it
+with his empty hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Wine!&mdash;wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain
+on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old
+feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so
+cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.</p>
+
+<p>Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by
+discord&mdash;their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of
+lewd riot and of amorous verse.</p>
+
+<p>Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white
+face of the moon.</p>
+
+<p>After awhile he mocked it&mdash;the cold, chaste thing that was the meek
+trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.</p>
+
+<p>Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous
+melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the
+wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague
+memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests
+whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing
+torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows
+flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by
+the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women
+with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled
+anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where
+the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble
+pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the
+wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight
+thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy
+hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire
+of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance
+of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in
+endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the
+ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the
+people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never
+set:&mdash;all these memories floated before her and only served to make her
+fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.</p>
+
+<p>There he lay delirious&mdash;a madman chained at her feet, so close in the
+little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely
+keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air,
+from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.</p>
+
+<p>And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except
+the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were the first cries
+that had ever broken from her lips for human aid; and they were vain.</p>
+
+<p>The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a dotard's dreams. The
+village was not aroused. What cared any of its sleepers how these
+outcasts fared?</p>
+
+<p>She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony had spent itself in
+the passion of appeal.</p>
+
+<p>The night&mdash;would it ever end?</p>
+
+<p>Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage of her old life
+seemed like peace and freedom.</p>
+
+<p>Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunkard struck her&mdash;all
+unconscious of the blow&mdash;across her eyes, and fell, contorted and
+senseless, with his head upon her knees.</p>
+
+<p>He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt his lustful
+triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, and babbled with a strange
+sound, low and fast and inarticulate.</p>
+
+<p>"In the little green wood&mdash;in the little green wood," he muttered.
+"Hark! do you hear the mill-water run? She looked so white and so cold;
+and they all called her a saint. What could a man do but kill <i>that</i>?
+Does she cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie&mdash;be you devil
+or god. You sit on a great white throne and judge us all. So they say.
+You can send us to hell?... Well, do. You shall never wring a word from
+her to <i>my</i> hurt. She thinks I killed the child? Nay&mdash;that I swear.
+Phratos knew, I think. But he is dead;&mdash;so they say. Ask him.... My
+brown queen, who saw me kill the red bull,&mdash;are you there too? Ay. How
+the white jewels shine in your breast! Stoop a little, and kiss me. So!
+Your mouth burns; and the yellow jasmine flower&mdash;there is a snake in it.
+Look! You love me?&mdash;oh-ho!&mdash;what does your priest say, and your lord?
+Love!&mdash;so many of you swore that. But she,&mdash;she, standing next to her
+god there,&mdash;I hurt her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, they found the
+sightless face of the dead man lying full in the light of the sun:
+beside him the girl crouched with a senseless stare in the horror of her
+eyes, and on her lips a ghastly laugh.</p>
+
+<p>For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her Father's kingdom.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"The reed was worthy to die!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In this prison she lay without any sense of the passing of hours and
+days and months.</p>
+
+<p>The accusation against her fell to the ground harmless; no one pursued
+it: the gold was gone&mdash;somewhere, nowhere. No one knew, unless it were
+the bee-wife, and she held her peace.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"The old gods are not dead; they only wait&mdash;they only wait! I am
+theirs&mdash;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,&mdash;you know&mdash;and she went back to hell. So will I&mdash;if they
+will it. What can it matter how the reed dies?&mdash;by fire, by steel, by
+storm?&mdash;what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, God! the reed
+was found worthy to die! And I&mdash;I am too vile, too poor, too shameful
+even for <i>that</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for this
+alone&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>For the fable&mdash;which had grown to hold the place of so implicit a faith
+to her&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When the winter turned, the darkness in which her reason had been
+engulfed began to clear, little by little.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I must go to Paris," she muttered again and again. "I must go to
+Paris."</p>
+
+<p>So much escaped her;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>So when they spoke of their god, she answered always as the lark answers
+when his jailers speak to him of song:&mdash;"Set me free."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One day they said to her:</p>
+
+<p>"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in
+which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Is that true?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed
+Master."</p>
+
+<p>"If a Christian swear it,&mdash;it must be a lie," she said, with the smile
+that froze their timid blood.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They
+told her it was the early spring.</p>
+
+<p>"The spring," she echoed dully,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head wearily.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not peace that I seek," she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>Peace?</p>
+
+<p>He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, she knew. What
+she had sought to gain for him&mdash;what she would seek still when once she
+should get free&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>All the little things came to her like the notes of a song heard far
+away&mdash;far away&mdash;in another world. They were all so familiar, yet so
+strange.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and bade her get from the
+ground.</p>
+
+<p>"You are fitter to go back again," he muttered; "you are mad still, I
+think."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>They had said that she was free: but what were words? They had taken her
+once; they might take her twice.</p>
+
+<p>She ran, and ran, and ran.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, God!" she thought, "I know now&mdash;one cannot be utterly wretched
+whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was
+beautiful, and was a woman.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and how could
+she use it?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know what it was; yet it drew her eyes to it. She thought of
+the palaces.</p>
+
+<p>A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed to the cloud.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that light?" she asked him.</p>
+
+<p>The cowherd stared and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"That light? It is only the sun shining on the domes and the spires of
+Paris."</p>
+
+<p>"Paris!"</p>
+
+<p>She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed her hands upon her
+breast, and in her way thanked God.</p>
+
+<p>She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it.</p>
+
+<p>She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. It looked quite
+close.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The woman told her four leagues and more.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;thinking of him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked to rest the night
+there.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On the wall nearest her hung all alone a picture,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Paris!" she muttered, mechanically, as she lifted her face with a
+hopeless, bewildered prayer.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me the way to Paris," she muttered, instinctively, and she tried
+to rise and walk, not well knowing what she did.</p>
+
+<p>The old man laughed a little, silently.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah-h-h! Women are the only peaches that roll of their own accord from
+the wall to the wasp's nest!"</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of his voice her eyes opened wide upon him; she knew his
+face again.</p>
+
+<p>"Where am I?" she asked him, with a sharp terror in her voice.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Is this Rioz?" She could not comprehend; a horror seized her, lest she
+should have strayed from Paris back into her mother's province.</p>
+
+<p>"No. It is another home of mine; smaller, but choicer maybe. Who has cut
+your hair close?"</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered and turned paler with the memory of that ghastly
+prison-house.</p>
+
+<p>"Well; I am not sure but that you are handsomer,&mdash;almost. A sculptor
+would like you more now,&mdash;what a head you would make for an Anteros, or
+an Icarus, or a Hyacinthus! Yes&mdash;you are best so. You have been ill?"</p>
+
+<p>She could not answer; she only stared at him, blankly, with sad,
+mindless, dilated eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"A little gold!" she muttered, "a little gold!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At noon she awoke, crying aloud that the Red Mouse claimed her soul from
+Thanatos.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;death amidst the fields of asphodel, and in
+the eternal peace of the realm of Thanatos.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly her eyes fell on a familiar thing, a little picture close at
+hand, the picture of herself amidst the poppies.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Where are my clothes?" she muttered to the serving-woman who watched
+beside her. "It is broad day;&mdash;I must go on;&mdash;to Paris."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You are better?" he asked. "Are you better, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>She looked up, and met the eyes of Sartorian. They smiled again on her
+with the smile of the Red Mouse.</p>
+
+<p>The one passion which consumed her was stronger than any fear or any
+other memory: she only thought&mdash;&mdash;this man must know?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you done?&mdash;is he living or dead?&mdash;you must know?"</p>
+
+<p>His eyes still smiled:</p>
+
+<p>"I gave him his golden key;&mdash;how he should use it, that was not in our
+bond? But, truly, I will make another bond with you any day,
+Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered, and her hands dropped from their hold.</p>
+
+<p>"You know nothing?" she murmured.</p>
+
+<p>"Of your Norse god? nay, nothing. An eagle soars too high for a man's
+sight to follow, you know&mdash;oftentimes."</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed his little soft laugh.</p>
+
+<p>The eagles often soared so high&mdash;so high&mdash;that the icy vapors of the
+empyrean froze them dead, and they dropped to earth a mere bruised,
+helpless, useless mass:&mdash;he knew.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;all things, save her love.</p>
+
+<p>"Rest awhile," he said, gently. "Rest; and we may&mdash;who knows?&mdash;learn
+something of your Northern god. First, tell me of yourself. I have
+sought for tidings of you vainly."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes glanced round her on every side.</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go," she muttered.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay&mdash;a moment yet. You are not well."</p>
+
+<p>"I am well."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed? Then wait a moment."</p>
+
+<p>She rested where he motioned; he looked at her in smiling wonder.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He surveyed her with that smile which she had resented on the day when
+she had besought pity of him for Arslàn's sake.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you not eat?" was all he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Not here."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed, his low humorous laugh that displeased her so bitterly,
+though it was soft of tone.</p>
+
+<p>"And all those silks, and stuffs, and laces&mdash;do they please you no
+better?"</p>
+
+<p>"They are not mine."</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh! do you not know yet? A female thing, as beautiful as you are,
+makes hers everything she looks upon?"</p>
+
+<p>"That is a fine phrase."</p>
+
+<p>"And an empty one, you think. On my soul! no. Everything you see here is
+yours, if it please you."</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with dreaming perplexed eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want of me?" she said, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay&mdash;why ask? All men are glad to give to women with such a face as
+yours."</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;oh,
+God!&mdash;how she could have hated him, she thought!</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"You lost your Norse god as I prophesied?" he asked, carelessly.</p>
+
+<p>He saw her whole face change as with a blow, and her body bend within
+itself as a young tree bends under a storm.</p>
+
+<p>"He went when you gave him the gold," she said below her breath.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. You are very faithful still, I see. Yet, I cannot think that you
+believed my prophecy, or you&mdash;a woman&mdash;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;&mdash;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,&mdash;but I talk idly. Let us talk of you; see, I
+chose your likeness, and he let me have it&mdash;did you dream that he would
+part with it so lightly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not? He had a million things more beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her keenly. He could measure the superb force of this
+unblenching and mute courage.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;all women love these;
+the gypsy as well as the empress. Hold them a moment."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She looked, then laid them&mdash;indifferently&mdash;down.</p>
+
+<p>"Three sparrow's eggs are as big, and almost as blue, among the moss in
+any month of May!"</p>
+
+<p>He moved them away, chagrined.</p>
+
+<p>"How do you intend to live? he asked, dryly.</p>
+
+<p>"It will come as it comes," she answered, with the fatalism and
+composure that ran in her Eastern blood.</p>
+
+<p>"What have you done up to this moment since you left my house at Rioz?"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;though not her courage.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"And a woman is so soon old!" he added, with as subtle a significance.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you intend to do with yourself?" he pursued.</p>
+
+<p>"Intend! It is for the rich 'to intend,' the poor must take what
+chances."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;exceedingly."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;if I could."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>She rose and stood before him in the rosy glow of the fire that bathed
+her limbs until they glowed like jade and porphyry.</p>
+
+<p>"No beautiful woman need be poor&mdash;no&mdash;no beautiful woman need be honest,
+I dare say."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled, holding his delicate palms to the warmth of his hearth.</p>
+
+<p>"Your lover drew a grand vision of Barabbas. Well&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"And you have been ill?"</p>
+
+<p>"So they say."</p>
+
+<p>"You will die of cold and exposure."</p>
+
+<p>"So best."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a dog stir."</p>
+
+<p>"You would if the dog chose to go."</p>
+
+<p>"To a master who forsook it&mdash;for a kick and a curse?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"To refuse to stay is uncouth," he said to her.</p>
+
+<p>"I am uncouth, no doubt."</p>
+
+<p>"And it is ungrateful."</p>
+
+<p>"I would not be that."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You gave him a handful of gold pieces for <i>that</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>She touched the three sapphires.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;to the poor," he
+added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.</p>
+
+<p>Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was
+close at hand&mdash;the world in which she would be houseless, friendless,
+penniless, alone.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do I know?" her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang
+loud on the stillness. "<i>Do you?</i> 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>I</i> know? Do <i>you</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them."</p>
+
+<p>"Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know&mdash;to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and
+forever to see the sun."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Arslàn had never spoken to her thus.</p>
+
+<p>He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he
+asked her,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Such lives are; do you not envy them?"</p>
+
+<p>She thought,&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall see all things for
+you, instead."</p>
+
+<p>She flashed her eyes upon him.</p>
+
+<p>"How can that be?"</p>
+
+<p>"Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Alone; yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You have not a coin to stand a day between you and hunger?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not one."</p>
+
+<p>"You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much as a night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not one."</p>
+
+<p>"You have just left a public place of pestilence?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I am Folle-Farine; yes."</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic acceptance of the fate
+that made her name&mdash;merely because hers&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sardonic, meaning eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;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&mdash;you have lived enough.'"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I!" she murmured brokenly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you. All that I say you shall be: homeless, tribeless, nameless,
+nationless, though you stand there now, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;hers?&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her and smiled, and bent towards the warmth of the fire.</p>
+
+<p>"All that I say you shall be; and&mdash;the year is all winter for the poor,
+Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She knew not what evil threatened; but vaguely she felt that treason was
+close about her.</p>
+
+<p>"If you do not mock me," she said slowly, "if you do not&mdash;how will you
+make me what you promise?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will show the world to you, you to the world; your beauty will do the
+rest."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"This is a wondrous pear you offer me!" she said, bitterly. "And so
+cheap?&mdash;it must be rotten somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>"It is golden. Who need ask more?"</p>
+
+<p>And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat.</p>
+
+<p>Then, and then only, she understood him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the blows of steel.</p>
+
+<p>"I ask more,&mdash;that I should pluck it with clean hands, and eat of it
+with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beggar,&mdash;homeless, penniless,
+tribeless, nationless! So you think, no doubt. But we who are born
+outlawed are born free,&mdash;and do not sell our freedom. Let me go."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;"let you go? Why should I let you go,
+Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Why? Why? To save your own life&mdash;if you are wise."</p>
+
+<p>He laughed in his throat again.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;become you like your ignorance and your
+ferocity. I would not for worlds that you should change them."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go!" she cried, across his words.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, fool! the winter will be hard,&mdash;and you are bare of foot,&mdash;and you
+have not a crust!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! Go?&mdash;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&mdash;in your despair, and
+lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go, I say!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Let me go!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"None."</p>
+
+<p>"You want to go,&mdash;penniless as you are?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will go so,&mdash;no other way."</p>
+
+<p>"You will fall ill on the road afresh."</p>
+
+<p>"That does not concern you."</p>
+
+<p>"You will starve."</p>
+
+<p>"That is my question."</p>
+
+<p>"You will have to herd with the street dogs."</p>
+
+<p>"Their bite is better than your welcome."</p>
+
+<p>"You will be suspected,&mdash;most likely imprisoned. You are an outcast."</p>
+
+<p>"That may be."</p>
+
+<p>"You will be driven to public charity."</p>
+
+<p>"Not till I need a public grave."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;always."</p>
+
+<p>For the first time she quailed as though struck by a sharp blow; but her
+voice remained inflexible and serene.</p>
+
+<p>"I can live without love or pity, as I can without home or gold. Once
+for all,&mdash;let me go."</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>Ere she knew his intent he had moved the panel and drawn it behind him,
+and left her alone,&mdash;shut in a trap like the birds that Claudis Flamma
+had netted in his orchards.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When she arose from her supplication, her choice was already made.</p>
+
+<p>And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+
+<p>AT sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a
+smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a
+scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed
+his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery
+sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water's edge.</p>
+
+<p>The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and
+rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the
+basement walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the
+garden palace, where the bird of Hêrê dwelt.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peacock swept in
+the light, there was an open casement, a narrow balcony of stone; a
+group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the
+night&mdash;the night wet and moonless,&mdash;waters a fathom deep,&mdash;a bed of sand
+treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be
+save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid
+yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.</p>
+
+<p>On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have
+told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of
+the Brocken.</p>
+
+<p>But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long
+in the breast of the women whom men love.</p>
+
+<p>The Sun came from the east, and passed through the pale stricken faces
+that watched from the casement, and came straight to where the Red Mouse
+sat amidst the poppies.</p>
+
+<p>"Have you let a female soul escape you?" said the Sun.</p>
+
+<p>The Red Mouse answered:</p>
+
+<p>"Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards
+the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch,
+and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to
+me."</p>
+
+<p>Said the Sun:</p>
+
+<p>"That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has told me oftentimes
+that Eros is your pander&mdash;always."</p>
+
+<p>"Anteros only," said the Red Mouse.</p>
+
+<p>The Sun, wondering, said again:</p>
+
+<p>"And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into every female soul
+you enter at birth, and dwell there unto death. Is it, then, not so?"</p>
+
+<p>The Red Mouse answered:</p>
+
+<p>"The boast is not mine; it is man's."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she thought, would
+prove her grave; but the waters, with human-like caprice, had cast her
+back upon the land with scarce an effort of her own. Given back thus to
+life, whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled to her
+feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy night through the
+grassy stretches of the unknown gardens and lands in which she found
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with lead, but she was made
+swift by terror and hatred, as though Hermes for once had had pity for
+anything human, and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals.</p>
+
+<p>She ran on and on, not knowing whither; only knowing that she ran from
+the man who had tempted her by the strength of the rod of wealth.</p>
+
+<p>The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the dense mist no
+lights far or near, of the city or planets, of palace or house were
+seen. She did not know where she went; she only ran on away and away,
+anywhere, from the Red Mouse and its master.</p>
+
+<p>When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she paused, and trembling
+crept into a cattle-shed to rest and take breath a little. She shrank
+from every habitation, she quivered at every human voice; she was
+afraid&mdash;horribly afraid&mdash;in those clinging vapors, those damp deathly
+smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those indistinct and
+unfamiliar creatures of a country strange to her.</p>
+
+<p>That old man with the elf's eyes, who had tempted her, was he a god too,
+she wondered, since he had the rod that metes power and wealth? He might
+stretch his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her.</p>
+
+<p>The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for her, and humbly
+welcomed her. She hid herself among their beds of hay, and in the warmth
+of their breath and their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any
+half-drowned dog; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, and
+hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. She slept from sheer
+exhaustion of mind and body. The cattle could have trodden her to death,
+or tossed her through the open spaces of their byres, but they seemed to
+know, they seemed to pity; and they stirred so that they did not brush a
+limb of her, nor shorten a moment of her slumbers.</p>
+
+<p>When she awoke the sun was high.</p>
+
+<p>A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails,
+kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest
+there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place passively, not
+well knowing what she did.</p>
+
+<p>The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping
+with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a
+delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of
+the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a
+wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.</p>
+
+<p>The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the
+porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf&mdash;f&mdash;f! get out, you
+drowned rat."</p>
+
+<p>She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force
+to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with
+her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember&mdash;and be
+thankful&mdash;that in the night that was past she had been strong.</p>
+
+<p>The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint;
+she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with
+weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had
+looked again on the face of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept
+into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.</p>
+
+<p>She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and
+rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by
+one, as the death tears of the llama fall.</p>
+
+<p>This was the young year round her; that she knew.</p>
+
+<p>The winter had gone by; its many months had passed over her head whilst
+she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken
+the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary
+season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine
+might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body
+might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot
+fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and
+dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless
+worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to
+serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from
+which a toad would turn. Oh, God! would death never take her likewise?
+Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of
+the dead?</p>
+
+<p>That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so
+full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's
+only friend":&mdash;even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Vague memories of things which she had heard in fable and tradition, of
+bodies accursed and condemned to wander forever unresting and wailing;
+of spirits, which for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that
+they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world itself
+endured; creatures that the very elements had denied, and that were too
+vile for fire to burn, or water to drown, or steel to slay, or old age
+to whither, or death to touch and take in any wise. All these memories
+returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered if she were such a
+one as these.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great sin; she had done
+none willingly, and yet all people called her vile, and they must know.</p>
+
+<p>Even the old man, mocking her, had said:</p>
+
+<p>"Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, soon or late. And
+your fate is shame; it was your birth-gift, it will be your
+burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? No. But you can make it potent as
+gold, and sweet as honey if you choose, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>And she had not chosen; yet of any nobility in the resistance she did
+not dream. She had shut her heart to it by the unconscious instinct of
+strength, as she had shut her lips under torture, and shut her hands
+against life.</p>
+
+<p>She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friendless, and every
+human creature was against her. Her tempter had spoken only the bare and
+bleak truth. A dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living
+thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more desolate than
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless sky, but in the
+little wood it was cool and shady, and had the moisture of a heavy
+morning dew. Millions of young leaves had uncurled themselves in the
+warmth. Little butterflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, danced
+in the light. Brown rills of water murmured under the grasses, the
+thrushes sang to one another through the boughs, and the lizard darted
+hither and thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter.</p>
+
+<p>A little distance from her there was a group of joyous singers who
+looked at her from time to time, their laughter hushing a little, and
+their simple carousal under the green boughs broken by a nameless
+chillness and involuntary speculation. She did not note them, her face
+being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the thrushes' song or
+of the human singers' voices rousing her from the stupefaction of
+despair which drugged her senses.</p>
+
+<p>They watched her long; her attitude did not change.</p>
+
+<p>One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a step or two
+forwards; a girl with winking feet, clad gayly in bright colors, though
+the texture of her clothes was poor.</p>
+
+<p>She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you in trouble?"</p>
+
+<p>The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver.</p>
+
+<p>"It is no matter, I am only&mdash;tired."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you all alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the damp and the gloom; we
+are so pleasant and sunny there. Come."</p>
+
+<p>"You are good, but let me be."</p>
+
+<p>The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily rose and came.</p>
+
+<p>"Heaven! she is handsome!" the men muttered to one another.</p>
+
+<p>She looked straight at them all, and let them be.</p>
+
+<p>"You are all alone?" they asked her again.</p>
+
+<p>"Always," she answered them.</p>
+
+<p>"You are going&mdash;where?"</p>
+
+<p>"To Paris"</p>
+
+<p>"What to do there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know."</p>
+
+<p>"You look wet&mdash;suffering&mdash;what is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was nearly drowned last night&mdash;an accident&mdash;it is nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Where have you slept?"</p>
+
+<p>"In a shed: with some cattle."</p>
+
+<p>"Could you get no shelter in a house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did not seek any."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you do? What is your work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Anything&mdash;nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"What is your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>"That means the chaff;&mdash;less than the chaff,&mdash;the dust."</p>
+
+<p>"It means me."</p>
+
+<p>They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.</p>
+
+<p>They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock
+had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror
+and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were,
+the very current of the young blood in her veins.</p>
+
+<p>They were silent a little space. Then whispered together.</p>
+
+<p>"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We
+follow art. We will befriend you."</p>
+
+<p>She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing.
+But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their
+bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the
+great city.</p>
+
+<p>In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were
+going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she
+would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with
+them&mdash;fearing the Red Mouse.</p>
+
+<p>They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they
+followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and
+alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly
+her step, her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant still
+even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these
+he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless
+value in the world, and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next
+town. Will you take a part?"</p>
+
+<p>Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she
+started at his voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I do not know what you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It
+will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall
+do shall be to stand and be looked at&mdash;you are beautiful, and you know
+it, no doubt?"</p>
+
+<p>She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she
+were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty
+that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory
+to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been
+strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse
+a throb of passion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any
+lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought,
+who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her
+own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across
+the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.</p>
+
+<p>It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with
+lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great
+fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded
+cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets
+were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.</p>
+
+<p>They were well known and well liked there; the people clustered by
+dozens round them, the women greeting them with kisses, the children
+hugging the dogs, the men clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink
+and be merry.</p>
+
+<p>They bade her watch them at their art in a rough wooden house outside
+the wine tavern.</p>
+
+<p>She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, while the mimic
+life of their little stage began and lived its hour.</p>
+
+<p>To the mind which had received its first instincts of art from the cold,
+lofty, passionless creations of Arslàn, from the classic purity and from
+the divine conception of the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage
+could seem but poor and idle mimicry; gaudy and fragrantless as any
+painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem.</p>
+
+<p>The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure idealism of her
+mind and temper revolted in contempt from the visible presentment and
+the vari-colored harlequinade of the actor's art. To her, a note of
+song, a gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were enough to
+unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, a paradise of faith
+and of desire; and for this very cause she shrank away, in amazement and
+disgust, from this realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left
+nothing for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue than
+the common language of human hopes and fears. It could not touch her,
+it could not move her; it filled her&mdash;so far as she could bring herself
+to think of it at all&mdash;with a cold and wondering contempt.</p>
+
+<p>For to the reed which has once trembled under the melody born of the
+breath divine, the voices of mortal mouths, as they scream in rage, or
+exult in clamor, or contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the
+emptiest of all the sounds under heaven.</p>
+
+<p>"That is your art?" she said wearily to the actors when they came to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, is it not art; and a noble one?"</p>
+
+<p>A scornful shadow swept across her face.</p>
+
+<p>"It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. There is neither
+heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth."</p>
+
+<p>They were sharply stung.</p>
+
+<p>"What has given you such thoughts as that?" they said, in their
+impatience and mortification.</p>
+
+<p>"I have seen great things," she said simply, and turned away and went
+out into the darkness, and wept,&mdash;alone.</p>
+
+<p>She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who had heard the songs
+of Pan amidst the rushes by the river, and had listened to the charmed
+steps of Persephone amidst the flowers of the summer;&mdash;could she honor
+lesser gods than these?</p>
+
+<p>"They may forget&mdash;they may forsake, and he likewise, but I never," she
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>If only she might live a little longer space to serve and suffer for
+them and for him still; of fate she asked nothing higher.</p>
+
+<p>That night there was much money in the bag. The players pressed a share
+upon her; but she refused.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I begged from you?" she said. "I have earned nothing."</p>
+
+<p>It was with exceeding difficulty that they ended in persuading her even
+to share their simple supper.</p>
+
+<p>She took only bread and water, and sat and watched them curiously.</p>
+
+<p>The players were in high spirits; their chief ordered a stoup of bright
+wine, and made merry over it with gayer songs and louder laughter, and
+more frequent jests than even were his wont.</p>
+
+<p>The men and women of the town came in and out with merry interchange of
+words. The youths of the little bourg chattered light amorous nonsense;
+the young girls smiled and chattered in answer; whilst the actors
+bantered them and made them a hundred love prophecies.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then a dog trotted in to salute the players' poodles; now and
+then the quaint face of a pig looked between the legs of its master.</p>
+
+<p>The door stood open; the balmy air blew in; beyond, the stars shone in a
+cloudless sky.</p>
+
+<p>She sat without in the darkness, where no light fell among the thick
+shroud of one of the blossoming boughs of pear-trees, and now and then
+she looked and watched their laughter and companionship, and their gay
+and airy buffoonery, together there within the winehouse doors.</p>
+
+<p>"All fools enjoy!" she thought; with that bitter wonder, that aching
+disdain, that involuntary injustice, with which the strong sad patience
+of a great nature surveys the mindless merriment of lighter hearts and
+brains more easily lulled into forgetfulness and content.</p>
+
+<p>They came to her and pressed on her a draught of the wine, a share of
+the food, a handful of the honeyed cates of their simple banquet; even a
+portion of their silver and copper pieces with which the little leathern
+sack of their receipts was full,&mdash;for once,&mdash;to the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>She refused all: the money she threw passionately away.</p>
+
+<p>"Am I a beggar?" she said, in her wrath.</p>
+
+<p>She remained without in the gloom among the cool blossoming branches
+that swayed above-head in the still night, while the carousal broke up
+and the peasants went on their way to their homes, singing along the
+dark streets, and the lights were put out in the winehouse, and the
+trill of the grasshopper chirped in the fields around.</p>
+
+<p>"You will die of damp, roofless in the open air this moonless night,"
+men, as they passed away, said to her in wonder.</p>
+
+<p>"The leaves are roof enough for me," she answered them: and stayed there
+with her head resting on the roll of her sheepskin; wide awake through
+the calm dark hours; for a bed within she knew that she could not pay,
+and she would not let any charity purchase one for her.</p>
+
+<p>At daybreak when the others rose she would only take from them the crust
+that was absolutely needful to keep life in her. Food seemed to choke
+her as it passed her lips,&mdash;since how could she tell but what his lips
+were parched dry with hunger or were blue and cold in death?</p>
+
+<p>That morning, as they started, one of the two youths who bore their
+traveling gear and the rude appliances of their little stage upon his
+shoulders from village to village when they journeyed thus&mdash;being
+oftentimes too poor to permit themselves any other mode of transit and
+of porterage&mdash;fell lame and grew faint and was forced to lay down his
+burden by the roadside.</p>
+
+<p>She raised the weight upon her back and head as she had been wont to do
+the weights of timber and of corn for the mill-house, and bore it
+onward.</p>
+
+<p>In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not yield, but carried the
+wooden framework and the folded canvases all through the heat and
+weariness of the noonday.</p>
+
+<p>"You would have me eat of your supper last night. I will have you accept
+of my payment to-day," she said, stubbornly.</p>
+
+<p>For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and even full of
+honor, whatever men might say: had not Helios himself been bound as a
+slave in Thessaly?</p>
+
+<p>They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit highways, and under
+the shadows of green trees. The fields were green with the young corn
+and the young vines; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs
+nodded in their footsteps; the skies were blue; the earth was fragrant.</p>
+
+<p>At noonday the players halted and threw themselves down beneath a
+poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat their noonday meal of bread
+and a green cress salad.</p>
+
+<p>The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from rain-drops still
+wet upon the grasses, and the budding rose vines. The hedge was full of
+honeysuckle and tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed
+cattle came and looked at them; little redstarts picked up their
+crumbs; from a white vine-hung cottage an old woman brought them salt
+and wished them a fair travel.</p>
+
+<p>But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she asked always,&mdash;"Where
+is Paris?"</p>
+
+<p>At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud upon the purple
+haze of the horizon.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and thanked the gods that
+they had thus given her to behold the city of his desires.</p>
+
+<p>The chief of the mimes watched her keenly.</p>
+
+<p>"You look at Paris," he said after a time. "There you may be great if
+you will."</p>
+
+<p>"Great? I?"</p>
+
+<p>She echoed the word with weary incredulity. She knew he could but mock
+at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay," he made answer seriously. "Even you! Why not? There is no dynasty
+that endures in that golden city save only one&mdash;the sovereignty of a
+woman's beauty."</p>
+
+<p>She started and shuddered a little; she thought that she saw the Red
+Mouse stir amidst the grasses.</p>
+
+<p>"I want no greatness," she said, slowly. "What should I do with it?"</p>
+
+<p>For in her heart she thought,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What would it serve me to be known to all the world and remembered by
+all the ages of men if he forget&mdash;forget quite?"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and
+fruitful zone of the city&mdash;one of the fragrant and joyous
+pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls
+came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the
+light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened
+violets in each other's breasts.</p>
+
+<p>The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.</p>
+
+<p>"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.</p>
+
+<p>She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslàn had
+declared that fame&mdash;or death&mdash;should come to him.</p>
+
+<p>The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.</p>
+
+<p>A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its
+gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the
+labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises
+of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of
+her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to
+daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the
+glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush
+of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive,
+with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the
+palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.</p>
+
+<p>The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so
+incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they
+searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of
+bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that
+her eyes never lost that look.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest
+of them asked her.</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which
+it was?&mdash;whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she
+would light on at the last?</p>
+
+<p>She was a mystery to them.</p>
+
+<p>She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water
+and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore
+bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to
+care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the
+bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether
+the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored
+aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.</p>
+
+<p>She was silent always, and she never smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.</p>
+
+<p>By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient,
+enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne
+that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to
+the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and
+alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never
+ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslàn's was
+not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too
+tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.</p>
+
+<p>So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very
+strange and wondrous to her.</p>
+
+<p>The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which
+the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep
+browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all
+gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise,
+change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun,
+walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs,
+various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and
+discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets,
+and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of
+anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless
+revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.</p>
+
+<p>For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all
+about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from
+it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless
+seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of
+birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence
+and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."</p>
+
+<p>"You are not happy?" one man said to her.</p>
+
+<p>"Happy!"</p>
+
+<p>She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested
+golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a
+showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped
+head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the
+bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.</p>
+
+<p>"Show your beauty once&mdash;just once amidst us on the stage, and on the
+morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of
+heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.</p>
+
+<p>But she refused always.</p>
+
+<p>Her beauty&mdash;it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or
+death, for him.</p>
+
+<p>The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending
+vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched
+the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of
+the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could
+never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to
+face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more
+unending, than a great city.</p>
+
+<p>She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the
+strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her
+sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no
+other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every
+accent of persuasion or of passion.</p>
+
+<p>When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in
+the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them
+to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in
+the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and
+called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them
+with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold
+mute weariness of contempt.</p>
+
+<p>One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of
+money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you
+will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she
+showed him the edge of her hidden knife.</p>
+
+<p>One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that
+alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and
+watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old
+market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude,
+and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many
+colors.</p>
+
+<p>"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a
+name of power, if only you will come."</p>
+
+<p>"Come whither?" she asked him.</p>
+
+<p>"Come with me&mdash;only to my supper-table&mdash;for one hour; my horses wait."</p>
+
+<p>She threw the chain of stones at her feet.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no hunger," she said, carelessly. "Go, ask those that have to
+your feast."</p>
+
+<p>And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the many honeyed and
+persuasive words with which in vain he urged her, that night and many
+another night, until he wearied.</p>
+
+<p>One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by under a gilded
+gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, and hung with delicate
+draperies, there looked out the fair head of a woman, with diamonds in
+the ears, and a shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling
+scornful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose; and a woman's voice called to
+her, mockingly:</p>
+
+<p>"Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk barefoot in the
+dust on the stones, and let the sun beat on your head? O fool! there is
+gold in the air, and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here,
+for a woman!"</p>
+
+<p>And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of the gardener's
+wife of the old town by the sea.</p>
+
+<p>She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sorrowful, musing
+eyes, full of startled courage: soon she comprehended; and then her gaze
+gave back scorn for scorn.</p>
+
+<p>"Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the trellised vine?"
+she said, with her voice ascending clear in its disdain. "And are those
+stones in your breast any brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your
+child?"</p>
+
+<p>The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, and withdrew from the
+casement.</p>
+
+<p>She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down in the dust. It
+was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless&mdash;an emblem of pleasure and
+wealth. She left it where it lay, and went onward.</p>
+
+<p>The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she might take as
+easily as she could have taken the rose from the dust, had no power to
+allure her.</p>
+
+<p>The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the ears, the purple
+draperies, the ease and the affluence and the joys of the sights and the
+senses, these to her were as powerless to move her envy, these to her
+seemed as idle as the blow-balls that a child's breath floated down the
+current of a summer breeze.</p>
+
+<p>When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the gods by night steal
+through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound
+anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass,
+and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness
+imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.</p>
+
+<p>"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
+smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades&mdash;to buy souls and to sell
+them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
+other?"</p>
+
+<p>There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
+gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
+their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
+in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
+for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right
+errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal
+it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from
+passion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her
+when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they
+betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable
+reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.</p>
+
+<p>They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his
+soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all
+time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of
+resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or
+the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult
+rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed
+her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and
+of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the
+dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.</p>
+
+<p>It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at
+the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much
+crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous,
+hopeless class that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent&mdash;so silent
+that no one notices when death replaces life.</p>
+
+<p>Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a
+high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed
+almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so
+fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close
+about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost
+there.</p>
+
+<p>In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very
+barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of
+dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the
+rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of
+the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar
+sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs.
+And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were
+something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought
+a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of
+it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was
+yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.</p>
+
+<p>She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live
+there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those
+offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer
+than themselves.</p>
+
+<p>They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours'
+toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever
+they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with
+any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long
+as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the
+sparrows in the dark.</p>
+
+<p>She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen,
+roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm
+herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of
+their crust, a little copper piece,&mdash;anything that they could afford or
+she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the réveilleuse of the
+quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:&mdash;"Her eyes have
+no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange trade&mdash;to rise whilst yet for the world it was night,
+and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the
+staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons
+and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew.
+So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the
+bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in
+her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter
+those mercies of the night.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in
+the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house,
+from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp
+alone burning.</p>
+
+<p>They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to
+call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty
+of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.</p>
+
+<p>Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them
+also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their
+starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over
+the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up
+in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or
+the potato-fields outside the walls,&mdash;she could neither fear them nor
+hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate,
+wondering grief.</p>
+
+<p>She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin,
+suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being
+in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of
+its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and
+that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on
+her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all
+strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It
+was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair
+that had closed around her.</p>
+
+<p>And some of these in turn loved her.</p>
+
+<p>Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued,
+flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark
+stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking
+low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike
+dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.</p>
+
+<p>"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she
+always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a
+distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the
+children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that
+had closed about her heart.</p>
+
+<p>It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry
+nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her
+throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the
+thirst of overdriven cattle.</p>
+
+<p>All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the
+while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.</p>
+
+<p>She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so
+surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever
+sleep. She sought for him always;&mdash;sought the busy crowds of the living;
+sought the burial-grounds of the dead.</p>
+
+<p>As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she
+passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of
+the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories
+that it treasured; it became clearer to her&mdash;this thing of his desires,
+this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a
+world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and
+endlessly yearned.</p>
+
+<p>The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible
+and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let
+me only die as the reed died,&mdash;what matter,&mdash;so that only the world
+speak his name!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons
+had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far
+below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm
+altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great
+silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of
+the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.</p>
+
+<p>The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it,
+seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with
+dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on
+the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,&mdash;how long?"</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute
+and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail
+life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips
+the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with
+gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and
+poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is
+but one god now,&mdash;that god is gold."</p>
+
+<p>"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance.
+"You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and
+poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden
+pear. It was not wise."</p>
+
+<p>He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced
+her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned
+against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment
+paralyzed.</p>
+
+<p>"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I
+bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for
+naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they
+betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by
+the snake.</p>
+
+<p>"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"</p>
+
+<p>"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not
+know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me.
+But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very
+weak, of course;&mdash;you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you
+on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,&mdash;and you will
+plunge after it,&mdash;and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you
+cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her
+lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures
+soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and
+are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>"You came&mdash;to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay&mdash;I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I&mdash;&mdash;My
+golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than
+his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under
+enforced composure.</p>
+
+<p>"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's
+quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with
+clean hands."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which
+stung her so ruthlessly.</p>
+
+<p>"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may,
+shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You&mdash;a thing
+beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be
+innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you
+choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice.
+Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it
+with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue
+will envy you the red robe bitterly then."</p>
+
+<p>Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the
+look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the
+side of the rushing mill-water.</p>
+
+<p>"You came&mdash;to say this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon
+tired, I say; but I&mdash;&mdash;Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he
+motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the
+wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur
+of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night
+air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the
+slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the
+beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin;
+you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while,
+and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy
+and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful
+fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the
+reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most
+bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but
+she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than
+was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels
+for a woman who sells her soul&mdash;at a loss. You see?&mdash;ah, surely, you
+see, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous
+moonlight about her. She saw&mdash;she saw now!</p>
+
+<p>And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and,
+by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of
+alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty,
+and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least
+believe&mdash;believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and
+her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is
+kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that
+through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and
+merciless gift.</p>
+
+<p>"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's
+voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you
+have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who
+has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you
+last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it&mdash;know it, at least,
+enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you
+took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,&mdash;to stand homeless
+under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the
+rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace
+gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one
+smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a
+little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired,
+Folle-Farine!"</p>
+
+<p>She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming
+to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights
+shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.</p>
+
+<p>Tired!&mdash;ah, God!&mdash;tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he
+spake.</p>
+
+<p>"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the
+world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as
+your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by
+horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded
+gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of
+flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only
+chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a
+priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring
+you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!&mdash;what
+vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the
+swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!&mdash;what
+retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and
+magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the
+Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you
+can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance&mdash;so
+symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to
+wither at your birth,&mdash;a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the
+snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your
+fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed
+out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no
+anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way,
+you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more
+beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is
+the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of
+gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it
+high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will
+find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest
+vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of
+your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men;
+and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in
+triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;&mdash;nothing as you
+are, Folle-Farine!"</p>
+
+<p>She heard in silence to the end.</p>
+
+<p>On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam
+close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness,
+in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all
+creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted
+in the spaces of the stones.</p>
+
+<p>As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she
+reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow
+wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the
+void of the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you,
+and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that
+tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."</p>
+
+<p>And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though
+the deed she spake of tempted her.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;going home!&mdash;oh, mockery of the word!&mdash;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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her
+tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.</p>
+
+<p>For Love was with her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the
+river, a Nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With it was only one written line:</p>
+
+<p>"When you are tired, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the
+young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.</p>
+
+<p>An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face,
+lit with wolf's eyes, through the gloom.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you not tired?" she muttered in the formula taught her. "Are you
+not tired, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>For they chimed in chorus as the bells did:</p>
+
+<p>"Strength in the dust&mdash;in a reed&mdash;in a Nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;or die.</p>
+
+<p>"Why do they not die?" she wondered; and she thought of the dear gods
+that she had loved, the gods of oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>Truly there were no gifts like their gifts; and yet men knew their worth
+so little;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange, melancholy, dreary labor this into which she had
+entered.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which she alone was
+living.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Her heart ached for the country.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And yet she stayed on in this, which was to her the deepest hell, stayed
+on because he&mdash;in life or death&mdash;was here.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you shrink still?" he said, gently. "Put back your knife; look at me
+quietly; you will not have the casket?&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Living," he answered her, and still he smiled. "Living. Come with me,
+and see how he has used the liberty you gave. Come."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"It is the truth?" she muttered. "If you mock me,&mdash;if you lie&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I will come."</p>
+
+<p>Sartorian gazed at her in silence.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;had
+the gods forgotten? had he forgot?</p>
+
+<p>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?&mdash;free to rise to the heights of lofty desire,
+and never look downward, in pity, once?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What is that to you?" she said, in her shut teeth. "Show me the truth:
+and as for him,&mdash;he has a right to do as he will. Have I said ever
+otherwise?"</p>
+
+<p>He led the way onward in silence.</p>
+
+<p>This passion, so heroic even in its barbarism, so faithful even in its
+wretchedness, so pure even in its abandonment, almost appalled him,&mdash;and
+yet on it he had no pity.</p>
+
+<p>By his lips the world spoke: the world which, to a creature nameless,
+homeless, godless, friendless, offered only one choice&mdash;shame or death;
+and for such privilege of choice bade her be thankful to men and to
+their deity.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait here," he said, and drew her backward into a hollow in the wall.
+It was nearly dark.</p>
+
+<p>As she stood there in the darkness looking down through the narrow
+space, there came a shadow to her through the gloom,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;had been severed from
+him by the breadth of a stone as by an ocean's width; and he&mdash;doomed to
+fail always, spending his life in one endeavor, and by that one
+perpetually vanquished&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There was scarcely any light, but there was enough for her to read his
+story by&mdash;the story of continual failure.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;to
+her what mattered failure or scorn, famine or woe, defeat or despair?</p>
+
+<p>She saw his face once more.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;this was all she asked. She had told him that
+he could have no sins to her, and it had been no empty phrase.</p>
+
+<p>She crouched on his threshold, scarcely daring to breathe lest he should
+hear her.</p>
+
+<p>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;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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;&mdash;the gods whose pity he rejected and whose divinity he denied.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The dawn grew into morning.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The sleepers wakened of themselves or dreamed on as they might.</p>
+
+<p>She had no memory of them.</p>
+
+<p>She crouched in the gloom on his threshold, watching him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Another day&mdash;another day!" he muttered, wearily; and he turned from the
+Barabbas.</p>
+
+<p>Towards the form on his threshold he had never looked.</p>
+
+<p>She sat without and waited.</p>
+
+<p>Waited&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>For even a beaten dog is a creature less humble and timid than a woman
+that loves and whose love is rejected.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>With a curse he flung his brushes from him, and cast himself face
+downward on his bed of straw.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"A deathless name?&mdash;Oh, madman! A little breath on the mouths of men in
+all the ages to come?&mdash;Oh, fool! Hereafter you cry?&mdash;Oh, fool!&mdash;heaven
+and earth may pass away like a scroll that is burnt into ashes, and the
+future you live for may never come&mdash;neither for you nor the world. What
+you may gain&mdash;who shall say? But all you have missed, I know. And no man
+shall scorn me&mdash;and pass unscathed."</p>
+
+<p>There came an old lame woman by laboriously bearing a load of firewood.
+She paused beside the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"You look yonder," she said, resting her eyes on the stranger crouching
+on the threshold. "Are you anything to that man?"</p>
+
+<p>Silence only answered her.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;very soon. I
+have seen it before. Those men do not die. Their bodies are too strong.
+But their brains go,&mdash;look you. And their brains go, and yet they
+live&mdash;to fourscore and ten many a time&mdash;shut up and manacled like wild
+beasts."</p>
+
+<p>Folle-Farine shivered where she crouched in the shadow of the doorway;
+she still said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>The crone mumbled on indifferent of answer, and yet pitiful, gazing into
+the chamber.</p>
+
+<p>"I have watched him often; he is fair to look at&mdash;one is never too old
+to care for that. All winter, spring, and summer he has lived so
+hard;&mdash;so cold too and so silent&mdash;painting that strange thing yonder. He
+looks like a king&mdash;he lives like a beggar. The picture was his god:&mdash;see
+you. And no doubt he has set his soul on fame&mdash;men will. All the world
+is mad. One day in the springtime it was sent somewhere&mdash;that great
+thing yonder on the trestles,&mdash;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;&mdash;in
+the world. That was in the spring of the year. He has been like this
+ever since. Walking most nights;&mdash;starving most days;&mdash;I think. But he
+is always silent."</p>
+
+<p>The speaker raised her wood and went slowly, muttering as she limped
+down each steep stair,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"There must hang a crown of stars I suppose&mdash;somewhere&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"The woman says aright," the voice of Sartorian murmured low against her
+ear.</p>
+
+<p>She had forgotten that he was near from the first moment that her eyes
+had once more fed themselves upon the face of Arslàn.</p>
+
+<p>"The woman says aright," he echoed, softly. "This man will perish; his
+body may not die, but his brain will&mdash;surely. And yet for his life you
+would give yours?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" she murmured with a swift soft trembling eagerness. "If the gods
+would but remember!&mdash;and take me&mdash;instead. But they forget&mdash;they forget
+always."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, truly, the gods forget. But if you would give yourself to death for
+him, why not do a lesser thing?&mdash;give your beauty, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>A scarlet flush burned her from head to foot. For once she mistook his
+meaning. She thought, how could a beauty that he&mdash;who perished
+there&mdash;had scorned, have rarity or grace in those cold eyes, of force or
+light enough to lure him from his grave?</p>
+
+<p>The low melody of the voice in her ear flowed on.</p>
+
+<p>"See you&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"You were to give that gold," she muttered, in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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?&mdash;who? It is so deaf, so slow of
+foot, so blind, unless the film before its eyes be opened by gold."</p>
+
+<p>He paused and waited.</p>
+
+<p>She watched silent on the threshold there.</p>
+
+<p>The cruel skill of his words cast on her all the weight of this ruin
+which they watched.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The sweet voice of Sartorian murmured on:</p>
+
+<p>"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!&mdash;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&mdash;beyond
+any man's dispute&mdash;forever. I could do it, almost in a day; and he need
+never know. But, then, you are not tired, Folle-Farine!"</p>
+
+<p>She writhed from him, as the doe struck to the ground writhes from the
+hounds at her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Kill me!" she muttered. "Will not that serve you? Kill me&mdash;and save
+him!"</p>
+
+<p>Sartorian smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! you are but weak, after all, Folle-Farine. You would die for that
+man's single sake,&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her once, then turned away.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;yet in act failed.</p>
+
+<p>To save him by any martyrdom of her body or her soul, so she had sworn;
+yet now!&mdash;Suddenly she seemed base to herself, and timorous, and false.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>All the day she watched beside him there, amidst the brazen clangor of
+the bells and scream of the rough winds above the roofs.</p>
+
+<p>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;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;all these told their story with an eloquence more cruel than lies
+in any words.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>All the day through she watched beside him&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Where she kneeled beside his bed she drew his hands against her
+heart,&mdash;timidly, lest consciousness should come to him and he should
+curse her and drive her thence&mdash;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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>She did not know; she felt astray and blind and full of guilt. It might
+be&mdash;so she thought&mdash;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,&mdash;and found her wanting.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Dignity, innocence, strength, pride&mdash;what right had she to these, what
+title had she to claim them&mdash;she who had been less than the dust from
+her birth upward?</p>
+
+<p>To perish for him anyhow&mdash;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,&mdash;and was helpless. More helpless even than she had been when
+first she had claimed back his life from Thanatos.</p>
+
+<p>Seven days she watched thus by him amidst the metal clangor of the
+bells, amidst the wailing of the autumn winds between the roofs.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And when the people&mdash;whose debts to her she had often forgiven, and whom
+she had once fancied had borne her a little love&mdash;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,&mdash;since evil alone could save him.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Every night during those seven days the flutelike voice of her tempter
+made its hated music on her ear. It asked always,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Are you tired, Folle-Farine?"</p>
+
+<p>Her ears were always deaf; her lips were always dumb.</p>
+
+<p>On the eighth night he paused a little longer by her in the gloom.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;his soul's desire when his
+sense returns. So little&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>Her strength was broken as she heard. She turned and flung herself in
+supplication at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"So little&mdash;so little; and you hold your hand!"</p>
+
+<p>Sartorian smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay; you hold your silence, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>She did not move; her upraised face spoke without words the passion of
+her prayer.</p>
+
+<p>"Save him!&mdash;save him! So little, so you say; and the gods will not
+hear."</p>
+
+<p>"The gods are all dead, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>"Save him! You are as a god! Save him!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am but a mortal, Folle-Farine. Can I open the gates of the tomb, or
+close them?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can save him,&mdash;for you have gold."</p>
+
+<p>He smiled still.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! you learn at last that there is but one god! You have been slow to
+believe, Folle-Farine!"</p>
+
+<p>She clung to him; she writhed around him; she kissed with her soilless
+lips the base dust at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"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!&mdash;I
+know! You can save him if you will!"</p>
+
+<p>She laughed where she was stretched upon the ground, a laugh that stayed
+the smile upon his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>He stooped, and the sweetness of his voice was low and soft as the south
+wind.</p>
+
+<p>"I will save him, if you say that you are tired, Folle-Farine."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot!" she muttered faintly in her throat.</p>
+
+<p>"Then let him die!" he said; and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>Once again he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;waiting in cold patience for the slow sure end.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Let him die!" she muttered, with lips dry as the lips of the dead. "Let
+him die!"</p>
+
+<p>Once more the choice was left to her. So men said: and the gods were
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he
+struck his staff upon each stair,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The picture will feed the stove; the law will give me that."</p>
+
+<p>She heard and shivered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great
+canvas of the Barabbas.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some
+deliverance, some mercy&mdash;who could say?&mdash;might yet be found, she
+thought. The gods were dead; but men,&mdash;were they all more wanton than
+the snake, more cruel than the scorpion?</p>
+
+<p>For the first time in seven days she left his side.</p>
+
+<p>She rose and staggered from the garret, down the stairway, into the
+lower stories of the wilderness of wood and stone.</p>
+
+<p>She traced her way blindly to the places she had known. They closed
+their doors in haste, and fled from her in terror.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Have pity!" she muttered. "You are poor, indeed, I know; but help me.
+He dies there!"</p>
+
+<p>The woman shook her off, and shrank.</p>
+
+<p>"Get you gone!" she cried. "My little child will sicken if you breathe
+on her!"</p>
+
+<p>The others said the same, some less harshly, some more harshly. Twice or
+thrice they added:</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Art mad? She is plague-stricken."</p>
+
+<p>She went from them in silence, and left them, and passed out into the
+open air.</p>
+
+<p>In all this labyrinth of roofs, in all these human herds, she yet
+thought, "Surely there must be some who pity?"</p>
+
+<p>For even yet she was so young; and even yet she knew the world so
+little.</p>
+
+<p>She went out into the streets.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a little gold!"</p>
+
+<p>So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach as Aldebaran,
+when it glistened through the storm-wrack of the rain.</p>
+
+<p>Why could he have not been content&mdash;she had been&mdash;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,&mdash;these the pure joys of earth and air which were her only
+heritage.</p>
+
+<p>She went out into the streets.</p>
+
+<p>It was a night of wind and rain.</p>
+
+<p>The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. Beggars, and thieves,
+and harlots jostled her in the narrow ways.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be hell,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>It was the hell of the Christians: in it there was no hope for her.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted her; when they had any
+space to think of her at all.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;she
+would have kissed the mud from the feet of any creature who would have
+had thus much of mercy.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>She stumbled on through the narrow ways.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"She is mad," they said to one another, and went onward.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"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?&mdash;fool! Give him
+gold&mdash;give him gold! We are Christians here: and we have but one God."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>The woman thrust her away, and raised, shrill and sharp through all the
+clamor of the crowd, the cry of thief.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>She went back to the place where he lay&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>The rats hurried to their holes at the light; the hag let fall her
+shears, and fled through an opening in the wall.</p>
+
+<p>The old man looked up and smiled with a ghastly leer upon her in the
+shadows.</p>
+
+<p>"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;&mdash;dead, dead."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>She set down her lamp, and crossed the chamber, and kneeled beside the
+straw that made his bed.</p>
+
+<p>She was quite calm.</p>
+
+<p>She knew that the world gave her one chance&mdash;one only. She knew that men
+alone reigned, and that the gods were dead.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;he would never
+know.</p>
+
+<p>Between them there would be forever silence. He would never know.</p>
+
+<p>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;"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>To die with him!</p>
+
+<p>She laughed to think how sweet and calm such sacrifice as that had been.</p>
+
+<p>Amidst the folded lilies, on the white waters, as the moon rose,&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;so they said.</p>
+
+<p>A martyrdom in shame; a life in ignominy&mdash;these were all to which she
+might aspire&mdash;so they said.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that she knew.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Almost it was stronger than her strength. Almost she yielded to the
+desire which burned in her to let him die,&mdash;and die there with him,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Almost she yielded; but the greatness of her love was stronger than its
+vileness, and its humility was more perfect than its cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to her&mdash;mad, and bruised, and stunned with her misery&mdash;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&mdash;what could it matter?&mdash;a
+thing baser than the dust,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+
+<p>That night the moon found the Red Mouse, and said,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Did I not declare aright? Over every female thing you are
+victorious&mdash;soon or late?"</p>
+
+<p>But the Red Mouse answered,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, not so. For the soul still is closed against me; and the soul
+still is pure. But this men do not see, and women cannot know;&mdash;they are
+so blind."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+
+<p>Ere another year had been fully born, the world spoke in homage and in
+wonder of two things.</p>
+
+<p>The one, a genius which had suddenly arisen in its midst, and taken
+vengeance for the long neglect of bitter years, and scourged the world
+with pitiless scorn until, before this mighty struggle which it had
+dared once to deride and to deny, it crouched trembling; and wondered
+and did homage; and said in fear, "Truly this man is great, and truth is
+terrible."</p>
+
+<p>The other,&mdash;the bodily beauty of a woman; a beauty rarely seen in open
+day, but only in the innermost recesses of a sensualist's palace; a
+creature barefooted, with chains of gold about her ankles, and loose
+white robes which showed each undulation of the perfect limbs, and on
+her breast the fires of a knot of opal; a creature in whose eyes there
+was one changeless look, as of some desert beast taken from the freedom
+of the air and cast to the darkness of some unutterable horror; a
+creature whose lips were forever mute, mute as the tortured lips of
+Læna.</p>
+
+<p>One day the man whom the nations at last had crowned, saw the creature
+whom it was a tyrant's pleasure to place beside him now and then, in the
+public ways, as a tribune of Rome placed in his chariot of triumph the
+vanquished splendor of some imperial thing of Asia made his slave.</p>
+
+<p>Across the clear hot light of noon the eyes of Arslàn fell on hers for
+the first time since they had looked on her amidst the pale poppies, in
+the noonrise, in the fields.</p>
+
+<p>They smiled on her with a cold, serene, ironic scorn.</p>
+
+<p>"So soon?" he murmured, and passed onward, whilst the people made way
+for him in homage.</p>
+
+<p>He had his heart's desire. He was great. He only smiled to think&mdash;all
+women were alike.</p>
+
+<p>Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife were thrust into
+her breast.</p>
+
+<p>But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were so strong, they
+were so mute; they did not even once cry out against him, "For thy
+sake!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.</p>
+
+<p>The golden willows blew in the low winds; the waters came and went; the
+moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds sighed in the
+silence. Two winters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer; and all
+the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary already had been
+slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the empty
+casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were
+taking leaf between the square stones of the paven floors; on the
+deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
+of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
+devoured one by one the immortal offspring of Zeus; about the feet of
+the bound sun-king in Phæros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
+smile the gray nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
+around and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
+round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
+from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
+the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
+flooded water, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
+everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in
+hunger or sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gangrened
+and ruined.</p>
+
+<p>The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of eternal night, are
+unharmed and unaltered by any passage of the years of earth,&mdash;the only
+gods who never bend beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold
+the nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas
+change places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that
+is told, and the deities that are worshiped in the temples change name
+and attributes and cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them.</p>
+
+<p>In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand in band, looking
+outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished with the
+faith of each age as it changed; other gods, lived by the breath of
+men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice; but they&mdash;their
+empire is the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of
+life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every
+creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood
+to the nest-bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a
+sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And
+Thanatos&mdash;to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to
+come; beneath his foot all generations lie, and in the hollow of his
+hand he holds the worlds. Though the earth be tenantless, and the
+heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the
+universe be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal
+darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its eternal solitudes he
+alone will wander and he still behold his work.</p>
+
+<p>Deathless as themselves, their shadows stood; and the worm and the
+lizard and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm
+clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their
+lips,&mdash;knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the
+worlds shall have perished they still will reign on,&mdash;the slow, sure,
+soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal
+oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>A little light strayed in from the gray skies, pale as the
+primrose-flowers that grow among the reeds upon the shore, and found its
+way to them trembling, and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
+unfathomable eyes.</p>
+
+<p>To eyes which spake and said: "Sleep, Dreams, and Death;&mdash;we are the
+only gods that answer prayer."</p>
+
+<p>With the faint gleam of the tender evening light there came across the
+threshold a human form, barefooted, bareheaded, with broken links of
+golden chains gleaming here and there upon her limbs, with white robes
+hanging heavily, soaked with dews and rains; with sweet familiar smells
+of night-born blossoms, of wet leaves, of budding palm-boughs, of rich
+dark seed-sown fields, and the white flower-foam of orchards shedding
+their fragrance from about her as she moved.</p>
+
+<p>Her face was bloodless as the faces of the gods; her eyes had a look of
+blindness, her lips were close-locked together; her feet stumbled often,
+yet her path was straight.</p>
+
+<p>She had hidden by day, she had fled by night; all human creatures had
+scattered from her path, in terror of her as of some unearthly thing:
+she had made her way blindly yet surely through the sweet cool air,
+through the shadows and the grasses, through the sighing sounds of
+bells, through the leafy ways, through the pastures where the herds were
+sleeping, through the daffodils blowing in the shallow brooks;&mdash;through
+all the things for which her life had been athirst so long and which she
+reached too late,&mdash;too late for any coolness of sweet grass beneath her
+limbs to give her rest; too late for any twilight song of missel-thrush
+or merle to touch her dumb dead heart to music; too late for any kiss of
+clustering leaves to heal the blistering shame that burned upon her lips
+and withered all their youth. And yet she loved them,&mdash;loved them never
+yet more utterly than now when she came back to them, as Persephone to
+the pomegranate-flowers of hell.</p>
+
+<p>She crossed the threshold, whilst the reeds that grew in the water by
+the steps bathed her feet and blew together softly against her limbs,
+sorrowing for this life so like their own, which had dreamed of the
+songs of the gods and had only heard the hiss of the snakes.</p>
+
+<p>She fell at the feet of Thanatos. The bonds of her silence were
+loosened; the lips dumb so long for love's sake found voice and cried
+out:</p>
+
+<p>"How long?&mdash;how long? Wilt thou never take pity, and stoop, and
+say, 'Enough'? I have kept faith, I have kept silence, to the end. The
+gods know. My life for his; my soul for his: so I said. So I have given.
+I would not have it otherwise. Nay,&mdash;I am glad, I am content, I am
+strong. See,&mdash;I have never spoken. The gods have let me perish in his
+stead. Nay, I suffer nothing. What can it matter&mdash;for me? Nay, I thank
+thee that thou hast given my vileness to be the means of his glory. He
+is immortal, and I am less than the dust:&mdash;what matter? He must not
+know; he must never know; and one day I might be weak, or mad, and
+speak. Take me whilst still I am strong. A little while agone, in the
+space in the crowds he saw me. 'So soon?' he said,&mdash;and smiled. And yet
+I live! Keep faith with me; keep faith&mdash;at last. Slay me
+now,&mdash;quickly,&mdash;for pity's sake! Just once,&mdash;I speak."</p>
+
+<p>Thanatos, in answer, laid his hand upon her lips, and sealed them, and
+their secret with them, mute, for evermore.</p>
+
+<p>She had been faithful to the end.</p>
+
+<p>To such a faith there is no recompense, of men or of the gods, save only
+death. On the shores of the river the winds swept through the reeds,
+and, sighing amidst them, mourned, saying, "A thing as free as we are,
+and as fair as the light, has perished; a thing whose joys were made,
+like ours, from song of the birds, from sight of the sun, from sound of
+the waters, from smell of the fields, from the tossing spray of the
+white fruit-boughs, from the play of the grasses at sunrise, from all
+the sweet and innocent liberties of earth and air. She has perished as a
+trampled leaf, as a broken shell, as a rose that falls in the public
+ways, as a star that is cast down on an autumn night. She has died as
+the dust dies, and none sorrow. What matter?&mdash;what matter? Men are wise,
+and gods are just,&mdash;they say."</p>
+
+<p>The moon shone cold and clear. The breath of the wild thyme was sweet
+upon the air. The leaves blew together murmuring. The shadows of the
+clouds were dark upon the stream. She lay dead at the feet of the Sons
+of Night.</p>
+
+<p>The Red Mouse sat without, and watched, and said, "To the end she hath
+escaped me." The noisome creatures of the place stole away trembling;
+the nameless things begotten by loneliness and gloom glided to their
+holes as though afraid; the blind newts crept into the utter darkness
+afar off; the pure cool winds alone hovered near her, and moved her
+hair, and touched her limbs with all the fragrance of forest and plain,
+of the pure young year and the blossoming woodlands, of the green
+garden-ways and the silvery sea. The lives of the earth and the air and
+the waters alone mourned for this life which was gone from amidst them,
+free even in basest bondage, pure though every hand had cast defilement
+on it, incorrupt through all corruption&mdash;for love's sake.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+
+<p>In the springtime of the year three reapers cut to the roots the reeds
+that grew by the river.</p>
+
+<p>They worked at dawn of day: the skies were gray and dark; the still and
+misty current flowed in with a full tide; the air was filled with the
+scent of white fruit-blossoms; in the hush of the daybreak the song of a
+lark thrilled the silence; under the sweep of the steel the reeds fell.</p>
+
+<p>Resting from their labors, with the rushes slain around them, they,
+looking vacantly through the hollow casements, saw her body lying there
+at the feet of the gods of oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>At first they were shaken and afraid. Then the gleam of the gold upon
+her limbs awakened avarice; and avarice was more powerful than fear.
+They waded through the rushes and crossed the threshold, and, venturing
+within, stood looking on her in awe and wonder, then timorously touched
+her, and turned her face to the faint light. Then they said that she was
+dead.</p>
+
+<p>"It is that evil thing come back upon us!" they muttered to one another,
+and stood looking at one another, and at her, afraid.</p>
+
+<p>They spoke in whispers; they were very fearful; it was still twilight.</p>
+
+<p>"It were a righteous act to thrust her in a grave," they murmured to one
+another at the last,&mdash;and paused.</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, truly," they agreed. "Otherwise she may break the bonds of the
+tomb, and rise again, and haunt us always: who can say? But the
+gold&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>And then they paused again.</p>
+
+<p>"It were a sin," one murmured,&mdash;"it were a sin to bury the pure good
+gold in darkness. Even if it came from hell&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"The priests will bless it for us," answered the other twain.</p>
+
+<p>Against the reddening skies the lark was singing.</p>
+
+<p>The three reapers waited a little, still afraid, then hastily, as men
+slaughter a thing they dread may rise against them, they stripped the
+white robes from her and drew off the anklets of gold from her feet, and
+the chains of gold that were riven about her breast and limbs. When they
+had stripped her body bare, they were stricken with a terror of the dead
+whom they thus violated with their theft; and, being consumed with
+apprehension lest any, as the day grew lighter, should pass by there and
+see what they had done, they went out in trembling haste, and together
+dug deep down into the wet sands, where the reeds grew, and dragged her
+still warm body unshrouded to the air, and thrust it down there into its
+nameless grave, and covered it, and left it to the rising of the tide.</p>
+
+<p>Then with the gold they hurried to their homes.</p>
+
+<p>The waters rose and washed smooth the displaced soil, and rippled in a
+sheet of silver as the sun rose over the place, and effaced all traces
+of their work, so that no man knew this thing which they had done.</p>
+
+<p>In her death, as in her life, she was friendless and alone; and none
+avenged her.</p>
+
+<p>The reeds blew together by the river, now red in the daybreak, now white
+in the moonrise; and the winds sighed through them wearily, for they
+were songless, and the gods were dead.</p>
+
+<p>The seasons came and went; the waters rose and sank; in the golden
+willows the young birds made music with their wings; the soft-footed
+things of brake and brush stole down through the shade of the leaves and
+drank at the edge of the shore, and fled away; the people passed down
+the slow current of the stream with lily sheaves of the blossoming
+spring, with ruddy fruitage of the summer woods, with yellow harvest of
+the autumn fields,&mdash;passed singing, smiting the frail songless as they
+went.</p>
+
+<p>But none paused there.</p>
+
+<p>For Thanatos alone knew,&mdash;Thanatos, who watched by day and night the
+slain reeds sigh, fruitless and rootless, on the empty air,&mdash;Thanatos,
+who by the cold sad patience of his gaze spoke, saying,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I am the only pity of the world. And even I&mdash;to every mortal thing I
+come too early or too late."</p>
+
+
+<h3>THE END.</h3>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p class="center">Transcriber's Note: Hyphen variations left as printed.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<h2><span class="smcap">Ouida's Works.</span></h2>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Granville de Vigne</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Strathmore</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Chandos</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Idalia</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Under Two Flags</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Tricotrin</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Puck</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Cecil Castlemaine's Gage</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Randolph Gordon</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Beatrice Boville</span></p>
+
+<p>These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most powerful and
+fascinating works of fiction which the present century, so prolific in
+light reading, has produced.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Folle-Farine
+
+Author: Ouida
+
+Release Date: May 20, 2012 [EBook #39745]
+[Last updated: November 24, 2012]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLE-FARINE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          FOLLE-FARINE.
+
+                            By OUIDA,
+
+    AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "IDALIA," "TRICOTRIN," "PUCK,"
+    "GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," "UNDER TWO FLAGS," ETC.
+
+        "Un gazetier fumeux qui se croit au flambeau
+          Dit au pauvre qu'il a noye dans les tenebres:
+        Ou donc l'apercois-tu ce Createur du Beau?
+          Ce Redresseur que tu celebres!"
+
+                                   BAUDELAIRE.
+
+
+    PHILADELPHIA
+    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
+    1871.
+
+    Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by
+
+    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,
+
+    In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
+
+
+
+
+            A
+        LA MEMOIRE
+         D'INGRES,
+      PEINTRE-POETE.
+
+
+
+
+FOLLE-FARINE.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from
+the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which
+flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the
+impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment,
+and then is scattered--on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight,
+down in the mud. What matters? who cares?
+
+Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in
+the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere,
+borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to
+lie in a fetid ditch.
+
+Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones,
+grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself
+Love avers that its God does grind the world.
+
+"It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born;
+it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not
+any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it
+is very like you," said the old miller, watching the millstones.
+
+Folle-Farine heard--she had heard a hundred times,--and held her peace.
+
+Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.
+
+As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The
+dust,--sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the
+shred husks and the shattered stalks.
+
+Folle-Farine,--she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from
+between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were
+thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so
+mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.
+
+The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it
+listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it
+died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the
+curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could
+mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with
+it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the
+dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.
+
+In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much
+better dealt with than she was.
+
+"Folle-Farine! Folle--Folle--Folle--Farine!" the other children hooted
+after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her
+bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and
+answered to it as others to their birthnames.
+
+It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, absolutely worthless; the
+very refuse of the winnowings of the flail of fate. But she accepted
+that too, so far as she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a
+dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, the dust had
+its wings while she had none.
+
+All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it liked, through the
+open doors, and among the tossing boughs, and through the fresh cool
+mists, and down the golden shafts of the sunbeams; and all day long she
+stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and then cursed, or
+first cursed and then beaten,--which was all the change that her life
+knew. For herself, she saw no likeness betwixt her and the dust; for
+that escaped from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode under the
+flail, always.
+
+Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew.
+
+The great black wheel churned and circled in the brook water, and
+lichens and ferns and mosses made lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent
+place; the red mill roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer
+leaves; the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their holes in
+the wall; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in many orchards filled
+the air; the great grindstones turned and turned and turned, and the
+dust floated forth to dance with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam.
+
+Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers above the wheel,
+and watched with her thoughtful eyes, and wondered again, after her own
+fashion, why her namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had
+none.
+
+Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness savagely.
+
+"Little devil!" cried the miller, "go fetch me those sacks, and carry
+them within, and pile them; neatly, do you hear? Like the piles of stone
+in the road."
+
+Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedience to the command,
+and went to the heap of sacks that lay outside the mill; small sacks,
+most of them; all of last year's flour.
+
+There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the mill-garden, where
+they were; a tall flower all scarlet and gold, and straight as a palm,
+with bees sucking into its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem.
+She stood a moment looking at its beauty; she was scarce any higher than
+its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, something after its
+fashion. She was a child of six or eight years, with limbs moulded like
+sculpture, and brown as the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half
+savage and half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and straight
+dark brows--the brows of the friezes of Egypt.
+
+Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, knotted around her
+waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure in
+the sun, to a golden-brown color, though in texture it was soft as
+velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep
+grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and purple butterflies
+over her head, an artist would have painted her and called her by a
+score of names, and described for her some mystical or noble fate: as
+Anteros, perhaps, or as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born
+to the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived by
+Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still the earth lay
+black and barren and fruitless, under the ban and curse of a bereaved
+maternity.
+
+But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine; and here she had only to
+labor drearily and stupidly like the cattle of the field; without their
+strength, and with barely so much even as their scanty fare and
+begrudged bed.
+
+The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she had a beauty which
+ripened and grew rich under their warmth, like that of a red flower bud
+or a golden autumn fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes
+that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She was Folle-Farine;
+a little wicked beast that only merited at best a whip and a cruel word,
+a broken crust and a malediction; a thing born of the devil, and out of
+which the devil needed to be scourged incessantly.
+
+The sacks were all small; they were the property of the peasant
+proprietors of the district,--a district of western Normandy. But though
+small they were heavy in proportion to her age and power. She lifted
+one, although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accustomed
+action; poised it on her back, clasped it tight with her round slender
+arms, and carried it slowly through the open door of the mill. That one
+put down upon the bricks, she came for a second,--a third,--a fourth,--a
+fifth,--a sixth, working doggedly, patiently and willingly, as a little
+donkey works.
+
+The sacks were in all sixteen; before the seventh she paused.
+
+It was a hot day in mid-August: she was panting and burning with the
+exertion; the bloom in her cheeks had deepened to scarlet; she stood a
+moment, resting, bathing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall
+tuft of lilies.
+
+The miller looked round where he worked, among his beans and cabbages,
+and saw.
+
+"Little mule! Little beast!" he cried. "Would you be lazy--you!--who
+have no more right to live at all than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad?"
+
+And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught up a piece of rope
+with which he had been about to tie his tall beans to a stake, and he
+struck the child with it. The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling
+round her bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark.
+
+She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted her head and
+looked at him, and dropped her hands to her sides. Her great eyes glowed
+fiercely; her red curling lips shut tight; her straight brows drew
+together.
+
+"Little devil! Will you work now?" said the miller. "Do you think you
+are to stand in the sun and smell at flowers--you? Pouf-f-f!"
+
+Folle-Farine did not move.
+
+"Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute," said the miller. "If you
+stand still a second before they are all housed, you shall have as many
+stripes as there are sacks left untouched. Oh-he, do you hear?"
+
+She heard, but she did not move.
+
+"Do you hear?" he pursued. "As many strokes as there are sacks, little
+wretch. Now--I will give you three moments to choose. One!"
+
+Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head erect, her arms
+crossed on her chest. A small, slender, bronze-hued, half-nude figure
+among the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of
+the lilies.
+
+"Two!"
+
+She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a
+purple-winged butterfly lighting on her head.
+
+"Three!"
+
+She was still mute; still motionless.
+
+He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted
+the rope.
+
+It curled round her breast and back, again and again and again; she
+shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. He struck her the ten
+times; with the same number of strokes as there remained sacks
+uncarried. He did not exert any great strength, for had he used his
+uttermost he would have killed her, and she was of value to him; but he
+scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the execution of his threat,
+and the rope was soon wet with drops of her bright young blood.
+
+The noonday sun fell golden all around; the deep sweet peace of the
+silent country reigned everywhere; the pigeons fled to and fro in and
+out of their little arched homes; the millstream flowed on, singing a
+pleasant song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low sound on
+the turf; close about was all the radiance of summer flowers; of heavy
+rich roses, of yellow lime tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely
+phlox, and all the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the
+warmth the child shuddered under the scourge; against the light the
+black rope curled like a serpent darting to sting; among the sun-fed
+blossoms there fell a crimson stain.
+
+But never a word had she uttered. She endured to the tenth stroke in
+silence.
+
+He flung the cord aside among the grass. "Daughter of devils!--what
+strength the devil gives!" he muttered.
+
+Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her back bruised and
+lacerated, her eyes still glanced with undaunted scorn and untamed
+passion. Still she said nothing; but, as his hand released her, she
+darted as noiselessly as a lizard to the water's edge, set her foot on
+the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped aloft to the
+highest point, and seated herself astride on that crossbar of black
+timber on which she had been throned when he had summoned her first,
+above the foam of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of
+innumerable leaves.
+
+Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh as the voice of
+a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reckless indifference, a stave of
+song in a language unknown to any of the people of that place; a loud
+fierce air, with broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which
+rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their rebellion, through
+the foliage, and above the sound of the loud mill water.
+
+"It is a chant to the foul fiend," the miller muttered to himself.
+"Well, why does he not come and take his own? he would be welcome to
+it."
+
+And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, and said an ave or two
+over it to exorcise it.
+
+Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed; the stripes on her
+shoulders burned like flame; her little brain was dizzy; her little
+breast was black with bruises; but still she sang on, clutching the
+timber with her hands to keep her from falling into the foam below, and
+flashing her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the leaves.
+
+"Can one never cut the devil out of her?" muttered the miller, going
+back to his work among the beans.
+
+After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice
+despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the
+shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam
+and eddy below.
+
+The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole
+the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great
+lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper
+chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.
+
+The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the
+water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the
+pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned
+on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about
+them.
+
+The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat
+aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.
+
+"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not--no
+supper for you to-night."
+
+Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly,
+her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing
+like the eyes of a wild hawk.
+
+She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through
+the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.
+
+The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean
+as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and
+furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with
+pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of
+saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some
+rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal
+there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old
+serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of
+Normandy.
+
+The miller stayed the child at the threshold.
+
+"Little devil--not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the
+sacks."
+
+Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food on the board,
+past the images of the saints, past the high lancet window, through
+which the moonlight had begun to stream, and out at the opposite door.
+
+There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to which that door had
+opened, pushed aside a little wooden wicket, entered a loft in the roof,
+loosened the single garment that she wore, shook it off from her, and
+plunged into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard mosses
+which served her as a bed. Covered in these, and curled like a dormouse
+in its nest, she clasped her hands above her head and sought to forget
+in sleep her hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both.
+
+Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon it; there was a
+little rudely-sculptured representation of the Nativity; there was a
+wooden figure of St. Christopher; a portrait of the Madonna, and many
+other symbols of the church. But the child went to her bed without a
+prayer on her lips, and with a curse on her head and bruises on her
+body.
+
+Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too hurt and sore to be
+able to lie without pain; the dried grasses, so soft to her usually,
+were like thorns beneath the skin that still swelled and smarted from
+the stripes of the rope. She was feverish; she tossed and turned in
+vain; she suffered too much to be still; she sat up and stared with her
+passionate wistful eyes at the leaves that were swaying against the
+square casement in the wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and
+bright across her bed.
+
+She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the house. They
+were not many: a cat's mew, a mouse's scratch, the click-clack of the
+old woman's step, the shrill monotony of the old man's voice, these were
+all. After awhile even these ceased; the wooden shoes clattered up the
+wooden stairs, the house became quite still; there was only in the
+silence the endless flowing murmur of the water breaking against the
+motionless wheels of the mill.
+
+Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her anything to eat or
+drink. She had heard them muttering their prayers before they went to
+rest, but no hand unlatched her door. She had no disappointment, because
+she had had no hope.
+
+She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in her; but she went
+no further. She did not know what it was to hope. She was only a young
+wild animal, well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed.
+
+As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her nest of grass,
+slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her casement--a small square hole
+in the wall, and merely closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut
+in it scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush of summer
+air met her burning face; a cool cluster of foliage hit her a soft blow
+across the eyes as the wind stirred it. They were enough to allure her.
+
+Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only two instincts--air
+and liberty.
+
+She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the agility that only
+is born of frequent custom, and got upon the shelving thatch of a shed
+that sloped a foot or so below, slid down the roof, and swung herself by
+the jutting bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The housedog, a
+brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about the mill, growled
+and sprang at her; then, seeing who she was, put up his gaunt head and
+licked her face, and turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant
+patrol.
+
+Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and fervently, without
+a word. The mastiff was the only living thing that did not hate her; she
+was grateful, in a passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took
+to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin of the water,
+and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on whose edge the mill-house
+stood.
+
+Once there she was content.
+
+The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees stood thick, the
+pale quivering luminance of the moon, the mystical eerie sounds that
+fill a woodland by night, all which would have had terror for tamer and
+happier creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced
+delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of fear; and she had
+remained too ignorant to have been ever taught it.
+
+It was still warm with all the balmy breath of midsummer; there were
+heavy dews everywhere; here and there, on the surface of the water,
+there gleamed the white closed cups of the lotos; through the air there
+passed, now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird on the
+wing; the wood, whose trees were pines, and limes, and maples, was full
+of a deep dreamy odor; the mosses that clothed many of the branches
+hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies.
+
+Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as in a trance, the
+stillness only broken by some faint note of a sheep's bell, some distant
+song of a mule-driver passing homeward.
+
+The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly soothed and made
+glad, she knew not why, by all the dimness and the fragrance round her.
+
+She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that every now and
+then broke up through the grasses; she felt the dews, shaken off the
+leaves above, fall deliciously upon her face and hair; she filled her
+hands with the night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness
+as though it were milk and honey; she crouched down and watched her own
+eyes look back at her from the dark gliding water of the river.
+
+Then she threw herself on her back upon the mosses--so cool and moist
+that they seemed like balm upon the bruised hot skin--and lay there
+looking upward at the swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the
+stately flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of the swift
+brown bats, at the soft trembling of the foliage in the breeze, at the
+great clouds slowly sailing across the brightness of the moon. All these
+things were vaguely sweet to her--with the sweetness of freedom, of
+love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never
+known: so may the young large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the
+forest in the hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer
+has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no more against
+its flank.
+
+She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a sort of voluptuous
+delight, all movements in the air, all changes in the clouds, all
+shadows in the leaves. All the immense multitude of ephemeral life
+which, unheard in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering
+voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb and under every
+bough around her. The silvery ghostlike wing of an owl touched her
+forehead once. A little dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes
+floated across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint things,
+hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the stars. But none of these
+things had terror for her; they were things of the night, with which she
+felt vaguely the instinct of kinship.
+
+She was only a little wild beast, they said, the offspring of darkness,
+and vileness, and rage and disgrace. And yet, in a vague, imperfect way,
+the glories of the night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its
+melancholy and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her dauntless
+eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and stirred the
+half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some nameless ecstasy, that
+were not merely physical.
+
+And then, in her way, being stung by these, and moved, she knew not why,
+to a strange sad sense of loneliness and shame, and knowing no better
+she prayed.
+
+She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands upon her chest,
+and prayed after the fashion that she had seen men and women and
+children pray at roadside shrines and crosses; prayed aloud, with a
+little beating, breaking heart, like the young child she was.
+
+"O Devil! if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with me; leave me not alone:
+lend me thy strength and power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give
+me this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee always."
+
+She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, faltering
+language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the
+earth and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, while this
+mighty unknown King of the dominion of darkness, whose child she ever
+heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, and reigned afar in some
+great world, oblivious of her misery.
+
+The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of her own voice. She
+waited breathless for some answer, for some revelation, some reply;
+there only came the pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud
+and striking on the waters.
+
+She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the shining course of the
+stream, through the grasses and the mosses and under the boughs, to her
+little nest under the eaves.
+
+As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into the fuller light,
+her bare feet glistening and her shoulders wet with the showers of dew,
+a large dark shape flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon
+the eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept onward lost in
+shade. At that moment, likewise, a radiant golden globe flashed to her
+sight, dropped to her footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten
+from the skies.
+
+It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey; it was but a great
+meteor fading and falling at its due appointed hour; but to the heated,
+savage, dreamy fancy of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing
+of prophecy, a spirit of air; nay, why not Him himself?
+
+In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had ever heard, it had
+been often told her that he took such shapes as this.
+
+"If he should give me his kingdom!" she thought; and her eyes flashed
+alight; her heart swelled; her cheeks burned. The little dim untutored
+brain could not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or sift,
+or measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable, seemed
+to come to her and bathe her in its heat and color. She was his
+offspring, so they all told her; why not, then, also his heir?
+
+She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in those legends
+she had fed on, who was suddenly called from poverty and toil, from
+hunger and fatigue, from a tireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to
+inherit some fairy empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like
+one of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown imperial power
+smite all his poor pale barren life to splendor, so Folle-Farine,
+standing by the water's side in the light of the moon, desolate,
+ignorant, brutelike, felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men.
+If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter now were stripes
+or wounds or woe?
+
+She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair visions in his
+sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, and swung herself upward
+by the tendrils of ivy, and crouched once more down in her nest of
+mosses.
+
+And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or the influence of
+instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, for she fell asleep in her
+little loft in the roof as though she were a thing cherished of heaven
+and earth, and dreamed happily all through the hours of the
+slowly-rising dawn; her bruised body and her languid brain and her
+aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger and passion and
+pain forgotten; with the night-blooming flowers still clasped in her
+hands, and on her closed mouth a smile.
+
+For she dreamed of her Father's Kingdom, a kingdom which no man denies
+to the creature that has beauty and youth, and is poor and yet proud,
+and is of the sex of its mother.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
+there was a little Norman town, very very old, and beautiful exceedingly
+by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous
+galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and
+its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great cathedral,
+noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds,
+and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day,
+so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through
+them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for
+corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the
+wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the
+carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of
+the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of
+carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her
+lover.
+
+All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
+fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
+the fields of colza, where the white bead-dress of the women workers
+flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west were the
+deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's and
+of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the great dim
+stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
+and, whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with
+poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by
+a little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.
+
+A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place; picturesque everywhere; often
+silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
+bells or the chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
+With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
+with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
+traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
+in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
+cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the fruits and flowers in the
+market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
+under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
+opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
+stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg across to her neighbor in
+the other.
+
+Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
+uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
+dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
+but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
+hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
+jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. Victorian or St. Scaevola.
+
+But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful
+rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
+the straight lithe form of their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb,
+and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
+dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire and
+the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
+the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
+cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
+white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
+painters, and the wondrous flush of color from mellow fruits and flowers
+glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual
+presence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, through frost
+and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst them, and
+beheld the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the scourged mules
+droop their humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth to
+the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and women pass through
+hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and
+the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years
+come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing
+famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said
+to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo! your God is Love."
+
+This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
+frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
+no harbor of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
+made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
+except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
+eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn, to the use of the great
+cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.
+
+Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
+of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
+and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm gray
+morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
+in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
+over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
+And she would look back often, often as she went; and when all was lost
+in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire that she still saw
+through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
+trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."
+
+But none such ever did come back.
+
+They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
+that the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
+gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
+the next morning, withered and dead.
+
+One among the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of whom
+the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through the
+lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller of
+Ypres.
+
+Ypres was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern outskirt of the town,
+a place of orchards and wooded tangle; through which there ran a branch
+of the brimming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught a
+moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by the grim mill-wheels
+that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The mill-house was
+very ancient; its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of
+shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its frontage was
+of quaint pargeted work, black and white, except where the old
+blazonries had been.
+
+It had been handed down from sire to son of the same race through many
+generations--a race hard, keen, unlearned, superstitious, and
+caustic-tongued--a race wedded to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste
+of life, cruel of judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race
+holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted virtue even
+than those gold and silver pieces which had ever been its passion,
+hidden away in earthen pipkins under old apple-roots, or in the crannies
+of wall timber, or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.
+
+Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, man-begrudging,
+Norman stock, was true to the type and the traditions of his people.
+
+He was too ignorant even to read; but priests do not deem this a fault.
+He was avaricious; but many will honor a miser quicker than a
+spendthrift. He was cruel; but in the market-place he always took heed
+to give his mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay in
+her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no language but that
+of her wistful black eyes; and this is a speech to which men stay but
+little to listen. The shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was
+feared and respected with the respect that fear begets; and in truth he
+had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of it, with scorn for those
+who found it hard to walk less straightly and less circumspectly than
+himself.
+
+He married late; his wife died in childbirth; his daughter grew into the
+perfection of womanhood under the cold, hard, narrow rule of his
+severity and his superstition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love
+as it was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her beyond all
+other things; saved for her, toiled for her, muttered ever that it was
+for her when at confession he related how his measures of flour had
+been falsely weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought by
+the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned: from one to whom
+the good report of his neighbors and the respect of his own conscience
+were as the very breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that
+he could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in his small
+sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips.
+Reprimand, or homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever
+heard from him. She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he
+held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in trembling.
+
+At twenty-two Reine Flamma was the most beautiful woman in Calvados, and
+the most wretched.
+
+She was straight as a pine; cold as snow; graceful as a stem of wheat;
+lovely and silent; with a mute proud face, in which the great blue eyes
+alone glowed with a strange, repressed, speechless passion and
+wishfulness. Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as the lives
+of the many women of her race who, before her, had lived and died in the
+shadow of that water-fed wood had always been. Her father rebuked and
+girded at her, continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the
+spotlessness of this lily, refine even the purity of this virgin gold.
+
+She never answered him anything, nor in anything contradicted his will;
+not one among all the youths and maidens of her birthplace had ever
+heard so much as a murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said
+that such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the
+marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that these dark-blue
+slumbering eyes would have given to any who should have had the skill to
+construe them right. There were none of such skill there; and so, she
+holding her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a curious dumb
+reverence, and said among themselves that the race of Flamma would die
+well and nobly in her.
+
+"A saint!" said the good old gentle bishop of the district, as he
+blessed her one summer evening in her father's house, and rode his mule
+slowly through the pleasant poplar lanes and breeze-blown fields of
+colza back to his little quiet homestead, where he tended his own
+cabbages and garnered his own honey.
+
+Reine Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took his benediction in
+silence.
+
+The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, at daybreak,
+and reciting his paternosters, thanked the Mother of the World that she
+had given him thus strength and power to rear up his motherless daughter
+in purity and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched blouse,
+groped his way down the narrow stair, and went in his daily habit to
+undraw the bolts and unloose the chains of his dwelling.
+
+There was no need that morning for him; the bolts were already back; the
+house-door stood wide open; on the threshold a brown hen perched pluming
+herself; there were the ticking of the clock, the chirming of the birds,
+the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds upon the silence.
+
+He called his daughter's name: there was no answer. He mounted to her
+chamber: it had no tenant. He searched hither and thither, in the house,
+and the stable, and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the
+wood; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he looked in every
+likely and unlikely place: there was no reply.
+
+There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat with his face to the
+south and mourned unceasingly.
+
+And from that day neither he nor any man living there ever heard again
+of Reine Flamma.
+
+Some indeed did notice that at the same time there disappeared from the
+town one who had been there through all that spring and summer. One who
+had lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, and had been
+whispered as an Eastern prince by reason of his scattered gold, his
+unfamiliar tongue, his black-browed, star-eyed, deep-hued beauty, like
+the beauty of the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger
+and Reine Flamma in each other's presence; and the rumor was discredited
+as a foulness absurd and unseemly to be said of a woman whom their
+bishop had called a saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few
+mouths, and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have perished
+in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step on the mill-timber, as
+she went at dawn to feed her doves, or by some strange sad trance of
+sleep-walking, from which she had been known more than once to suffer.
+
+Claudis Flamma said little; it was a wound that bled inwardly. He
+toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bargains, and worked early and
+late with his hireling, and took for the household service an old Norman
+peasant woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he suffered.
+All that he ever said was, "She was a saint: God took her;" and in his
+martyrdom he found a hard pride and a dull consolation.
+
+It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. He believed in
+miracles and all manner of divine interposition, and he believed
+likewise that she, his angel, being too pure for earth, had been taken
+by God's own hand up to the bosom of Mary; and this honor which had
+befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor on his
+cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,
+they cleared from his way as from a prince's, and crossed themselves as
+they changed words with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ.
+
+So six years passed away; and the name of Reine Flamma was almost
+forgotten, but embalmed in memories of religious sanctity, as the dead
+heart of a saint is imbedded in amber and myrrh.
+
+At the close of the sixth year there happened what many said was a thing
+devil-conceived and wrought out by the devil to the shame of a pure
+name, and to the hinderance of the people of God.
+
+One winter's night Claudis Flamma was seated in his kitchen, having
+recently ridden home his mare from the market in the town. The fire
+burned in ancient fashion on the hearth, and it was so bitter without
+that even his parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some
+wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and glowed, and
+shot flame up the wide black shaft of the chimney. The day's work was
+over; the old woman-servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the
+fire; the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the brick
+floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken presses that had been
+the riches of his race for generations, glimmered in the light; the
+doors were barred, the shutters closed; around the house the winds
+howled, and beneath its walls the fretting water hissed.
+
+The miller, overcome with the past cold and present warmth, nodded in
+his wooden settle and slept, and muttered dreamily in his sleep, "A
+saint--a saint!--God took her."
+
+The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook her head, and
+went on with her spinning with lips that moved inaudibly: she had been
+wont to say, out of her taskmaster's hearing, that no woman who was
+beautiful ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old
+creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable hut on the
+other side of the wood, had known more than she had chosen to tell of
+the true fate of Reine Flamma.
+
+Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded through the silence.
+The miller, awakened in a moment, started to his feet and grasped his
+ash staff with one hand, and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the
+trestle. The watch-dog arose, but made no hostile sound.
+
+A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed away faintly; there
+was stillness again; the mastiff went to the bolted door, smelt beneath
+it, and scratched at the panels.
+
+On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beating on the wood
+from without; such a slight fluttering noise as a wounded bird might
+make in striving to rise.
+
+"It is nothing evil," muttered Flamma. "If it were evil the beast would
+not want to have the door opened. It may be some one sick or stray."
+
+All this time he was in a manner charitable, often conquering the
+niggardly instincts of his character to try and save his soul by serving
+the wretched. He was a miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give;
+but since his daughter had been taken to the saints he had striven with
+all his might to do good enough to be taken likewise to that Heavenly
+rest.
+
+Any crust bestowed on the starveling, any bed of straw afforded to the
+tramp, caused him a sharp pang; but since his daughter had been taken he
+had tried to please God by this mortification of his own avarice and
+diminution of his own gains. He could not vanquish the nature that was
+ingrained in him. He would rob the widow of an ephah of wheat, and leave
+his mare famished in her stall, because it was his nature to find in all
+such saving a sweet savor; but he would not turn away a beggar or refuse
+a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, he might turn away from him
+an angel unawares.
+
+The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound outside had ceased.
+
+The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped more firmly the
+ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the stout key, and opened the door
+slowly, and with caution. A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against
+his face; a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent
+stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from head to foot,
+there stood a little child.
+
+The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly welcome. Claudis
+Flamma drew her with a rough grasp across the threshold, and went out
+into the air to find whose footsteps had been those which had trodden
+heavily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was falling fast;
+it was a cloudy moonless night. He did not dare to go many yards from
+his own portals, lest he should fall into some ambush set by robbers.
+The mastiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no danger
+near, so the old man returned, closed the door carefully, drew the bolts
+into their places, and came towards the child, whom the woman Pitchou
+had drawn towards the fire.
+
+She was a child of four or five years old; huddled in coarse linen and
+in a little red garment of fox's skin, and blanched from head to foot,
+for the flakes were frozen on her and on the little hood that covered,
+gypsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike
+figure, but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed great
+beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet berry; the radiance
+and the contrast of it were like the glow of holly fruit thrust out
+from a pile of drifted snow.
+
+The miller shook her by the shoulder.
+
+"Who brought you?"
+
+"Phratos," answered the child, with a stifled sob in her throat.
+
+"And who is that?"
+
+"Phratos," answered the child again.
+
+"Is that a man or a woman?"
+
+The child made no reply; she seemed not to comprehend his meaning. The
+miller shook her again, and some drops of water fell from the ice that
+was dissolving in the warmth.
+
+"Why are you come here?" he asked, impatiently.
+
+She shook her head, as though to say none knew so little of herself as
+she.
+
+"You must have a name," he pursued harshly and in perplexity. "What are
+you called? Who are you?"
+
+The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been fastened on the
+leaping flames, and flashed them upon his in a terror of bewildered
+ignorance--the piteous terror of a stray dog.
+
+"Phratos," she cried once more, and the cry now was half a sigh, half a
+shriek.
+
+Something in that regard pierced him and startled him; he dropped his
+hand off her shoulder, and breathed quickly; the old woman gave a low
+cry, and staring with all her might at the child's small, dark, fierce,
+lovely face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling many
+prayers.
+
+Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by some unseen snake,
+and willing to wreak his vengeance on the nearest thing that was at
+hand.
+
+"Fool! cease your prating!" he muttered, with a brutal oath. "Take the
+animal and search her. Bring me what you find."
+
+Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced his lips tightly,
+and locked his bony hands upon his knees. He knew what blow awaited him;
+he was no coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any iron
+into his soul and tell none that it hurt him.
+
+The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner of the chamber, and
+began to despoil her of her coverings. The creature did not resist; the
+freezing cold and long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids
+were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she had not strength,
+because she had not consciousness enough, to oppose whatsoever they
+might choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they
+had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, like those in a
+netted animal's impatient but untamed regard.
+
+Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her of her warm
+fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her little rough hempen shirt,
+which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow.
+
+The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom on it; it had been
+tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent,
+showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,
+but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the
+long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees.
+
+She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of
+homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor,
+either from amazement or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never
+spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and
+who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner
+of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of
+glittering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they
+were, and seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes.
+
+The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to
+guard them--fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin
+she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman on her
+side strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched
+out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought--fought
+with all the breath and the blood that were in her tiny body.
+
+She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip
+of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden
+away in a hole in the wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant
+hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles
+that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes.
+
+They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters,
+chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a
+diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them removed in
+perfect silence; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the
+battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as
+though disdainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in
+her eyes, and smouldered there like a half-stifled fire--it burned on
+and on for many a long year afterwards, unquenched.
+
+When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would
+neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall,--mute.
+
+"Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen
+them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the
+stars rose, and as Reine Flamma listened to the voice that wooed her to
+her destruction.
+
+She let the child be, and searched her soaked garments for any written
+word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's
+skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it to
+her master.
+
+Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the
+light of the lamp.
+
+He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the characters his tough
+frame trembled, and his withered skin grew red with a sickly, feverish
+quickening of the blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had
+been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible
+than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which
+the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her
+being almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a moment,
+watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet
+seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the
+fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden
+swooning sense seized him for the first time in all his life; his limbs
+failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped for breath; he
+needed not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature,
+whom he had believed so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of
+her youth, was----
+
+His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were
+filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own
+mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and
+glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands
+wildly together in the air, and cried aloud:
+
+"She was a saint, I said--a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I
+thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!"
+
+And he laughed aloud--thrice.
+
+The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as
+a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death,
+startled by that horrible mirth, came forward.
+
+The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered
+like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her
+little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking
+its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and
+burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same face ere then in
+Calvados.
+
+She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and
+discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the hearth,
+and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little
+dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not
+what.
+
+He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a
+sound. The blood flowed from her mouth.
+
+He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more.
+
+"She was a saint!--a saint! And the devil begot in her _that_!"
+
+Then he went out across the threshold and into the night, with the
+letter still clinched in his hand.
+
+The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered with ice and
+water; he took no heed, but passed through it, his head bare and his
+eyes blind.
+
+The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+All night long he was absent.
+
+The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature
+could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised
+the little wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet
+bed; restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she had
+knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly,
+as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even
+pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also
+had guessed the message of that unread letter.
+
+The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and
+was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough
+nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,
+tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually
+on the unknown name of Phratos.
+
+The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known
+the true story of that disappearance which some had called death and
+some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent
+brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves,
+that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.
+
+"She is his sure enough," she muttered. "He was the first with Reine
+Flamma. I wonder has he been the last."
+
+And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at
+any evil thought.
+
+The mastiff stayed beside the child.
+
+She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her
+spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.
+
+She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the
+past which her master and her townfolk had never held, it all seemed
+natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it
+was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.
+
+The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in
+the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman
+slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused
+her.
+
+She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led
+that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which
+the human animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine;
+put to what use she might be--to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a
+pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a
+prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a
+preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but
+she did not care: all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough to
+eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat
+at night.
+
+The night went on, and passed away: one gleam of dawn shone through a
+round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun
+arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth.
+
+She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and
+tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She
+drew it slowly open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been
+for some time morning.
+
+The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all
+the branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid
+mill-stream; in one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the
+bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even
+in its famished impatience.
+
+Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her
+master there.
+
+Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared
+to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting
+wood; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would
+have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly,
+giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod
+ankle deep in snow, and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.
+
+He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and called him by his
+name; he started, and raised his head and looked at her.
+
+Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon
+his face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather-beaten always, but it was
+livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage
+look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man
+recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the
+living world.
+
+The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her old
+blunt, dogged fashion,--
+
+"Is she to stay?"
+
+Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know
+if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her
+kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.
+
+He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make,
+held fast, yet striving to essay a death-grip; then he checked himself,
+and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and
+went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to
+venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this,
+fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his
+soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atonement.
+
+So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her
+fire, and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to
+boil, and muttered all the while,--
+
+"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."
+
+And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.
+
+Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis
+Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no
+utterance could be ever got.
+
+But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Ypres
+from that time thenceforward.
+
+Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these
+begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate
+and scorn, which did not cease but rather grew with time.
+
+The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the last that she
+received from him by many; and whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she
+showed it, not as children do, but rather like some chained and untamed
+animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the
+more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the
+people among whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one full of
+round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them.
+
+For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he
+let her lead the same life that was led by the brutes that crawled in
+the timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw.
+The woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals
+as she chose; she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the
+fire warmth reached; she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under
+the roof; so much she could do and no more.
+
+After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest
+had been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had
+never made a moan, nor sought for any solace.
+
+All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with
+her arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest;
+they were both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words
+oftentimes; they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one
+another.
+
+The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that
+was cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body
+almost motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless,
+wounded, frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual
+slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the
+bear, with the spring she awakened.
+
+When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this
+creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked
+limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she
+came. He set his teeth, and answered ever:
+
+"The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma."
+
+The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more;
+and they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to
+press it on him, or even to ask him whether his daughter were with the
+living or the dead.
+
+With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the
+frost-bound waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose
+under the shadows of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did
+hers. For she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the
+silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was
+her teacher, out into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young
+blossoming world, where the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers
+and the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where she could
+stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and
+steep her limbs in the coolness of waters, and bathe her aching feet in
+the moisture of rain-filled grasses.
+
+With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,
+incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the
+earth and the air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant,
+passionate gladness.
+
+She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year
+the people from more distant places who rode their mules down to the
+mill on their various errands stared at this child, and wondered among
+themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.
+
+He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:
+
+"The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a
+saint--Reine Flamma."
+
+And he never added more. To tell the truth, the horrible, biting,
+burning, loathsome truth, was a penance that he had set to himself, and
+from which he never wavered.
+
+They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors, and all feared
+his scourging tongue. But when they went away, and gossiped among
+themselves by the wayside well or under the awnings of the
+market-stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they had
+thought long ago; the creature had been no better than her kind; and
+they had never credited the fable that God had taken her, though they
+had humored the miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old
+woman, a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from the
+fishing village with a creel upon her back and the smell of the sea
+about her rags, heard, standing in the market-place, and laughed, and
+mocked them, these seers who were so wise after the years had gone, and
+when the truth was clear.
+
+"You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with a grin upon her face.
+"Oh, yes! you were so wise! Who said seven years through that Reine
+Flamma was a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who
+hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said that the devil had
+more to do with her than the good God, and that the black-browed gypsy,
+with jewels for eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to
+whom she gave herself? Oh-he, you were so wise!"
+
+So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well
+knowing that indeed no creature among them had ever been esteemed so
+pure, so chaste, and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's
+daughter.
+
+Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled eyes," and saw those
+brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face
+of the child whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in
+shame whilst they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be
+said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger had been the fiend
+himself, taking human shape for the destruction of one pure soul, and
+the mocking of all true children of the church.
+
+Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote,
+ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a
+living power, traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not
+seldom triumphing: of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them
+was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at
+will shapes grotesque or awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers
+had beheld him; why not they?
+
+So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers and tanners, the
+fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the peasant proprietors from the
+country round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young
+child at Ypres as a devil-born thing. "She was hell-begotten," they
+would mutter when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and
+avoid her if they could.
+
+The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been
+permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry
+for it; the world, they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed
+like torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such treats were
+forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that, thought within
+themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it was mistaken
+mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth
+by fire of such as she.
+
+In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the
+country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which
+followed there were mildew and sickness everywhere; in the summer there
+was a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and
+great suffering and scarcity.
+
+There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to
+the advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their
+huts and homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this
+offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.
+
+Since, however, the time was past when the broad market-place could have
+been filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the gray
+cathedral have grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living
+body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and said these things
+only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding
+their children to consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the
+other side of the road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel,
+they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with her as their
+fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote--"only."
+
+Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's dulled brain awakened,
+and all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she
+found herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of
+mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the devil!" she heard again and
+again muttered as they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this
+repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her
+imputed origin.
+
+It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-daring, and
+all-enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts,
+her supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health.
+Perfect of shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of
+hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no knowledge, but
+with unerring instinct.
+
+She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their
+mother's arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother,
+and she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a
+young fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to
+starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by
+slaughter.
+
+She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took blows uncomplainingly,
+and as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.
+
+"The child of the devil!" they said. In a dumb, half-unconscious
+fashion, this five-year-old creature wondered sometimes why the devil
+had not been good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and
+veins that would not bleed.
+
+She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here;
+she thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have
+their mother's kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.
+
+Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. She was to him a
+thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin;
+but he did what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily; he fed
+her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came
+naturally to his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from
+idleness; he beat her when she did not, and not seldom when she did,
+them. He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a stick to her
+without mercy.
+
+After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to
+fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was
+right to abhor the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of
+utter darkness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul,
+begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal tempter.
+
+He never questioned her as to her past--that short past, like the span
+of an insect's life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions,
+with instincts, with desires, even with memories,--in a word, with
+character:--a character he could neither change nor break; a thing
+formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.
+
+He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set
+her hard tasks of bodily labor which she did not dispute, but
+accomplished so far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged
+patience, half ferocity, half passiveness.
+
+In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle-Farine;
+taking the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most
+despised thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and
+the name adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever
+known.
+
+Folle-Farine!--as one may say, the Dust.
+
+In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she
+began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled
+her first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French
+about her.
+
+Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a
+certain wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never
+have looked for them, never have believed in them. She was devil-born:
+she was of devil nature: in his eyes.
+
+Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would sometimes gather,
+and receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born
+stainless out of corruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.
+Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into
+his orchard, and said:
+
+"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out
+sweetness and honey? Fool!--as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the
+blossom."
+
+And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his sight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not a blank; it was
+indeed filled to overflowing with pictures that her tongue could not
+have told of, even had she spoken the language of the people amidst whom
+she had been cast.
+
+A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down that bitter
+night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of color,
+broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech
+woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise of
+torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown mountain-streams
+rushing broad and angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful
+by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock; and still
+shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and mules' bells that
+rang drowsily through leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the
+clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes; and high blue
+crests of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to the divinest
+flush of rose and amber with the setting of the sun.
+
+This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as the splendors of a
+dream of Paradise rest on the brain of some young sleeper wakening in
+squalor, cold, and pain. But the people of the place she had been
+brought to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and her
+strange, imperfect trills of song; and she could not tell them that this
+land had been no realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the
+forest region of the Liebana.
+
+Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had made their camp.
+They were a score in all; they held themselves one of the noblest
+branches of their wide family; they were people with pure Eastern blood
+in them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in their
+forms and postures.
+
+They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle; they stopped the mules
+in the passes, and lightened their load of wine-skins: they entered the
+posada, when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil
+question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like a
+threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn out of the
+girdle. They were low thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose
+livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and plundering nights;
+yet they were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of the
+East, and they wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.
+
+They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old three-stringed
+viols; and when their women danced on the sward by moonlight, under the
+broken shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines
+above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining sequins that bound
+their heavy hair, the muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar,
+shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him in his childhood by
+his grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to revelry, at
+midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom.
+
+Among them was a man yet more handsome than the rest, taller and lither
+still; wondrous at leaping and wrestling, and all athletic things;
+surest of any to win a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at
+a blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a single glance of
+his terrible eyes.
+
+His name was Taric.
+
+He had left them often to wander by himself into many countries, and at
+times when, by talent or by terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play
+the fool to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where credulity
+and luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his own
+phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right
+royally whilst his gains lasted.
+
+Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead the common, roving,
+thieving life of his friends and brethren, till the fit of ambition or
+the run of luck were again on him. Then his people would afresh lose
+sight of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in some
+painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome him ragged, famished, and
+footweary, on their own sunburnt sierras.
+
+And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them; and they made him
+welcome whenever he returned, and never quarreled with him for his
+faithlessness; but if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or
+keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always say--"Let Taric
+lead."
+
+One day their camp was made in a gorge under the great shadows of the
+Picos da Europa, a place that they loved much, and settled in often,
+finding the chestnut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the
+heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for
+feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long absence, suddenly
+standing, dark and mighty, between them and the light, as they lay
+around their soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.
+
+"There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the great cork-tree,
+against the bridge," he said to them. "Go to her some of you."
+
+And, with a look to the women which singled out two for the errand, he
+stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, and helped himself to the
+soup, and lay quiet, vouchsafing them never a word, but playing
+meaningly with the knife handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw that
+some of the men were about to oppose his share of a common meal which he
+had not earned by a common right.
+
+It was Taric--a name of some terror came to their fierce souls.
+
+Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored of them all;
+Taric, who had slain the bull that all the matadors had failed to daunt;
+Taric, who had torn up the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a
+flood, as easily as a child plucks up a reed; Taric, who had stopped the
+fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and cut the man's throat
+with no more ado than a butcher slits a lamb's.
+
+So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the fire and of the
+broth, and of the thin red wine.
+
+Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quita and Zara, went on their quest, and
+found things as he had said.
+
+Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long and damp, and the
+wood grew thickly, and an old rude bridge of unhewn blocks of rock
+spanned, with one arch, the river as it rushed downward from its
+limestone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just born.
+
+Quita looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by any chance, any
+gold or jewels might be on her; there were none. There was only an ivory
+cross on her chest, which Quita drew off and hid. Quita covered her with
+a few boughs and left her.
+
+Zara wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, and held it warm in
+her breast, and hastened to the camp with it.
+
+"She is dead, Taric," said Quita, meaning the woman she had left.
+
+He nodded his handsome head.
+
+"This is yours, Taric?" said Zara, meaning the child she held.
+
+He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and stretched himself.
+
+"What shall we do with her?" asked Quita.
+
+"Let her lie there," he answered her.
+
+"What shall we do with it?" asked Zara.
+
+He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown throat in a
+significant gesture.
+
+Zara said no word to him, but she went away with the child under some
+branches, on which was hung a tattered piece of awning, orange striped,
+that marked her own especial resting-place.
+
+Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, advanced, and looked
+Taric full in the eyes.
+
+"Has the woman died by foul means?"
+
+Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace him, answered him
+without offense, and with a savage candor,--
+
+"No--that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look at her if
+you like. I loved her well enough while she lived. But what does that
+matter? She is dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries."
+
+"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her body?"
+
+Taric laughed.
+
+"There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her if you choose,
+Phratos."
+
+"I will," the other answered him; and he took his way to the cork-tree
+by the bridge.
+
+The man who spoke was called Phratos.
+
+He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a mutual love for a
+life that wandered always, and was to no man responsible, and needed no
+roof-tree, and wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild
+with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather than to
+eat the good things of the earth in submission and in durance.
+
+He had not their physical perfection: an accident at his birth had made
+his spine misshapen, and his gait halting. His features would have been
+grotesque in their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and
+the gay archness of the mouth.
+
+Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face and form, Phratos
+alone was deformed and unlovely; and yet both deformity and unloveliness
+were in a way poetic and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin garments,
+knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and with his thick tangled
+hair falling down on his shoulders, they were rather the deformity of
+the brake-haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr,
+than those of a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the temper
+of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers, he loved music, and
+could make it, in all its innumerable sighs and songs, give a voice to
+all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and the woodlands;
+and for many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other things
+he forever laughed and was glad.
+
+Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight
+in his wits, yet his kin honored him.
+
+For he could draw music from the rude strings of his old viol that
+surpassed their own melodies as far as the shining of the sun on the
+summits of the Europa surpassed the trembling of the little lamps under
+the painted roadside Cavaries.
+
+He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy moved him, by a bright
+fountain at a noonday halt, under the ruined arches of a Saracenic
+temple, before the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a cool
+shadowy court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a balcony at
+night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for
+a moment from the darkness through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he
+played in suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and dogs
+still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their eyes with their
+hands, and think of old dead times, when they played and prayed at their
+mothers' knees.
+
+And his music had so spoken to himself that, although true to his tribe
+and all their traditions, loving the vagrant life in the open air, and
+being incapable of pursuing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew,
+neither tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and
+candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none could turn
+him; living on such scant gains as were thrown to him for his music from
+balconies and posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and
+towns through which he passed, and making a handful of pulse and a slice
+of melon, a couch of leaves and a draught of water, suffice to him for
+his few and simple wants.
+
+His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning their race by taking
+payment in lieu of making thefts; and they mocked him often, and taunted
+him, though in a manner they all loved him,--the reckless and
+blood-stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never quarrel
+with them, neither would he give over his strange ways which so incensed
+them, and with time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like
+other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way
+unmolested and without contradiction.
+
+If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they would have missed
+his music sorely; that music which awoke them at break of day soaring up
+through their roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the
+skies.
+
+Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off the boughs, and looked
+at her. She was quite dead. She had died where she had first sunk down,
+unable to reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green nook on
+the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the entrance of that narrow
+gorge in which the encampment had been made.
+
+The face, which was white and young, lay upward, with the shadows of the
+flickering foliage on it; and the eyes, which Quita had not closed, were
+large and blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had
+got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers and stray golden
+leaves twisted in it.
+
+Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.
+
+He could imagine her history.
+
+Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought many a one thus to share
+his fierce free life for a little space, and then drift away out of it
+by chance, or be driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken
+away like this one by death.
+
+In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It was written in a
+tongue he did not know. He held it awhile, thinking, then he folded it
+up and put it in his girdle,--it might be of use, who could tell? There
+was the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke up, and
+Zara left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the last butterflies of
+the fading summer, which was in all likelihood all she would do.
+
+Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had looked long enough at
+the dead creature, he turned to the tools he had brought with him, and
+set patiently to make her grave.
+
+He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, and his infirmity
+made all manual toil painful to him. His task was hard, even though the
+earth was so soft from recent heavy rains.
+
+The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it was quite
+nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. When the grave was ready
+he filled it carefully with the golden leaves that had fallen, and the
+thick many-colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpet.
+
+Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest shroud, and, with
+the moss like a winding-sheet between it and the earth which had to fall
+on it, he committed the dead woman to her resting-place.
+
+It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her there.
+
+He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest-tree and by a
+mountain-stream seemed the most natural rest at last that any creature
+could desire or claim. No rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of
+any neglect, cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in
+her loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of the wild
+roe as a requiem.
+
+Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was on him, bohemian
+though he was, as he took up his mattock and turned away, and went
+backward down the gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain
+and sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and
+the flush of the autumn, and the wildness of the winter, when the
+swollen stream should sweep above her tomb, and the famished beasts of
+the hills would lift up their voices around it.
+
+When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric.
+
+Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being able to
+understand the character, looked at it and read it through by the light
+of the flaming wood. When he had done so he tossed it behind, in among
+the boughs, in scorn.
+
+"The poor fool's prayer to the brute that she hated!" he said, with a
+scoff.
+
+Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it.
+
+In a later time he found some one who could decipher it for him.
+
+It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at Ypres, telling him
+the brief story of her fatal passion, and imploring from him mercy to
+her unborn child should it survive her and be ever taken to him.
+
+Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness and the meanness
+of her father's character; she only remembered that he had loved her,
+and had deemed her pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no
+word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred that Claudis
+Flamma had been other than a man much wronged and loving much, patient
+of heart, and without blame in his simple life.
+
+Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought it might some day
+save her offspring. This old man's vengeance could not, he thought, be
+so cruel to the child as might be the curse and the knife of Taric.
+
+"She must have been beautiful?" said Phratos to him, after awhile, that
+night; "and you care no more for her than that."
+
+Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the flame and made his
+answer:
+
+"There will be as good grapes on the vines next year as any we gathered
+this. What does it signify?--she was only a woman.
+
+"She loved me; she thought me a god, a devil, a prince, a chief,--all
+manner of things;--the people thought so too. She was sick of her life.
+She was sick of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the market.
+She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a saint. When a woman
+is young and has beauty, it is dull to be worshiped--in that way.
+
+"I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun was setting. I do not
+know why I cared for her--I did. She was like a tall white lily; these
+women of ours are only great tawny sunflowers.
+
+"She was pure and straight of life; she believed in heaven and hell; she
+was innocent as the child unborn; it was tempting to kill all that. It
+is so easy to kill it when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion
+and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She came with me,--after
+a struggle, a hard one. I kept her loyally while the gold lasted; that I
+swear. I took her to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and
+silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her; that I swear.
+
+"But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and wept in secret, and
+at times I caught her praying to the white cross which she wore on her
+breast. That made me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said
+anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that made me more mad.
+
+"Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things one by one. Not
+that she minded that, she would have sold her soul for me. We wandered
+north and south; and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking
+a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel off one of their
+dolls in their churches; and I wanted to get rid of her, and I could not
+tell how. I had not the heart to kill her outright.
+
+"But she never said a rough word, you know, and that makes a man mad.
+Maddalena or Kara or Rachel--any of them--would have flown and struck a
+knife at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have been blows
+and furious words and bloodshed; and then we should have kissed, and
+been lovers again, fast and fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only
+looks at you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her,--what is
+one to do?
+
+"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate
+berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk.
+Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway
+or on the plains, and I did not,--one is so foolish sometimes for sake
+of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,--I may have said
+so, perhaps; I do not remember.
+
+"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on
+the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I
+thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she
+fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as
+it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who
+would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his
+cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even
+show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone--for I tried to make
+her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we
+could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw
+her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the
+sun set----"
+
+His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and
+drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat
+of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from
+his heart,--truthfully.
+
+Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.
+
+He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and
+of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the
+earth-clogged mosses.
+
+"The child lives?" he said at length.
+
+Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp
+through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.
+
+"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.
+
+And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the
+nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.
+
+That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zara,
+who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves,
+strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.
+
+"The child lives still?" he asked.
+
+Zara nodded her head.
+
+"You will try and keep it alive?" he pursued.
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"What is the use? Taric would rather it were dead."
+
+"What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it will not hinder him.
+A child more or less with us, what is it? Only a draught of goat's milk
+or a handful of meal. So little; it cannot be felt. You have a child of
+your own, Zara; you cared for it?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, with a sudden softening gleam of her bright savage
+eyes.
+
+She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his naked limbs on the
+sward with joy at Phratos's music.
+
+"Then have pity on this motherless creature," said Phratos, wooingly. "I
+buried that dead woman; and her eyes, though there was no sight in them,
+still seemed to pray to mine--and to pray for her child. Be merciful,
+Zara. Let the child have the warmth of your arms and the defense of your
+strength. Be merciful, Zara; and your seed shall multiply and increase
+tenfold, and shall be stately and strong, and shall spread as the
+branches of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury in vain,
+and beneath which all things of the earth can find refuge. For never was
+a woman's pity fruitless, nor the fair deeds of her days without
+recompense."
+
+Zara listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive words stole on
+her ear like music. Like the rest of her people, she half believed in
+him as a seer and prophet; her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile.
+
+"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you
+fancy."
+
+And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn
+night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had
+been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky
+fir-needles.
+
+"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our
+people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien
+creature to her bosom.
+
+"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the
+sleeping face of her own son.
+
+Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and
+soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the
+forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the
+only payment in his power.
+
+Zara, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half
+touched, half angered.
+
+"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played
+once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead
+woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat
+together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.
+
+For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours'
+span was rejected as unworthy and despised.
+
+Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and
+nevertheless, the child grew and throve.
+
+The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along
+the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely
+losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy
+peaks of the Europa.
+
+He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning
+some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to
+distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the
+woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.
+
+His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zara, and under the defense
+of Phratos.
+
+Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as
+the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at
+her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the
+weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in
+time to come, she--who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on
+the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples--might bring him a
+fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its
+weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.
+
+Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his
+leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay
+asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.
+
+Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he
+left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the
+Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children.
+Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana;
+for besides them there was Phratos.
+
+Phratos never abandoned her.
+
+Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zara's tent there was misery very
+often.
+
+Zara had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a
+besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and
+blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children,
+brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs,
+and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin
+round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and
+slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in
+another like young bears.
+
+But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of
+their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood,
+was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they
+wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but
+left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to
+wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there
+were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males
+when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern
+bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was
+Phratos.
+
+Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes
+had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.
+
+Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or
+died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in
+the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the
+northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for
+his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as
+she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the
+gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of
+hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in
+gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.
+
+When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he
+who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which
+the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze
+unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry
+and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge
+broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones
+for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and
+the mulberry.
+
+When the sons of Zara had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the
+tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew
+thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter
+seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging
+boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard
+from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths
+cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen
+shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the
+steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the
+flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than
+her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half
+pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to
+pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was
+the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his
+tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.
+
+Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of
+Taric had entered her sixth year.
+
+She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its
+higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild
+as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the
+postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the
+fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage,
+to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to
+him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given
+her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the
+peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green
+woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they
+took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over
+their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a
+round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.
+
+In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed
+fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the
+children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana
+she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free--free to lie
+in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things
+of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under
+the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to
+climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the
+snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in
+dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.
+
+One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more
+than two years.
+
+He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and
+form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and
+in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of
+subtle ferocity new to them.
+
+His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence, the passions,
+the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy--who had retained all
+the vices of his race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living,
+and of endurance under hardship--the gall of a sharp poverty had become
+unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and wine, and boastful
+brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.
+
+The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liebana; in one of
+its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and coursed
+through by a headlong hill-stream that spread itself into darkling
+breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy
+lilies and a tangled web of water-plants.
+
+He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their camp-fire lit
+beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was welcomed, and fed, and
+plied with such as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and
+incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through all their
+quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle and the
+most faithless, of them all.
+
+He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.
+
+When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in
+the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at
+play.
+
+"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They showed her to
+him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough of ash; the
+pool beneath mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without
+words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced
+above her in the leaves.
+
+"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.
+
+"In her own fashion,--as a flower in the wind," Phratos answered him,
+with a smile; and, willing to woo for her the good graces of her father,
+he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the
+child.
+
+She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a
+fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if she
+stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of
+liquor.
+
+Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was, danced.
+
+But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed
+theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide
+her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds
+sing and the young kids gambol.
+
+Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardor beyond
+her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the fire-glow,
+the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air,
+like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never still, never
+ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet always with
+a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.
+
+Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she
+dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean
+flight.
+
+"She will do," he muttered.
+
+"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.
+
+Taric laughed.
+
+"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he answered.
+
+Phratos said nothing, but he heard.
+
+After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of
+their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if
+they should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood
+partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a
+watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.
+
+Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the
+stars were clear in midnight skies, the woman Zara stole out of her tent
+to him.
+
+"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice. "You want the child
+killed?"
+
+Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.
+
+"Not I; what should I gain?"
+
+"What is it you want, then, with her?"
+
+"I mean to take her, that is all. See here--a month ago, on the other
+side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was at a wineshop,
+hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with him who danced to his
+music, and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who anticked like
+a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal of silver. We got friends, he
+and I. At the week's end the brat died: some sickness of the throat,
+they said. Her master tore his hair and raved; the little wretch was
+worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he would give twelve
+gold pieces. He shall have her. She will dance for him and me; there is
+plenty to be made in that way. The women are fools over a handsome
+child; they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her away
+before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven days, by starving and
+giving the stick. She will dance while she is a child. Later on--there
+are the theaters; she will be strong and handsome, and in the great
+cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I shall take
+her away by sunrise."
+
+"To sell her?"
+
+The hard fierce heart of Zara rebelled against him; she had no
+tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray
+child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her
+race were roused against him by his words.
+
+Taric laughed again.
+
+"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing-dog of her for the peasants'
+pastime; and in time she will make dancing-dogs of the nobles and the
+princes for her own sport. It is a brave life--none better."
+
+The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his
+child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less
+offended the instincts and prejudices of her clan.
+
+"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.
+
+"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say--or do? The little
+beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it refuse to
+pipe when we play for it, I will."
+
+The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left
+him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a
+right to do what he chose with his own. So went and lay down among her
+brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.
+
+Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,
+lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with
+fresh boughs of resinous wood.
+
+When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his
+slumber was one not easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and
+threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a
+dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was Phratos.
+
+He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and
+the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a thing
+for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than
+to turn him aside from his purpose.
+
+"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he stood there,
+and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with self-reproach for a
+crime.
+
+He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he
+went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the
+skins of Zara's tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams
+slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the woman,
+sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her litter
+of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the
+entrance, the slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric.
+
+She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.
+
+"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the stifled cry died
+on her lips.
+
+He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the
+curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.
+Her eyes had closed again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy
+with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing
+that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold
+feared nothing.
+
+Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a
+half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his dreams
+with the knife that was thrust in his waistband.
+
+Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of
+the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over which
+the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro
+its chain. No one heard him.
+
+He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,
+carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her
+hair there were still the sequins. They glittered in the white light as
+he went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his
+shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from them.
+
+"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.
+
+"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was content and slept
+again--the strings of the viol sending a soft whisper in her drowsy ear,
+each time that the breeze arose and swept across them.
+
+When the morning came it found him far on his road, leaving behind him
+the Liebana.
+
+There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as
+she had never been.
+
+They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills
+and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were
+never weary. They rode aloft whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he
+weary, for the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the
+sunshine.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+It was late in the year.
+
+The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and
+gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer
+fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been
+gathered in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of
+good humor.
+
+Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad
+market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper
+coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust
+for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but
+moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.
+
+He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and her feet
+were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of
+hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood
+and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half
+leafless, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid
+in soft gold mists of vapor; and saw all these as in a dream, herself
+borne high in air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar
+fraternity of the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content,
+like a mole or a dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never
+hungry nor cold; no one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.
+
+It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was
+nearly always on foot.
+
+Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some
+straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of vegetables,
+that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the marshy
+lands, or the poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as a rule
+he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and
+shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which
+he traveled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his
+garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced child who ran
+by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.
+
+"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of those
+shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.
+
+She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy
+tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance
+that they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter
+Phratos's hand--half terrified, half triumphant.
+
+The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet
+glories of the south and of the west, their red leafage and purple
+flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level
+pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the
+northerly lands.
+
+The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped
+them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,
+ethereal as vapor; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that
+seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green
+cultivated hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds
+seemed never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed
+with leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow
+and obscure with vapor. These were for what they exchanged the pomp of
+dying foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the
+mistral, the odors of the nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of
+the aloes and olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network
+against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich southwest.
+
+The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, and disquieted; but
+she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.
+
+She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly
+fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild
+shapes of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted
+with age. But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had
+supreme faith in Phratos.
+
+One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and
+hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a
+little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and
+roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the
+poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.
+
+The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice
+choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied
+air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;
+through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and
+the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their
+rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the
+night in a heavy snowstorm.
+
+Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot
+drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the
+wood and the mill of Ypres.
+
+They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of
+Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.
+
+He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little
+town along a road by the river towards the country.
+
+"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in
+his voice.
+
+The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out
+the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but
+she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."
+
+They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a
+dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the
+mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense
+silence.
+
+He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a
+garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not
+closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked
+to him--a houseless wanderer from his youth up--strangely warm and safe
+and still.
+
+An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span,
+on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs
+smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of
+the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves;
+from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of
+onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and
+carved wood.
+
+He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be
+sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell
+that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal
+selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other
+souls in eternal damnation.
+
+He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what
+the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.
+
+"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and
+prosperous, and alone by their fireside."
+
+It seemed that they must be so.
+
+Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.
+
+His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and
+to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the
+hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who
+was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and
+often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a
+woman-child,--and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as
+Taric.
+
+To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his
+tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,
+wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found
+him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way
+to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to
+place her with her mother's people.
+
+She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at
+the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.
+
+He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the
+letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.
+
+"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant
+fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle,
+and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come
+and see how it fares with thee."
+
+Her small hands tightened upon his.
+
+"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the
+gypsy children.
+
+There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and
+the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos.
+She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being
+thrust into the cage,--not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid
+of it and rebelling by instinct.
+
+He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the
+first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's
+foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for
+neither caresses nor compassion--knowing well that to the love-child of
+Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last
+could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.
+
+"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on
+the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the
+child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low
+entrance-place.
+
+Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood
+into the gloom and the storm of the night.
+
+He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her
+evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the
+peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust,
+and disdain.
+
+"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he
+faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with her--let it be
+well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair
+where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be
+hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a
+far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."
+
+And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to
+him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the
+vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he
+had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the
+future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much
+in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that
+was possible to him.
+
+Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though
+he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the
+clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise
+with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into
+the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for
+evermore.
+
+"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague
+remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.
+
+But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which
+forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in
+all the many years that came.
+
+For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,
+lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and
+wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert,
+on which no single star-ray shone.
+
+The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of
+snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen
+in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All
+lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the
+tempest of the winds.
+
+The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.
+Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow.
+Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a
+strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the
+silence and then died again.
+
+At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in
+the great colorless waste.
+
+But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face
+again.
+
+"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew
+their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their
+saints that they were safe beneath a roof.
+
+He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the
+blast.
+
+A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a
+hundred times he failed; and moved only round and round vainly, never
+escaping the maze of the endless white fields.
+
+Now the night was long, and he was weakly.
+
+In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the
+cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered
+on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his
+foot as he passed her.
+
+"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger But the lad lives--save
+him."
+
+And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat rattled, and she
+died.
+
+The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.
+
+Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and
+worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at
+the driving snow.
+
+Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had
+nearly covered the body of his mother.
+
+All around were the fields. There was no light, except from the lantern
+on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The stillness
+was intense. The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from
+the sound of them.
+
+The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his
+limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,
+struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and then
+he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a shallow
+pool of ice.
+
+At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could
+bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold
+upon the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes
+beating on him.
+
+"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she was a
+beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him. Neither could she ever
+bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.
+
+He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it and
+folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew
+the little body away under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and
+wrapped it closely round, and left it there.
+
+It was all that he could do.
+
+Then, with no defense between him and the driving cold, he strove once
+more to find his road.
+
+It was quite dark; quite still.
+
+The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was patchless as the sea.
+
+He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and bruised yet holds
+its way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience. His veins were
+frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge; a
+sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.
+
+He knew well what it meant.
+
+He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;
+and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose
+laughter he would fain have heard.
+
+He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers
+had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and dumb:
+it only sighed in answer.
+
+He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and put it
+in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.
+
+Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple, and cold to
+the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.
+
+There was no light anywhere.
+
+The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands stretched all around
+him; where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light
+could penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only
+sound that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some
+perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.
+
+But what he saw and what he heard were not these going barefoot and
+blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the
+golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness
+of flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the
+swift feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in
+the desolate courts of old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons
+shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea.
+
+These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know,
+and sleep conquered him; he dropped down on the white earth noiselessly
+and powerlessly as a leaf sinks; the snow fell and covered him.
+
+When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor in the fields,
+while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both
+his body and the child's.
+
+The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter of the sheepskin:
+Phratos was dead.
+
+The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him so that his life
+was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives
+the stricken deer.
+
+"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there,
+and the snow kept him.
+
+His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their
+children.
+
+But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the
+viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.
+
+And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never
+again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and
+never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the
+tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the
+birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps
+cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.
+
+An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very
+bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by
+one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand
+pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen
+years instead of ninety were at work on them.
+
+When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a
+slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his
+hammer aside, took off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its
+heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black
+crust and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry.
+
+The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no
+rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the
+air, with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds
+were mute and invisible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious
+shadow, swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the
+roofing of broad chestnut leaves.
+
+The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless
+poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The fields were all ablaze
+around on every side with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the
+scarlet flame of innumerable poppies.
+
+Here and there they were broken by some little house, white or black, or
+painted in bright colors, which lifted up among its leaves a little
+tower like a sugar-loaf, or a black gable, and a pointed arch beneath
+it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless
+in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with fruits ruby red,
+some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.
+
+Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords,
+where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient
+picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.
+
+The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score
+of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all
+long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.
+
+He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread;
+he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the
+dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky,
+the air and the landscape: why not?
+
+They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him,
+and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and
+bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.
+
+He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his
+hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were
+cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the
+gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue
+piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and
+his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.
+
+His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time--a
+time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the
+sun.
+
+With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the
+lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to
+kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and
+because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all
+that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a
+thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so
+intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray
+and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in
+its humanity.
+
+For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White
+Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;
+the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"
+
+He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour
+was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;
+when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses, served also
+to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the
+child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the
+juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the
+bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat
+here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of
+the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him,
+because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed
+God and died.
+
+Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering
+sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road
+a girl.
+
+She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight
+and supple as one who passed her life on the open lands and was abroad
+in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless
+measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia;
+she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs
+were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor
+of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country,
+but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket,
+filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a mass of color and of
+blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes,
+blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the
+sun.
+
+She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that
+were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.
+Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet
+as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one
+another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep
+it--until death.
+
+As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which
+for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,
+and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.
+
+She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,
+small and even, like rows of cowry shells.
+
+"You are well, Marcellin?"
+
+The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own
+keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and
+absorbed retrospection will lend.
+
+"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know
+that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"
+
+"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"
+
+She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a
+voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any
+peasantry.
+
+She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk
+of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.
+
+"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said
+curtly.
+
+Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.
+
+He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her
+head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk
+that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed
+nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her
+made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was
+fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a
+galley-slave.
+
+The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.
+
+"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not
+understand."
+
+The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.
+
+"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that
+a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may be shot as
+it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to
+grace a rich man's table. You see?"
+
+She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but
+barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy
+track of a metaphorical utterance.
+
+But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face
+again.
+
+"The 'possible,' then, is only--the worse?" she said slowly.
+
+The old man smiled still grimly.
+
+"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will
+give--one day--the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and
+the lark's power to sing _Laus Deo_ in heaven. _I_ do not say--they do."
+
+"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable
+curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was
+unfathomable and mute.
+
+"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that
+priests hold the gifts of it?"
+
+Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance
+fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.
+
+"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have
+beauty: the devil will give you one."
+
+"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of
+the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that
+is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.
+
+"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of
+men."
+
+His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood
+leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless
+and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.
+
+"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do
+they, then, so hate me?"
+
+The old man stroked his beard.
+
+"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe
+him."
+
+She mused over the saying; silent still.
+
+The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air,
+mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against
+the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which
+flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the
+shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.
+
+Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.
+
+"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'----"
+
+"When it means Death," she added.
+
+The old man took his pipe back and smoked.
+
+"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."
+
+Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the luster of her
+eyes.
+
+"But the lark praised God--why should it be so dealt with?"
+
+Marcellin smiled grimly.
+
+"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the steel."
+
+She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons
+born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied
+had been Cain.
+
+At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and
+through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of
+scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not
+from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that
+burned on the hillside.
+
+There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from
+it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber
+wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew
+larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green
+water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.
+
+It was a procession of the Church.
+
+It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it
+approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his
+head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest
+against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.
+
+The Church passed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and
+the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains
+and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing
+children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of
+the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells
+ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.
+
+The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a
+choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit
+air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and
+pierced through the noonday silence.
+
+It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were
+choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old
+man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting
+eyelids.
+
+"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.
+"Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded eyes."
+
+Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.
+
+The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
+
+"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and
+to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."
+
+The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and
+winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens
+for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the
+priests prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and
+the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the
+grasses and the bright butterfly dead in the dust.
+
+The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids;
+the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a
+little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of
+defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the
+wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.
+
+"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one
+fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little,
+white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the
+sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.
+
+"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a
+handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow
+to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village
+chapel.
+
+And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched
+more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they
+went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of
+darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because
+they had thus passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their
+lips, with the cross as their symbol.
+
+So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of
+sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the river,
+into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the
+great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then
+rose and sang the "Angelus."
+
+Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under
+the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored
+God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of
+harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.
+
+The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;
+and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears,
+dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:--"We have had
+no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to
+dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We had never such droughts
+as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell
+was among us."
+
+For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the
+earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were
+dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to
+few men to know--a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and
+delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams;
+a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers
+blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid,
+unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out
+of an air that was death, off an earth that was hell.
+
+When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had
+seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he
+had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had
+been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of
+Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he
+had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had been his
+playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had
+beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within
+king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,
+and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white
+beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats
+that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had
+his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and
+all women martyrs or furies.
+
+And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed him
+by cursed him, saying,--
+
+"This man slew a king."
+
+For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red
+at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for
+in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so
+deadly as age.
+
+Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the
+Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the
+fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full
+crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all
+around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once
+looked his eyes rested there.
+
+She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among
+the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had
+seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the
+red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as
+the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the
+land.
+
+The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;
+above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple;
+around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as
+gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders,
+blue and black from the marks of a thong.
+
+He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a
+look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the
+same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he
+hated.
+
+"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put
+her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.
+
+"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be
+hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.
+
+"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"
+
+She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.
+
+"Who beat you?" he pursued.
+
+A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.
+
+"Flamma."
+
+"You were wicked?"
+
+"They said so."
+
+"And what do you do when you are beaten?"
+
+"I shut my mouth."
+
+"For what?"
+
+"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be glad."
+
+Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen,
+passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was
+shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.
+
+"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret
+and the ache out of your bruises."
+
+The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first
+creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of
+his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only
+those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on
+their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling
+and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped
+hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and
+passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a
+curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she
+had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading
+cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched
+down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway--a
+hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old
+republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in
+solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without
+content.
+
+He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with
+water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand
+was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with
+carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh,
+from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his
+only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of
+woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried
+life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with
+greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.
+
+"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold.
+The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and
+timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a
+blow.
+
+"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human
+thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after
+her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the
+poppies.
+
+"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child,
+who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it
+seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom--which they
+called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises;
+and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.
+
+"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red
+poppies.
+
+And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved
+to one another, being outcasts from all others.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to
+wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed
+stillness--a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand
+sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old
+dead centuries.
+
+On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual
+chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population.
+The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of
+mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt
+smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own
+tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by
+the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers
+had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to
+adhere.
+
+But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the
+peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at
+their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned
+into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place
+was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely
+a dog asleep in the sun.
+
+When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and
+donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily
+avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were
+put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy
+choristers and the little children put their white linen and their
+scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and
+sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to
+their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to
+their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the
+poor flies they killed in the sun.
+
+The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy
+silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places
+about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons
+dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken
+carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of
+lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.
+
+Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,
+there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the
+wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.
+
+She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her
+burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched
+out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.
+
+The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a
+moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that
+spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall--an ancient well, with a
+stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone
+running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved
+loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its
+service.
+
+She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick
+green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain,
+she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it
+again and again thirstily.
+
+The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered
+limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many
+feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket
+which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries,
+melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had
+not taken even one to freshen her dry mouth.
+
+Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, and drank it, and
+steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone bench,
+with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round limbs
+full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther.
+
+The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing
+movement of water, possess an ineffable charm for natures that are
+passion-tossed, feverish, and full of storm.
+
+There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise
+for her, in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the lichen-grown
+walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the clusters of
+delicate carvings beneath and below; in the sculptured frieze where
+little nests that the birds had made in the spring still rested; in the
+dense brooding thickness of the boughs that brought the sweetness and
+the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled town.
+
+She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,
+a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her guerdon.
+
+As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters
+opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high,
+fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap that are the female
+note of that especial town.
+
+The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,
+shrieked shrilly to her son,--
+
+"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is drinking the
+blest water!"
+
+The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the little garden behind
+his house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of
+the cathedral, that overshadowed it.
+
+He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man, though
+stout and strong.
+
+The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable
+sanctity attached to it.
+
+According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at
+the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St.
+Jerome, who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth
+century, and dwelt for awhile near the cathedral, working at the
+honorable trade of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles
+throughout the district.
+
+It was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the
+fountain, and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day in full
+faith and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and
+purified of bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry
+flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and drank; to the
+benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to that of their souls and
+bodies.
+
+Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified spring.
+
+"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child of hell! How durst
+you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God struck water from the
+stone for such as you?"
+
+Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her
+audacious eyes and laughed; then tossed her head again and plunged it
+into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the
+rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.
+
+The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,
+shrieked aloud:
+
+"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint the gift
+of God with lips of the devil!"
+
+And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the
+other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her
+head in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her
+lofty headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, screamed to him
+to show he was a man, and have no mercy.
+
+As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow across her,
+Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her
+beautiful fierce face.
+
+She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift
+movement from its hold, and, catching his head under her left arm,
+rained blows on him from his own weapon, with a sudden gust of
+breathless rage which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular
+limbs the strength and the force of man.
+
+Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung him from
+her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of the
+court, caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the
+water over him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word,
+walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the
+carriage of her bare limbs and the folds of her ragged garments, bearing
+the empty osier basket on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the
+screams of the sacristan and his mother.
+
+In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were
+sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old
+woman's voice remained unheard.
+
+The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their
+niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog
+aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out
+into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living
+creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open
+country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of
+the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace
+shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.
+
+She laughed a little as she saw.
+
+"They will not come after _me_," she said to herself. "They are too
+afraid of the devil."
+
+She judged rightly; they did not come.
+
+She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in
+the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat
+prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling
+heap of refuse.
+
+The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed
+like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.
+
+The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed
+motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing
+of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles
+of the cathedral.
+
+Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked
+streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,
+twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its
+only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of
+timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and
+grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing
+beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to
+be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and
+honesty to a noble offspring.
+
+The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound
+that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique
+mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.
+
+In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and
+color.
+
+The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted
+pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow
+casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and
+rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail,
+which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a
+little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the
+sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.
+
+From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the
+rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.
+
+She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her
+amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to
+Folle-Farine,--
+
+"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"
+
+Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.
+
+"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things
+had a fascination for her.
+
+This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she
+looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down
+through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral
+windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands
+full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the
+laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she
+passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the
+things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had
+no part or likeness.
+
+She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the
+jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above
+in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins
+shaking in her yellow tresses.
+
+"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy
+nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and
+fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your
+father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good
+things?"
+
+"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him
+endlessly with breathless prayer?
+
+"Will he not? Wait a year--wait a year."
+
+"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.
+
+"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."
+
+"He hears you."
+
+The fair woman above laughed:
+
+"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."
+
+And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the
+rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but
+a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.
+
+"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you
+witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if
+you stare so."
+
+Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart.
+That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a
+time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only
+mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.
+
+The street was dark for her like all the others now.
+
+The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the
+vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.
+
+"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the
+thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.
+
+Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head
+dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.
+
+She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and
+usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But
+from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden
+leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of
+light might wander even to her.
+
+She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,
+where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts
+and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.
+
+The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,
+the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the
+fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen
+were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the
+scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.
+
+Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and
+there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The
+cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers;
+the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.
+
+At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a
+spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.
+
+Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty,
+and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins,
+keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.
+
+The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.
+
+A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of
+wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its
+garden.
+
+Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on
+her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from
+under the tower of her high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a
+student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a
+beard yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her
+white wrist as he caught the red flower.
+
+Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and a
+nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?
+
+Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a
+sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall twisted
+stone chimneys, and a beurre pear covering with branch and bloom its old
+gray walls.
+
+An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and a young one was
+sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing gayly as she
+swept.
+
+"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to look tenderly
+at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the sycamore leaves
+were playing.
+
+The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee-bowl.
+
+"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."
+
+She was happy though she was blind.
+
+Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of
+honeysuckle.
+
+"How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear your voice like
+that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and the
+corn, half softened, half enraged.
+
+Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or
+take gladness in her life? Or was she greater than they because all
+human delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?
+
+Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between the yellowing seas
+of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, over which a swarm of bees was
+murmuring, there came a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her
+heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails
+as she went to the herds on the hillside.
+
+She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half
+asleep, with his curly head against her breast. As she passed, the woman
+drew her kerchief over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the
+child.
+
+"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered. "Her look
+withered Remy's little limb."
+
+And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she
+should tread a separate pathway through the clover, and did not brush
+the garments of the one she was compelled to pass.
+
+Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.
+
+She knew of what the woman was thinking.
+
+In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the
+western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in
+haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,
+hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard
+his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and
+looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.
+
+But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had
+stepped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his
+left leg at the knee. The limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled
+by a tendency to disease, had never been restored, but hung limp,
+crooked, useless, withered from below the knee.
+
+Through all the country side the little cripple, Remy, creeping out into
+the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out in a passionate pity as the
+object of her sorcery, the victim of her vengeance. When she had heard
+what they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing together her
+straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.
+
+All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant covered the boy's
+face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud and swept on
+through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic
+movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or the
+antelope, singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the
+sigh of the wind, which were all the language that lingered in her
+memory from the land that had seen her birth.
+
+To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of
+even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the
+community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription
+without wonder and without resistance.
+
+Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth hold?
+
+In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of
+Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
+and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.
+
+Few of the people could read and fewer still could write. They knew
+nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to
+believe. They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock
+crew: they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and
+to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood
+that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the
+best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins.
+
+Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though
+their lives were content and mirthful, and the most part pious. They
+went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to
+pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with
+which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and chanting
+dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows.
+
+The beauty and the faith of the old Mediaeval life were with them still;
+and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty
+likewise. They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest,
+and among themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of
+color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless
+communism and characterless monotony of modern cities.
+
+But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their
+beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in
+legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
+superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
+and at their hearths.
+
+Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable
+against her, and thought that in being so they did their duty.
+
+They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
+Flamma race; the strong poetic veneration of their forefathers, which
+had symbolized itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or
+buttress in their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a
+weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in their blood;
+the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.
+
+Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open
+square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in
+brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the
+cross, and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism
+of the sword in the red days of revolution.
+
+They were the same people still: industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,
+wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of
+heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with
+the brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this
+outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.
+
+When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,
+mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift among
+strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly
+tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends
+with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the
+mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around her in the
+glad green world of summer.
+
+But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;
+at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into
+terror. She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than
+understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her
+own kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures
+of the fields and the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and
+the water.
+
+"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed the youths in the
+market-place against her as the little child went among them, carrying a
+load for her grandsire heavier than her arms knew how to bear.
+
+"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the old man himself, as
+she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of his storehouses,
+carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to
+need such convoy.
+
+"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the six-year-old
+infants at play by the river when she waded in amidst them to reach with
+her lither arm the far-off water-flowers they were too timorous to
+pluck, and tender it to the one who had desired it.
+
+"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight after thou hadst
+laid hands on her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick as she went
+near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad dockleaf
+the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.
+
+So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away when she tried to do
+good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute,
+callous, isolated.
+
+There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so tender of
+heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonized, that had
+compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad
+gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the
+noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of the lamb, in
+the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she
+had sympathy and she had example.
+
+She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they were sinless,
+diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of base masters; loving
+greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten, overtasked, slaughtered.
+
+She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter
+hatred.
+
+So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in
+a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.
+
+The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had termed
+heavenward; but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would
+have none of them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had
+availed; she would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they
+would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit
+herself to their religion.
+
+As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned
+her to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the
+whole province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or
+known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an
+exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the bypaths
+of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.
+
+Where had she learnt these?
+
+They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.
+
+Who had he been?
+
+Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in its
+dimness.
+
+She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,
+nor in what land they had dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on
+her remembrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be known again; a
+life odorous with bursting fruits and budding flowers; full of strangest
+and of sweetest music; spent forever under green leaves and suns that
+had no setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding forests;
+forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the measure of deep winds and
+drifting clouds.
+
+For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the
+old gypsy life of the Liebana remained with her only as some stray
+fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now
+an exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature,
+in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her
+anguish of vain desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds
+than those amidst which she toiled. At times she remembered likewise the
+songs and the melodies of Phratos; remembered them when the moon rays
+swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, or the breath of spring
+stole through the awakening woods; and when she remembered them she
+wept--wept bitterly, where none could look on her.
+
+She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a
+human form and was now dead in an earthly grave; her memory of him was
+of some nameless creature, half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter
+and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice
+forever singing; clad in goat's hair, and gigantic and gay; a creature
+that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice,
+that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep
+under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft
+sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth,
+or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to
+spare the bare feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an
+empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her
+memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the
+Piraeus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of
+mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars,
+to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.
+
+This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the
+priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful
+scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though
+she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.
+
+She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on
+her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert
+women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.
+
+She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily
+tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much
+knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a
+future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words;
+hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.
+
+Yet for all that she sang;--sang because the vitality in her made her
+dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her
+glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the
+soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly
+cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze,
+the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.
+
+Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was
+breaking stones.
+
+His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and
+hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust
+was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the
+people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet
+to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot
+unbroken azure of the skies.
+
+Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one
+another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly;
+when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one
+hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any
+proscription overlong.
+
+The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a
+curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who
+had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to
+believe that he had served hell.
+
+With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people
+had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each
+other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love
+between them.
+
+"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed
+him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.
+
+"The birds in cage sing," she answered him. "But, think you they are
+glad?"
+
+"Are they not?"
+
+She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
+and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
+straying over into the corn beyond.
+
+"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the great south
+road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people, no doubt,
+were gone to labor in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
+wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
+his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
+drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
+torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
+crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall. His song
+was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle
+was glad?"
+
+"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a
+monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.
+
+"I took the cage down and opened the door."
+
+"And he?"
+
+"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
+where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running;
+and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
+the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among
+the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"
+
+"And what do you mean by that?"
+
+Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
+herself, but it was beyond her to express it.
+
+All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy
+was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and
+too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into
+metaphor or deduction.
+
+The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he
+had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was
+not gladness, and neither was silence pain.
+
+Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also
+knew.
+
+"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the
+cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing
+sound of the falling hammer.
+
+A smile curled her lips.
+
+"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done
+wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their
+thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."
+
+"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh
+lean face.
+
+He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and
+left.
+
+"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept
+over her.
+
+"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could
+not understand it in connection with herself.
+
+A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working
+her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice
+tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the
+open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was
+a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her
+child at her breast.
+
+She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a
+beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to
+fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope,
+neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious
+hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.
+
+"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You
+might be a man worth something; but a woman!--a thing that has no
+medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the
+hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into
+the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which
+will you do in the future?"
+
+"What?"
+
+She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures
+round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their
+peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's
+nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a
+future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant
+to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low
+lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.
+
+She had one desire, indeed--a desire vague but yet fierce--the desire
+for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had
+known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind
+was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of
+hope she knew nothing.
+
+The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He
+smiled with a certain bitter pity.
+
+"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But
+yet----"
+
+Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of
+her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as
+great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew
+that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its
+hand the tender of at least one future--one election, one kingdom, one
+destiny.
+
+"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"
+
+Marcellin smiled bitterly.
+
+"Many will love you, doubtless--as the wasp loves the peach that he
+kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"
+
+She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in
+the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which
+it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she
+now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.
+
+"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she
+said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves
+the peach?"
+
+Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,--
+
+"Wait!"
+
+She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her
+thoughts--strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as
+incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.
+
+"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not,
+and that is to come--is it so?"
+
+"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old
+man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses
+in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and
+yet a thing that one sees always--sees even when one lies a-dying, they
+say--for men are fools."
+
+Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of
+her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching
+a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the
+hot, pale, sickly dust.
+
+"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded
+insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."
+
+Marcellin smiled.
+
+"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish
+things, called poets, do."
+
+"What is a poet?"
+
+"A foolish thing, I tell you--mad enough to believe that men will care
+to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who
+never looks and never listens."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others,
+and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the
+simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat
+quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by
+the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the
+dawn.
+
+"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most
+often. I seem to remember, when I dream--so much! so much!"
+
+"Remember--what should you remember? You were but a baby when they
+brought you hither."
+
+"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdom--in the
+devil's kingdom. Why not?"
+
+Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all
+through all our lives hanker to get back to it.
+
+"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."
+
+"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a
+woman."
+
+"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no
+fitness with herself.
+
+A woman!--she!--a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned,
+and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!
+
+"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and
+wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty
+years. I remember the woman that they say bore you--Reine Flamma. She
+was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She
+wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot
+of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away
+her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God
+never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard--and
+replied."
+
+"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"
+
+Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and
+strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.
+
+"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his
+following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.
+That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul,
+striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.
+The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the
+world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like
+the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the
+shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets,
+where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It
+is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is
+perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to
+itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the
+trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor,
+yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in
+distress--since of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest--comes to
+the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards
+the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet
+passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in
+its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems
+divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made
+the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its
+weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its
+cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."
+
+He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint
+stones.
+
+She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike
+eyes dilated.
+
+In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he
+had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a
+raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare
+times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the
+unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her,
+but to no other.
+
+Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to
+the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of
+purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though
+she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb
+unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.
+
+"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.
+
+He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now,
+freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove
+in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.
+
+"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes,
+and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and
+in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill
+it--with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soul--no more."
+
+She freed it from his hand.
+
+"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much power,
+why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you
+always?"
+
+"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand years--since the
+world began--without an answer. Because the law of all creation is
+cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always the breath of
+life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and lives again
+in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little. The worms
+destroy; the grasses nourish. Few great men do more than the first, or
+do as much as the last."
+
+"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his parable; "it is
+two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way you pay for it with
+your body. Begone."
+
+She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and
+yet she knew, in a vague way, that he cared for her; moreover, she
+rejoiced in that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man
+amidst them, held all men.
+
+His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its
+natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of
+knowledge--something, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from
+sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in
+idiocy or in self-murder.
+
+She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight
+white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her
+home.
+
+There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth had the faint
+light of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it
+never seemed possible to her that her fate could be other than it was,
+since so long the messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had
+been silent and leaden-footed to her call.
+
+Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two mouths that day
+bidden her "wait"?
+
+She entered at length the little wood of Ypres, and heard that rush and
+music of the deep mill water which was the sole thing she had learned to
+love in all the place.
+
+Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered
+Claudis Flamma back full recompense for all the toil they cost
+him--recompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that poverty
+which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on him. Both
+were now rich in all their maturer abundance, since the stream which
+rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long
+drought so severely felt in all other districts.
+
+The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit; the great
+pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny orange heaps; little
+russet-breasted bullfinches beat their wings vainly at the fine network
+that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall apricots; a gray cat was
+stealing among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a
+round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous
+dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown
+and white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny
+summer joys.
+
+Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower-garden stretched,
+spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of
+lichens; and the earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden
+gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the deep-blue lupins,
+and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green slender stems and the pure
+white cups of the virginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with
+their purple tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites
+drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet glad garden
+world, the butterflies, purple and jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby
+dress, the dainty azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled
+wasp with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his
+pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising,
+praising, rejoicing.
+
+The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow,
+where the river tumbled down in two or three short breaks and leaps
+which broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a
+sheet of dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of
+the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.
+
+The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the old fashion when men
+builded their dwellings slowly and for love; common with all its
+countless carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque
+human likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the
+green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep shelving eaves
+bright with diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day
+with curling swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.
+
+It was beautiful; and the heart of Reine Flamma's young daughter
+doubtless would have clung to it with all a child's instinct of love and
+loyalty to its home had it not been to her only a prison-house wherein
+three bitter jailers forever ruled her with a rod of iron--bigotry and
+penury and cruelty.
+
+She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the long grass under a
+mulberry-tree, ere she went in to give her account of the fruit sold and
+the moneys brought by her.
+
+She had been on foot since four o'clock in the dawn of that sultry day;
+her only meal had been a bowl of cold milk and a hunch of dry bread
+crushed in her strong small teeth. She had toiled hard at such bodily
+labor as was set to her; to domestic work, to the work of the distaff
+and spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had never been able to
+break her; they had found that she would be beaten black and blue ere
+she would be bound to it; but against open air exertion she had never
+rebelled, and she had in her all the strength and the swiftness of the
+nomadic race of the Liebana, and had not their indolence and their
+dishonesty.
+
+She was very hungry, she was again thirsty; yet she did not break off a
+fruit from any bough about her; she did not steep her hot lips in any
+one of the cool juicy apricots which studded the stones of the wall
+beyond her.
+
+No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in that dim dead time
+when Phratos had closed her small hands in his whenever they had
+stretched out to some forbidden thing, and had said, "Take the goods the
+gods give thee, but steal not from men." And yet honest she was, by
+reason of the fierce proud savage independence in her, and her dim
+memories of that sole friend loved and lost.
+
+She wanted many a thing, many a time--nay, nearly every hour that she
+lived, she wanted those sheer necessaries which make life endurable; but
+she had taught herself to do without them rather than owe them, by
+prayer or by plunder, to that human race which she hated, and to which
+she always doubted her own kinship.
+
+Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the bodily delights of
+rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet odors; the scent of the fruits and
+flowers was heavy on the air; the fall of the water made a familiar
+tempestuous music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though
+deadened by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by the tender
+tones of the numberless birds that sang about her.
+
+"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay there watching
+the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed
+birds float from blossom to blossom.
+
+For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pantheistic instinct
+of the divine age, when the world was young, to behold a sentient
+consciousness in every leaf unfolded to the light; to see a soul in
+every created thing the day shines on; to feel the presence of an
+eternal life in every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows; in
+every flame that lifts itself to heaven; in every bell that vibrates on
+the air; in every moth that soars to reach the stars.
+
+Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
+though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast
+of burden.
+
+"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the sunrays
+pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, the shadows move across the
+deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon a lily, the
+scarlet-throated birds dart in and out through the yellow feathery
+blossoms of the limes.
+
+All birds were her friends.
+
+Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of their various songs,
+and many ways and means of luring them to come and rest upon her
+shoulder and peck the berries in her hand.
+
+She had lived so much in the open fields and among the woods that she
+had made her chief companions of them. She could emulate so deftly all
+their voices, from the call of the wood dove to the chant of the
+blackbird, and from the trill of the nightingale to the twitter of the
+titmouse, that she could summon them all to her at will, and have dozens
+of them fluttering around her head and swaying their pretty bodies on
+her wrist.
+
+It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so weird and
+magical, and they would come home from their fields on a spring daybreak
+and tell their wives in horror how they had seen the devil's daughter in
+the red flush of the sunrise, ankle-deep in violets, and covered with
+birds from head to foot, hearing their whispers, and giving them her
+messages to carry in return.
+
+One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. Francis had done as
+much and it had been accredited to him as a fair action and virtuous
+knowledge, but she was frowned down and chattered down by her louder
+neighbors, who told her that she might look for some sharp judgment of
+heaven for daring to couple together the blessed name of the holy saint
+and the accursed name of this foul spirit.
+
+But all they could say could not break the charmed communion between
+Folle-Farine and her feathered comrades.
+
+She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she had always saved
+some of her scanty meal for them, and in the springtime and the summer
+they always rewarded her with floods of songs and soft caresses from
+their nestling wings.
+
+There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
+cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little home-bred
+things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of characters.
+
+The robins with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
+real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by
+the strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families
+of finches in their gay apparelings; the plain brown bird that fills the
+night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
+princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the
+air; the kingfishers that have hovered so long over the forget-me-nots
+upon the rivers that they have caught the colors of the flowers on their
+wings; the bright blackcaps green as the leaves, with their yellow
+waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent freebooters of the woodland
+liberties; all these were her friends and lovers, various as any human
+crowds of court or city.
+
+She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
+did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
+peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not
+reason on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed,
+an innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.
+
+Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
+pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of
+a bough of ivy shook as with a struggle. She rose and looked; a line of
+twine was trembling against the foliage; in its noosed end the throat of
+the mavis had been caught; it hung trembling and clutching at the air
+convulsively with its little drawn up feet. It had flown into the trap
+as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.
+
+There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.
+
+She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
+down upon the ivy; the succor came too late; the little gentle body was
+already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
+soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
+from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.
+
+"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she stood with
+the little dead bird in her hand.
+
+Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
+curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously
+bewailed its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the
+air with trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.
+
+Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
+God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
+rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
+song.
+
+All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
+lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvae, and purified the
+trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and
+had fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly
+to the winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of
+men; and now it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because a
+human greed begrudged it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper
+coin.
+
+Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a knife
+in his hand and a basket to cut lilies for one of the choristers of the
+cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
+Visitation of Mary.
+
+He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled as he went by to
+himself.
+
+"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking how shrewd and
+how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the
+grass and the leaves.
+
+She said nothing; but a darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
+came in sight in the distance.
+
+She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth and laid moss in it and
+put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
+handfuls of fallen rose leaves and with a sprig or two of thyme. Around
+her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries;--who
+now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now should rove
+with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit with him
+beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves?--who
+now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn
+break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Meanwhile Claudis Flamma cut the lilies for the cathedral altars,
+muttering many holy prayers as he gathered the flowers of Mary.
+
+When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, kept fresh in wet moss
+by the young chorister who had been sent for them, the miller turned to
+her.
+
+"Where is the money?"
+
+She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern thong about her
+waist, opened the pouch, and counted out the coins, one by one, on the
+flat stone of a water-tank among the lilies and the ivy.
+
+There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some dozens of copper
+ones. The fruit had been left at various stalls and houses in small
+portions, for it was the custom to supply it fresh each day.
+
+He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, counted them again
+and again, and yet again; after the third enumeration he turned sharply
+on her:
+
+"There are two pieces too little: what have you done with them?"
+
+"There are two sous short," she answered him curtly. "Twelve of the figs
+for the tanner Florian were rotten."
+
+"Rotten!--they were but overripe."
+
+"It is the same thing."
+
+"You dare to answer me?--animal! I say they had only tasted a little too
+much of the sun. It only made them the sweeter."
+
+"They were rotten."
+
+"They were not. You dare to speak! If they had been rotten they lay
+under the others; he could not have seen----"
+
+"I saw."
+
+"You saw! Who are you?--a beggar--a beast--a foul offspring of sin. You
+dared to show them to him, I will warrant?"
+
+"I showed him that they were not good."
+
+"And gave him back the two sous?"
+
+"I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing for the rotten
+ones."
+
+"Wretch! you dare to tell me that!"
+
+A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth; her eyes looked at him
+with all their boldest fiercest luster.
+
+"I never steal--not even from you, good Flamma."
+
+"You have stolen now!" he shrieked, his thin and feeble voice rising in
+fury at his lost coins and his discovered treachery. "It is a lie that
+the figs were rotten; it is a lie that you took but seven sous. You
+stole the two sous to buy you bread and honey in the streets, or to get
+a drink at the wineshops. I know you; I know you; it is a devil's device
+to please your gluttonous appetite. The figs rotten!--not so rotten as
+is your soul would they be, though they were black as night and though
+they stunk as river mud! Go back to Denis Florian and bring me the two
+sous, or I will thrash you as a thief."
+
+She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter.
+
+"You can thrash me; you cannot make me a thief."
+
+"You will not go back to Florian?"
+
+"I will not ask him to pay for what was bad."
+
+"You will not confess that you stole the money?"
+
+"I should lie if I did."
+
+"Then strip."
+
+She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment's hesitation
+unloosened the woolen sash knotted round her waist, and pushed down the
+coarse linen shirt from about her throat.
+
+The white folds fell from off the perfect curves of her brown arms, and
+left bare her shining shoulders beautiful as any sculptured Psyche's.
+
+She was not conscious of degradation in her punishment; she had been
+bidden to bow her head and endure the lash from the earliest years she
+could remember. According to the only creed she knew, silence and
+fortitude and strength were the greatest of all the virtues. She stood
+now in the cross-lights among the lilies as she had stood when a little
+child, erect, unquailing, and ready to suffer, insensible of humiliation
+because unconscious of sin, and because so tutored by severity and
+exposure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and the fugitive
+shrinking of her sex.
+
+She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be silent, which she
+had had when she had stood among the same tall lilies, in the same
+summer radiance, in the years of her helpless infancy.
+
+She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound crouches to it; not
+from inborn cowardice, but simply from the habit of obedience and of
+endurance.
+
+He had ever used her as the Greeks the Helots; he always beat her when
+she was in fault to teach her to be faultless, and when without offense
+beat her to remind her that she was the offspring of humiliation and a
+slave.
+
+He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick rope which lay
+coiled upon the turf ready for the binding of some straying boughs; and
+struck her with it, slowly. His arm had lost somewhat of its strength,
+and his power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss of his
+copper pieces and the sense that she had discovered the fraudulent
+intention of his small knavery lent force to his feebleness; as the
+scourge whistled through the air and descended on her shoulders it left
+bruised swollen marks to stamp its passage, and curling, adder-like, bit
+and drew blood.
+
+Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she had stood in her
+childhood; not a nerve quivered, not a limb flinched; the color rushed
+over her bent face and her bare bosom, but she never made a movement;
+she never gave a sound.
+
+When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she still said not one word;
+she drew tight once more the sash about her waist, and fastened afresh
+the linen of her bodice.
+
+The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and throbbed; but she
+was used to such pain, and bore it as their wounds were borne by the
+women of the Spartan games.
+
+"Thy two sous have borne thee bitterness," he muttered with a smile.
+"Thou wilt scarce find fruit rotten again in haste. There are bread and
+beans within; go get a meal; I want the mule to take flour to
+Barbizene."
+
+She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the burning of her skin
+made her feel sick and weak. She went away and cast herself at full
+length in the shade of the long grasses of the orchard, resting her chin
+upon her hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp moss;
+thinking, thinking, thinking, of what she hardly knew, except indeed
+that she wished that she were dead, like the bird she had covered with
+the rose leaves.
+
+He did not leave her long to even so much peace as this; his shrill
+voice soon called her from her rest; he bade her get ready the mule and
+go.
+
+She obeyed.
+
+The mule was saddled with his wooden pack; as many sacks as he could
+carry were piled upon the framework; she put her hand upon his bridle,
+and set out to walk to Barbizene, which was two leagues away.
+
+"Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat her out of her,"
+muttered the miller, as he watched the old mule pace down the narrow
+tree-shadowed road that led across the fields: and he believed that he
+did rightly in this treatment of her.
+
+It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, indeed, but he did
+not think that in such self-indulgence he ever erred. He was a bitter,
+cunning, miserly old man, whose solitary tenderness of feeling and
+honesty of pride had been rooted out forever when he had learned the
+dishonor of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In the ten years of
+time which had passed since first the little brown, large-eyed child had
+been sent to seek asylum with him, he had grown harder and keener and
+more severe with each day that rose.
+
+Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept her, partly from a
+savage sense of duty, partly from the persuasion that she had the power
+in her to make the strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned.
+
+For the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that the devil, in some
+witchery of human guise, had polluted his daughter's body and soul, and
+that it was by the foul fiend and by no earthly lover that she had
+conceived and borne the creature that now abode with him.
+
+Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometimes felt more furious
+against this offspring of hell because ever and again some gleam of
+fantastic inborn honor, some strange savage instinct of honesty, would
+awake in her and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small and
+secret sins of chicanery wherein his soul delighted, and for which he
+compounded with his gods.
+
+He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the body labored
+hardest when the brain was still asleep, which is true; she could not
+read; she could not write; she knew absolutely nothing. Yet there was a
+soul awake in her; yet there were innumerable thoughts and dreams
+brooding in her fathomless eyes; yet there was a desire in her fierce
+and unslacked for some other life than this life of the packhorse and of
+the day laborer which alone she knew.
+
+He had done his best to degrade and to brutalize her, and in much he had
+succeeded; but he had not succeeded wholly. There was a liberty in her
+that escaped his thraldom; there was a soul in her that resisted the
+deadening influence of her existence.
+
+She had none of the shame of her sex; she had none of the timorous
+instincts of womanhood. She had a fierce stubborn courage, and she was
+insensible of the daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to
+his word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and worthless
+to dread the pain of the lash. She would bathe in the woodland pool,
+remembering no more that she might be watched by human eyes than does
+the young tigress that has never beheld the face of man.
+
+In all this she was brutalized and degraded by her tyrant's bondage: in
+other things she was far higher than he and escaped him.
+
+Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of severe physical
+labor, it had still irony and it had still imagination; and under the
+hottest heats of temptation there were two things which by sheer
+instinct she resisted, and resisted so that neither of them had ever
+been forced on her--they were falsehood and fear.
+
+"It is the infamous strength of the devil!" said Claudis Flamma, when he
+found that he could not force her to deviate from the truth.
+
+The world says the same of those who will not feed it with lies.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+That long dry summer was followed by an autumn of drought and scarcity.
+
+The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring down rain. The
+wooden Christs gazed all day long on parching lands and panting cattle.
+Even the broad deep rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink
+in the long drought. The orchards sickened for lack of moisture, and the
+peasants went about with feverish faces, ague-stricken limbs, and
+trembling hearts. The corn yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and
+when the winter came it was a time of dire scarcity and distress.
+
+Claudis Flamma and a few others like him alone prospered.
+
+The mill-house at Ypres served many purposes. It was a granary, a
+market, a baker's shop, an usurer's den, all in one.
+
+It looked a simple and innocent place. In the summertime it was peaceful
+and lovely, green and dark and still, with the blue sky above it, and
+the songs of birds all around; with its old black timbers, its
+many-colored orchards, its leafy gardens, its gray walls washed by the
+hurrying stream.
+
+But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. The water roared,
+and the leafless trees groaned in the wind, and the great leaden clouds
+of rain or fog enveloped it duskily.
+
+To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it with
+aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible; they
+dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master--the hardest
+and the shrewdest and the closest-fisted Norman of them all.
+
+For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter
+subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with
+their labor or their suffering, with the best of all their wool, or oil,
+or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom
+for five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old
+pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg of their little pet
+daughter's dowry.
+
+And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit
+them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well
+with the good saints and with holy church,--a wise man, in a word, with
+whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and
+avarice.
+
+For the most part the population around Ypres was thrifty and thriving
+in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and by this portion
+of it the silent old miser was much honored as a man laborious and
+penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must
+have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or
+under the bricks of his kitchen.
+
+By the smaller section of it--poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools--who
+belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and
+slow to save, and who so fell into want and famine and had to borrow of
+others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate
+deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe,
+and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.
+
+In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn, these and their
+like fell further in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and
+beg of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living.
+They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible
+extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give
+them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they
+could do no better.
+
+It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and
+being never quit of his hold his debtors never could try for aid
+elsewhere.
+
+The weather towards the season of Noel became frightfully severe; the
+mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped
+pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open
+country, and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the higher
+lands.
+
+There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare
+harvests of a district usually so opulent in all riches of the soil
+brought trouble and dearth in their train. Sickness prevailed because
+the old people and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots
+unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, many homes
+were flooded, and some even swept away.
+
+Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never
+stopped work, and famine prices could be asked in this extremity.
+
+Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after month,
+with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being left
+her that she could claim as her own.
+
+She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in
+frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even
+the young men among them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face
+of hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the
+golden glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness: and
+if they did note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the
+marks of a vagrant and accursed race.
+
+She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never
+dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she
+went by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well
+with the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.
+
+The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her
+head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the fire and
+dreams in her musing eyes--all these were so unlike themselves that they
+saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.
+
+Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except
+such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her.
+So had every winter gone since she had come there--a time so long ago
+that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often
+doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.
+
+Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of
+the mule and the bullocks--indifferent and knowing no better, and only
+staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty
+night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever
+come to her--those splendid and familiar unknown things that looked on
+all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to
+care.
+
+Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were
+together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor
+suffered immeasurably.
+
+A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and a score
+of times saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog,
+pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire
+deny them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times
+its value for some niggard grant of food.
+
+"Why should I think of it, why should I care?" she said to herself; and
+yet she did both, and could not help it.
+
+There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from
+the mill, by name Manon Dax.
+
+She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled and bent, yet strong,
+with bright eyes like a robin's, and a tough frame, eighty years old.
+
+She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cutter; he had been
+dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their
+offspring die too; and had now left on her hand to rear four young
+great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for
+food as new-born birds cry in their nests.
+
+She washed a little when she could get any linen to wash, and she span,
+and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot
+of ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes
+and herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four
+nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and
+worked in hail and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained,
+but said that God was good to her.
+
+She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live
+long--that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God would
+take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought her
+to do, and was content.
+
+Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of the
+winter fell like a knife. She was only one among thousands.
+
+Nobody noticed her; still it was hard.
+
+All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was
+no well nearer than half a league, and half a league out and half a
+league back every day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two
+heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has
+only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one's withered limbs.
+
+The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her fiercely
+by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a hard time coming in which their
+pigs would be ill fed. The roots in her little garden-plot were all
+black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and
+stewed and eaten.
+
+The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were
+ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by rievers younger and more
+agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.
+
+The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for
+food, and she had none to give them.
+
+"If it were only myself!" she thought, stopping her ears not to hear
+them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to creep
+away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold
+froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and
+tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was
+good, and so to let death come--content.
+
+But it was not only herself.
+
+The poor are seldom so fortunate--they themselves would say so
+unhappy--as to be alone in their homes.
+
+There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish
+things she had loved,--small lives that had been rosy even on so much
+hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful
+even at the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of
+mouldy crusts, or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been--until now,
+when even so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay
+were soaked through with snow-water; now--when they were quite silent,
+except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.
+
+"I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was born asked man
+or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper coin," she thought,
+sitting by her black hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and
+stopping her ears to shut out the children's cries.
+
+She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter living,--she had
+scores of times in her long years been as famished as this, and as cold,
+and her house had been as desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never
+asked for an alms, being strong and ignorant, and being also in fear of
+the world, and holding a debt a great shame.
+
+But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish;
+being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in
+their strength before her.
+
+The struggle was long and hard with her. She would have to die soon, she
+knew, and she had striven all her lifetime so to live that she might die
+saying, "I have asked nothing of any man."
+
+This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a
+feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten. Any
+way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something; or
+else those four small things, who were like a cluster of red berries on
+a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.
+
+"It is bitter, but I must do it," she thought. "Sure it is strange that
+the good God cares to take any of us to himself through so sharp a way
+as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say, 'Not heaven
+for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.'"
+
+And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on
+which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all
+of them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.
+
+"Be still, my treasures," she said to them, striving to speak cheerily,
+and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born; "I go away for a
+little while to try and get you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care
+of them till I come back."
+
+Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of
+the little black door of the hut on to the white road and into the
+rushing winds.
+
+"I will go to Flamma," she said to herself.
+
+It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this season of midwinter.
+
+The business of the day was done. The people had come and gone, favored
+or denied, according to such sureties as they could offer. The great
+wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill sat
+against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in
+his ledger--crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to
+understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his
+pen.
+
+All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of
+every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were
+hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had
+saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to
+know that he held all that, and also withheld it. It moved him with a
+certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants
+stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered
+out an entreaty--which he denied.
+
+It was what he liked; to sit there and count his gains after his
+fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the howling wind and
+driving hail, and chuckle to think how lean and cold and sick they were
+outside--those fools who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy's
+leman.
+
+To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be
+implored with tears of supplication, and answer with a grim jest; to see
+a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the
+big brass pans full of milk, and say to her "All that makes butter for
+Paris," and then see her go away wailing and moaning that her child
+would die, and tottering feebly through the snow--all this was sweet to
+him.
+
+Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man,
+yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had
+been aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an
+angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the
+poignancy of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to
+wound, and to see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only
+pleasure life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly,
+according to his light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and
+his God and his child had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had
+turned to gall.
+
+The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut
+and the water-mill.
+
+They were roads which passed through meadows and along cornfields,
+beside streamlets, and among little belts of woodland, lanes and paths
+green and pleasant in the summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and
+whistled through by northeast winds. She held on her way steadily,
+stumbling often, and often slipping and going slowly, for she was very
+feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity of the cold drove
+through and through her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth
+of the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the weather was so
+wild that the poplar-trees were bent to the earth, and the little light
+in the Calvary lamp by the river blew to and fro, and at last died out.
+Still she held on, a little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her
+lips and a hope in her heart.
+
+The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring,
+in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast gray
+waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times
+to and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she
+groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength,
+or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached
+the mill-house.
+
+Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores
+of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to
+Phratos, a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from
+the inclement night.
+
+She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma,
+who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which
+represented to him his earthly wealth.
+
+She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face
+working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an
+intense anxiety of appeal.
+
+"Flamma," she said simply to him, "we have been neighbors fifty years
+and more--thou and I, and many have borrowed of thee to their hurt and
+shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked
+anything of man or woman or child. But I come to-night to ask bread of
+you--bread for the four little children at home. I have heard them cry
+three days, and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two off
+the trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have come to you."
+
+He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbors, as she
+had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the
+same altar, side by side.
+
+"What dost want?" he asked simply.
+
+"Food," she made answer; "food and fuel. They are so cold--the little
+ones."
+
+"What canst pay for them?" he asked.
+
+"Nothing--nothing now. There is not a thing in the house except the last
+hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a little--just a
+little--while the weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the
+weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash and spin. I will pay
+faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin to any man. But I am
+so old, and the children so young----"
+
+Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen.
+
+Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. Where he went there
+stood pans of new milk, baskets of eggs, rolls of bread, piles of
+fagots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes
+glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.
+
+He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a
+thorn-tree.
+
+"Give these to thy children's children," he said, with a dark smile.
+"For these--and for no more--will they recompense thee when they shall
+grow to maturity."
+
+She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant
+but a stern jest.
+
+"Good Flamma, you mock me," she murmured, trembling; "the babies are
+little, and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for God's sake! A jest is
+well in season, but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a
+stripe."
+
+He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating voice,--
+
+"I give thee the only thing given without payment in this world--advice.
+Take it or leave it."
+
+She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and
+her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense
+in them.
+
+"You jest, Flamma! You only jest!" she muttered. "The little children
+starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for them? Just a little
+bread? I will pay as soon as the weather breaks."
+
+"I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor," he answered her, with the
+habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again, and went on
+counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his books.
+
+His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease her
+work, nor intercede by a word. The poor can be better to the poor than
+any princes; but the poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any
+slave-drivers.
+
+The old woman's head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and felt
+her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the air. It
+was already dark with the darkness of the descending night.
+
+The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone; all was cold--cold as
+death.
+
+She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children were
+alone. The winds blew and drove the snowflakes in a white cloud against
+her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the
+roar of the mill-water filled the air.
+
+There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden;
+beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way. She
+fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but lay
+still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the snowstorm
+beating together upon her.
+
+"The children! the children!" she moaned feebly, and then was still; she
+was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not lift herself nor
+see what was around her; she thought that she was in her bed at home,
+and felt as though she would soon sleep.
+
+Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly-moving shape,
+that flew as silently and as quickly as a night-bird, and paused as
+though on wings beside her.
+
+A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to
+her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.
+
+"Hush, it is I! I--Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not
+much--they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what
+you said--I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you
+pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it."
+
+"Food--for the children!"
+
+The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a
+little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to
+her.
+
+But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a
+groan--her limb was broken.
+
+Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk's
+through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.
+
+"You cannot get up; you are old," she said abruptly. "See--let me carry
+you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much;
+but it will serve."
+
+She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion.
+What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had
+always mocked and hated her.
+
+"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses," she
+thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.
+
+Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for
+strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to
+the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.
+
+Why did she do it?
+
+She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this woman,
+so poor and so brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied
+in her extremity.
+
+Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer
+them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.
+
+"I cannot rise," she murmured; "my leg is broken, I think. But it is no
+matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are, you are good, and
+have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my
+life--anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain--indeed."
+
+Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped and lifted the
+old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy burden set
+out on her way in the teeth of the storm.
+
+She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, by sight and name.
+
+Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart,
+but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbors, had
+drawn the little ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak,
+lest the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner's youngest born, should
+fall on them, and harm them in like manner.
+
+Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as
+Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through the
+frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the
+sacks of corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a
+packhorse.
+
+Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even strive to speak
+again; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement,
+of a close, soft pressure that sheltered her from the force of the
+winds, of a subtle warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame,
+and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be still.
+
+She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.
+
+Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and listened.
+
+"Did you speak?" she whispered.
+
+Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.
+
+"God is good," she muttered, like one speaking in a dream.
+
+Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow,
+pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a
+reindeer, and sure of eye in the dark as a night-hawk.
+
+"Are you in pain?" she asked once of the burden she carried.
+
+There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep.
+
+The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and
+inured to all hardships of the weather; yet short as it was, it cost her
+an hour to travel it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with
+snow-water, blown back continually by the opposing winds, and forced to
+stagger and to pause by the fury of the storm.
+
+At last she reached the hut.
+
+The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children
+echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep,
+cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in
+unchecked; all was quite dark.
+
+She felt her way within, and being used by long custom to see in the
+gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and birds can see, she found the bed
+of hay, and laid her burden gently down on it.
+
+The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest ones crept up
+close to their grandmother, and pressed their cheeks to hers, and
+whispered to her eagerly, with their little famished lips, "Where is
+the food, where is the food?"
+
+But there was still no answer.
+
+The clouds drifted a little from the moon that had been so long
+obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapor of the heavy sky; the
+whitened ground threw back the rays increased tenfold; the pale gleam
+reached the old still face of Manon Dax.
+
+There was a feeble smile upon it--the smile with which her last words
+had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"
+
+She was quite dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.
+
+The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow
+which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been
+too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.
+
+She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of
+its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay
+together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the
+leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors
+and plains; it is a common fate.
+
+She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and
+quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not
+taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter,
+tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of
+it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the
+door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all
+night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the
+clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she
+could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.
+
+"They die of famine--and they die saying their 'God is good,'" she
+thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and
+melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of
+the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel,
+and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the
+warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a
+nest.
+
+She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner
+of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she
+had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against
+her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single
+gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so
+bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying "God
+is good." She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving
+animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.
+
+She forgave--because she forgot--that in other winters this door had
+been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had
+mocked her in their first imperfect speech.
+
+The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter's day came; the storm had lulled,
+but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was
+piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.
+
+She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she
+knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they
+too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had
+no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never
+spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for
+its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.
+
+Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and
+mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common
+humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they
+disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.
+
+At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going
+to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude
+hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.
+
+She rose and called to him.
+
+He stared and stood still.
+
+She went to the doorway and signed to him.
+
+"Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are here,
+alone, and they starve."
+
+"Manon Dax dead?" he echoed stupidly: he was her nearest neighbor; he
+had helped her fetch her washing-water sometimes from the well half a
+league away; when his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old
+woman had nursed her carefully and well through many a tedious month.
+
+"Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had broken
+her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one. The
+little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too."
+
+It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that
+addressed him; but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to
+her, he recognized the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight
+brow, the fathomless eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising
+there suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn and
+shadow.
+
+He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the
+darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he
+had gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the
+sleeping children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.
+
+The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice
+of the roads would allow.
+
+His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a
+few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop
+made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its
+wide-spreading orchards and their excellence of fruits.
+
+Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the
+people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds;
+women were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the
+sleepy-eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers
+played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost.
+
+The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the
+ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins
+flew to and fro songless.
+
+His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.
+
+"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.
+
+"What of that?" said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had
+died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine
+themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.
+
+"This of that," said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of
+his own terrors. "The young devil of Ypres has killed her, that I am
+sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like
+coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that."
+
+"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe;
+while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the
+women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange
+news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day
+was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it
+than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse
+had fared with the swelling in the throat.
+
+They were very dull there from year's end to year's end; once a month,
+maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a
+peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from
+the outer world;--beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing,
+and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone
+crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.
+
+This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be
+challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil
+omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true
+an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly
+matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears
+and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his
+listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had
+encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been
+slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.
+
+Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be
+accredited of the begotten of the fiend:--a fiend, whom all the grown
+men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come
+to ruin poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels,
+and his strength passing the strength of all men.
+
+The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the
+bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials
+of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily
+labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who
+had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.
+
+A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the
+village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and
+deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his
+tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two
+hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.
+
+"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been
+struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are
+there, and that devil of Ypres is with them. We--good Christians and
+true--should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the
+young ones hither."
+
+Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be
+driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.
+
+"That is as it should be," assented the other women. "Go, Flandrin, and
+we--we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to
+the public charity; better cannot be done. Go."
+
+"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply,"
+cried his wife.
+
+"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee," said
+another.
+
+"Not she," grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. "One day my
+blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his
+cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said
+'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you
+are to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed and went on. What
+are you to do with a witch like that,--eh?"
+
+"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus. "Go! Every minute you
+waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!"
+
+"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly. "I will not go
+after those infants, it is not a man's work."
+
+In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him,
+of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly
+down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black,
+fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused,
+that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the devil's prey, than those,
+his choicest, swine.
+
+The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But
+vainly--he would not move alone. He had become possessed with the
+terrors that his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for
+all their imprecations.
+
+"Let us go ourselves, then!" screamed his wife at length, flourishing
+above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow. "Men are
+forever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes
+to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the fire!"
+
+There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to
+emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a
+broom, a pegstick, each whatever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin
+in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe of
+poplars. They were not very sure in their own minds why they went, nor
+for what they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and
+pious, and they had a great hate in their hearts against her.
+
+They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them, and their
+tongues flew still faster than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made
+them sharp and keen on their prey; they screamed themselves hoarse,
+their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the
+creaking of the trees; and they inflamed each other with ferocious
+belief in the sorcery they were to punish.
+
+They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little, they
+toiled hard from their birth to their grave, they were most of them
+chaste wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they
+slaved in fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were
+narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, where
+they thought themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable. They
+were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for
+another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the
+priests and lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that
+it is a creed holy and honorable--how can the people know that it is at
+once idiotic and hellish?
+
+Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof, and
+watched the open door.
+
+The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned
+and caught her hand, and held it.
+
+She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the
+woodstack, or their grandam's skirts, a hundred times when they had seen
+her on the road or in the orchard. But she was sorry for them; almost as
+sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when their nests were
+scattered on the ground in a tempest, or for the little starveling
+rabbits when they screamed in their holes for the soft, white mother
+that was lying, tortured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap.
+
+She was sorry for them--half roughly, half tenderly--with some shame at
+her own weakness, and yet too sincerely sorry to be able to persuade
+herself to leave them to their fate there, all alone with their dead.
+
+For in the savage heart of Taric's daughter there was an innermost
+corner wherein her mother's nature slept.
+
+She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and listening for
+footsteps.
+
+The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds; the dense fog of
+the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the
+trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard by there
+wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin's cattle, deserted
+of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds.
+
+She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet, she had
+resolved not to leave the children all alone; though Flamma should come
+and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So
+she sat still and waited.
+
+After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen
+snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused
+clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter
+morning.
+
+The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little
+passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the
+hill with Flandrin in their midst.
+
+She rose and looked out at them quietly.
+
+For a minute they paused--irresolute, silent, perplexed: at the sight of
+her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the crime they
+came to bring against her.
+
+The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the
+onslaught.
+
+"What!" she screamed, "nine good Christians fearful of one daughter of
+hell? Fie! for shame! Look; my leaden Peter is round my neck! Is he not
+stronger than she any day?"
+
+In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the same time, they were
+through the door and on the mud floor of the hearth, close to her,
+casting hasty glances at the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires
+they had left to die out all through that bitter winter. They came about
+her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop, flourishing their
+sticks in her eyes, and casting at her a thousand charges in one breath.
+
+Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the threshold, wishing he
+had never said a word of the death of Manon Dax to his good wife and
+neighbors.
+
+"You met that poor saint and killed her in the snow with your
+witcheries!" one cried.
+
+"You have stifled that poor babe where it lay!" cried another.
+
+"A good woman like that!" shrieked a third, "who was well and blithe and
+praising God only a day ago, for I saw her myself come down the hill for
+our well water!"
+
+"It is as you did with the dear little Remy, who will be lame all his
+life through you," hissed a fourth. "You are not fit to live; you spit
+venom like a toad."
+
+"Are you alive, my angels?" said a fifth, waking the three children
+noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. "Are you alive after that
+witch has gazed on you? It is a miracle! The saints be praised!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not comprehending why
+they thus with one accord fell upon her. She pointed to the bodies on
+the hearth, with one of those grave and dignified gestures which were
+her birthright.
+
+"She was cold and hungry," she said curtly, her mellow accent softening
+and enriching the provincial tongue which she had learned from those
+amidst whom she dwelt. "She had fallen, and was dying. I brought her
+here. The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with the rest
+because they were frightened, and alone. There is no more to tell. What
+of it?"
+
+"Thou hadst better come away. What canst thou prove?" whispered Flandrin
+to his wife.
+
+He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would fain have stilled
+it. But that was beyond his power. The women had not come forth half a
+league in the howling winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with
+a mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken.
+
+They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused
+her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a
+thousand tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their
+sticks; and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of
+Manon Dax lay upward in the dim light.
+
+The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had
+seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him
+and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long
+and dreary night.
+
+The woman covered his eyes with a scream.
+
+"Ah--h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child is bewitched! It is
+horrible!"
+
+"Look on that;--oh, infernal thing!" cried Flandrin's wife, lifting up
+her treasured figure of Peter. "You dare not face that blessed image.
+See--see all of you--how she winces, and turns white!"
+
+Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called her. Its
+gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her in
+any human thing.
+
+She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw
+it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She
+stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it
+through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then
+she folded her arms, and waited for them.
+
+There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed
+on her.
+
+They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted
+hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were
+strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and
+they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked
+alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and
+the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.
+
+They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her,
+they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the
+malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and
+its own security.
+
+Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power
+against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her
+backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their
+worst on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, nor lift
+herself to wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of
+wringing from her a single cry, and that she did. She was mute while the
+rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were
+driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched at her hair,
+and twisted and tore it,--she was quite mute throughout.
+
+"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I have
+heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried Flandrin's
+wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.
+
+Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in
+their midst, and a dozen eager, violent hands seized a closer grip upon
+her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud
+floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell. The
+smooth, soft skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without
+spot or blemish.
+
+"What matter,--what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin. "When our fathers
+hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for that? Draw blood, and
+you will see."
+
+She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her
+prey.
+
+"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she cried, with a
+laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.
+
+Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. She was powerless,
+defenseless, flung on her back amidst her tormentors, fastened down by
+treading feet and clinching hands; she could resist in nothing, she
+could not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud eyes looked
+unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.
+
+The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her
+chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a
+wounded bird,--not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these
+women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their hands.
+
+The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak. Except for
+her eyes, which glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to and fro,
+seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down
+by ruffians to make a bonfire.
+
+"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried
+the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to
+that uttermost test.
+
+Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:
+
+"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come
+out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to
+try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick--as you love your
+lives--quick!"
+
+The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a
+name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.
+
+They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the
+hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing
+sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.
+
+The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the
+little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.
+
+"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his
+gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.
+
+The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest
+infant likewise--of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to
+say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of
+charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were
+quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see
+their work.
+
+"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told
+us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little
+Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken
+the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them
+food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and
+do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."
+
+"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who
+liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's
+births, and who was a good old man, though stern.
+
+He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by
+the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged
+his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed
+in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be
+beforehand with him there.
+
+"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough
+for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange
+mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues
+sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.
+
+The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a
+sullen impatience.
+
+"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Ypres!" they
+muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get
+over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That
+will teach her to leave honest folk alone."
+
+And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.
+
+"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing
+Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you
+in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy
+great-grandmother."
+
+But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into
+silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly
+withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old
+kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at
+twilight by the bright wood fire.
+
+Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery
+slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village,
+and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.
+
+For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and
+blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.
+
+Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily
+and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the
+sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they
+have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter
+will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his
+outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in
+the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease
+from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.
+
+When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon
+Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they
+should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in
+accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest,
+a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could
+gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side;
+but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts
+that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily
+justified to the law.
+
+"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of
+all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a
+bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil--anything,--except now and then an
+honest woman."
+
+But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered
+it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old
+grandam and the year-old infant.
+
+When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her
+tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to
+raise herself from the floor, and had failed.
+
+She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that
+her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first
+sharp moment of the persecution.
+
+As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the
+blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what
+had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and
+lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.
+
+It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and
+outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.
+
+She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.
+
+"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known
+how they pay any good done to them."
+
+She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course
+of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid
+with.
+
+She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she
+hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and
+pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed
+and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without
+her vengeance.
+
+"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she
+thought--this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its
+teaching.
+
+She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into
+the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or
+token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the
+ashes of the hearth.
+
+"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that
+her God was good!"
+
+She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff
+and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin
+deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her
+ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been
+flung backward on her head.
+
+She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had
+done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The
+sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled
+through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and
+grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through
+the woods and pastures.
+
+The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull
+red ray here and there above the woods in the east.
+
+It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still
+rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over
+the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the
+snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.
+
+She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when
+he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then
+tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any
+creature that might need one.
+
+That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence
+was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour
+more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown
+her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that
+she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow,
+beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her
+eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all
+for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland
+meadows, starved and stiff.
+
+She did not know;--and had she known, wretched though existence was to
+her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be
+slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again--a
+change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and
+no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.
+
+By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of
+the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her
+eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.
+
+She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first
+morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and
+for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which
+the sheds and storehouses ran.
+
+She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy
+or remission of her labors.
+
+She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had
+brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.
+
+She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass; and
+she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there
+leaning her head on her hands.
+
+The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal
+flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty
+fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly
+against her, purring all the while.
+
+The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her
+master,--
+
+"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."
+
+The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the
+courtyard.
+
+"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not
+lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"
+
+Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her
+eyes.
+
+"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
+
+"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth;
+enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than
+himself.
+
+A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its
+stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief
+phrases,--
+
+"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the
+road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed
+there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told
+him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed
+old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is
+no matter. But it made me late."
+
+In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an
+unconscious glimmer of appeal,--a vague fancy that for once she might,
+perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and
+contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any
+compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once
+he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
+
+But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since
+first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
+
+Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost
+ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it
+would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so
+mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it
+infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have
+had pity and charity where he had lacked them.
+
+He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue
+with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her
+bosom had been stained with blood.
+
+"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer
+to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal
+rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them
+of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them
+that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for
+a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able
+to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be
+the worse for thee."
+
+She obeyed him.
+
+There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with
+her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead
+thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.
+
+But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness,
+without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the
+dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake
+her with the kisses of his rough tongue.
+
+She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once
+spoke to her.
+
+"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good
+Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon,
+and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his
+neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl
+maddened my dame,--spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image
+away in a ditch."
+
+"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward
+through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or
+were displeased.
+
+Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very
+spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should
+also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair
+offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.
+
+The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too
+ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use;
+they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all
+rousing of their sticks, or of their words.
+
+They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay
+in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in
+pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually,
+thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold
+spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the
+hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana,
+and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended,
+shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned
+to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise
+little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol
+ringing always through her brain.
+
+The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.
+
+There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked
+fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned,
+and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare,
+and rioted over by furious cross winds.
+
+Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked
+up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,--for the first time since
+they had had to do with her,--she had committed, for the millionth time,
+a crime.
+
+There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a
+spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens
+straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping,
+and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the
+intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.
+
+There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the
+woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless
+house.
+
+The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white
+roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering
+in its light.
+
+There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought
+their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.
+
+She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,--a
+yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside
+the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged
+him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those
+bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a
+sentinel slain at his post--frozen to death in his old age after a life
+of faithfulness repaid with blows.
+
+She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had
+loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of
+the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to
+sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round
+her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.
+
+She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead,
+lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so
+that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should
+be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well
+to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of
+summer liberty and leisure.
+
+She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow
+above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and
+she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another
+for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can
+exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone,
+and love and trust each other only out of all the world.
+
+Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept
+forever in the old gray orchard, she had but one left. She went to seek
+this one.
+
+Her heart ached for a kind glance--for a word that should be neither of
+hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to know such
+a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that
+despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die hard, without murmur
+or appeal.
+
+Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to all save
+herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin, who to all save
+herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.
+
+He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way; they had the kinship
+of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent,
+savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might
+love each other in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter
+and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.
+
+She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold, and
+alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by
+his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous
+time when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream
+which was never to come true upon earth.
+
+Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed ever in it.
+
+She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the insults
+of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place; but each
+one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and
+killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts that had
+survived in her through all the brutalizing debasement of her life.
+
+She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood,
+and, being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of
+it, as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and
+now and then the thought crossed her--why not take a flint and a bit of
+tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow
+at the foot of the hill?
+
+She thought of it often--would she ever do it?
+
+She did not know.
+
+It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired
+a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had
+lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also?
+They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried
+to do good to one of them the others had set on her as a witch.
+
+In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through
+their hamlet to seek Marcellin.
+
+The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows
+and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a
+solitary tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the
+snowdrifts; here and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of
+ice that covered all the streams and pools.
+
+The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with
+all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her
+scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her shirt,
+and it gripped fast the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which
+the reward for her charity had taught her--a lesson not lightly to be
+forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.
+
+In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbors, kept
+high festival for a fresh year begun.
+
+Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and
+many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood
+cracking and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many
+of their interiors as she went by in the shadow without.
+
+In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, roasting chestnuts
+in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another they romped with
+their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.
+
+In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that
+was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung round with dried herbs and fruits,
+an old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for
+a short glad hour.
+
+In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savory odor, and
+the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she watched her
+youngest-born playing with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors,
+and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.
+
+In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a wife that day, kept
+open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing to the music of
+a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with
+many-hued ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in the
+noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still woods, and in the
+midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height of the hill, the
+little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.
+
+She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on her knife.
+
+"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation that
+possessed her--"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a bonfire they
+would have for their feasting!"
+
+The thought was sweet to her.
+
+Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do
+well and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil
+sorcery.
+
+She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to
+see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them
+with a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives,
+"Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"
+
+Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint and
+tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to
+pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.
+
+She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet
+to her--so sweet because so horrible.
+
+How soon their mirth would be stilled!
+
+As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the red glare that
+would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid
+flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the children's
+shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, with
+a halo of light round its head: the thing was little Bernardou, and the
+halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.
+
+He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.
+
+"I know you--you were good that night. The people all say you are
+wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back to
+gran'mere--oh, take me back!"
+
+She was startled and bewildered. This child had never mocked her, but he
+had screamed and run from her in terror, and had been told a score of
+stories that she was a devil, who could kill his body and soul.
+
+"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice was troubled,
+and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time to a child
+without being derided or screamed at in fear.
+
+"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff and cold, I know,
+and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know she would, if
+she only heard _us_. We never cried in the night but she heard in her
+sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell her--do, do tell her!"
+
+She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness
+of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and held her mute.
+
+"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him suddenly,
+glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins' house, through
+which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the
+gilded bells.
+
+"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want gran'mere," he
+said, with a sob. "They beat me often, and oh! if she knew, she would
+wake and come. Do tell her--do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex
+her, if only she will come back!"
+
+His piteous voice was drowned in tears.
+
+His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs
+had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him,
+clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in the
+cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first daisy
+of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to
+sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.
+
+It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he
+wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in
+another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they expected
+him to be.
+
+It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and
+they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.
+
+"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary
+softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and
+fierce temper. "I wish I could."
+
+For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds,
+and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away
+and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which
+she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the
+snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither
+where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too
+dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the
+world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and
+dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing
+be hostile to her.
+
+Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that
+eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.
+
+As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts,
+a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside
+Flandrin's house,--
+
+"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out
+there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."
+
+The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she
+was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place
+and the children in order.
+
+"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch
+that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine
+whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst
+bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."
+
+She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above
+the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the
+tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them
+a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.
+
+Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then
+she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and
+carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.
+
+She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's words
+had touched and softened her, she remembered the long patient bitter
+life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second
+year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last, "God is good."
+
+"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for Him, and He seems to care
+nothing for them whether they be old or young."
+
+Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the house in which
+little Bernardou was sheltered.
+
+His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet
+to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveler upon the
+highest Alpine summits--a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste.
+
+The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the
+fields that were in summer all one scarlet group of poppies.
+
+The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells
+in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was
+still.
+
+On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in
+the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in
+the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and
+a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.
+
+In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten--the
+dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.
+
+Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her
+enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had
+turned.
+
+But she walked on steadily.
+
+At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one
+welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that
+would look on her without a frown.
+
+It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail
+drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of
+her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and
+give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each
+other, and want no other cheer or comrade.
+
+It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the
+poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year's-night she
+had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had
+loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad,
+though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the
+hearth had been cold.
+
+She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her
+spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its
+door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached
+the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without
+derision or told her woes without condemnation.
+
+His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the
+side of a stream.
+
+A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of
+its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel
+rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only
+sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on
+the rarefied sharp air.
+
+She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night,
+and went to the door and pushed against it to open it--it was locked.
+
+She struck it with her hand.
+
+"Open, Marcellin--open quickly. It is only I."
+
+There was no answer.
+
+She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.
+
+A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull
+light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is
+there?"
+
+"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an
+hour with you. Is anything amiss?"
+
+The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her,
+peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire,
+and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.
+
+"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.
+
+"Marcellin, yes--where is he?"
+
+"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my
+place."
+
+"Died!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her
+limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich
+and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.
+
+"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that God
+would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never
+thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years
+for him--you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger
+than the saints--somehow. You are that thing of Ypres, are you not? Get
+you gone!"
+
+"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.
+
+Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set
+on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.
+
+"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he
+dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole
+day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what
+can one do?----and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest
+has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe
+nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take
+your foot from my door!"
+
+Folle-Farine stood motionless.
+
+"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.
+
+"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night
+from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet
+dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do
+not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer--anyways he
+was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with
+the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch
+him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last
+they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He
+died just under the great Calvary--it was like his blasphemy. They have
+put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a
+saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God,
+and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you
+gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul
+fiend for him--they are surely together now."
+
+And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.
+
+"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she muttered, as
+she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.
+
+Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way
+through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.
+
+"He died alone--he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she
+crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate
+was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one
+friend on earth.
+
+The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness
+to all the maledictions of men.
+
+The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing
+glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with
+the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,--these which were
+so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on
+soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell
+as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.
+
+For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her
+strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower
+in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the
+public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a
+hundred years.
+
+For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her
+life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed
+itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and
+many sighs of shuddering breezes.
+
+The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half
+the heavens.
+
+There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
+the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
+the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.
+
+Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
+black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard;
+blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam;
+driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither
+and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the
+winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops
+and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.
+
+The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
+life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
+the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
+
+Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
+boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
+went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
+early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
+face.
+
+A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
+sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and,
+striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing
+wall within.
+
+It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a
+prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged
+slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an
+old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood
+among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
+
+A man watched the spider as it went.
+
+It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
+glow of the sunken sun.
+
+It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
+on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
+breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
+troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
+for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
+and multiplied.
+
+It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
+whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
+who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
+
+This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
+also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.
+
+He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun
+die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
+
+For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
+northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
+been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
+twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his
+trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.
+
+He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst
+the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
+bitter to the rich.
+
+But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart
+in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his
+yielding to their torments.
+
+He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what
+they gained, would have held him accursed--the madness that starves and
+is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
+For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the
+future who cares,--save the madmen themselves?
+
+He watched the spider as it went.
+
+It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
+story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
+kingdom--if only in dreams.
+
+This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth;
+and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and
+power and worth.
+
+The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the
+vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the
+floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon
+the dull rugged surface of stone.
+
+Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.
+
+It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at
+length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
+swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast
+about.
+
+Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm,
+in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
+begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
+tropic flower.
+
+It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a
+gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
+been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
+Night's Dream.
+
+A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
+lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.
+
+A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow
+chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
+that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that
+glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
+dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
+sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a
+lotus-leaf.
+
+A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells
+to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
+
+The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread
+out their pale gold on the level of the floor.
+
+It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed,
+wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to
+the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the
+night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst
+yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.
+
+It lived before its time,--and it was like the human soul, which, being
+born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering
+in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in
+wretchedness.
+
+It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
+life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale
+flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which
+the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent
+wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.
+
+There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
+shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.
+
+The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
+the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead
+violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and
+forgotten.
+
+The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
+teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in
+plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its
+hoard.
+
+He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth.
+Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols
+of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life
+which perishes of divine desire.
+
+Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand
+and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.
+
+His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his
+breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured
+indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even
+this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to
+die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows
+of winter hid all offal from its fangs.
+
+It was horrible.
+
+He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels
+of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all--the
+sheer animal need of food. "_J'avais quelque chose la!_" was, perhaps,
+the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the
+guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was
+the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with
+it.
+
+When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and
+sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in
+his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave
+life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights,
+because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which
+yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is
+the agony of Prometheus.
+
+With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which
+moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which
+compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
+worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
+
+Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety,
+of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs
+that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly
+fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon
+earth.
+
+Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and
+made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will
+be that in him greater than himself, which he knows--and cannot know
+without some fierce wrench and pang--will be numbed and made impotent,
+and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all
+that men behold of death.
+
+It was so with this man now.
+
+Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of
+obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he
+believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a
+purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his
+power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die;
+it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any
+toothless snake would perish in its swamp.
+
+He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had
+spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of
+the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the
+title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.
+
+For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly
+as he looked:
+
+"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my
+body in a ditch," he thought.
+
+And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he
+instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and
+took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of
+the lamp behind him.
+
+They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some
+housewife's kitchen-stove.
+
+What matter?
+
+He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his
+soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as
+his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had
+power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.
+
+Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.
+
+He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire
+seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and
+choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his
+naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.
+
+He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more
+torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and
+manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this
+slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.
+
+He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that
+uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of
+release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.
+
+He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its
+throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn--it might be
+before midnight--this agony would grow so great that it would conquer
+him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of
+besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a
+knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.
+
+Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any
+other thing than of the passion that ruled him.
+
+Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a
+sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some
+broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed
+lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a
+dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;--all these he gazed on and
+touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or
+deepened line of his chalk stylus.
+
+All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely
+sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to
+him,--"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave _us_ alone?"
+
+And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and
+wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the
+night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon
+him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed
+the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased,
+confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men
+wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards
+senseless on his hearth.
+
+The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in
+through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by,
+uttering weary cries against the storm.
+
+On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its
+filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the
+hearth, and saying in its heart,--"Thou Fool!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water
+through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and
+where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black
+timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin,
+of fiend and of martyr.
+
+She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with
+her foot.
+
+The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river
+inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were
+seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she
+glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily,
+dreamily.
+
+She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and
+grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at
+the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with
+their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce
+sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats
+of the land.
+
+Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free
+effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the
+water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some
+lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement
+arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old
+creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of
+some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year
+fragrant in her boddice.
+
+The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the
+dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely
+interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which
+brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and
+leaning on their swords.
+
+In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round
+the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the
+kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at
+soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire had worn in
+the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned
+glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her
+fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous
+laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved
+ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high
+oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face,
+bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping
+on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had
+charge of, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her
+own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,--only--and
+therefore hopeless.
+
+All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the
+water below.
+
+She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned
+them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures
+of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned
+bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.
+
+Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt,
+these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and
+enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always
+together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people,
+whose god on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who
+toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and
+scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and
+content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling
+to one another, and in a way be glad.
+
+Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted
+with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it
+was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of
+ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.
+
+As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw that it stood
+open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the
+broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open
+beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within;
+there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the
+hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp
+night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected
+and thrice-welcome guest.
+
+She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white
+cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her
+blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her,
+a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind
+her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was
+there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with
+pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and
+shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within
+shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.
+
+Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped,
+she was stirred with a vague, passionate, contemptuous wonder: what was
+this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no
+share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet----
+
+There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the
+wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the
+water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that
+severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day
+was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists
+were setting in from the sea as the night descended.
+
+She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the
+rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray
+upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the
+melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved
+the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in
+round her with the darkness.
+
+The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other
+place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy
+with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was
+the window of the gardener's wife.
+
+At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but
+some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced
+them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.
+
+The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown
+shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror
+before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both
+hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells
+brought to her from the sea.
+
+"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine,
+looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water
+with envy at her heart.
+
+She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more
+like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and
+hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked
+her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They
+cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as
+she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road
+with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or
+twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.
+
+For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had
+killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious
+people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry,
+through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and
+the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on
+her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for
+the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking
+chestnuts.
+
+It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a
+desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten
+by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so
+stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark
+repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way,
+with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories
+that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed,
+when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or
+sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to
+arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of
+hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was
+alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.
+
+She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more
+despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any
+creature.
+
+To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone;
+by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge
+and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her
+brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that
+consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people
+who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted
+him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some
+noxious beast.
+
+Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance;
+a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her.
+The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage
+into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood
+upon a crime.
+
+It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within
+her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be;
+but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and
+tow-horse,--something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and
+the dog for their services.
+
+The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury
+inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime
+could have made her free she would have seized it.
+
+She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked
+out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without
+one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike
+waste.
+
+The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong
+in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by
+ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief
+for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the
+public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was
+too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the
+desert and the forest was too hot.
+
+What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she
+had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its
+mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew
+whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and
+stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to
+its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows
+where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the
+air; and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so
+vanished;--a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of
+freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a
+thing of heaven and of liberty.
+
+The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.
+
+There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.
+She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness
+of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the
+storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer
+over a bridge.
+
+There was no other light.
+
+The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe
+behind her in the still sad air.
+
+There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong
+tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many
+tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong.
+Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned
+it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river
+had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because
+legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men
+who haunted it.
+
+No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after
+nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry
+grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his
+market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one
+trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.
+
+To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.
+
+The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts,
+with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and
+always wondrous beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and
+with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold
+in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream
+that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that
+wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.
+
+For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life
+or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created
+thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.
+
+As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with
+fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew
+wilder yet.
+
+There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of
+tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom.
+The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the
+boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were
+submerged.
+
+She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all
+that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it
+should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the
+river reeds.
+
+For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her
+own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to
+Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it
+would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.
+
+As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the
+darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been
+placed so low down against the shore, that its front walls, strong of
+hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the
+dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and
+brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of
+one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square
+casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted
+by a sickly glimmer of the moon.
+
+Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by
+a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes
+entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of
+setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the
+land, and use her force to push it off into the current.
+
+She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her
+kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the
+sand, and stood to her waist in the water.
+
+But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it
+lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked
+and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her
+boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.
+
+She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had
+time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window
+behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird
+had come.
+
+She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp
+within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she
+paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.
+
+The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays
+of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level
+with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain
+fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this
+legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone;
+dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to
+and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in
+the capitals of its columns.
+
+No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its
+way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.
+
+She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had
+gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had
+never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors
+in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.
+
+Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed--believed that the
+dead lived and gathered there.
+
+White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all
+motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible
+loveliness of death.
+
+In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the
+tombs of the kings of the East.
+
+Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a
+leaf; yet she was not afraid.
+
+A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her
+life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she
+had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in
+the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and
+only told that it was day by blows.
+
+She had no fear of them--these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the
+lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the
+sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture
+and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if
+these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal
+homes--whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?
+
+It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.
+
+She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself
+lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the
+floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world--stood
+motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw
+breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven
+from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected
+back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy
+light on all the forms around her.
+
+"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and
+she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its
+beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower
+than the dust--a mortal amidst this great immortal host.
+
+The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with
+a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and
+impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge
+of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.
+
+They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her
+they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they
+seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of
+silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which
+she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to
+the skies at night from a sleepless bed.
+
+They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth
+was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were
+not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in
+every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the
+west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar
+groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by
+the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were
+felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.
+
+They were indeed the dead: the dead who--dying earliest, whilst yet the
+earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to
+remember them, and to count them worthy of lament--perished in their
+bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.
+
+From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her
+through the mist.
+
+Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of
+the dark sea-gates.
+
+Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on
+by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.
+
+Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight,
+on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds
+of daffodils and asphodel.
+
+Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless,
+bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of
+the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe
+increase.
+
+Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithaeron in the mad moonless
+nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that
+heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.
+
+Here at his labor, in Pherae, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest
+wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the
+kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which
+empty air could make in a hollow reed.
+
+Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos;
+their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering
+fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the
+old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the
+same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their
+coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,--the gods of the
+Night and of the Grave.
+
+These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the
+halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from
+the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor
+story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them;
+she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the
+eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of
+Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten
+love.
+
+Just so had he looked so long ago--so long!--in the deep woods at
+moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping
+waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.
+
+They had called him an outcast,--and lo!--she found him a god.
+
+She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,--wept
+with grief for the living lost forever,--wept with joy that the dead
+forever lived.
+
+Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them
+human things,--things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back
+and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain,
+rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for
+once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with
+her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain,
+and looked around her fearfully.
+
+She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as
+mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.
+
+As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body
+of a man.
+
+It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare;
+upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs
+were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the
+moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.
+
+In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a
+statue, in that passionless rest,--that dread repose.
+
+Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent
+forward and looked closer on his face.
+
+He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,--not as they
+were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and
+with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,--but
+dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath
+frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the
+burden of their sin and woe.
+
+She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,--sorrowful,
+because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had
+the shadow of mortality upon him.
+
+Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as
+though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and
+wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a
+divine, but a human form,--dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a
+man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love
+to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of
+their own faults and follies.
+
+Had the gods slain him--being a mortal--for his entrance there?
+
+Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.
+
+He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden,
+full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very
+strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and
+rugged faces of the populace around her.
+
+That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of
+that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest
+beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some
+murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its
+fall.
+
+"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she
+thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,--he,--only a man, and
+dead?"
+
+The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time
+or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies
+seem possible to her as truth.
+
+Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the
+immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an
+infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet,
+having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.
+
+She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she
+stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe,
+but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with
+the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and
+gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide
+of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the
+lily.
+
+A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved
+her,--for he was beautiful, and he was dead.
+
+"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for
+the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he
+who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's
+face no more.
+
+The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the
+flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw
+nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence
+to his lips.
+
+On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:
+
+"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that
+dead man--perish."
+
+She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an
+irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the
+delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.
+
+She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods,
+if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned;
+whilst he who lay dead--though so still and so white, and so mute and so
+powerless,--he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring
+had killed him.
+
+"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,--I am nothing--nothing. Let
+me die as the Dust dies--what matter?"
+
+The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone
+through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.
+
+He alone heard. He--the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone
+remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods--for this
+man's sake--she chose.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her
+tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the
+form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the
+hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.
+
+He was dead still;--or so she thought;--she watched him with dim
+dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.
+
+She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the
+closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his
+heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had
+brought back to him.
+
+It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a
+stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a
+nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given
+back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the
+gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of
+love; but hers--hers--shared only with the greatness she had bought for
+him.
+
+Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart;
+she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.
+
+His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster
+in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.
+
+"To die--of hunger--like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat,
+and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the
+stones.
+
+She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his
+cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her
+feet.
+
+She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of
+all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain,
+as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from
+altar fires of sacrifice.
+
+The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of
+her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.
+
+"To die--of hunger!"
+
+She muttered the phrase after him--shaken from her stupor by its gaunt
+and common truth.
+
+It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart
+rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in
+wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had
+killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had
+gathered there as to a festival to see him die.
+
+As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous
+odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has
+long fasted, almost unto death.
+
+She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon
+Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds
+of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against
+alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all
+that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had
+often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and
+wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad
+to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to
+quiet the gnawing of their entrails.
+
+She stood still beside him, and thought.
+
+All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes
+were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of
+the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head;
+this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the
+feebly beating heart;--these she saw as she would have seen the white
+outlines of a statue in the dark.
+
+He moved a little with a hollow sigh.
+
+"Bread--bread--bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"
+
+At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard
+life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the
+dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her
+poetic ignorance.
+
+The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she
+had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for
+him--that was well--if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it?
+The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone,
+she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.
+
+In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread.
+It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in
+scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch;
+she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some
+jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.
+
+That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing
+towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched
+teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand
+gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood,
+which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and
+full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that
+hour drenched with water.
+
+She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air,
+the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the
+reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had
+seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of
+that fell disease.
+
+There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so
+much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever
+dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human
+hand--to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child--was always
+clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot
+of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged
+mercy or aid at any human hearth.
+
+She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such
+need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men,
+women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the
+land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work
+hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst
+multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to
+which appeal could in such straits be made.
+
+If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of
+it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of
+fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.
+
+What could she do? she pondered.
+
+Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she
+stood irresolute.
+
+To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft
+to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.
+
+In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.
+
+All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued
+with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most
+harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to
+her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood
+her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her
+continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to
+see the children and the maidens--those who held her accursed, and were
+themselves held so innocent and just--steal the ripe cherries from the
+stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls,
+pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie
+softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a
+soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at,
+despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless
+and her lips untouched.
+
+It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they,"
+when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on
+their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which
+she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have
+reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and
+her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone,
+though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with
+which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths
+of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all
+other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for
+sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never
+sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose
+face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to
+the thing which she abhorred.
+
+She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of
+passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens
+around her were haunted;--so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless
+arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and
+taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of
+their vengeful and indolent masters.
+
+She had been so proud!--and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this
+immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had
+worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her
+as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure
+she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.
+
+It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she
+had offered for his to the gods.
+
+She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn
+with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her
+straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the
+darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that
+burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.
+
+"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to
+swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in
+the delirium of his brain.
+
+The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung
+her to action as the spur stings a horse.
+
+She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open
+portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water;
+she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and
+climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched
+into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and
+the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Ypres.
+
+It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by
+her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in
+water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot
+deep.
+
+She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue,
+of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the
+black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking
+strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran
+hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of
+was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her
+the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of
+lead,--the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the
+watch of the cruel gods.
+
+She reached Ypres, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog
+does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the
+driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for
+even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts
+had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
+
+As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard,
+stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom,
+with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as
+familiar by night as day.
+
+The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The
+shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma
+and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might
+save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.
+
+She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network
+of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her
+own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the
+body of the house.
+
+Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the
+staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses
+to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near
+at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.
+
+She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She
+did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done,
+that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor,
+she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue.
+She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she
+had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to
+execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred
+in her, blood and bone.
+
+Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly
+found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were
+wanted in the house were stored.
+
+The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly,
+but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It
+had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all
+communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper
+casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents;
+the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter
+in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats
+floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to
+sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.
+
+Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint
+gray glimmer from the clearing skies.
+
+A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters
+fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the
+chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a
+twittering outcry.
+
+She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly
+forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket
+that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food
+as was to be found there--loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a
+flask of the richest wine--wine of the south, of the hue of the violet,
+sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.
+
+That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of
+fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square,
+and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and
+lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the
+agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.
+
+She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then
+threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the
+osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.
+
+She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.
+
+She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to
+walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets
+roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she
+felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her
+limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and
+unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the
+reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the
+darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were
+blowing with a sound like the sea.
+
+She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet,
+holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.
+
+Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow
+against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her.
+It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes
+as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the
+outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of
+the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the
+boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.
+
+The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays
+upon the path she followed.
+
+At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy;
+the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and
+gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little
+creek.
+
+She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.
+
+"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was
+the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who
+flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of
+their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her;
+it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the
+dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had
+avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in
+Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten
+figs for sweet.
+
+For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who
+cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres
+a nation for a throne.
+
+She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on
+through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load:--in Christ's name
+they would have seized her as a thief.
+
+The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight
+was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower,
+and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the
+basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below,
+then again followed them herself.
+
+Her heart thrilled as she entered.
+
+Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her
+absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with
+her, they had not raised him from the dead.
+
+"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet
+yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.
+
+She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on
+fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a
+little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop
+through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
+
+The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a
+rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker
+movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his
+mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made
+nestless by the hurricane.
+
+He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without
+knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a
+strong shudder shook him.
+
+His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.
+
+"J'avais quelque chose la!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice
+rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.
+
+"J'avais quelque chose la!" and with a sigh he fell back once more--his
+head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.
+
+Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with
+him--that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died
+like a dog, powerless to save them.
+
+The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath--the one
+bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp
+out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs--stayed on the
+blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its
+helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create--that
+once it had been clear to record--that once it had dreamed the dreams
+which save men from the life of the swine--that once it had told to the
+world the truth divested of lies,--and that none had seen, none had
+listened, none had believed.
+
+There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
+brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
+reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these
+have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent;
+like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a
+swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon
+ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all
+joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of
+the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
+theft of the parasite.
+
+She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
+reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
+but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's
+agony.
+
+For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.
+
+For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor
+and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
+
+"I am _yours_! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the
+light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of
+negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones
+that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on
+the winds? Shall I die so? I?--the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"
+
+Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the
+darkness over the expanse of the flood.
+
+The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and
+moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, awakened and afraid,
+came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation
+of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge
+from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of
+the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the
+granaries above.
+
+She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard
+was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the
+human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.
+
+The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing
+eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the
+Lykegenes toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to
+grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.
+
+But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human
+form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half
+sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of
+the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the
+day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the
+beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
+
+He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times
+of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious,
+words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament
+for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.
+
+After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less
+frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire,
+and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer
+time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he
+grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he
+sank to a deep sleep.
+
+The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed
+creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an
+instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in
+this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of
+Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and
+visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all
+thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act
+like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less
+dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that
+unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and
+unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.
+
+To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and
+he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as
+she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have
+found frozen in the woods of winter.
+
+His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture
+that gave him easiest rest.
+
+With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the
+lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the
+inaudible beating of his heart.
+
+Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like
+the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses
+and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.
+
+For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from
+off her ear she was happy.
+
+She did not ask wherefore,--neither of herself or of the gods did she
+question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.
+
+She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he
+slept, and was content.
+
+So the hours passed.
+
+Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of
+waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.
+
+Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen
+world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.
+
+He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as
+it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too
+great sweetness of a summer shower.
+
+It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted
+with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close
+in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been
+conscious;--under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill
+stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming
+of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly
+human.
+
+A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly
+from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.
+
+It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.
+
+She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows
+it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and
+market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all
+aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious,
+thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and
+dared not, because her teeth were strong.
+
+She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as
+she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed
+amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and
+unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine
+back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.
+
+Now,--as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the
+hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun
+was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot
+shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.
+
+She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted
+above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the
+boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water,
+and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the
+shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her
+arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin
+and the curves of her shining shoulders.
+
+A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as
+she was;--wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes,
+outcast and ashamed.
+
+She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even
+as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in
+theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their
+water-world in tempest.
+
+She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more
+conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the
+earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those
+eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in
+abhorrence and in scorn;--and that he could have any other look, for
+her, she had no thought.
+
+She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any
+human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every
+tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in
+welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.
+
+For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;--that
+she had known when she had offered it.
+
+She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall,
+through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was
+flushed as with some great guilt.
+
+With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.
+
+With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy
+and shame.
+
+The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on
+her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the
+creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men
+had made her.
+
+At the casement, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon
+him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky
+and watery mists of the cold dawn.
+
+She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her
+flight.
+
+The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness
+and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.
+
+He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a
+fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like
+an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with
+water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with
+mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the
+half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him
+all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of
+honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms
+tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed,
+fair and free.
+
+But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened
+they had passed.
+
+Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she
+went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the
+sighing rushes.
+
+The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road
+was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the
+ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in
+any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the
+half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Ypres.
+
+The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all
+the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but
+the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats
+went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the
+night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse
+had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
+
+From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the
+fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its
+fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and
+with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.
+
+Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the
+wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns
+sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a
+sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath
+of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken
+primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.
+
+A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh
+moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin
+had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the
+wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill
+notes of woe.
+
+Folle-Farine saw nothing.
+
+She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of
+long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or
+cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.
+
+Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the
+place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any
+other thing than blows.
+
+As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it,
+though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in
+the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of
+honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion
+fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same
+she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he
+had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly;
+and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and
+thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or
+not.
+
+It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all
+creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her
+right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be
+beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.
+
+The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.
+
+Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he
+was weighing corn for the grinding.
+
+"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.
+
+She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.
+
+He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the
+same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.
+
+"Where is the boat?--that is worth more than your body. And soul you
+have none."
+
+She raised her head and looked upward.
+
+"I have lost the boat."
+
+She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she
+had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel,
+he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for
+many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes
+and the cheerless grassy ways.
+
+That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but
+this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from
+the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the
+confusion of the saints God.
+
+"Drifted where?"
+
+"I do not know--on the face of the flood,--with the tide."
+
+"You had left it loose."
+
+"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It
+went adrift."
+
+"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"
+
+"You can."
+
+"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat--find it above
+or below water--or to the town prison you go as a thief."
+
+The word smote her with a sudden pang.
+
+For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in
+silence at his bidding.
+
+In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets,
+she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely
+less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon
+the cross worked no miracles for her;--a child of sin.
+
+For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to
+drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink
+upon the road. She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in
+their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might
+have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the
+few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.
+
+She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she
+could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do
+for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze,
+she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being
+blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and
+fast as in a net.
+
+At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the
+entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her
+homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against
+the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar,
+away to the northward, in the full sunrise.
+
+It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Ypres,
+brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their
+boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy
+breaths of charity.
+
+She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and
+delving in the red and chilly day.
+
+She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river
+weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.
+
+"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was
+faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for
+once was bowed.
+
+He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at
+his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed
+such weakness neither in his eye nor words.
+
+"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will
+spare you half the stripes:--strip."
+
+Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow
+of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough
+garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness,
+drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.
+
+"I am guilty--this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:--she was
+thinking of her theft.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager
+and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with
+fervent and rapturous oratory.
+
+It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter
+world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding
+leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning
+the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to
+blossom.
+
+The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of
+fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the
+mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty
+subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a
+manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a
+mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great
+sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed
+them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it
+stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself,
+but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic
+and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land,
+raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and
+who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned
+and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a
+genius heaven-sent.
+
+When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the
+mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any
+sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way
+beautiful, had come upon him.
+
+He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations;
+and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never
+assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never
+tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village;
+mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the
+dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which
+thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times,
+the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.
+
+He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and
+very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on
+the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its
+sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under
+the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.
+
+Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast
+green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye
+could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and
+foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the
+force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to
+princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great
+cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness
+and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of
+men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the
+nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high
+endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And
+his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them,
+telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had
+gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.
+
+This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of
+the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening
+with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the
+purple pines:
+
+"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among
+the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
+
+"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the
+people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves,
+'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still
+or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for
+him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they
+dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
+were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
+
+"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For
+he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended upon him as
+wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and
+with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept
+it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble
+palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart
+was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury,
+with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to
+gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in
+other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury
+overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in
+the short space of a single summer-day.
+
+"But it was bought with a price.
+
+"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his
+path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he
+called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words
+across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
+metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the
+red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
+pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at
+eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here
+at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his
+best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into
+his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met
+his own.
+
+"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this
+agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
+was wealth.
+
+"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will
+barter its life away.
+
+"Look you,--this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish,
+even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its
+own fulfilled desire.
+
+"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to
+men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.
+
+"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's lust
+of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of
+wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever
+falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with
+poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old
+green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every
+gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed,
+because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one
+vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field,
+nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and
+know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence
+of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the
+old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough,
+and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and
+cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead,
+and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will
+perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened
+hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that
+the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them,
+but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and
+health, holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."
+
+His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the
+sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on the
+shore.
+
+The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had
+spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were the words of truth.
+
+Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang, clear,
+scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of youth:
+
+"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or bird, or
+rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and mass my
+armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered? You are
+mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you know
+not, and that never has smiled upon you."
+
+The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his hand; he
+was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that curled
+loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like
+steel in their scorn.
+
+The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which
+blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash
+doubter from that sacred audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their
+hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.
+
+"Is it thee, Arslan? Dost thou praise gold?--I thought thou hadst
+greater gods."
+
+The boy hung his head and his face flushed.
+
+"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And without power what is
+life?"
+
+And he went on his way out from the people, with the dead bird, which he
+had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mysteries of
+its silvery hues.
+
+The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.
+
+"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured. "For there is
+that in him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it, if he
+would."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+And the words of the Preacher had come true; so true that the boy Arslan
+grown to manhood, had dreamed of fame, and following the genius in him,
+and having failed to force the world to faith in him, had dropped down
+dying on a cold hearth, for sheer lack of bread, under the eyes of the
+gods.
+
+It had long been day when he awoke.
+
+The wood smouldered, still warming the stone chamber. The owls that
+nested in the ceiling of the hall were beating their wings impatiently
+against the closed casements, blind with the light and unable to return
+to their haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside him on the
+floor; the fire had scared the rats from theft.
+
+He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate and drank with the
+avidity of long fast. Then he stared around him blankly, blinded like
+the owls.
+
+It seemed to him that he had been dead; and had risen from the grave.
+
+"It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space," he muttered
+dully.
+
+His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weariness. He did not
+reason. He only felt.
+
+His mind was a blank.
+
+Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered
+that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, endured much
+torment of the body, had fallen headlong and lost his consciousness.
+This was all he could recall.
+
+He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of
+brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked
+at the gray closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There
+was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood
+and the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs to render the
+place different from what it had been when he last had seen it.
+
+He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had
+suffered, and must have slept.
+
+Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to
+him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold
+and hunger; that some one must have seen and succored his necessity; and
+that the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been
+the food of alms.
+
+His limbs writhed and his teeth clinched as the thought stole on him.
+
+To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking
+aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in
+all the vigor of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be
+saved by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the
+travail of all the barren years, only at their close to be called back
+to life by aid that was degradation!
+
+He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes
+must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent
+over him in his misery. Some other human form must have been near his in
+this hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have
+been; he would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in
+its swamp or a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him
+tenfold preferable to a life restored to him by such a means as this.
+
+Death before accomplishment is a failure, yet withal may be great; but
+life paved by alms is a failure, and a failure forever inglorious.
+
+So the shame of this ransom from death far outweighed with him the
+benefit.
+
+"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul against those
+unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation.
+"Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was
+passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"
+
+And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only
+birthright--freedom.
+
+Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would soon
+have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his
+wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some miser
+at prayers, for a bag of gold--rather crime than the debt of a beggar.
+
+So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced
+humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal
+craving, he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his
+own.
+
+He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad
+only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against
+this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease and
+ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes in
+his teeth so long as his life should last.
+
+He arose slowly and staggered to the casement.
+
+He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so
+long desired. He knew that he had been starving long--how long? Long
+enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively
+he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine cask,
+the wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life;
+they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.
+
+Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.
+
+That was his only thanksgiving.
+
+The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon
+the rising day--a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness,
+after the deluge of the rains.
+
+The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed
+over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists floated
+before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave back, as
+in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries, and
+the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.
+
+On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to
+drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes, the
+great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pursuing
+their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in the
+twilight of the damp gray vapor; a world half seen, half shrouded,
+lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden
+powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its visions
+of the future.
+
+"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled wearily as he
+said it.
+
+Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague light; in
+that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met heaven.
+
+Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of
+moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It
+was beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no
+sound except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor,
+whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery
+air; this colorless transparent exhalation, breathing up from the land
+to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every
+common and familiar form became transfigured.
+
+It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely
+by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.
+
+Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and
+things full of anguish, had their being:--the cattle in the
+slaughter-houses; the drunkard in the hovels; disease and debauch and
+famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the
+hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the
+inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent,
+cramped, and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured,
+forever blameless, yet forever accursed;--all these were there beneath
+that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender
+shafts of spires and the chimes of half-heard bells.
+
+He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the
+vapors shifted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a
+disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and casement answered
+casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved
+daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at
+their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went
+forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.
+
+Then he turned away.
+
+The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven
+out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple
+truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in
+his necessity and succored.
+
+He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the
+refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his
+shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.
+
+He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labor, this
+abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being
+derided for his pains, while other men prostituted their powers to base
+use and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and applause; he had
+grown tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew
+them not when it beheld them.
+
+He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had
+passion, and had manhood. Tired--utterly, because he was destitute of
+all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.
+
+"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any worth." It does
+not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be lying dying in old
+age to know thus much in all truth and all bitterness.
+
+"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart, as he turned
+aside from the risen sun.
+
+He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of
+existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by
+death ere we can set it straight.
+
+He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling
+greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been
+fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had
+been never reached.
+
+As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream that rushed
+beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the opposite wall, where the
+white shapes of his cartoons were caught by the awakening sun.
+
+The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted
+at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them;
+yet with the morning they arose, stainless, noble, undefiled.
+
+Among them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its
+full radiance.
+
+This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic
+symmetrical supple form of a man who was also a god.
+
+In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a
+divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on
+that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal
+tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the
+corn-mill he labored, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that
+toiled beside him.
+
+For it was the great Apollo in Pherae.
+
+The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained
+with murder; the beauty which had the light and luster of the sun had
+been darkened with passion and with crime; the will which no other on
+earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastisement
+of Zeus.
+
+He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh
+with fruitfulness and gladness,--he whose prophetic sight beheld all
+things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the
+doom of all unspent ages,--he, the Far-Striking King, labored here
+beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the gods, and yet a slave.
+
+In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io paean sounded still.
+
+Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of
+sacrifice.
+
+With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of
+Leto's son.
+
+The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of
+Delphinios.
+
+At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still
+breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and
+still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him
+wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding
+from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly
+to bear his yoke in Thessaly.
+
+Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his
+bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow
+mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen
+eyes, even as though he cried:
+
+"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to
+me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and
+the herds? For seven chords strung on a shell--for a melody not even
+thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine
+empire to me! Will human ears give heed to thy song, now thy scepter has
+passed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision
+foreseeing the future. O god! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit
+thee now?"
+
+Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes
+of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale
+and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pherae.
+
+For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
+the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
+to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
+Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds,
+and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
+no ear, dully mortal, can hear.
+
+And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
+calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
+and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslan buried
+his face in his hands and wept.
+
+He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
+chained god in Pherae bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
+carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
+mill to grind for bread.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by
+the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds;
+dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the
+bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other
+end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which
+the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in
+the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of
+the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable luster above a sea of
+phosphorescent fire; those were Arslan's earliest memories--those had
+made him what he was.
+
+In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a
+few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with
+torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed
+by more than a day's journey from any other of the habitations of men.
+
+There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely
+springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the
+white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and
+glorious summers, when the children's eyes saw the elves kiss the roses,
+and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair
+hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the
+long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all
+things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the
+wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed
+over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood
+fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told
+strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep,
+prayed God to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen
+in the snow.
+
+In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of
+stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there
+was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to
+the church. It was the house of the pastor.
+
+The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of
+his life,--save a few that he had passed in a town as a student,--and he
+had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than
+this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of
+tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open
+weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his
+herb-garden, and his few sheep.
+
+On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself
+believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the
+young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.
+
+He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he
+was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he
+loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to
+torture the innocent.
+
+It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like
+music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own
+blue skies on a summer night.
+
+She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the
+old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her
+with an intense power; she desired passionately without knowing what she
+desired.
+
+The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls'
+garland of alpine flowers, the youths' singing in the brief rose
+twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep
+midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old
+Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to
+her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly;
+beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one
+day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her,
+and she went--whither?
+
+They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their
+mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a
+prison. They could not tell.
+
+They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did
+not even curse their God because they had given life to a woman-child.
+
+After awhile they heard of her.
+
+She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud,
+she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice
+which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the
+nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief
+words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever
+ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon--pardon
+for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.
+
+The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the
+heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself;
+but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does
+not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was
+a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the
+old man was left alone.
+
+The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice,
+severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the
+letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he
+chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between
+them rather than any division raised by her ingratitude and oblivion.
+
+The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking
+up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing
+with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the
+red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain
+grasses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing
+down the passes, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling
+the maidens to the dance.
+
+In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining
+above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with
+the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a
+lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a
+half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of
+the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell
+at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned
+she had given birth to a male child and was dead.
+
+Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury,
+malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her
+even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abasement,
+she had no strength.
+
+She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no
+name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslan.
+
+When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with
+her white large limbs folded to rest, and her noble fair face calm as a
+mask of marble, the old pastor knew little--nothing--of what her life
+through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a
+word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had
+triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw.
+Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had
+lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been
+eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she
+had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world
+to be able to learn.
+
+That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native
+mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he
+knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.
+
+In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that
+strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the
+crown of them nor the root.
+
+The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and
+stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom
+their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the multitude: and
+who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled
+fearlessly at the noonday sun.
+
+The child had his mother's Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble
+statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his
+free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide,
+wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection.
+The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad
+was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained
+their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was
+never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke
+with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them
+extraordinary in one so young.
+
+But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged
+with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and
+braced him with a scholar's lore and by a mountaineer's exposure; so
+that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken
+old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his
+age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to
+guide it justly.
+
+The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the
+spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape
+the dire perils of that world in which his mother's life had been caught
+and consumed like a moth's in flame. But Arslan's eyes looked ever
+across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother's;
+and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was
+silent.
+
+Moreover, he--who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of
+pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and
+lindens,--he had the gift of art in him.
+
+He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and
+unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of
+his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he
+drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn
+granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at
+liberty for his usage.
+
+When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little.
+"I will never leave the old man," he made answer; and he kept his word.
+Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply,
+after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were passed in the open
+air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst
+the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely
+forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or
+away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great
+arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the shore
+as a panther its prey.
+
+On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his
+mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life
+of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with
+the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the
+arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circumstance thus
+held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full
+shape and full stature.
+
+Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the
+patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to
+be lost again.
+
+In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's
+house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a
+mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers
+withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above
+their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there
+were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving
+woman.
+
+The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and
+the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or
+fuel, or any ray of light.
+
+The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by
+in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising
+God often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his
+strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the
+dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day
+had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and
+still praising God who had rewarded his innocence with shame and
+recompensed his service with agony.
+
+For two more days and nights Arslan remained in his living tomb,
+enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his
+hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without
+companionship.
+
+On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had
+labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.
+
+As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and passed over the
+mountains, seeking a new world.
+
+His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it
+save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall
+stone-pines; the old Norse passion of wandering was in his veins as it
+had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried
+freedom, passion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he
+went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's
+between the hills.
+
+He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of
+triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of
+old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs,
+had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves
+and in the teeth of an adverse wind.
+
+He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless;
+he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those
+still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest
+possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm
+and cattle to Arslan; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and
+vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslan, when he
+became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he
+went without care for the future on this score into the world of men;
+his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper
+compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism;
+his one passion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but
+half savage in its intensity.
+
+From that spring, when he had passed away from his birthplace as the
+winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain
+flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs,
+until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before
+the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and
+all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.
+
+Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds,
+and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his
+country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were
+in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure--as yet.
+
+In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme
+north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with
+Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their
+miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw;--the
+pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white,
+snow-world, the red moon fantastic and horrible in a sky of steel, the
+horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of
+the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had passed many
+seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal
+desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has
+either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often
+weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its
+inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men's wants and
+weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the
+works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the
+voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything
+he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.
+
+Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill,
+and being for the other half too sensual.
+
+The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height
+and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not
+one man in a million knew his name.
+
+During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an
+undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity
+in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it
+requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath
+the sun; he had studied the passions in all their deformities, as well
+as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in
+pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries,
+he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned
+back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight
+into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare
+himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his
+brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held
+needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling
+beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore
+of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors
+of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and
+purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl's cheek, the
+rottenness of corruption on a dead man's limbs, the hellish tint of a
+brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he
+studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save
+for one end,--knowledge and art.
+
+So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that it seemed to have
+left him without other passions; even as the surgeon dissects the fair
+lifeless body of some woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or sex,
+only intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, which he
+seeks therein, so did he study the physical beauty of women and their
+mortal corruption, without other memories than those of art. He would
+see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a goddess,
+and would think only to himself,--"How shall I render this so that on my
+canvas it shall live once more?"
+
+One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man was stabbed,--a
+young Maronite,--who lay dying in the roadway, without sign or sound,
+whilst his assassins fled; the silver Syrian moon shining full on his
+white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted
+on the dagger he had been spared no time to use; a famished street dog
+smelling at his blood. Arslan, passing through the city, saw and paused
+beside him; stood still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched
+figure; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, rigid face,
+the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the
+wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, following on his steps,
+joined him a little later, and started from his side in horror.
+
+"My God! what do you do there?" he cried. "Do you not see?--the man is
+dying."
+
+Arslan looked up--"I had not thought of that," he answered.
+
+It was thus always with him.
+
+He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to
+women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him,
+and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had passions, they
+had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of
+noon, half indifferent, half lustful, to strike fiercely what comes
+before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.
+
+But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet
+recompensed him nothing.
+
+Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them;
+they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.
+
+His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems
+impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed
+forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be
+acceptable to the multitude. They were compounded of an idealism clear
+and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They
+were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world,
+which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every
+art, would have none of them.
+
+So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts
+been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;--travel,
+study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends,
+utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in
+peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their
+common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though
+it had appeared inexhaustible on the shores of the north sea. His labors
+also were costly, and they brought him no return.
+
+The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the
+world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to
+find himself face to face with beggary.
+
+His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.
+
+All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other
+painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations
+themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his
+compeers and the terror of the multitudes. They hurled against him the
+old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain;
+and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own
+cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike
+obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and
+they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it
+without remorse, and even with contentment.
+
+He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he
+possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute,
+if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it
+cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused
+utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty
+to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prostitute it; he
+refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.
+
+"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always
+hooted against him.
+
+It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in
+its unwilling ears.
+
+So the words of the old Scald by his own northern seashores came to
+pass; and at length, for the sake of art, it came to this, that he
+perished for want of bread.
+
+For seven days he had been without food, except the winter berries which
+he broke off the trees without, and such handfuls of wheat as fell
+through the disjointed timbers of the ceiling, for whose possession he
+disputed with the rats.
+
+The sheer, absolute poverty which leaves the man whom it has seized
+without so much as even a crust wherewith to break his fast, is commoner
+than the world in general ever dreams. For he was now so poor that for
+many months he had been unable to buy fresh canvas on which to work, and
+had been driven to chalk the outlines of the innumerable fancies that
+pursued him upon the bare smooth gray stone walls of the old granary in
+which he dwelt.
+
+He let his life go silently away without complaint, and without effort,
+because effort had been so long unavailing, that he had discarded it in
+a contemptuous despair.
+
+He accepted his fate, seeing nothing strange in it, and nothing
+pitiable; since many men better than he had borne the like. He could not
+have altered it without beggary or theft, and he thought either of these
+worse than itself.
+
+There were hecatombs of grain, bursting their sacks, in the lofts above;
+but when, once on each eighth day, the maltster owning them sent his men
+to fetch some from the store, Arslan let the boat be moored against the
+wall, be filled with barley, and be pushed away again down the current,
+without saying once to the rowers, "Wait; I starve!"
+
+And yet, though like a miser amidst his gold, his body starved amidst
+the noble shapes and the great thoughts that his brain conceived and his
+hand called into substance, he never once dreamed of abandoning for any
+other the career to which he had dedicated himself from the earliest
+days that his boyish eyes had watched the vast arc of the arctic lights
+glow above the winter seas.
+
+Art was to him as mother, brethren, mistress, offspring, religion--all
+that other men hold dear. He had none of these, he desired none of them;
+and his genius sufficed to him in their stead.
+
+It was an intense and reckless egotism, made alike cruel and sublime by
+its intensity and purity, like the egotism of a mother in her child. To
+it, as the mother to her child, he would have sacrificed every living
+creature; but to it also, like her, he would have sacrificed his very
+existence as unhesitatingly. But it was an egotism which, though
+merciless in its tyranny, was as pure as snow in its impersonality; it
+was untainted by any grain of avarice, of vanity, of selfish desire; it
+was independent of all sympathy; it was simply and intensely the passion
+for immortality:--that sublime selfishness, that superb madness, of all
+great minds.
+
+Art had taken him for its own, as Demeter, in the days of her
+desolation, took the child Demophoon, to nurture him as her own on the
+food of gods, and to plunge him through the flames of a fire that would
+give him immortal life. As the pusillanimous and sordid fears of the
+mortal mother lost to the child for evermore the possession of Olympian
+joys and of perpetual youth, so did the craven and earthly cares of
+bodily needs hold the artist back from the radiance of the life of the
+soul, and drag him from the purifying fires. Yet he had not been utterly
+discouraged; he strove against the Metaniera of circumstance; he did his
+best to struggle free from the mortal bonds that bound him; and as the
+child Demophoon mourned for the great goddess that had nurtured him,
+refusing to be comforted, so did he turn from the base consolations of
+the senses and the appetites, and beheld ever before his sight the
+ineffable majesty of that Mater Dolorosa who once had anointed him as
+her own.
+
+Even now, as the strength returned to his limbs and the warmth to his
+veins, the old passion, the old worship, returned to him.
+
+The momentary weakness which had assailed him passed away. He shook
+himself with a bitter impatient scorn for the feebleness into which he
+had been betrayed; and glanced around him still with a dull wonder as to
+the strange chances which the night past had brought. He was incredulous
+still; he thought that his fancy, heated by long fasting, might have
+cheated him; that he must have dreamed; and that the food and fuel which
+he saw must surely have been his own.
+
+Yet reflection told him that this could not be; he remembered that for
+several weeks his last coin had been spent; that he had been glad to
+gather the birds' winter berries to crush beneath his teeth, and gather
+the dropped corn from the floor to quiet the calm of hunger; that for
+many a day there had been no fire on the hearth, and that only a frame
+which the long sunless northern winters had braced in early youth, had
+enabled him to resist and endure the cold. Therefore, it must be
+charity!
+
+Charity! as the hateful truth came home to him, he met the eyes of the
+white, slender, winged Hermes; eyes that from out that colorless and
+smiling face seemed to mock him with a cruel contempt.
+
+His was the old old story;--the rod of wealth bartered for the empty
+shell that gave forth music.
+
+Hermes seemed to know it and to jeer him.
+
+Hermes, the mischief-monger, and the trickster of men, the inventive god
+who spent his days in chicanery of his brethren, and his nights in the
+mockery of mortals; the messenger of heaven who gave Pandora to mankind;
+Hermes, the eternal type of unscrupulous Success, seemed to have voice
+and cry to him:--"Oh, fool, fool, fool! who listens for the music of the
+spheres and disdains the only melody that men have ears to hear--the
+melody of gold!"
+
+Arslan turned from the great cartoon of the gods in Pherae, and went out
+into the daylight, and stripped and plunged into the cold and turbulent
+stream. Its chillness and the combat of its current braced his nerves
+and cleared his brain.
+
+When he was clad, he left the grain-tower with the white forms of its
+gods upon its walls, and walked slowly down the bank of the river. Since
+life had been forced back upon him he knew that it was incumbent upon
+his manhood to support it by the toil of his hands if men would not
+accept the labor of his brain.
+
+Before, he had been too absorbed in his pursuit, too devoted to it body
+and soul, to seek to sustain existence by the sheer manual exertion
+which was the only thing that he had left untried for self-maintenance.
+In a manner too he was too proud; not too proud to labor, but too proud
+to easily endure to lay bare his needs to the knowledge of others. But
+now, human charity must have saved him; a charity which he hated as the
+foulest insult of his life; and he had no chance save to accept it like
+a beggar bereft of all shame, or to seek such work as would give him his
+daily bread.
+
+So he went; feebly, for he was still weak from the length of his famine.
+
+The country was well known to him, but the people not at all. He had
+come by hazard on the old ruin where he dwelt, and had stayed there full
+a year. These serene blue skies, these pale mists, these corn-clad
+slopes, these fields of plenteous abundance, these quiet homesteads,
+these fruit-harvests of this Norman plain were in soothing contrast to
+all that his life had known.
+
+These old quaint cities, these little villages that seemed always hushed
+with the sound of bells, these quiet streams on which the calm sunlight
+slept so peacefully, these green and golden lands of plenty that
+stretched away to the dim gray distant sea,--all these had had a certain
+charm for him.
+
+He had abided with them, partly because amidst them it seemed possible
+to live on a handful of wheat and a draught of water, unnoticed and
+unpitied; partly because having come hither on foot through many lands
+and by long hardship, he had paused here weary and incapable of further
+effort.
+
+Whilst the little gold he had had on him had lasted he had painted
+innumerable transcripts of its ancient buildings, and of its summer and
+autumnal landscapes. And of late--through the bitter winter--of late it
+had seemed to him that it was as well to die here as elsewhere.
+
+When a man knows that his dead limbs will be huddled into the common
+ditch of the poor, the nameless, and the unclaimed, and that his dead
+brain will only serve for soil to feed some little rank wayside
+poisonous weed, it will seldom seem of much moment in what earth the
+ditch be dug, by what feet the sward be trod.
+
+He went now on his way seeking work; he did not care what, he asked for
+any that might serve to use such strength as hunger had left in him, and
+to give him his daily bread. But this is a great thing to demand in this
+world, and so he found it.
+
+They repulsed him everywhere.
+
+They had their own people in plenty, they had their sturdy, tough,
+weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm,
+for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their
+field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of
+arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as
+the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their
+tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that
+lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.
+
+They would have none of him.
+
+"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have
+none of him.
+
+He had an evil name with them.
+
+They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been
+seen since he had come to the granary by the river.
+
+Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the
+fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son;
+the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with
+carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead--dead like the
+flowers that were still among his curls.
+
+Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton,
+half a singer and half a gypsy--handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous:
+the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden
+bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a
+fantoccini player who accompanied her.
+
+Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a
+rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier
+of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that
+date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined
+until it died.
+
+The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills
+of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to
+the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had
+arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds;
+all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circumstance.
+But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry
+always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it
+became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living
+thing should be painted by the artist Arslan would assuredly never
+survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.
+
+In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman,
+nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage
+of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long
+repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.
+
+At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early
+habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he
+would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood,
+or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one
+with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and
+bitter there as gall.
+
+He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn
+had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from
+the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on
+the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.
+
+The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that
+reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only
+breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a
+sudden passion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the
+clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were
+it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than
+here.
+
+He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the
+strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun
+as it leapt at dawn from the waters.
+
+The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests
+filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean
+ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies,
+the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these
+came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by
+him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for
+their freedom.
+
+As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and looked out upon
+the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a
+flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose
+with a hiss from the sedges.
+
+The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who
+steered by a string wound round her foot.
+
+She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her
+bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke;
+her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he
+saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of
+the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine
+bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of
+the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their
+color struck him with a sudden surprise.
+
+He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers,
+treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of
+countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen
+water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such
+limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky,
+upon the desert's edge. But here!--a face of Asia among the cornlands of
+Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with
+wonder.
+
+The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving
+the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of
+the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the
+clouds of river-mist.
+
+He watched her, only seeing a beggar-girl rowing a skiff full of corn
+down a sluggish stream. There was nothing to tell him that he was
+looking upon the savior of his body from the thralls of death; if there
+had been,--in his mood then,--he would have cursed her.
+
+The boat glided into the fog which closed behind it: a flock of
+water-birds swam out from the rushes and darted at some floating kernels
+of wheat that had fallen over the vessel's side; they fought and hissed,
+and flapped and pecked among themselves over the chance plunder; a large
+rat stole amidst them unnoticed by them in their exultation, and seized
+their leader and bore him struggling and beating the air with
+blood-stained wings away to a hole in the bank; a mongrel dog, prowling
+on the shore, hearing the wild duck's cries, splashed into the sedges,
+and swam out and gripped the rat by the neck in bold sharp fangs, and
+bore both rat and bird, bleeding and dying, to the land; the owner of
+the mongrel, a peasant, making ready the soil for colza in the low-lying
+fields, snatched the duck from the dog to bear it home for his own
+eating, and kicked his poor beast in the ribs for having ventured to
+stray without leave and to do him service without permission. "The
+dulcet harmony of the world's benignant law," thought Arslan, as he
+turned aside to enter the stone archway of his own desolate dwelling.
+"To live one must slaughter--what life can I take?"
+
+At that moment the setting sun pierced the heavy veil of the vapor, and
+glowed through the fog.
+
+The boat, now distant, glided for a moment into the ruddy haze, and was
+visible; the water around it, like a lake of flame, the white steam
+above it like the smoke of a sacrifice fire.
+
+Then the sun sank, the mists gathered closely once more, all light
+faded, and the day was dead.
+
+He felt stifled and sick at heart as he returned along the reedy shore
+towards his dreary home. He wondered dully why his life would not end:
+since the world would have none of him, neither the work of his brain
+nor the work of his hands, it seemed that he had no place in it.
+
+He was half resolved to lie down in the water there, among the reeds,
+and let it flow over his face and breast, and kiss him softly and coldly
+into the sleep of death. He had desired this many times; what held him
+back from its indulgence was not "the child within us that fears death,"
+of which Plato speaks; he had no such misgiving in him, and he believed
+death to be a simple rupture and end of all things, such as any man had
+right to seek and summon for himself; it was rather that the passion of
+his art was too strong in him, that the power to create was too intense
+in him, so that he could not willingly consign the forces and the
+fantasies of his brain to that assimilation to which he would, without
+thought or pause, have flung his body.
+
+As he entered the haunted hall which served him as his painting-room, he
+saw a fresh fire of logs upon the hearth; whose leaping flames lighted
+the place with cheerful color, and he saw on the stone bench fresh food,
+sufficient to last several days, and a brass flagon filled with wine.
+
+A curious emotion took possession of him as he looked. It was less
+surprise at the fact, for his senses told him that it was the work of
+some charity which chose to hide itself, than it was wonder as to who,
+in this strange land, where none would even let him earn his daily
+bread, knew enough or cared enough to supply his necessities thus. And
+with this there arose the same intolerant bitterness of the degradation
+of alms, the same ungrateful hatred of the succor that seemed to class
+him among beggars, which had moved him when he had awakened with the
+dawn.
+
+He felt neither tenderness nor gratitude, he was only conscious of
+humiliation.
+
+There were in him a certain coldness, strength, and indifference to
+sympathy, which, whilst they made his greatness as an artist, made his
+callousness as a man. It might have been sweet to others to find
+themselves thus remembered and pitied by another at an hour when their
+forces were spent, their fate friendless, and their hopes all dead. But
+it was not so to him, he only felt like the desert animal which,
+wounded, repulses every healing hand, and only seeks to die alone.
+
+There was only one vulnerable, one tender, nerve in him, and this was
+the instinct of his genius. He had been nurtured in hardihood, and had
+drawn in endurance with every breath of his native air; he would have
+borne physical ills without one visible pang, and would have been
+indifferent to all mortal suffering; but for the powers in him for the
+art he adored, he had a child's weakness, a woman's softness.
+
+He could not bear to die without leaving behind his life some work the
+world would cherish.
+
+Call it folly, call it madness, it is both; the ivory Zeus that was to
+give its sculptor immortality lives but in tradition; the bronze Athene
+that was to guard the Piraeus in eternal liberty has long been leveled
+with the dust; yet with every age the artist still gives life for fame,
+still cries, "Let my body perish, but make my work immortal!"
+
+It was this in him now which stirred his heart with a new and gentler
+emotion; emotion which, while half disgust was also half gladness. This
+food was alms-given, since he had not earned it, and yet--by means of
+this sheer bodily subsistence--it would be possible for him to keep
+alive those dreams, that strength by which he still believed it in him
+to compel his fame from men.
+
+He stood before the Phoebus in Pherae, thinking; it stung him with a
+bitter torment; it humiliated him with a hateful burden--this debt which
+came he knew not whence, and which he never might be able to repay. And
+yet his heart was strangely moved; it seemed to him that the fate which
+thus wantonly, and with such curious persistence, placed life back into
+his hands, must needs be one that would bear no common fruit.
+
+He opposed himself no more to it. He bent his head and broke bread, and
+ate and drank of the red wine:--he did not thank God or man as he broke
+his fast; he only looked in the mocking eyes of Hermes, and said in his
+heart:
+
+"Since I must live, I will triumph."
+
+And Hermes smiled: Hermes the wise, who had bought and sold the
+generations of men so long ago in the golden age, and who knew so well
+how they would barter away their greatness and their gladness, their
+bodies and their souls, for one sweet strain of his hollow reed pipe,
+for one sweet glance of his soulless Pandora's eyes.
+
+Hermes--Hermes the liar, Hermes the wise--knew how men's oaths were
+kept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+At the close of that day Claudis Flamma discovered that he had been
+robbed--robbed more than once: he swore and raved and tore his hair for
+loss of a little bread and meat and oil and a flagon of red wine. He did
+not suspect his granddaughter; accusing her perpetually of sins of which
+she was innocent, he did not once associate her in thought with the one
+offense which she had committed. He thought that the window of his
+storehouse had been forced from the exterior; he made no doubt that his
+spoiler was some vagabond from one of the river barges. Through such
+tramps his henhouse and his apple-lofts had often previously been
+invaded.
+
+She heard his lamentations and imprecations in unbroken silence; he did
+not question her; and without a lie she was able to keep her secret.
+
+In her own sight she had done a foul thing--a thing that her own hunger
+had never induced her to do. She did not seek to reconcile herself to
+her action by any reflection that she had only taken what she had really
+earned a thousand times over by her service; her mind was not
+sufficiently instructed, and was of too truthful a mould to be capable
+of the deft plea of a sophistry. She could dare the thing; and do it,
+and hold her peace about it, though she should be scourged to speak; but
+she could not tamper with it to excuse it to herself; for this she had
+neither the cunning nor the cowardice.
+
+Why had she done it?--done for a stranger what no pressure of need had
+made her do for her own wants? She did not ask herself; she followed her
+instinct. He allured her with his calm and kingly beauty, which was like
+nothing else her eyes had ever seen; and she was drawn by an
+irresistible attraction to this life which she had bought at the price
+of her own from the gods. Yet stronger even than this sudden human
+passion which had entered into her was the dread lest he whom she had
+ransomed from his death should he know his debt to her.
+
+Under such a dread, she never opened her lips to any one on this thing
+which she had done. Silence was natural to her; she spoke so rarely,
+that many in the province believed her to be dumb; no sympathy had ever
+been shown to her to woo her to disclose either the passions that burned
+latent in her veins, or the tenderness that trembled stifled in her
+heart.
+
+Thrice again did she take food and fuel to the water-tower undetected,
+both by the man whom she robbed, and the man whom she succored. Thrice
+again did she find her way to the desolate chamber in its owner's
+absence and refill the empty platters and warm afresh the cold blank
+hearth. Thrice again did Claudis Flamma note the diminution of his
+stores, and burnish afresh his old rusty fowling-piece, and watch half
+the night on his dark staircase, and prepare with his own hands a jar of
+poisoned honey and a bag of poisoned wheat, which he placed, with a
+cruel chuckle of grim glee, to tempt the eyes of his spoilers.
+
+But the spoiler being of his own household, saw this trap set, and was
+aware of it.
+
+In a week or two the need for these acts which she hated ceased. She
+learned that the stranger for whom she thus risked her body and soul,
+had found a boatman's work upon the water, which, although a toil rough
+and rude, and but poorly paid, still sufficed to give him bread. Though
+she herself was so pressed with hunger, many a time, that as she went
+through the meadows and hedge-rows she was glad to crush in her teeth
+the tender shoots of the briers and the acrid berry of the brambles, she
+never again, unbidden, touched so much as a mouldy crust thrown out to
+be eaten by the poultry.
+
+Flamma, counting his possessions greedily night and morning, blessed the
+saints for the renewed safety of his dwelling, and cast forth the
+poisoned wheat as a thank-offering to the male birds who were forever
+flying to and fro their nested mates in the leafless boughs above the
+earliest violets, and whose little throats were strangled even in their
+glad flood of nuptial song, and whose soft bright eyes grew dull in
+death ere even they had looked upon the springtide sun.
+
+For it was thus ever that Folle-Farine saw men praise God.
+
+She took their death to her own door, sorrowing and full of remorse.
+
+"Had I never stolen the food, these birds might never have perished,"
+she thought, as she saw the rosy throats of the robins and bullfinches
+turned upward in death on the turf.
+
+She blamed herself bitterly with an aching heart.
+
+The fatality which makes human crime recoil on the innocent creatures of
+the animal world oppressed her with its heavy and hideous injustice.
+Their God was good, they said: yet for her sin and her grandsire's greed
+the harmless song-birds died by the score in torment.
+
+"How shall a God be good who is not just?" she thought. In this mute
+young lonely soul of hers Nature had sown a strong passion for justice,
+a strong instinct towards what was righteous.
+
+As the germ of a plant born in darkness underground will, by sheer
+instinct, uncurl its colorless tendrils, and thrust them through
+crevices and dust, and the close structure of mortared stones, until
+they reach the light and grow green and strong in it, so did her nature
+strive, of its own accord, through the gloom enveloping it; towards
+those moral laws which in all ages and all lands remain the same, no
+matter what deity be worshiped, or what creed be called the truth.
+
+Her nascent mind was darkened, oppressed, bewildered, perplexed, even
+like the plant which, forcing itself upward from its cellar, opens its
+leaves not in pure air and under a blue sky, but in the reek and smoke
+and fetid odors of a city.
+
+Yet, like the plant, she vaguely felt that light was somewhere; and as
+vaguely sought it.
+
+With most days she took her grandsire's boat to and fro the town,
+fetching or carrying; there was no mode of transit so cheap to him as
+this, whose only cost was her fatigue. With each passage up and down the
+river, she passed by the dwelling of Arslan.
+
+Sometimes she saw him; once or twice, in the twilight, he spoke to her;
+she only bent her head to hide her face from him, and rowed more quickly
+on her homeward way in silence. At other times, in his absence, and when
+she was safe from any detection, she entered the dismal solitudes
+wherein he labored, and gazed in rapt and awed amazement at the shapes
+that were shadowed forth upon the walls.
+
+The service by which he gained his daily bread was on the waters, and
+took him often leagues away--simple hardy toil, among fishers and
+canal-carriers and barge-men. But it left him some few days, and all his
+nights, free for art; and never in all the years of his leisure had his
+fancy conceived, and his hand created, more exquisite dreams and more
+splendid fantasies than now in this bitter and cheerless time, when he
+labored amidst the poorest for the bare bread of life.
+
+"Des belles choses peuvent se faire dans une cave:" and in truth the
+gloom of the cellar gives birth to an art more sublime than the light of
+the palace can ever beget.
+
+Suffering shortens the years of the artist, and kills him oftentimes ere
+his prime be reached; but in suffering alone are all great works
+conceived.
+
+The senses, the passions, the luxuries, the lusts of the flesh, the
+deliriums of the desires, the colors, the melodies, the fragrance, the
+indolences,--all that make the mere "living of life" delightful, all go
+to enrich and to deepen the human genius which steeps itself in them;
+but it is in exile from these that alone it can rise to its greatest.
+
+The grass of the Holy River gathers perfume from the marvelous suns and
+the moonless nights, and the gorgeous bloom of the East, from the
+aromatic breath of the leopard and the perfume of the fallen
+pomegranate; from the sacred oil that floats in the lamps, and the
+caress of the girl-bathers' feet and the myrrh-dropping unguents that
+glide from the maidens' bare limbs in the moonlight,--the grass holds
+and feeds on them all. But not till the grass has been torn from the
+roots, and been crushed, and been bruised and destroyed, can the full
+odors exhale of all it has tasted and treasured.
+
+Even thus the imagination of man may be great, but it can never be at
+its greatest until one serpent, with merciless fangs, has bitten it
+through and through, and impregnated it with passion and with
+poison--that one deathless serpent which is Memory.
+
+Arslan had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies,
+and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect
+utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was
+absolute,--when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife
+with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,--when he kept his body
+alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the
+fields,--when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,--when
+only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking
+his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,--when it
+seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous
+was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull
+bleaching white on the sand.
+
+Yet he had never done greater things,--never in the long years through
+which he had pursued and studied art.
+
+With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the
+tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and
+simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and
+color the imaginations of his brain.
+
+And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of
+Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when
+she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing,
+scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute
+and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness
+her brief youth had ever known.
+
+Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord,
+there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the
+imaginative senses latent in her,--enough of the old mediaeval fancy, of
+the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a
+consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.
+
+Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of
+a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in
+which she dwelt.
+
+Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,--where the
+common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a
+thousand fashions,--where the graceful and the grotesque and the
+terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite,
+confusion,--where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the
+jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking
+sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on
+which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some
+trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead hand,--where all these
+were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any
+poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.
+
+Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely
+ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic
+incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that
+intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.
+
+Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of
+forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore
+them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds
+of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude,
+lying waste, bearing no harvest.
+
+Of these visits Arslan himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild
+temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.
+
+She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole
+in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the
+stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals,
+which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.
+
+And this secret--in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times
+blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face
+and frame--changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless,
+passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into
+desires.
+
+For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she
+became human.
+
+All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows
+stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only
+with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days
+of his leisure.
+
+Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and
+stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and
+watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of
+the oil-lamp burning behind him.
+
+She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes
+created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget
+worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a
+little dust.
+
+The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he
+wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found
+him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like
+nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command
+like this, yet perish for a crust!--that fusion of omnipotence and
+powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad
+strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.
+
+She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed
+spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took
+no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.
+
+She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take
+form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or
+on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike
+such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile,
+the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the
+temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command,
+and beneath his touch.
+
+She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon
+him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him;
+and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his
+generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant
+failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness
+which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful
+service, and would not let him do as other men did--tell the world lies,
+and take its payment out in gold.
+
+Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it
+were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a
+trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.
+
+But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human
+sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter
+unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at
+him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of
+his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often
+past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like
+the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to
+his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.
+
+She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young
+and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this
+love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and
+savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of
+the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his
+easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she
+knew not why, into the deepest shadow.
+
+Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself
+atonement for her fault--the fault through which those tender little
+bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the
+year.
+
+She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied
+herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set
+aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those
+learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his
+revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she
+toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had
+taken.
+
+Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil
+origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute;
+she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands
+pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.
+
+So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath
+of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the
+boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses--a
+spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the
+past winter.
+
+It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Ypres, and for all the
+other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire,
+that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast
+fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.
+
+The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which
+the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
+
+It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
+
+Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of
+women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on
+their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast
+their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests,
+knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with
+boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of
+toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all
+together in competition but in amity.
+
+Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like
+a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a
+soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom
+amidst tufts of thyme.
+
+The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like
+copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging
+the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.
+
+The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses
+or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of
+the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their
+baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of
+their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they
+had garnered through all the winter.
+
+Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the
+wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest,
+of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of
+the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of
+the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly
+budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of
+velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of
+lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the
+homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.
+
+It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the
+music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill
+paddles.
+
+In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a
+favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of
+large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her
+pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and
+a little ruddy wild strawberry.
+
+Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood
+surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms
+a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping
+as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof
+above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.
+
+"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she passed with her
+wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment
+the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I
+saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have
+gone this very night to Paris."
+
+"Thou art not alone, Edmee," groaned an old woman, tottering from her
+egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up
+in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen--the best sitter I
+have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noel--just cackled
+and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog
+rushed in and killed the blessed bird--killed her in her basket! A great
+yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again
+into the earth, like lightning."
+
+"Not worse than she did to my precious Remy," said a tanner's wife, who
+drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen,
+querulous child.
+
+"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the
+days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh
+lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.
+
+"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three
+Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a
+living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like
+nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's
+curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce
+have known him. You remember?"
+
+"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken
+almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by
+her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would
+never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"
+
+"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little
+Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her
+eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."
+
+"A _jettatrice_ ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of
+Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.
+
+"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not
+for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."
+
+"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with
+which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed
+sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my
+son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she
+went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood
+from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken
+carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he
+slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:--she is a witch; there is no
+question but she is a witch."
+
+"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the
+youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.
+
+"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time,
+and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is
+blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of
+water.
+
+"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from
+me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron
+instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit
+the tongue of a quivering starling.
+
+"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried
+a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.
+
+"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman
+who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.
+
+"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping
+green herbs together for salads.
+
+And all the while the girl Edmee clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over
+it.
+
+"If she were only here," swore Edmee's lover, under his breath.
+
+At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.
+
+She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for
+one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the
+flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.
+
+Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither
+hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free,
+firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.
+
+She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a
+little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But
+the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of
+her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added
+impulse to their rage.
+
+They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing
+hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them.
+They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor
+chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to
+her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they
+had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a
+selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech
+and act.
+
+The lover of Edmee loosened his hand from the silver beads about her
+throat, and caught up instead a stone.
+
+"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of
+her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her
+course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.
+
+"Who lamed my Remy?" screamed the cripple's mother.
+
+"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.
+
+"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.
+
+"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with
+the starling.
+
+"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.
+
+"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?"
+shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.
+
+"Who is a witch?--who dances naked?--who bathes with devils at the full
+moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he
+stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at
+her as she came.
+
+"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured
+the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no
+echo.
+
+The old soldier even rebuked her. "A _jettatrice_ should be killed for
+the good of the people," he mumbled.
+
+Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon
+the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps
+into their midst; unfaltering.
+
+The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a
+thing that was devil-begotten.
+
+"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!"
+cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his
+small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and
+nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling
+them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly,
+steadily, with her face set against the light.
+
+Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the
+stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her--a
+jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest.
+It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced
+with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty
+and their own savage hate.
+
+"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only
+laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they
+arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once
+losing their luminous calm scorn.
+
+The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to
+see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his
+laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"
+
+One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while
+the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering
+in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so
+rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her
+clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then,
+swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking
+out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered
+from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.
+
+Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way
+across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed
+against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her
+invulnerable and possessed.
+
+She moved calmly with a firm tread backward--backward--backward; holding
+her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the
+sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps.
+They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the
+rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great
+square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth
+curled in contemptuous laughter.
+
+"Strike _now_!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood
+still.
+
+But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not
+so much as a word that answered her.
+
+She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the
+tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them
+stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and
+was still.
+
+At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung
+above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and
+their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of
+tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had
+they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she
+had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give
+freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow
+birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?
+
+She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and
+went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe
+through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side.
+There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly
+down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the
+shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to
+keep out the sun.
+
+A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse
+dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no
+one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his
+little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all
+there were here to look on her.
+
+She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the
+town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her
+shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still
+bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it,
+and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to
+her to be but little. She had passed through similar scenes before,
+though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her,
+except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.
+
+The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.
+
+The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of
+peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In
+the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there
+were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes
+of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid
+breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open casement,
+some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the
+people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were
+made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.
+
+The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all
+the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible
+at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past
+the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone
+walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the
+poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with
+the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and
+the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt
+giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.
+
+When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks
+and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift
+in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through
+the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the casement
+into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly
+apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.
+
+It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things
+that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his
+bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted
+except at earliest dawn.
+
+The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and
+shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were
+free to her; she had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek
+them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its
+coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after
+the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless
+sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her
+more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad,
+cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from
+without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the gods of Oblivion.
+
+
+Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the
+most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic
+beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had
+repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the
+same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance;
+like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For
+Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his
+mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his
+golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was
+a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were
+welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand
+of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery
+nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and
+colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an
+unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden
+with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and
+the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things,
+had learned that there was but one good possible in all the
+universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their
+blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there
+was a great darkness.
+
+So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as
+brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her
+in their mute majesty.
+
+They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,--they
+are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,--who stay with the
+exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe
+in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a
+beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and lust, and
+brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the
+loneliest nights for genius and youth,--they are the gods of consolation
+and of compensation,--the gods of the orphan, of the outcast, of the
+poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs
+of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of
+all who hunger with the body or with the soul.
+
+And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her only friends,--as
+the only rulers who ever could loose the bands of her fate and let her
+forth to freedom--Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.
+
+They were above her where she sank upon the stone floor; the shadows
+were dark upon the ground; but the sunrays striking through the distant
+window against the opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy
+Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet.
+
+She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, the populace that
+had hooted her abroad, the stripes that awaited her at home. The
+answering gaze of the gods magnetized her; the poetic virus which had
+stirred dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered brain.
+Without knowing what she wanted, she longed for freedom, for light, for
+passion, for peace, for love.
+
+Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultuous pageantry; the higher
+instincts of her nature rose and struggled to burst the bonds in which
+slavery and ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew nothing,
+knew no more than the grass knew that blew in the wind, than the
+passion-flower knew that slept unborn in the uncurled leaf; and yet
+withal she felt, saw, trembled, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all
+blindly, all in confusion and in pain.
+
+The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, that had never
+quailed before the fury of any living thing; her head fell on her chest;
+she wept bitterly,--not because the people had injured her,--not because
+her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore,--but because a distance
+so immeasurable, so unalterable, severed her from all of which these
+gods told her without speech.
+
+The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst the stones on
+which she sat and her own form were dark in shadow; and as though the
+bright boy Hypnos pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had
+compassion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb
+violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion with it.
+
+The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness of fasting, the
+fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences of the place, had their
+weight on her. Crouching there half on her knees, looking up ever in the
+faces of the three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her and
+stilled her; its languor stole through her veins; its gentle pressure
+closed her eyelids; gradually her rigid limbs and her bent body relaxed
+and unnerved; she sank forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms,
+and the stillness of a profound sleep encompassed her.
+
+Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, delirious dreams
+floated through her brain, and peopled her slumber with fairer things
+than the earth holds, and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were
+wet.
+
+Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her with his dark sad
+eyes, and held his finger on his close-pressed lips, as though he
+said--"Not yet."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Her sleep remained unbroken; there was no sound to disturb it. The caw
+of a rook in the top of the poplar-tree, the rushing babble of the
+water, the cry of a field-mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the
+far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern road that ran
+broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing of the rats in the
+network of timbers which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the
+noises that reached this solitary place, and these were both too faint
+and too familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slumber heavy,
+and the forms on which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full of
+dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows lengthened, the day
+advanced: nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell rang
+over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria from the cathedral in
+the town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned around.
+
+As the chimes died, Arslan crossed the threshold of the granary and
+entered the desolate place where he had made his home. For once his
+labor had been early completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare
+and precious moments of the remaining light.
+
+He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying beneath his
+cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused and looked down.
+
+Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all the abandonment of
+youth and of sleep; her face was turned upward, with quick silent
+breathings parting the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the
+linen of her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back
+from her right arm and shoulder; the whole supple grace and force that
+were mingled in her form were visible under the light folds of her
+simple garments. The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of
+Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor where she was
+stretched.
+
+As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.
+
+But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he
+recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen
+rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for
+her strange unlikeness to all around her.
+
+He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep
+overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.
+
+He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which,
+at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet
+beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in
+her for his art.
+
+A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the
+light fell, he began to sketch her attitude, rapidly, in black and
+white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such
+transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which
+color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and
+slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins;
+the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red
+carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the
+eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming;
+while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in
+full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;--these gave a picture which
+required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.
+
+He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with
+something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown
+out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their
+mere outline.
+
+Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as
+though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold
+and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But
+she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every
+curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as
+little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as that with which the vivisector
+tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist
+plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to
+examine.
+
+The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see
+them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand
+tremble a moment in such translation.
+
+To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from the female
+corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and
+to Arslan the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as
+sexless, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the
+tools for his art: no more.
+
+When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside
+the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the
+deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight
+the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he
+had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude
+than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had
+recorded in his works.
+
+He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; and he had sought
+women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of
+contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative
+affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always--
+
+    "De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,
+      De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,
+    Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, o mon ame!
+      Rien qu'un dessin fort pale aux trois crayons."
+
+And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so hotly for an
+instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or
+satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance
+of chastity.
+
+He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness
+of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which
+tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient
+existence.
+
+She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who
+looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily
+blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.
+
+She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled
+there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He
+painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep
+in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him
+than these would have been.
+
+The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the
+boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from
+the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children
+going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips
+of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air
+through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.
+
+The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they
+pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up
+suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood
+fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves
+strained to listen and striving to combat.
+
+For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that
+she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were
+from the clamor of her late tormentors.
+
+He turned and looked at her.
+
+"What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of the country.
+
+She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew her disordered
+dress together, and stood mute, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and
+the blood coming and going under her transparent skin.
+
+"What do you fear?" he asked again.
+
+"_I_ fear?"
+
+She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous defiance; the heroism
+of her nature, which an hour earlier had been lashed to its fullest
+strength, cast back the question as an insult; but her voice was low and
+husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.
+
+For she feared him; and for the moment she had forgotten how she had
+come there and all that had passed, except that some instinct of the
+long-hunted animal was astir in her to hide herself and fly.
+
+But he stood between her and the passage outward, and pride and shame
+held her motionless. Moreover, she still listened intently: the confused
+voices of the children still seemed to her like those of the multitude
+by whom she had been chased; and she was ready to leap tiger-like upon
+them, rather than let them degrade her in his sight.
+
+He looked at her with some touch of interest: she was to him only some
+stray beggar-girl, who had trespassed into his solitude; yet her untamed
+regard, her wide-open eyes, the staglike grace of her attitude, the
+sullen strength which spoke in her reply,--all attracted him to closer
+notice of these.
+
+"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly. "You were asleep here
+when I came, more than an hour ago."
+
+The color burned in her face: she said nothing.
+
+The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from
+beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy
+these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in
+her.
+
+"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to
+return to the attitude sketched out upon his easel.
+
+She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined
+with the apprehensiveness of chastisement which becomes second nature to
+every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every
+real or imagined fault.
+
+"I came to see _those_," she answered him, with a backward movement of
+her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the
+gods above her.
+
+The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as
+this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom,
+throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had
+never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this
+outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent
+of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he
+be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his
+works.
+
+"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be to _you_?"
+
+She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her
+head drooped; she knew that they were much to her--friends, masters,
+teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to
+tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been
+ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was
+ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts,
+and it locked her lips to silence.
+
+Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind
+and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the
+half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape
+and cannot.
+
+Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of
+blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in
+her linen left it bare.
+
+"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It is nothing."
+
+"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"
+
+"The people struck me."
+
+"Struck you? With what?"
+
+"Stones."
+
+"And why?"
+
+"I am Folle-Farine."
+
+She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient
+reply.
+
+But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the
+populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to
+have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had
+never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence.
+To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost
+that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.
+
+"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate
+you?"
+
+She gave a gesture of assent.
+
+"And you hate them in return?"
+
+She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a
+trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.
+
+"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in
+my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I
+have never killed one yet."
+
+He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed
+passion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn
+which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands
+clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was
+a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that
+conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its
+exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he
+moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.
+
+"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence
+against you?"
+
+"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything
+else.
+
+"Have you no other name?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you must have a home? You live--where?"
+
+"At the mill with Flamma."
+
+"Does he also ill use you?"
+
+"He beats me."
+
+"When you do wrong?"
+
+She was silent.
+
+"Wrong?" "Right?"
+
+They were but words to her--empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat
+her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught
+that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.
+
+Arslan looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her
+to return to the attitude necessary to the completion of his picture.
+
+He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At
+all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was
+afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to
+her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a fear as though, in
+lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some
+crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it
+seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had
+wearied of, and might have wished to lose.
+
+"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.
+
+She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's
+face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made
+her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of
+this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift,
+which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a
+burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.
+
+"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does
+the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could
+ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever
+touch.
+
+By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as
+she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned,
+had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature
+beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him
+one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel.
+Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study
+on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same
+watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in
+her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished
+to turn to the purpose of his art--like a flower that he plucked on his
+way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some
+vacant nook in a mountain foreground.
+
+"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him,
+flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarrassed, with her hands
+nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her
+sad, lustrous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered
+fear.
+
+"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."
+
+"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care
+to come?"
+
+Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was
+burning.
+
+"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a
+pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.
+
+He laughed a little; bitterly.
+
+"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your
+way. Has no one ever told you so?"
+
+"I?"
+
+She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly; she thought that
+he spoke in derision of her.
+
+"You," he answered. "Why not? Look at yourself here: all imperfect as it
+is, you can see something of what you are."
+
+Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused waves of dull
+color, out of whose depths her own face arose, like some fair drowned
+thing tossed upward on a murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had
+wounded her, and stood still, trembling.
+
+She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque water of the
+bathing pool, with a certain sense of their beauty wakening in her; she
+had tossed the soft, thick, gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her
+bare shoulder, with a certain languor and delight; she had held a knot
+of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast with her own
+white skin;--but she had never imagined that she had beauty.
+
+He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus taught her creep with
+all its poison into her veins.
+
+He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before in Nubian girls
+with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, who had never thought that they
+had loveliness,--though they had seen their forms in the clear water of
+the wells every time that they had brought their pitchers thither,--and
+who had only awakened to that sweet supreme sense of power and
+possession, when first they had beheld themselves live again upon his
+canvas.
+
+"You are glad?" he asked her at length.
+
+She covered her face with her hands.
+
+"I am frightened!"
+
+Frightened she knew not why, and utterly ashamed, to have lain thus in
+his sight, to have slept thus under his eyes; and yet filled with an
+ecstasy, to think that she was lovely enough to be raised amidst those
+marvelous dreams that peopled and made heaven of his solitude.
+
+"Well, then,--let me paint you there," he said, after a pause. "I am
+too poor to offer you reward for it. I have nothing----"
+
+"I want nothing," she interrupted him, quickly, while a dark shadow,
+half wrath, half sorrow, swept across her face.
+
+He smiled a little.
+
+"I cannot boast the same. But, since you care for all these hapless
+things that are imprisoned here, do me, their painter, this one grace.
+Lie there, in the shadow again, as you were when you slept, and let me
+go on with this study of you till the sun sets."
+
+A glory beamed over all her face. Her mouth trembled, her whole frame
+shook like a reed in the wind.
+
+"If you care!" she said, brokenly, and paused. It seemed to her
+impossible that this form of hers, which had been only deemed fit for
+the whip, for the rope, for the shower of stones, could have any grace
+or excellence in his sight; it seemed to her impossible that this face
+of hers, which nothing had ever kissed except the rough tongue of some
+honest dog, and which had been blown on by every storm-wind, beaten on
+by every summer sun, could have color, or shape, or aspect that could
+ever please him!
+
+"Certainly I care. Go yonder and lie as you were lying a few moments
+ago--there in the shadow, under these gods."
+
+She was used to give obedience--the dumb unquestioning obedience of the
+packhorse or the sheepdog, and she had no idea for an instant of
+refusal. It was a great terror to her to hear his voice and feel his
+eyes on her, and be so near to him; yet it was equally a joy sweeter and
+deeper than she had ever dreamed of as possible. He still seemed to her
+like a god, this man under whose hand flowers bloomed, and sunrays
+smiled, and waters flowed, and human forms arose, and the gracious
+shapes of a thousand dreams grew into substance. And yet, in herself,
+this man saw beauty!
+
+He motioned her with a careless, gentle gesture, as a man motions a
+timid dog, to the spot over which the three brethren watched hand in
+hand; and she stretched herself down passively and humbly, meekly as the
+dog stretches himself to rest at his master's command. Over all her
+body the blood was leaping; her limbs shuddered; her breath came and
+went in broken murmurs; her bright-hued skin grew dark and white by
+turns; she was filled with a passionate delight that he had found
+anything in her to desire or deem fair; and she quivered with a
+tumultuous fear that made her nervous as any panting hare. Her heart
+beat as it had never done when the people had raged in their fury around
+her. One living creature had found beauty in her; one human voice had
+spoken to her gently and without a curse; one man had thought her a
+thing to be entreated and not scorned;--a change so marvelous in her
+fate transfigured all the world for her, as though the gods above had
+touched her lips with fire.
+
+But she was mute and motionless; the habit of silence and of repression
+had become her second nature; no statue of marble could have been
+stiller, or in semblance more lifeless, than she was where she rested on
+the stones.
+
+Arslan noticed nothing of this; he was intent upon his work. The sun was
+very near its setting, and every second of its light was precious to
+him. The world indeed he knew would in all likelihood never be the wiser
+or the richer for anything he did; in all likelihood he knew all these
+things that he created were destined to moulder away undisturbed save by
+the rats that might gnaw, and the newts that might traverse, them. He
+was buried here in the grave of a hopeless penury, of an endless
+oblivion. They were buried with him; and the world wanted neither him
+nor them. Still, having the madness of genius, he was as much the slave
+of his art as though an universal fame had waited his lowliest and
+lightest effort.
+
+With a deep breath that had half a sigh in it he threw down his brushes
+when the darkness fell. While he wrought, he forgot the abject
+bitterness of his life; when he ceased work, he remembered how hateful a
+thing it is to live when life means only deprivation, obscurity, and
+failure.
+
+He thanked her with a few words of gratitude to her for her patience,
+and released her from the strain of the attitude. She rose slowly with
+an odd dazzled look upon her face, like one coming out of great darkness
+into the full blaze of day. Her eyes sought the portrait of her own
+form, which was still hazy and unformed, amidst a mist of varying hues:
+that she should be elected to have a part with those glorious things
+which were the companions of his loneliness seemed to her a wonder so
+strange and so immeasurable that her mind still could not grasp it.
+
+For it was greatness to her: a greatness absolute and incredible. The
+men had stoned, the women cursed, the children hooted her; but he
+selected her--and her alone--for that supreme honor which his hand could
+give.
+
+Not noticing the look upon her face he placed before her on the rude
+bench, which served in that place for a table, some score of small
+studies in color, trifles brilliant as the rainbow, birds, flowers,
+insects, a leaf of fern, an orchid in full bloom, a nest with a blue
+warbler in it, a few peasants by a wayside cross, a child at a well, a
+mule laden with autumn fruit--anything which in the district had caught
+his sight or stirred his fancy. He bade her choose from them.
+
+"There is nothing else here," he added. "But since you care for such
+things, take as many of them as you will as recompense."
+
+Her face flushed up to the fringes of her hair; her eyes looked at the
+sketches in thirsty longing. Except the scarlet scarf of Marcellin, this
+was the only gift she had ever had offered her. And all these
+reproductions of the world around her were to her like so much sorcery.
+Owning one, she would have worshiped it, revered it, caressed it,
+treasured it; her life was so desolate and barren that such a gift
+seemed to her as handfuls of gold and silver would seem to a beggar were
+he bidden to take them and be rich.
+
+She stretched her arms out in one quick longing gesture; then as
+suddenly withdrew them, folding them on her chest, whilst her face grew
+very pale. Something of its old dark proud ferocity gathered on it.
+
+"I want no payment," she said, huskily, and she turned to the threshold
+and crossed it.
+
+He stayed her with his hand.
+
+"Wait. I did not mean to hurt you. Will you not take them as reward?"
+
+"No."
+
+She spoke almost sullenly; there was a certain sharpness and dullness of
+disappointment at her heart. She wanted, she wished, she knew not what.
+But not that he should offer her payment.
+
+"Can you return to-morrow? or any other day?" he asked her, thinking of
+the sketch unfinished on the sheet of pinewood. He did not notice the
+beating of her heart under her folded arms, the quick gasp of her
+breath, the change of the rich color in her face.
+
+"If you wish," she answered him below her breath.
+
+"I do wish, surely. The sketch is all unfinished yet."
+
+"I will come, then."
+
+She moved away from him across the threshold as she spoke; she was not
+afraid of the people, but she was afraid of this strange, passionate
+sweetness, which seemed to fill her veins with fire and make her drunk
+and blind.
+
+"Shall I go with you homeward?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"But the people who struck you?--they may attack you again?"
+
+She laughed a little; low in her throat.
+
+"I showed them a knife!--they are timid as hares."
+
+"You are always by yourself?"
+
+"Always."
+
+She drew herself with a rapid movement from him and sprang into her boat
+where it rocked amidst the rushes against the steps; in another instant
+she had thrust it from its entanglement in the reeds, and pulled with
+swift, steady strokes down the stream into the falling shadows of the
+night.
+
+"You will come back?" he called to her, as the first stroke parted the
+water.
+
+"Yes," she answered him; and the boat shot forward into the shadow.
+
+Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars
+sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.
+
+There was little need to exact the promise from her.
+
+Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which,
+whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth,
+and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime
+world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that hell which
+none,--once having entered it,--can ever more forsake.
+
+She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from
+the shore and the stream into the gloom of the night.
+
+He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted
+shadows.
+
+Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where
+it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the
+night.
+
+"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I
+have nearly enough for remembrance there."
+
+And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to
+those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for
+whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of
+the dead.
+
+From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she
+was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its
+home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its
+grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up
+into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom,
+or to fall into the fowler's snare;--what matter which?
+
+The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the
+great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the
+gloom.
+
+She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her
+as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.
+
+She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the
+silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a
+fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into
+little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or
+a smith's forge.
+
+By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge
+betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical,
+silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings
+and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless
+whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the
+multitudes of the city whither it goes.
+
+It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just
+rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was
+moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to
+and fro in his wood-yard.
+
+At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches,
+and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the
+minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted,
+and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud
+reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest
+terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.
+
+In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and
+dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered,
+puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle;
+there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that
+made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and
+fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter;
+under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a
+nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring;
+on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a
+gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap
+in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.
+
+The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and
+unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with
+a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold
+of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the
+gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslan.
+
+She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp
+earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on
+her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of
+dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night air
+lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of
+rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had
+brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.
+
+The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance
+at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up
+the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray
+bent brows.
+
+"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth.
+"Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"
+
+The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the
+softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.
+
+"I say nothing," she answered.
+
+"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to
+make thee speak. Nothing!--when three of the clock should have seen thee
+back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without
+account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure--in shame and
+iniquity--in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"
+
+"Since you know, why ask?"
+
+She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge
+from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought
+her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they
+had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.
+
+"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left
+undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to
+name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell,
+or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"
+
+"I have done as I chose."
+
+She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own
+that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.
+
+"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak--_you!_--a thing
+less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose--you!--who have not a
+rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat,
+not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine--mine--mine. As you
+choose. _You!_--you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you
+sloth! You are nothing--nothing--less than the blind worm that crawls in
+the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it
+shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break
+your will."
+
+As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an
+oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he
+raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that
+dumb, passive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted
+whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.
+
+But the creature, silent and stirless, who before had stood to receive
+his lashes as though her body were of bronze or wood, that felt not, was
+changed. A leonine and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She
+started out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure as a
+willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs back, released, into
+the air.
+
+She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by a sudden gesture
+from him, and flung it away to the farther end of the chamber; then she
+turned on him as a hart turns brought to bay.
+
+Her supple body was erect like a young pine; her eyes flashed with a
+luster he had never seen in them; the breath came hard and fast through
+her dilated nostrils.
+
+"Touch me again!" she cried aloud, while her voice rang full and
+imperious through the stillness. "Touch me again; and by the heaven and
+hell you prate of, I will kill you!"
+
+So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the old man dropped
+his hands and stood and gazed at her aghast and staring; not recognizing
+the mute, patient, doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this
+stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him in all the
+royalty of wrath, in all the passion of insurrection.
+
+He could not tell what had altered her, what had wrought this
+transformation, what had changed her as by sorcery; he could not tell
+that what had aroused a human soul in her had been the first human voice
+that she had listened to in love; he could not tell that her body had
+grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her beautiful, and
+that her life for the first time had acquired a worth and dignity in her
+sight because one man had deemed it fair.
+
+He could not tell; he could only see that for the first time his slave
+had learned somewhere, and in somewise, what freedom meant; and had
+escaped him. This alone he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid.
+
+She waited, watching him some moments, with cold eyes of disdain, in
+which a smouldering fire slept, ready to burst into an all-devouring
+flame.
+
+There was not a sound in the place; the woman spinning stopped her
+wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, savage fashion; the lean cat ceased
+its cries; there was only the continual swish of the water in the
+sluices under the wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black
+Forest clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in its
+cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the thyme, and the sage,
+and the onions hung among the twisted rafters.
+
+Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her hip, her lips
+curved scornfully and close, her face full of passion, which she kept
+still as the dead birds hanging on the wall; whilst all the time the
+tawny smoky hues of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic
+play over her head and limbs.
+
+Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently,
+without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the
+horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble
+fortitude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as
+was the daily bread she broke.
+
+But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the gods upon her, now
+she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she
+would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her
+body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the
+water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath
+the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslan.
+
+There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held
+motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.
+
+Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the
+moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily
+in him; some vague remembrance passed over him, that, whatsoever else
+she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and
+kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will,
+with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.
+
+He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard
+at her in the dusky lamp-light.
+
+He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and
+groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant
+life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would
+have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and
+trample it under foot, and spit on it.
+
+He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his
+path, while he struck out the light with his staff.
+
+"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late.
+To-morrow I will deal with thee."
+
+She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like
+stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her
+nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew
+that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslan
+had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to
+preserve it by death from that indignity.
+
+From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been used to bare her
+shoulders to the lash, and take the stripes as food and wages; she had
+no more thought to resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on
+earth, has to resist his master's blows; the dull habits of a soulless
+bondage had been too strong on her to be lightly broken, and the
+resignation of the loyal beasts that were her comrades, had been the one
+virtue that she had seen to follow.
+
+But now at length she had burst her bonds, and had claimed her freedom.
+
+She had tasted the freshness of liberty, and the blood burned like fire
+in her face as she remembered the patience and the shame of the years of
+her slavery.
+
+There was no mirror in her little room in the gabled eaves; all the
+mirror she had ever known had been that which she had shared with the
+water-lilies, when together she and they had leaned over the smooth dark
+surface of the mill-pond. But the moon streamed clearly through the one
+unshuttered window, a moon full and clear, and still cold; the
+springtide moon, from which the pale primroses borrow those tender hues
+of theirs, which never warm or grow deeper, however golden be the sun
+that may shine.
+
+Its clear colorless crescent went sailing past the little square lattice
+hole in the wall; masses of gorgeous cloud, white and black, swept by in
+a fresh west wind; the fresh breath of a spring night chased away the
+heat and languor of the day; the smell of all the blossoms of the spring
+rose up from wood and orchard; the cool, drowsy murmuring of the
+mill-stream beneath was the only sound on the stillness, except when now
+and then there came the wild cry of a mating owl.
+
+The moonbeams fell about her where she stood; and she looked down on her
+smooth skin, her glistening shoulders, her lustrous and abundant hair,
+on which the wavering light played and undulated. The most delicious
+gladness that a woman's life can know was in tumult in her, conflicting
+with the new and deadly sense of shame and ignorance. She learned that
+she was beautiful, at the same time that she awoke to the knowledge of
+her dumb, lifeless slavish inferiority to all other human things.
+
+"Beautiful!" she muttered to herself, "only as a poppy, as a snake, as a
+night-moth are beautiful--beautiful and without fragrance, or sweetness,
+or worth!"
+
+And her heart was heavy, even amidst all its pleasure and triumph, heavy
+with a sense of utter ignorance and utter worthlessness.
+
+The poppy was snapped asunder as a weed, the snake was shunned and
+cursed for his poison, the night-moth was killed because his nature had
+made him dwell in the darkness; none of the three might have any fault
+in truth in them; all of the three might have only the livery of evil,
+and no more; might be innocent, and ask only to breathe and live for a
+little brief space in their world, which men called God's world. Yet
+were they condemned by men, and slain, being what they were, although
+God made them.
+
+Even so she felt, without reasoning, had it been and would it be, with
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+In the room below, the old Norman woman, who did not fear her
+taskmaster, unbarred the shutter to let the moon shine in the room, and
+by its light put away her wheel and work, and cut a halved lettuce up
+upon a platter, with some dry bread, and ate them for her supper.
+
+The old man knelt down before the leaden image, and joined his knotted
+hands, and prayed in a low, fierce, eager voice, while the heavy
+pendulum of the clock swung wearily to and fro.
+
+The clock kept fitful and uncertain time; it had been so long imprisoned
+in the gloom there among the beams and cobwebs, and in this place life
+was so dull, so colorless, so torpid, that it seemed to have forgotten
+how time truly went, and to wake up now and then with a shudder of
+remembrance, in which its works ran madly down.
+
+The old woman ended her supper, munching the lettuce-leaves thirstily in
+her toothless mouth, and not casting so much as a crumb of the crusts to
+the cat, who pitifully watched, and mutely implored, with great ravenous
+amber-circled eyes. Then she took her stick and crept out of the
+kitchen, her wooden shoes clacking loud on the bare red bricks.
+
+"Prayer did little to keep holy the other one," she muttered. "Unless,
+indeed, the devil heard and answered."
+
+But Claudis Flamma for all that prayed on, entreating the mercy and
+guidance of Heaven, whilst the gore dripped from the dead rabbit, and
+the silent song-birds hung stiff upon the nail.
+
+"Thou hast a good laborer," said the old woman Pitchou, with curt
+significance, to her master, meeting him in the raw of the dawn of the
+morrow, as he drew the bolts from his house-door. "Take heed that thou
+dost not drive her away, Flamma. One may beat a saddled mule safely, but
+hardly so a wolf's cub."
+
+She passed out of the door as she spoke with mop and pail to wash down
+the paved court outside; but her words abode with her master.
+
+He meddled no more with the wolf's cub.
+
+When Folle-Farine came down the stairs in the crisp, cool,
+sweet-smelling spring morning that was breaking through the mists over
+the land and water, he motioned to her to break her fast with the cold
+porridge left from overnight, and looking at her from under his bent
+brows with a glance that had some apprehension underneath its anger,
+apportioned her a task for the early day with a few bitter words of
+command; but he molested her no further, nor referred ever so faintly to
+the scene of the past night.
+
+She ate her poor and tasteless meal in silence, and set about her
+appointed labor without protest. So long as she should eat his bread, so
+long she said to herself would she serve him. Thus much the pride and
+honesty of her nature taught her was his due.
+
+He watched her furtively under his shaggy eyebrows. His instinct told
+him that this nameless, dumb, captive, desert animal, which he had bound
+as a beast of burden to his mill-wheels, had in some manner learned her
+strength, and would not long remain content to be thus yoked and driven.
+He had blinded her with the blindness of ignorance, and goaded her with
+the goad of ignominy; but for all that, some way her bandaged eyes had
+sought and found the light, some way her numbed hide had thrilled and
+swerved beneath the barb.
+
+"She also is a saint; let God take her!" said the old man to himself in
+savage irony, as he toiled among his mill-gear and his sacks.
+
+His heart was ever sore and in agony because his God had cheated him,
+letting him hold as purest and holiest among women the daughter who had
+betrayed him. In his way he prayed still; but chiefly his prayer was a
+passionate upbraiding, a cynical reproach. She--his beloved, his marvel,
+his choicest of maidens, his fairest and coldest of virgins--had escaped
+him and duped him, and been a thing of passion and of foulness, of
+treachery and of lust, all the while that he had worshiped her.
+Therefore he hated every breathing thing; therefore he slew the birds in
+their song, the insects in their summer bravery, the lamb in its
+gambols, the rabbit in its play amidst the primroses. Therefore he cried
+to the God whom he still believed in, "Thou lettest that which was pure
+escape me to be defiled and be slaughtered, and now Thou lettest that
+which is vile escape me to become beautiful and free and strong!" And
+now and then, in this woe of his which was so pitiful and yet so brutal,
+he glanced at her where she labored among the unbudded vines and
+leafless fruit trees, and whetted a sickle on the whirling grindstone,
+and felt its edge, and thought to himself. "She was devil-begotten.
+Would it not be well once and for all to rid men of her?" For, he
+reasoned, being thus conceived in infamy and branded from her birth
+upward, how should she be ever otherwise than to men a curse?
+
+Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the bushes and by the
+glancing water, she saw the steel hook and caught his sideway gaze, and
+read his meditation.
+
+She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, "He shall not do it
+till I have been back _there_."
+
+Before the day was done, thither she went.
+
+He had kept her close since the sunrise.
+
+Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the country, which
+had a certain pleasure to her, because she gained by them liberty and
+air, and the contentment of swift movement against fresh blowing winds.
+Nor did he send her to the town. He employed her through ten whole hours
+in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and carrying from his yard to
+his lofts, always within sight of his own quick eye, and within call of
+his harsh voice.
+
+She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do swiftly and well. There
+was no fault to find in any of her labors.
+
+When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, the last burden
+borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her roughly go indoors and winnow
+last year's wheat in the store chambers till he should bid her cease.
+
+She came and stood before him, her eyes very quiet in their look of
+patient strength.
+
+"I have worked from daybreak through to sunset," she said, slowly, to
+him. "It is enough for man and beast. The rest I claim."
+
+Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone wall that parted the
+timber-yard from the orchard, and was out of sight, flying far and fast
+through the twilight of the boughs.
+
+He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped on his breast, his
+hands worked restlessly on the stone coping of the wall, his withered
+lips muttered in wrath.
+
+"There is hell in her," he said to himself. "Let her go to her rightful
+home. There is one thing----"
+
+"There is one thing?" echoed the old woman, hanging washed linen out to
+dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed almond-shrubs.
+
+He gave a dreary, greedy, miser's chuckle:
+
+"One thing;--I have made the devil work for me hard and well ten whole
+years through!"
+
+"The devil!" mumbled the woman Pitchou, in contemptuous iteration. "Dost
+think the devil was ever such a fool as to work for thy wage of blows
+and of black bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how should he
+rule unless he paid his people well?"
+
+Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, through the pastures
+where the leek herds dreamed their days away, through the young wheat
+and the springing colza, and the little fields all bright with promise
+of the spring, and all the sunset's wealth of golden light.
+
+The league was but as a step to her, trained as her muscles were to
+speed and strength until her feet were as fleet as are the doe's. When
+she had gained her goal then only she paused, stricken with a sudden
+shyness and terror of what she hardly knew.
+
+An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards a little
+grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose water never stirred, save by
+a pigeon's rosy foot, or by a timid plover's beak, was motionless and
+clear as any mirror.
+
+Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, and taught her
+eyes to seek her own reflection. It had a certain wonder in it to her
+now that fascinated her with a curious indefinable attraction. For the
+first time in her life she had thought of it, and done such slight
+things as she could to make it greater. They were but few,--linen a
+little whiter and less coarse--the dust shaken from her scarlet sash;
+her bronze-hued hair burnished to richer darkness; a knot of wild
+narcissi in her bosom gathered with the dew on them as she came through
+the wood.
+
+This was all; yet this was something; something that showed the dawn of
+human impulses, of womanly desires. As she looked, she blushed for her
+own foolishness; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood-flowers
+into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, though only a moment
+earlier she had gathered them, so senseless and so idle to have decked
+herself with their borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these
+he cared!
+
+Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.
+
+Arslan stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle
+of wood.
+
+He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and
+looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she
+saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face,
+closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand
+moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his
+hold like lead.
+
+She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and
+incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty
+nor terror.
+
+It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He
+started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and
+threw a black cloth over the trestle.
+
+"Do not look there," he said to her. "I had forgotten you.
+Otherwise----"
+
+"I have looked there. It is only a dead woman."
+
+"Only! What makes you say that?"
+
+"I do not know. There are many--are there not?"
+
+He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or
+curiosity was true and not assumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread,
+and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory
+of death were wholly absent from her.
+
+"There are many indeed," he made answer, slowly. "Just there is the
+toughest problem--it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds
+of human ephemerae, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the
+millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be
+choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is the
+_numbers_ that kill one's dreams of immortality!"
+
+She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had
+spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere
+cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl
+young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.
+
+"It is Fortis, the ragpicker's daughter," she said, indifferently, and
+dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she
+envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode
+there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its
+calm limbs.
+
+"Yes," he answered her. "It is his daughter. She died twenty hours
+ago,--of low fever, they say--famine, no doubt."
+
+"Why do you have her here?" She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the
+girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born;
+she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.
+
+"The dead sit to me often," he said, with a certain smile that had
+sadness and yet coldness in it.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"That they may tell me the secrets of life."
+
+"Do they tell them?"
+
+"A few;--most they keep. See,--I paint death; I must watch it to paint
+it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks
+his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the
+riverside last night. He said to me, 'You like studying the dead, they
+say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving;--and it cannot hurt
+her.' So I gave him the coin--though I am as poor as he--and I took the
+dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl
+shall go to her grave when I have done with her."
+
+She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled
+her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious
+pain.
+
+She did not care for the body lying there--it had been but the other day
+that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called
+her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past
+it; but there passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she,
+likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than
+this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.
+
+The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to
+lay her down in the cool water and let it take her to long sleep and to
+complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of
+value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb
+still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner,
+she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her
+absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his
+thought.
+
+Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his
+art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never
+occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak
+shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of
+life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond
+measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.
+
+She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his
+service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the
+sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple
+altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;--this seemed to her the
+most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's
+daughter lying there in such calm content.
+
+"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no
+harm; if I did, what would she know?"
+
+"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain
+perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to
+you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for
+that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often
+thought of it lately."
+
+He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken
+steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the
+district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being
+offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face
+with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they
+gained from their study but little.
+
+For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed
+there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He
+could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the
+bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were
+only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical
+development, but mindless as any clod of earth.
+
+He did not know how to answer her.
+
+"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so
+bitter to you?"
+
+She stared at him.
+
+"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"
+
+"But you are so young,--and you are handsome, and a woman?"
+
+She laughed a little.
+
+"A woman! Marcellin said that."
+
+"Well! What is there strange in saying it?"
+
+She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till
+the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.
+
+"That was a woman--a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow
+hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her
+lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I
+am a devil, they say."
+
+His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and
+whose irony escaped her.
+
+"What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call
+you so?"
+
+Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.
+
+"You do not believe that I am a devil?"
+
+"How should I tell? If you covet the title claim it,--you have a
+right,--you are a woman!"
+
+"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.
+
+"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. "And there
+is your creator."
+
+"_He!_"
+
+She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.
+
+"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words
+out of the empty wind. Hephaestus made her heart, fusing for it brass and
+iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages.
+But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night,
+and tell me your story while I work."
+
+She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had
+motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of
+Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.
+
+The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough
+to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a
+likeness to his own.
+
+It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely
+moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so
+little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and
+so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very
+slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to
+self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body
+and of the senses.
+
+As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing
+people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the
+night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his
+senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of
+the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests,
+and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn
+strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion:
+these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in
+the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?
+
+And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal
+soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the
+eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light
+of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees,
+and stirs in the strange _loves_ of wind-borne plants, and hums in every
+song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples
+with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell,
+every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of
+man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest
+thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent;
+tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence
+pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual
+torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking
+creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all
+creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured,
+at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly
+assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of
+inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus
+universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he
+pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse staggering
+beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age;
+the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through
+the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the
+slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under
+the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector
+while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable
+hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures
+dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of
+men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was
+the softest thing in all his nature.
+
+But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased.
+It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such
+simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast
+broadcast.
+
+Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her--that
+she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal
+in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights
+and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange
+kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid attitudes, in her curt,
+unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides,
+although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two
+years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship of
+boors, with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme
+poverty in which the latter months of his life had been passed, had
+excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none
+without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man
+even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who
+had brought the dead girl to him for a few brass coins, had been the
+only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made
+such change in it worse than its continuance.
+
+In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless,
+hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his
+curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his
+mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a
+wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if
+aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in
+quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance,
+he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.
+
+He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long
+imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with
+the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an
+intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the
+stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.
+
+The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once streaming across the
+darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out
+again among his fellows, then--the spider is left to miss the human love
+that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue
+flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom
+alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still
+locked they are much.
+
+Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world's neglect, and
+they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible
+dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining
+to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.
+
+And in these, in their bondage, there were little patience, or sympathy,
+or softness, and to them, even nature itself at times looked horrible,
+though never so horrible, because never so despicable, as humanity.
+Yet, still even in these an instinct of companionship abided; and this
+creature, with a woman's beauty, and an animal's fierceness and
+innocence, was in a manner welcome.
+
+"Why were women ever made, then?" she said, after awhile, following,
+though imperfectly, the drift of his last words, where she lay stretched
+obedient to his will, under the shadow of the wall.
+
+He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he has heard from the
+raving lips of some friend fever-stricken.
+
+"Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in the desert. He
+was content in his solitude: he was holy and at peace: the honey of the
+wild bee and the fruit of the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him;
+the lions were his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves; the eagle
+flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms were his
+messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and the soul alone had
+dominion; and day and night, upon the lonely air, he breathed the praise
+of God.
+
+"Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he said to himself, 'I
+have lived content; so shall I die purified, and ready for the kingdom
+of heaven.' For it was in the day when that wooden god, who hangs on the
+black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but had a name of
+power and of might, adjuring which, his people smiled under torture, and
+died in the flame, dreaming of a land where the sun never set, and the
+song never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest.
+
+"So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was glad and at peace.
+
+"One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain torrents fell, to the
+door of his cave there came a wayfarer, fainting, sickly, lame,
+trembling with terror of the desert, and beseeching him to save her from
+the panthers.
+
+"He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, for he said,
+'Wheresoever a woman enters, there the content of a man is dead.' But
+she was in dire distress, and entreated him with tears and supplications
+not to turn her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and he
+felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened the door to her,
+and bade her enter and be at sanctuary there in God's name.
+
+"But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and want fell from off
+her, her eyes grew as two stars, her lips were sweet as the rose of the
+desert, her limbs had the grace of the cheetah, her body had the
+radiance and the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And she
+laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, 'Thou thinkest thou hast lived,
+and yet thou hast not loved! Oh, sage! oh, saint! oh, fool, fool, fool!'
+Then into his veins there rushed youth, and into his brain there came
+madness; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity loathsome
+since passionless; and he stretched his arms to her and sought to
+embrace her, crying, 'Stay with me, though I buy thee with hell.' And
+she stayed.
+
+"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a
+phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the
+desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she
+beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the
+noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the
+rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.
+
+"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he
+searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to
+die."
+
+He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters,
+the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of
+passionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness
+of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the
+Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the
+phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed
+in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial,
+with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts
+in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning
+women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but
+when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into
+picture-like formations.
+
+She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire
+brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy
+allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.
+
+No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and
+beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed
+to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung
+as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.
+
+"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.
+
+"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."
+
+Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with
+the new light that broke in on her.
+
+"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"
+
+Arslan rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic
+smile.
+
+"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's
+kingdom of heaven!"
+
+She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had
+understood the parable of his narrative, yet the passion of it had
+passed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.
+
+"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.
+
+"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who
+remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse
+through which he has walked--himself sane--in a bygone time.
+
+"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong,
+half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want--I want to
+have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and
+they pray."
+
+"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his god. "Who does
+not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever
+you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."
+
+A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly
+faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not,
+since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the
+passion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power
+might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all
+men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her
+to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.
+
+"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she
+muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has
+none."
+
+"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech
+him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but
+it is your god only whom in their hearts they worship. See how the
+Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."
+
+"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none
+to the devil?"
+
+"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret god. Look you: I will tell you
+another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to
+all the various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under the sun.
+There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of
+ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before
+all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense
+before its divinity.
+
+"Now, no nation would look at the god of another; and each people
+clustered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying
+out, 'There is no god but this god.'
+
+"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king,
+whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and
+very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal
+peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought
+nothing but discord and war.'
+
+"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and
+he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be
+not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar
+whereat all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.'
+
+"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on
+it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with
+a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man,
+but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.
+
+"And each man forsook his god, and came and kneeled before this nameless
+altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in
+solitude. The poor forsaken gods stood naked and alone; there was not
+one man left to worship one of them."
+
+She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy
+fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled
+through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and
+every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.
+
+She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken
+God on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since
+she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of
+hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities
+alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that worship them.
+
+"If I had a god," she said, suddenly, "if a god cared to claim me--I
+would be proud of his worship everywhere."
+
+Arslan smiled.
+
+"All women have a god; that is why they are at once so much weaker and
+so much happier than men."
+
+"Who are their gods?"
+
+"Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods of their offspring, of
+their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as
+tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples.
+Others--less innocent--make gods of their own forms and faces; of bright
+stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and
+fine linen, of passions, and vanities, and desires; gods that they
+consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat,
+and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these gods will be
+yours?"
+
+She thought awhile.
+
+"None of them," she said at last.
+
+"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"
+
+She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and
+even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations
+naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for
+her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.
+
+"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that God is deaf. He
+must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no
+God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I were He.
+Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a
+little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing,
+quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been
+screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth;
+the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only
+scream--scream--scream. All in vain. Its God never heard. When I got it
+free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had
+bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much
+blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it
+down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could;
+but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun
+rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed
+any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a
+little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a
+god since all gods let these things be?"
+
+Arslan smiled as he heard.
+
+"Child,--men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are
+heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make
+life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.
+You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human, then. If you were
+human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to
+yourself a lease of immortality."
+
+She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him,
+and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity.
+It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been
+flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed
+little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of
+all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the
+field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were
+hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to
+gratify the appetites or the avarice of humanity--these sufferings were
+horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,--a crime
+for which she hated God and Man.
+
+"There is no god pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no god--not one?"
+
+"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three
+brethren that watched above her.
+
+"Are they your gods?"
+
+A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed a moment over his
+mouth.
+
+"My gods?--No. They are the gods of youth and of age--not of manhood."
+
+"What is yours, then?"
+
+"Mine?--a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen
+hands I have put them and myself--forever."
+
+She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest
+of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he passed his years
+in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous
+shapes that rose and bloomed around him.
+
+"Those are gentler gods?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the
+brethren above her. "Do you never--will you never--worship them?"
+
+"I have ceased to worship them. In time--when the world has utterly
+beaten me--no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one,
+see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."
+
+"And that god is----"
+
+"Death!"
+
+She was silent.
+
+Was this god not her god also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest
+and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?
+
+"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.
+
+And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the
+secrets of men,--he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's
+souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the
+braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling
+what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds
+silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all
+things fall at last.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and
+returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the
+ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave
+any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know--and had he
+known would not have heeded--that instead of going on her straight path
+back to Ypres she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the
+bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the
+riverside.
+
+It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and
+then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some
+night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went
+slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of
+the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the
+fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a
+republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The
+young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of
+the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in
+which all their metal tongues joined musically.
+
+She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of
+the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale
+rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black
+shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the
+strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead
+body, and the bending figure of Arslan as he stooped above the corpse
+and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of
+death.
+
+To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil
+thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make
+death--men's conqueror--his servant and his slave; she only begrudged
+every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid
+limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with
+a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and
+lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.
+
+He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any
+bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night
+breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the
+darkness.
+
+He worked more than half the night--worked until the small store of oil
+he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of
+a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and
+rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His
+hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his
+breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon
+his lungs.
+
+The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth
+that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever
+on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever
+on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that
+must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should
+have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For
+these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had
+neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death
+too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain
+glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the
+flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in
+his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of
+poverty and of obscurity.
+
+The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his
+manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to
+make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life
+by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the
+morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work
+of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.
+
+Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is
+Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to
+aim wildly and weakly?"
+
+He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again
+and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only
+that one dead woman shared.
+
+He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in
+search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be
+in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not
+in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to
+honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought,
+until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for
+once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once
+despairs of itself as self-deception.
+
+Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his
+fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him
+and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told
+himself, it must be so.
+
+He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing
+what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp
+exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few
+stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the
+silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon
+him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men
+that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the
+strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead
+also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave
+where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands
+powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices
+and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world
+above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of
+which paused by his tomb.
+
+It grew horrible to him--this death in life, to which in the freshness
+of manhood he found himself condemned.
+
+"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be
+without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long--let me
+be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days.
+Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men
+cannot, if they wish, let die."
+
+Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say?
+Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human
+creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and
+asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all
+the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to
+perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim
+exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"
+
+One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow sighing rushes,
+bathed in the moonlight and the mists; and the impersonal passion which
+absorbed him found echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just
+wakened in its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life
+as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of its
+involuntary cry.
+
+She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and yet her heart ached
+with his desire, and shared the bitterness of his denial. What kind of
+life he craved in the ages to come; what manner of remembrance he
+yearned for from unborn races of man; what thing it was that he
+besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, all peace, all
+personal woes and physical delights, she did not know; the future to her
+had no meaning; and the immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god,
+of whose worship she had no comprehension; and yet she vaguely felt that
+what he sought was that his genius still should live when his body
+should be destroyed, and that those mute, motionless, majestic shapes
+which arose at his bidding should become characters and speak for him to
+all the generations of men when his own mouth should be sealed dumb in
+death.
+
+This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured him, though the
+famine of the flesh had had no power to move him, thrilled her with the
+instinct of its greatness. This thirst of the mind, which could not
+slake itself in common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and
+pleasure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that dim
+instinct which had made her nerves throb at the glories of the changing
+skies, and her eyes fill with tears at the sound of a bird's singing in
+the darkness of dawn, and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as
+for some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant hush of
+earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she suffered; and a sweet
+newborn sense of unity and of likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter
+pity of her soul. To her he was as a king: and yet he was powerless. To
+give him power she would have died a thousand deaths.
+
+"The gods gave me life for him," she thought. "His life instead of mine.
+Will they forget?--Will they forget?"
+
+And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bulrushes she flung
+herself down prostrate in supplication, her face buried in the long damp
+river-grass.
+
+"Oh, Immortals," she implored, in benighted, wistful, passionate faith,
+"remember to give me his life and take mine. Do what you choose with me;
+forsake me, kill me; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind; let
+me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the chaff; let me be
+bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always; let me always suffer and
+always be scorned; but grant me this one thing--to give him his desire!"
+
+Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that vain would be the gift
+of life--the gift of mere length of years which she had bought for him.
+
+Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its solitude dreams
+had sprung forth windsown, like wayside grasses, and vague desires
+wandered like wild doves: but although blank, the soil was rich and deep
+and virgin.
+
+Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she had learned no evil: a
+stainless though savage innocence had remained with her. She had been
+reared in hardship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to her
+scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if they had been borne
+with courage and without murmur. On her, profoundly unconscious of the
+meaning of any common luxury or any common comfort, the passions of
+natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the empire of gold, had
+no hold at any moment. To toil dully and be hungry and thirsty, and
+fatigued and footsore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of
+the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich command. She knew
+scarcely of the existence of the simplest forms of civilization:
+therefore she knew nothing of all that he missed through poverty; she
+only perceived, by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he
+gained through genius.
+
+Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character trained by cruelty only
+to endurance: yet the soil was not rank but only untilled, not barren
+but only unsown; nature had made it generous, though fate had left it
+untilled; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to it and
+held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold.
+
+The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in
+her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the
+defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as
+they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and
+imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good
+things of which no man had taught her in anywise.
+
+Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by
+it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters,
+the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed
+into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless
+freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though
+she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the
+sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her
+which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.
+
+He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual
+delight, but only this one thing--a name that should not perish from
+among the memories of men.
+
+And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she
+yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on
+a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty
+pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's
+sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with
+every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works
+of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his
+body should be destroyed.
+
+It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time
+when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands
+blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his,
+though weakened.
+
+The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of
+an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem
+darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly
+he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he
+pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material
+life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels
+at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air,
+and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the
+forest-land and water-world are audible.
+
+He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of
+impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of
+lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god
+thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes
+which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never
+will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will
+drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since
+oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the
+devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and
+when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
+
+Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to
+feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have
+told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered
+to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a
+greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had
+known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a
+half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his
+life, and honored it without doubt or question.
+
+No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours
+under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.
+
+She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the
+first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But
+when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not
+dare to say her nay.
+
+A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly opening to her; the
+life of the imagination.
+
+All these many years since the last song of Phratos had died off her
+ear, never again to be heard, she had spent with no more culture and
+with no more pleasure than the mule had that she led with his load along
+the miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through that utter
+neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, some wild natural fancy
+had been awake in her, some vague sense stir that brought to her in the
+rustle of leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists,
+the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the open-air
+world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did not bear for any of
+those around her.
+
+Now in the words that Arslan cast to her--often as idly and
+indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds on snow, birds that
+he pities and yet cares nothing for--the old religions, the old beliefs,
+became to her living truths and divine companions. The perplexities of
+the world grew little clearer to her, indeed; and the miseries of the
+animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion of all things
+was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might be, they deepened and grew
+more entangled. He could imbue her with neither credulity nor
+contentment; for he possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool's
+paradise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that they have
+ascended Zion.
+
+The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of such a mind as
+his can furnish anodynes neither to itself nor any other. But such
+possessions and consolations--and these are limitless--as the
+imagination can create, he placed within her reach. Before she had
+dreamed--dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of
+tyranny; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon a mist-swept hill,
+by the western seas, while all the earth is dark, and only its dim
+fugitive waking sounds steal dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through
+the myths and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed
+almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting sun on the
+wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which all common things of daily
+life grow glorious, and through whose rosy hues the only sound that
+comes is some rich dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and
+melody of prayer.
+
+The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel place of labor and
+butchery, in which all creatures suffered and were slain. All things
+rose to have their story and their symbol for her; Nature remaining to
+her that one sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had feebly
+felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer to her, and made
+fuller of compassion. All the forms and voices of the fair dead years of
+the world seemed to grow visible and audible to her, with those
+marvelous tales of the old heroic age which little by little he
+unfolded to her.
+
+In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had no belief; she
+wanted a faith, and found one in all these strange sweet stories of a
+perished time.
+
+She had never thought that there had been any other generation before
+that which was present on earth with her; any other existence than this
+narrow and sordid one which encircled her. That men had lived who had
+fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, and stained
+those vivid hues in its ancient casements, had been a fact too remote to
+be known to her, though for twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in
+reverence of their loveliness.
+
+Through Arslan the exhaustless annals of the world's history opened
+before her, the present ceased to matter to her in its penury and pain;
+for the treasury-houses of the golden past were opened to her sight.
+Most of all she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages; and
+every humble and homely thing became ennobled to her and enriched,
+beholding it through the halo of poetry and tradition.
+
+When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two sparrows pecked and
+screamed and spent the pleasant summer hours above in the flower-scented
+air in shrill dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard
+in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and Cyx. When
+the wild hyacinths made the ground purple beneath the poplars and the
+pines, she saw in them the transformed loveliness of one who had died in
+the fullness of youth, at play in a summer's noon, and died content
+because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest of all gods,
+the god that loved him best. As the cattle, with their sleek red hides
+and curling horns, came through the fogs of the daybreak, across the
+level meadows, and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no
+more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the milk-white
+herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures of Pieria.
+
+All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song of the
+nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer for her a little
+brown bird that sang to the budding fruit and the closed daisies, but
+was the voice of AEdon bewailing her son through the ages, or the woe of
+Philomela crying through the wilderness. When through the white hard
+brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down the beams of light,
+she saw no longer in it an insect-hunter, a house-nesting creature, but
+saw the shape of Procne, slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding
+none. And when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing water,
+bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the mules to the
+mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she had heard the old glad story
+of the children of Zeus who dwelt so long within a herdsman's hut,
+nameless and dishonored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see
+the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise up and obey
+the magic of their song.
+
+Arslan in his day had given many evil gifts, but this one gift that he
+gave was pure and full of solace: this gift of the beauty of the past.
+Imperfect, obscure, broken in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance,
+it was indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory that time
+could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance could not impair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+"What has come to that evil one? She walks the land as though she were a
+queen," the people of Ypres said to one another, watching the creature
+they abhorred as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the
+market-stall.
+
+She seemed to them transfigured.
+
+A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her eyes; a proud
+elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance of her carriage: her face
+had a sweet musing mystery and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her
+smile was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair tidings
+in her heart unspoken.
+
+Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, absorbed in their
+small trades or in their continual field labor, were struck by the
+change in her, and looked after her, and listened in a stupid wonder to
+the sonorous songs in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips
+as she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden mules through
+the fords.
+
+They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, that she had thrown
+off their yoke, and had escaped from their narrow world, and was happy
+with some rich, mute, nameless happiness that they could neither evade
+nor understand.
+
+The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding
+a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that
+fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance
+which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and
+so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with
+indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than
+she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast
+that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure
+in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing
+the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful,
+clouded, fierce face.
+
+As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and
+to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came
+naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for
+some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest
+for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious
+sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed
+in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of
+ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden
+with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and
+the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free
+forest animal, was in a way welcome.
+
+All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was
+so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so
+unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift
+a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him
+when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another
+planet than his own.
+
+He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to
+inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without
+passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked
+in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured
+sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again
+with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful
+tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the
+tyranny of a human love.
+
+She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told
+himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows,
+and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious
+sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was
+a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of
+a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet
+appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake
+what slumbered there.
+
+But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she
+listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.
+
+The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created
+was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the
+peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.
+
+He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had
+flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of
+those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the
+walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself;
+despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the
+souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing--a
+thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of
+it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who
+was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the
+breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed
+at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,--these
+were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own
+weakness.
+
+She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he
+was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a
+worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.
+
+Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this
+new shame which they could cast at her.
+
+"She has found a lover,--oh-ho!--that brown wicked thing! A lover meet
+for her;--a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the
+mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own
+likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"--so the women
+screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or
+heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.
+
+At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a
+deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was
+only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and
+whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.
+
+In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated
+might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body
+or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy
+itself in its own darkness:--he had never stretched a finger to hold it
+back.
+
+The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of
+this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to
+him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should
+live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside
+he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first
+day, breathed a word to Arslan of the treatment that she received at
+Ypres. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his
+pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her
+how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well
+enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.
+
+And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did
+not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire,
+and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her
+teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to
+revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.
+
+So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslan's
+tower she spent in acquiring another art,--she learned to read.
+
+There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to
+her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly
+word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was
+better educated than most, and could even write a little.
+
+To her Folle-Farine went.
+
+"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every
+nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never
+find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you
+will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."
+
+The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have
+you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still----" The wish for
+the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared
+to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She
+consented.
+
+Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and
+scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little
+brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those
+green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no
+one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and
+despair of all the market-place.
+
+Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping
+under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green
+bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in
+rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the
+Evil Spirit of Ypres gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder,
+and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible
+things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.
+
+Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslan.
+
+It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night
+and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings;
+the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing
+against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle
+and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their
+folded white lilies,--these were all things he cared to study.
+
+The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the
+artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then
+break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and
+revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much
+deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and
+the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslan loved best to
+move abroad.
+
+Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her
+shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule
+seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them
+together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of
+all honest folk, were after some unholy work--coming from the orgy of
+some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them
+the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.
+
+For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and
+whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.
+
+Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the
+dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages
+she could for learning the art of letters.
+
+The acquisition was hard and hateful--a dull plodding task that she
+detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the
+lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with
+the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant
+was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen
+in communion with the wicked thing of Ypres.
+
+Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of
+the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from
+that belonged to the herb-seller--a rude old tattered pamphlet
+recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she
+had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the
+thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know
+these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you
+were not so ignorant!"--and since that day she had set herself to clear
+away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood
+with her hatchet.
+
+It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand
+before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles
+to me."
+
+He praised her; and she was glad and proud.
+
+It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full
+of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;--a love that
+unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her,
+and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.
+
+He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.
+
+A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman
+woods,--what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the
+desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he
+gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his
+exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission,
+was welcome to him.
+
+And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of
+her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes
+dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow
+dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.
+
+She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or
+the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would
+have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them
+more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at
+the blue-rock on the wing.
+
+This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit--habit, and the
+callousness begotten by his own continual pain.
+
+The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever
+knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty
+of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to
+change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind
+into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.
+
+He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his
+fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.
+
+His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition--a passion pure as
+crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his
+name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be
+his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into
+oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of
+his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into
+the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on
+the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.
+
+"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his
+paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so
+much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of
+hours--waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so
+many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly.
+It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes
+to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to
+do with you, go and hang yourself--or if you fear to do that, dig a
+ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows
+what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs
+to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what
+your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before
+you, Hosannah."
+
+So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his
+cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and
+which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that
+flew over them.
+
+Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the
+wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught
+her.
+
+"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read
+aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere
+on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and
+nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to
+have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to
+make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a
+thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice were
+wrong once, why not twice?"
+
+Arslan smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth
+than the ice floes of his native seas.
+
+"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's
+sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent,
+the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster
+of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi
+elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have
+Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and
+every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
+its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."
+
+She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
+roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.
+
+"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
+round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they
+bow when they pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
+with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
+him?"
+
+Arslan laughed a little.
+
+"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
+whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
+young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb
+that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
+who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money greeds and
+delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the
+assassination that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that
+deals moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned
+Fraud in the place of mailed Force,--lives always in purple and fine
+linen, and ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over
+his corpse."
+
+He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
+thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
+others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
+more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
+where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
+his hand.
+
+She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.
+
+"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly. "I have thought of
+something."
+
+And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
+surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
+a vision had arisen before him.
+
+The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone
+walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the
+level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded
+away as though they had existed only in a dream.
+
+All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes
+that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
+them.
+
+The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed
+before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he
+saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble
+palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of
+Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a
+city at high festival.
+
+And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had
+rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.
+
+A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and
+womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd
+in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose;
+a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow streamed; a sun which
+parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which
+it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the
+myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose gleaming marble walls the
+silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling
+cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple
+plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had
+scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they
+had one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes
+were filled with a god's pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned,
+and lashed, and hooted.
+
+And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon
+men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a
+brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
+eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of
+brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed,
+rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen,
+victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with
+wide-open throats and brazen lungs,--"Barabbas!"
+
+There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a
+terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or
+of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.
+
+One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the
+stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.
+
+A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and
+shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and
+fled.
+
+A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the
+rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod
+on him.
+
+A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he
+stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned
+captive.
+
+A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle,
+dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the
+sacrifice.
+
+A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist,
+sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after
+her in Barabbas' train.
+
+On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen,
+looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron
+boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning
+beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion
+of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to
+the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.
+
+And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above
+all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one
+faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure
+ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close,
+and tearing at each other's breasts.
+
+Six nights the conception occupied him--his days were not his own, he
+spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while
+his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the
+end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand
+could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been
+many of the greatest works the world has seen;--oaks sprung from the
+acorn that a careless child has let fall.
+
+When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood
+motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his
+sleepless eyes.
+
+He knew that his work was good.
+
+The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god
+when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne
+their full fruit.
+
+It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will
+discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the
+feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor
+of his ideal; the more surely will he--though the world ring with
+applause of him--be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.
+
+But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense,
+surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with
+a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain
+and of his hand contents him,--it is the purest joy on earth.
+
+Arslan knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he
+had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger
+and thirst and the passage of time.
+
+He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him.
+He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed
+with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had
+worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived
+there, recorded for the world that denied him.
+
+As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith
+in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what
+other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation
+remained with him.
+
+His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of
+the passing night.
+
+The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and
+plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the
+light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his
+fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.
+
+He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the
+best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the
+genius in him had ever conceived and put forth;--and he knew too that he
+was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he
+were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed
+whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame,
+unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken
+with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.
+
+There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in
+him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future
+generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were
+none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful
+things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their
+scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his
+mind and his hand--and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving
+one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for
+their meaning.
+
+To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few
+coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the
+bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.
+
+A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent
+life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle
+with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.
+
+"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to
+be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on
+it."
+
+All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he
+doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on
+canvas.
+
+If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to
+leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with
+each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the
+wing of the owl and the flittermouse.
+
+The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.
+
+Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.
+
+She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of
+his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then
+she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and
+bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts
+of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had
+brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have
+remembered.
+
+She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him
+and looked;--looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.
+
+The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of
+radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there
+was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.
+
+One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.
+
+She stood and gazed at it.
+
+She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of
+dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the
+dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was
+darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a
+thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its
+unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have been more
+marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch
+wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But
+now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the
+pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the
+creation, its creator.
+
+All she saw was the face of the Christ,--the pale bent face, in whose
+eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach
+that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.
+
+She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the
+people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ
+moved her strangely--there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken
+while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.
+
+Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated
+her with their ironies and with their woe--the parable of the genius
+rejected and the thief exalted.
+
+She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.
+
+"They have talked of their God--often--so often," she muttered. "But I
+never knew till now what they meant."
+
+Arslan turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.
+
+"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well--the world refuses me fame; but I do
+not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your
+admiration."
+
+"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the
+Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You
+care for the world--you?--who have painted _that_?"
+
+Arslan did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.
+
+He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless
+truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the
+painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a
+worldly success.
+
+Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?
+
+It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this
+untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious
+and mature intellect of the man of genius.
+
+He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.
+
+"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters,
+can see the truth and can tell it,--we are prophets so far,--but when we
+come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the
+dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no
+better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set
+to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."
+
+She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.
+
+Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks
+faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the
+wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the
+child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the
+soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there
+kneeled and prayed.
+
+Without looking at her, Arslan went out to his daily labor on the
+waters.
+
+The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed
+in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and
+voices of innumerable birds.
+
+"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and
+die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."
+
+Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire
+with a child's desire, the stars.
+
+For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and
+fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy;
+and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and
+his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will
+dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have
+closed on him and shut him forever from sight.
+
+When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its
+recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a
+fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or
+left down-trodden.
+
+But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot;
+it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none;
+nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot
+count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated
+under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be
+moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.
+
+Why should it not be?
+
+It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.
+
+And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from
+his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same
+old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound
+of the wind, and forever--forever unanswered!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats
+of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere
+the sun set.
+
+"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"
+
+"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You
+who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"
+
+"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it
+is."
+
+"The man has never yet lived who could tell--in fit language. Poseidon
+is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and
+reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."
+
+So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the
+osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet
+the swift salt waves.
+
+It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her
+errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the
+town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people
+of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that
+took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought
+the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself
+she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always
+in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran,
+spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a
+broad estuary.
+
+She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on
+which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something
+unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to
+herself.
+
+When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as
+probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull
+pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy
+burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of
+the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the
+sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in
+human nature.
+
+A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in
+by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little
+fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy
+with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded
+with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of
+the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of
+great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome
+cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the
+death-screams of scalded shellfish.
+
+He did not take her thither.
+
+He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily
+beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of
+silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some
+apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the
+water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with
+that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known
+restraint.
+
+Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road
+to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an
+old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for
+her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his
+clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing
+birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet
+hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and
+there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage;
+all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and
+the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze,
+for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.
+
+"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly
+as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and
+over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale
+crescent of a week-old moon.
+
+"To live apart?"--she did not understand.
+
+"Yes--like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man
+exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"
+
+Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.
+
+"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing--not
+so much as a fair word. That is well."
+
+"I think it is well--if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."
+
+"I am strong."
+
+She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force,
+which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.
+
+"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered.
+"I know what you mean--now. It is well--it was well with those men you
+tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to
+live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm,
+and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"
+
+"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such
+worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and
+he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool.
+And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild
+dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and
+despised?"
+
+Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and
+fierce as she answered him:
+
+"See here.--There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town
+who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says
+to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother
+Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are
+twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of God
+in Paradise.'
+
+"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is
+dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to
+go near by a league.
+
+"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the
+fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pass.
+He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they
+are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like
+betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need
+sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay,
+greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in
+each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.
+
+"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the
+fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the
+priests honor her, and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind
+mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall,
+and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on
+the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a
+night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now--is it well or no to be
+hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have
+become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."
+
+She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the
+caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and classing the
+kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a
+theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true
+instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any
+creature.
+
+She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of
+which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a
+passion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in
+common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as
+free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.
+
+He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and
+gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He
+answered her merely, with a smile:
+
+"You are only a barbarian; how should you understand that the seductions
+of civilization lie in its multiplications of the forms of vice? Men
+would not bear its yoke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their
+sins. You are an outcast from it;--so you have kept your hands honest
+and your lips pure. You may be right to be thankful--I would not pretend
+to decide."
+
+"At least--I would not be as they are," she answered him with a curl of
+the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes: the pride of the old nomadic tribes,
+whose blood was in her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority
+of the tamed and hearth-bound races--blood that ran free and fearless to
+the measure of boundless winds and rushing waters; that made the forest
+and the plain, the dawn and the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and
+the hiding-place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, sweeter
+than any nuptial bed.
+
+She had left the old life so long--so long that even her memories of it
+were dim as dreams, and its language had died off her lips in all save
+the broken catches of her songs; but the impulses of it were in her,
+vivid and ineradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid
+races of hearth and of homestead regarded her, she, the daughter of
+Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure.
+
+"I would not be as they are!" she repeated, her eyes glancing through
+the sunshine of the cloudless day. "To sit and spin; to watch their
+soup-pot boil; to spend their days under a close roof; to shut the stars
+out, and cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their straw
+in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, fearing to do what they
+will, lest the tongue of their neighbor wag evil of it; to cheat a
+little and steal a little, and lie always when the false word serves
+them, and to mutter to themselves, 'God will wash us free of our sins,'
+and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will not see and
+sure that their God will give them a quittance;--that is their life. I
+would not be as they are."
+
+And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana seemed to
+flash on her for one moment clear and bright through the veil of the
+weary years, and she walked erect and swiftly through the gorse, singing
+by his side the bold burden of one of the old sweet songs.
+
+And for the first time the thought passed over Arslan:
+
+"This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, and be yoked as a
+beast of burden,--if I chose."
+
+Whether or no he chose he was not sure.
+
+She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he
+cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to
+seek love from her he did not care.
+
+And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert
+mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared
+for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the
+gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.
+
+There was so little passion left in him.
+
+He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and
+the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its
+own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more
+than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses
+were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so,
+he had taught himself to desire it; and yet----
+
+As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the
+summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing
+creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a
+yellowhammer.
+
+Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the
+interior was visible. It was very poor--a floor of mud, a couch of
+rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls
+lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and
+trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that
+hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who
+was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple
+as herself.
+
+In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted
+her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks,
+he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white
+lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let
+the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head
+against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslan glanced at them
+as he passed.
+
+"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to
+be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a
+woman's lips."
+
+Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled
+suddenly, and walked on in silence.
+
+A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made her afraid: this
+forest-born creature, who had never known what fear was.
+
+The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only
+wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under
+the fire of the late afternoon sun. The slope was too gradual to break
+their monotony.
+
+Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint
+parched green; other color there was none; one little dusky panting bird
+flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.
+
+She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side;
+she hated the dull heat, the colorless waste, the hard scorch of the
+air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He
+had chosen to come to them.
+
+A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and
+covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the
+stunted bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the
+slope grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and
+them, steep and barren as a house-roof.
+
+Once he asked her,--
+
+"Are you tired?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead
+in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have
+dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any
+weakness.
+
+He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.
+
+The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the
+air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before
+them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and
+their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them.
+He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out
+and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and
+prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
+
+On the summit he stood still and released her.
+
+"Now look."
+
+She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led
+out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
+
+Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping,
+laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight,
+dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
+
+For what she saw was the sea.
+
+Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the
+waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels
+of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across
+it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward;
+rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent
+air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the
+cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch
+and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown
+curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that
+gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still,
+still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift
+wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher
+sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
+
+The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the
+earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again
+in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed
+away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.
+
+Arslan watched her in silence.
+
+He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only
+thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the
+northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's
+work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through
+all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the
+stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep
+through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the
+grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the
+corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take
+the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it
+claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the
+first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt
+small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to
+see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own
+conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters
+over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.
+
+Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it
+almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death
+would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a
+death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous; a death on which no
+woman should look and in which no man should have share.
+
+He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first
+paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her
+figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her
+breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching the wondrous
+brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it.
+Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one
+who for the first time hears of God.
+
+"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking;
+but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings,
+with little heed whether he thus added to either.
+
+At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she
+answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters,--
+
+"It has been there always--always--so near me?"
+
+"Before the land, the sea was."
+
+"And I never knew!"
+
+Her head drooped on her breast; tears rolled silently down her checks;
+her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She knew all
+she had lost--this is the greatest grief that life holds.
+
+"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between
+you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never
+climb theirs all their lives long."
+
+The words and their meaning escaped her.
+
+She had for once no remembrance of him; nor any other sense save of this
+surpassing wonder which had thus burst on her--this miracle that had
+been near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions
+dreamed.
+
+She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing
+straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.
+
+There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except
+where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were
+circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was
+gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far
+behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by
+the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears
+gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart
+was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.
+
+He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:
+
+"Since it pains you come away."
+
+A great sob shuddered through her.
+
+"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?--it
+is life, heaven, liberty!"
+
+For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and
+which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the
+dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them
+unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all
+the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and
+passions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now
+in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.
+
+Arslan looked at her, and let her be.
+
+Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the passions of
+this untrained and intense nature had interest for him--the cold
+interest of analysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed
+her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of
+mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with
+little pity and little tenderness.
+
+The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on
+into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank
+westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the
+edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the
+cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark
+and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still
+that look of one who worships with intense honor and passionate faith an
+unknown God.
+
+The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens;
+the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against
+the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the
+in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the
+rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which
+the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of
+fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came
+faint and weirdlike.
+
+Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and
+draw her to it with some unseen power.
+
+She started again as Arslan spoke.
+
+"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had
+seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic
+world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the
+twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"
+
+She gave a heavy stifled sigh.
+
+"It looks so free. And I----"
+
+On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only
+exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of
+ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more
+binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived
+the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and
+yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her
+to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a
+slave--since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its
+weight was upon her.
+
+He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of
+poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much
+poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.
+
+"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that
+govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty,
+but obedience--just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when
+it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in
+its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of
+the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it,
+but nature has never accorded it."
+
+The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the
+radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that
+trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from
+off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a
+rose.
+
+"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only
+known--I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on
+it--as that bird floats--it would be so quiet there and it would not
+fling me back, I think. It would have pity."
+
+Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire
+was in it.
+
+"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his
+words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"
+
+"You live," she said, simply.
+
+He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so
+clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had
+gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed
+was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.
+
+"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."
+
+With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in
+a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the
+shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and
+fled at the human footsteps.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little
+scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she
+obeyed.
+
+With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the
+purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might
+be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.
+
+It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the
+callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the
+dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed
+people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these
+things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of
+thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.
+
+But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would
+have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed
+thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his
+bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to
+cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.
+
+He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her
+the center of innumerable stories.
+
+He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after
+Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on
+the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty
+burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg.
+He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her
+streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed
+her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into
+the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the
+fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being
+purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's
+sake spoke not.
+
+He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking
+her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her
+beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind
+and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in
+other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell,
+the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by
+its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.
+
+Of all the studies he made from her--he all the while cold to her as any
+priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of
+sacrifice,--those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him
+best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and
+unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as
+with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
+
+In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating
+slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant
+blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the
+intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath,
+around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon
+her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in
+her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the
+sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep
+curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her
+with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken--the one touch of
+pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through
+the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.
+
+In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the
+same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of
+white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and
+twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same
+loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the
+face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and
+the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone
+there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips
+the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was
+left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,--ready for the
+mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,--ready for the
+feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in
+dust.
+
+And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all
+the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they
+were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so
+unsparing and unfaltering a hand.
+
+Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power,
+because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder,
+which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to
+which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it
+pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her
+beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his
+bidding.
+
+She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.
+
+She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would.
+That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her
+all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslan seemed sweet
+as the south wind.
+
+To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was
+to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life
+sublime to her.
+
+"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from
+the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Ypres went down
+the water-street beneath.
+
+"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no
+better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are--the little
+mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they
+say--sooner or later--to every creature that lives again for him in his
+art?"
+
+Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers
+of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they
+had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton
+temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.
+
+"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.
+
+"And you have no fear?"
+
+"I have no fear."
+
+The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow
+tresses.
+
+"Well--the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for
+the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you--his daughter--to lend
+yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the
+market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that
+for you--his own-begotten--I will cleave close to the saints and the
+angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the
+lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."
+
+The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision
+which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the
+fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around
+which they beat with their wings the empty air.
+
+The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched.
+If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught
+it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of
+pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing,
+she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her
+eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.
+
+Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.
+
+The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they
+were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling
+eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky
+orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen
+down,--she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her
+treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a
+human joy.
+
+Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely,
+with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the
+country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all
+unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep
+speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal
+tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her--nay, unfelt--went on her
+daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes,
+and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and
+entered into a heritage of grace.
+
+She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity;
+proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance
+made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in
+his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a
+thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed
+to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God
+for it--that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom
+she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the
+setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries
+of the starlit skies.
+
+Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in
+its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him,
+and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have
+crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave;
+she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of
+resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his
+hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be
+broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the
+greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to
+see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had
+any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could
+befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the
+wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then
+casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to
+this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and
+sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from
+the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was
+unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would
+have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the
+fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.
+
+To be of use to him,--to be held of any worth to him,--to have his eyes
+find any loveliness to study in her,--to be to him only as a flower that
+he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out
+on the land to wither as it would,--this, even this, seemed to her the
+noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.
+
+That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her
+limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of
+the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of
+the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never
+touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme,
+passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated
+all that they consumed.
+
+"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live
+forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself
+perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin
+first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.
+
+The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
+she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
+her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
+feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
+behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
+sky of Spain.
+
+He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
+
+She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
+his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is
+always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
+the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
+passion.
+
+Art is so vast; and human life is so little.
+
+It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be
+sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the
+heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It
+might have seemed to Arslan base to turn her ignorance and submission to
+his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make
+these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good
+was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they
+decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of
+the Mexican nation.
+
+The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his
+face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the
+opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to
+enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with
+the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have
+perished frozen in perpetual night.
+
+So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice
+that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which
+perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?
+
+The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is
+ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much
+of its priests.
+
+"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through
+the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with
+tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.
+
+She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.
+
+"I was thinking,--I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of,--the
+one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut
+down to make into a flute."
+
+"Ah?--you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are
+only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the
+market."
+
+"That is not the fault of the reeds?"
+
+"Not that I know; it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink
+of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do
+you think the reed felt then?--pain to be so sharply severed from its
+fellows?"
+
+"No--or the god would not have chosen it"
+
+"What, then?"
+
+A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to
+her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or
+the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath
+into the little life of a day.
+
+"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have
+forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed
+among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter
+the toads and the newts,--there is not a note of music in them
+all--except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they
+remember that long--long--ago, the breath of a great god was in them."
+
+Arslan looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds,
+and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about
+her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the
+thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden
+butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.
+
+He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.
+
+"Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he
+comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard
+you, he would think you mad."
+
+"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"
+
+"Nothing at all;--that I know. But you seem to envy that reed--so long
+ago--that was chosen?"
+
+"Who would not?"
+
+"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;--dancing
+there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with
+the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and
+the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."
+
+"Nay;--how do you know?"
+
+Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.
+
+"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather it was born in the sands, among
+the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,--no one asking, no
+one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad--no one caring
+where it dropped. Rather,--it grew there by the river, and such millions
+of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a
+thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out
+despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn.
+And then--I think I see!--the great god walked by the edge of the river,
+and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the
+earth forever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme
+that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange
+flame of the tall sand-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the
+sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed
+pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then
+he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;--killed it as a
+reed,--but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears
+of men. Was that death to the reed?--or life? Would a thousand summers
+of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a
+god first spoke through it?"
+
+Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was
+pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as
+the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as
+planets through the rain.
+
+She spoke of the reed and the god:--she thought of herself and of him.
+
+He was silent.
+
+The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze of the evening, and
+cast a malignant eye upon them, and bent his back and drew the curve of
+his hook through the rushes.
+
+Arslan watched the sweep of the steel.
+
+"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was
+cruel. "And the gods are all dead--Folle-Farine."
+
+She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her
+lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild
+strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.
+
+The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies
+grew dark.
+
+He looked, and let her go;--alone.
+
+In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which
+all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes,
+when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to
+make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslan, his reed was but a
+reed as the rest were--a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve--a thing of
+the stagnant water and drifting sand--a thing that lived by the breath
+of the wind--a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for
+a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any
+wise remember--a reed of the river, as the rest were.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the
+Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the
+dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I
+should be free; and with me _these_."
+
+The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he
+thought himself alone.
+
+This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this
+aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent
+in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as
+well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he
+despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him
+might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which
+he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his
+fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his
+brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.
+
+So little!--just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons,
+fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with
+which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;--and
+having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and
+arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still
+continue to deny him other victories.
+
+It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His
+boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a
+strong and hardy mountain-people.
+
+It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger
+unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes
+of wild weather.
+
+In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a
+salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had passed a
+winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the
+seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.
+
+None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its
+imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the
+impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual
+narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these
+were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his
+wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.
+
+"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so
+little--ever so little!"
+
+For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier
+times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at
+Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try
+once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the
+highest tributes that the multitude can give to the genius that arises
+amidst it.
+
+There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that
+wove in the darkness among the timbers.
+
+It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of
+the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes,
+and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the
+shore; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were
+wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.
+
+Otherwise it was intensely silent.
+
+In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of
+the tower, the market-boat of Ypres glided by, and the soft splash of
+the passing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.
+
+But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up
+at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and
+listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through
+the open casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his
+heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.
+
+She heard and understood.
+
+Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.
+
+"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the
+bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone
+tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down
+with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his
+sake.
+
+She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past--of
+all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their
+joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and
+the habits of the world--nothing of the world's pleasures and the
+world's triumphs.
+
+To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than
+this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the
+simplicity of it, seemed noble, and all that the heart of a man could
+desire from fate.
+
+Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of
+the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea,
+and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the
+pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the
+turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud,
+the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the
+leaves; or to lie still on the grass or the sand by the shore, and see
+the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb
+of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness
+of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams
+of worlds beyond the stars;--such a life as this seemed to her beyond
+any other beautiful.
+
+A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound
+of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between
+him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a
+street--a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and
+thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,--it seemed to
+her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was
+freest, simplest, and highest.
+
+She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the
+ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is
+doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the
+hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter
+and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.
+
+Of these she knew nothing.
+
+She had no conception of them--of the weakness and the force that twine
+one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and
+beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly
+disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could
+stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.
+
+But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that
+escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one
+that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her
+years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the
+twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.
+
+Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper
+pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a
+stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities
+would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads
+and cabins which had been her only world.
+
+"A little gold!--a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went
+on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase
+any pleasure for his appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever
+whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse
+circumstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the
+caged eagle.
+
+"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted
+on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the
+baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the
+air.
+
+"A little gold!"
+
+It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to
+stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought
+to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den
+still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary
+for him as she went.
+
+"What use for the gods to have given him back life," she thought, "if
+they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless
+desire?"
+
+It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality
+which they had given to Tithonus.
+
+"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.
+
+Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it
+as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to
+her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslan now. No gifts would she
+give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered
+and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding
+under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.
+
+When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had
+cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and
+glad in her eyes.
+
+A thought had come to her.
+
+In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together,
+under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden
+produce.
+
+"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."
+
+"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find
+those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's
+and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one
+ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to
+dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms,
+and he wanted to plant a young cherry."
+
+"There must have been a mass of coin?"
+
+"No,--only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up
+to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he
+sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found
+were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time--whatever he might mean by
+that."
+
+"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if
+one buried a brass button only long enough, he would give one a
+bank-note for it."
+
+"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would
+dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know
+about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the
+hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture
+he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a god. To
+worship old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like
+that,--how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the
+edge of the road."
+
+"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."
+
+"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."
+
+Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:
+
+"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"
+
+The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite
+horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the
+mill of Ypres.
+
+"He is a great noble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.
+
+"And where is his dwelling?"
+
+"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"
+
+She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with
+a glow at her heart.
+
+"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the
+Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that
+they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse
+with the devil's daughter.
+
+An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:
+
+"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces
+than for old coins; and--how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"
+
+She had passed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.
+
+"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and
+her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with
+a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope,
+that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not
+wholly hatred.
+
+That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell
+through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors,
+she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the
+steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.
+
+It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a casement that was
+never unclosed.
+
+On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's
+working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of
+leaden beads.
+
+On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the
+labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces,
+muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the
+sweet sins of her life and of her master's.
+
+She cared for her soul--cared very much, and tried to save it; but
+cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the
+fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and
+wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the
+tenth of a cherry.
+
+Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the
+sleeper.
+
+"Wake! I want a word with you."
+
+Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in
+horrible fear.
+
+Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.
+
+"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head.
+Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."
+
+The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her
+knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.
+
+Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and
+swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise
+against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and
+tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with
+terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of
+the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.
+
+It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable
+value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night
+and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master
+should discover and claim it.
+
+Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed--a quiet cold
+laugh--at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her
+in her infancy.
+
+"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?"
+she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you
+choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am
+strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst
+of the reckoning."
+
+And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing
+well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.
+
+It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.
+
+She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of
+hay in the loft.
+
+There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds
+that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity
+could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern
+clouds.
+
+She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon
+them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased
+to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never
+occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she
+had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.
+
+As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a
+strong emotion came over her.
+
+The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from
+the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment
+revived for her.
+
+The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of
+the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music,
+the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the
+hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,--all arose to
+her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile
+had buried them.
+
+The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins,
+she thought of Phratos.
+
+She had never known his fate.
+
+The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by
+the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted
+at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.
+
+Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her
+life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.
+
+All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father's race
+had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern
+seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made
+no plunder.
+
+The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among
+her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and
+tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the
+smile and the voice of Phratos.
+
+"I would never part with them for myself," she thought; "I would die of
+hunger first--were it only myself."
+
+And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little
+treasure--the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her,
+even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.
+
+The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded
+daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their
+golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.
+
+At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslan, she spoke to him,
+timidly,--
+
+"I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for
+Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I
+might do there--for you?"
+
+"Do? What should you do?" he answered her, with inattention and almost
+impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of
+inaction.
+
+She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as
+though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her
+lips.
+
+She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.
+
+"If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps," she said to
+herself.
+
+So she kept silence.
+
+On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the
+two mules, to Rioz.
+
+It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both
+the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she
+could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in
+either hand.
+
+The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some
+twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her
+own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new
+waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of
+a pastoral country in late summer.
+
+She met few people; a market-woman or two on their asses, a walking
+peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd--these were all.
+
+The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet
+roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only
+sound in the silence.
+
+It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell,
+surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a
+quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its
+roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble
+and the gorse grew wild.
+
+But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the
+roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore;
+she herself grew tired and fevered.
+
+She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway,
+where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a
+scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her
+brass pails on the ground.
+
+She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great
+bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a
+shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her
+bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered
+them.
+
+The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky,
+half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at
+their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great
+walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs
+was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept
+the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she
+would bring her food and drink.
+
+But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches,
+refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.
+
+The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the
+market-women had said, "What does the like of you want with the Prince?"
+
+"I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will," she
+answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.
+
+The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over
+the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed
+the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.
+
+"What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?" she muttered,
+watching the form of the girl as it passed up the steep sunshiny street.
+
+"Some evil, no doubt," answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was
+skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to
+founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb, _bon plaisir_, and the
+philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a _cajote_."
+
+Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the
+mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:
+
+"No one would ask the road _there_ for any good; that is sure. No doubt
+she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all
+the Arts!"
+
+Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.
+
+In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he
+had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things--girls' faces, coils of
+foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming
+on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown
+waters;--things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been
+transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of
+genius.
+
+She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and
+grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded
+slopes,--those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince
+Sartorian.
+
+One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry,
+looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his
+wife:
+
+"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his
+velvet-lined cupboards."
+
+And the wife laughed in answer,--
+
+"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."
+
+The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could
+mean; but she would not turn back to ask.
+
+Her feet were weary, like her mules'; the sun scorched her; she felt
+feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp
+ascent that rose in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river
+ran.
+
+At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all
+brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and shields. She pushed one
+open--there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the
+domain which they guarded.
+
+At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were
+green, the grass long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by
+she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to
+her.
+
+Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous
+flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of
+water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver
+breasts of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood
+here and there amidst the leavy darkness.
+
+She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.
+
+She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.
+
+A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great,
+fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was
+beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it,
+wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.
+
+A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it,
+thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it
+changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted,
+silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer's
+kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while,
+always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these
+cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.
+
+At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush
+and the lotos, and the white pampas-grass, and the flamelike flowering
+reed, of the East and of the West.
+
+All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets
+of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her
+to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a
+maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace.
+A door stood open near. She entered it.
+
+She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear
+in her whole temper.
+
+Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an
+endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the
+wonders that are gathered together by the world's luxury were for the
+first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the
+rich lived.
+
+She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.
+
+On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on
+the moss of the orchard at Ypres. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as
+fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups,
+the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were
+folded.
+
+It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by the dazzle of mere
+wealth. She walked through the splendid and lonely rooms wondering,
+indeed, and eager to see more; but there was no spell here such as the
+gardens had flung over her. To the creature free born in the Liebana no
+life beneath a roof could seem beautiful.
+
+She met no one.
+
+At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, she paused before
+a great picture in a heavy golden frame; it was the seizure of
+Persephone. She knew the story, for Arslan had told her of it.
+
+She saw for the first time how the pictures that men called great were
+installed in princely splendor; this was the fate which he wanted for
+his own.
+
+A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, stood before it:
+she recalled the words of the woman in the market-place; in her
+ignorance, she thought the picture was worshiped as a divinity, as the
+people worshiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned
+incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with something of gloomy
+contempt in her eyes, at the painting which was mantled in massive gold,
+with purple draperies opening to display it; for it was the chief
+masterpiece upon those walls.
+
+"And he cares for _that_!" she thought, with a sigh half of wonder, half
+of sorrow.
+
+She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his works were
+greater hanging on their bare walls where the spiders wove.
+
+"Who is 'he'?" a voice asked behind her.
+
+She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, humorous eyes, and
+an elfin face, delicate in its form, malicious in its meaning.
+
+She stood silent, regarding him; herself a strange figure in that lordly
+place, with her brown limbs, her bare head and feet, her linen tunic,
+her red knotted girdle.
+
+"Who are you?" she asked him curtly, in counter-question.
+
+The little old man laughed.
+
+"I have the honor to be your host."
+
+A disappointed astonishment clouded her face.
+
+"You! are you Sartorian?" she muttered--"the Sartorian whom they call a
+prince?"
+
+"Even I!" he said with a smile. "I regret that I please you no more. May
+I ask to what I am indebted for your presence? You seem a fastidious
+critic."
+
+He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuff whilst he looked at the
+lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, as he thought her, whom he had
+found thus astray in his magnificent chambers.
+
+She amused him; finding her silent, he sought to make her speak.
+
+"How did you come in hither? You care for pictures, perhaps, since you
+seem to feed on them like some wood-pigeons on a sheaf of corn?"
+
+"I know of finer than yours," she answered him coldly, chilled by the
+amused and malicious ridicule of his tone into a sullen repose. "I did
+not come to see anything you have. I came to sell you these: they say in
+Ypres that you care for such bits of coin."
+
+She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and tendered them to
+him.
+
+He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no sort of value;
+such things as he could buy for a few coins in any bazaar of Africa or
+Asia. But he did not say so.
+
+He looked at her keenly, as he asked:
+
+"Whose were these?"
+
+She looked in return at him with haughty defiance.
+
+"They are mine. If you want such things, as they say you do, take them
+and give me their value--that is all."
+
+"Do you come here to sell them?"
+
+"Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman from near Rioz say
+that you liked such things. Take them, or leave them."
+
+"Who gave them to you?"
+
+"Phratos."
+
+Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still loved the memory of
+Phratos.
+
+"And who may Phratos be?"
+
+Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning.
+
+"That is none of your business. If you think that I stole them, say so.
+If you want them, buy them. One or the other."
+
+The old man watched her amusedly.
+
+"You can be very fierce," he said to her. "Be gentle a little, and tell
+me whence you came, and what story you have."
+
+But she would not.
+
+"I have not come here to speak of myself," she said obstinately. "Will
+you take the coins, or leave them?"
+
+"I will take them," he said; and he went to a cabinet in another room
+and brought out with him several shining gold pieces.
+
+She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily.
+
+"Here is payment," he said to her, holding them to her.
+
+Her eyes fastened on the money entranced; she touched it with a light,
+half-fearful touch, and then drew back and gazed at it amazed.
+
+"All that--all that?" she muttered. "Is it their worth? Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite sure," he said with a smile. He offered her in them some thirty
+times their value.
+
+She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good fortune, then
+darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and took them and put them to her
+lips, and laughed a sweet glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her
+bosom.
+
+"I am grateful," she said simply; but the radiance in her eyes, the
+laughter on her mouth, the quivering excitement in all her face and
+form, said the same thing for her far better than her words.
+
+The old man watched her narrowly.
+
+"They are not for yourself?" he asked.
+
+"That is my affair," she answered him, all her pride rising in arms.
+"What concerned you was their value."
+
+He smiled and bent his head.
+
+"Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for? Wherever you came
+from, is this all that brought you here?"
+
+She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought the sketches
+from their hiding-place. She placed them before him.
+
+"Look at those."
+
+He took them to the light and scanned them slowly and critically; he
+knew all the mysteries and intricacies of art, and he recognized in
+these slight things the hand and the color of a master. He did not say
+so, but held them for some time in silence.
+
+"These also are for sale?" he asked at length.
+
+She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense expectation, her
+longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips quivering with eagerness. That he
+was a stranger and a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth;
+she saw he had perception.
+
+"See here!" she said, swiftly, the music of her voice rising and falling
+in breathless, eloquent intonation. "Those things are to the great works
+of his hand as a broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a
+thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a breadth of sand, a
+woman's face, and under his hand it grows glorious and gracious. He
+dreams things that are strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods,
+and he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he works for his
+bread, and in the gray night he wanders where none can follow him; and
+he brings back marvels and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories
+that are like the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees the
+things of his hand; and he is sick of his life, because the days go by
+and bring no message to him, and men will have nothing of him; and he
+has hunger of body and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he
+does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. But to him it is
+bitter that it is only seen by the newt, and the beetle, and the
+night-hawk. It wears his soul away, because he is denied of men. 'If I
+had gold, if I had gold!' he says always, when he thinks that none can
+hear him."
+
+Her voice trembled and was still for a second; she struggled with
+herself and kept it clear and strong.
+
+The old man never interrupted her.
+
+"He must not know: he would kill himself if he knew; he would sooner die
+than tell any man. But, look you, you drape your pictures here with gold
+and with purple, you place them high in the light; you make idols of
+them, and burn your incense before them. That is what he wants for his:
+they are the life of his life. If they could be honored, he would not
+care, though you should slay him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you
+idols of his: they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart is
+sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I would not care; but
+he cares, so that he perishes."
+
+She shivered as she spoke; in her earnestness and eagerness, she laid
+her hand on the stranger's arm, and held it there; she prayed, with more
+passion than she would have cast into any prayer to save her own life.
+
+"Where is he; and what do you call him?" the old man asked her quietly.
+
+He understood the meaning that ran beneath the unconscious extravagance
+of her fanciful and impassioned language.
+
+"He is called Arslan; he lives in the granary-tower, by the river,
+between the town and Ypres. He comes from the north, far away--very,
+very far, where the seas are all ice and the sun shines at midnight.
+Will you make the things that he does to be known to the people?
+You have gold; and gold, he says, is the compeller of men."
+
+"Arslan?" he echoed.
+
+The name was not utterly unknown to him; he had seen works signed with
+it at Paris and at Rome--strange things of a singular power, of a union
+of cynicism and idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world,
+and too pure for the other half.
+
+"Arslan?--I think I remember. I will see what I can do."
+
+"You will say nothing to him of me."
+
+"I could not say much. Who are you? Whence do you come?"
+
+"I live at the water-mill of Ypres. They say that Reine Flamma was my
+mother. I do not know: it does not matter."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust."
+
+"A strange namesake."
+
+"What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff of breath--less
+than the dust, anyhow."
+
+"Is it? I see, you are a Communist."
+
+"What?"
+
+"A Communist--a Socialist. You know what that is. You would like to
+level my house to the ashes, I fancy, by the look on your face."
+
+"No," she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, "I do not care to do
+that. If I had cared to burn anything it would have been the Flandrins'
+village. It is odd that you should live in a palace and he should want
+for bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So
+it is even, perhaps."
+
+The old man smiled, amused.
+
+"You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. Come in another
+chamber and take some wine, and break your fast. There will be many
+things here that you never saw or tasted."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"The thought is good of you," she said, more gently than she had before
+spoken. "But I never took a crust out of charity, and I will not begin."
+
+
+"Charity! Do you call an invitation a charity?"
+
+"When the rich ask the poor--yes."
+
+He looked in her eyes with a smile.
+
+"But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is young and beautiful,
+on which side lies the charity then?"
+
+"I do not favor fine phrases," she answered curtly, returning his look
+with a steady indifference.
+
+"You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. Well, come hither, a
+moment at least."
+
+She hesitated; then, thinking to herself that to refuse would seem like
+fear, she followed him through several chambers into one where his own
+mid-day breakfast was set forth.
+
+She moved through all the magnificence of the place with fearless steps,
+and meditative glances, and a grave measured easy grace, as tranquil and
+as unimpressed as though she walked through the tall ranks of the
+seeding grasses on a meadow slope.
+
+It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice adornment, the
+unnumbered treasures, and the familiar luxuries of a great noble's
+residence; but such things as these had no awe for her.
+
+The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations of luxury, could
+not impress her for an instant; she passed through them indifferent and
+undaunted, thinking to herself, "However they may gild their roofs, the
+roofs shut out the sky no less."
+
+Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet cast in the visible
+shape of sculpture or of painting, did her glance grow reverent and
+humid; only when she recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured
+stories, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith as pure and
+true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian child, did she falter and
+pause a little to gaze there with a tender homage in her eyes.
+
+The old man watched her with a musing studious glance from time to time.
+
+"Let me tempt you," he said to her when they reached the
+breakfast-chamber. "Sit down with me and eat and drink. No? Taste these
+sweetmeats at the least. To refuse to break bread with me is churlish."
+
+
+"I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin now," she answered
+obstinately, indifferent to the blaze of gold and silver before her, to
+the rare fruits and flowers, to the wines in their quaint flagons, to
+the numerous attendants who waited motionless around her.
+
+She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and
+the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits
+assailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.
+
+She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby glass, rimmed
+with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as
+indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained
+among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.
+
+"Your denial is very churlish," he said, after many a honeyed entreaty,
+which had met with no other answer from her. "How shall you bind me to
+keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of
+snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?"
+
+She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the
+golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.
+
+"A word that needs compelling," she answered him curtly, "is broken by
+the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root,
+to put faith in a man that needs a bond."
+
+He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amusement.
+
+"Where have you got all your wisdom?" he asked.
+
+"It is not wisdom; it is truth."
+
+"And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well."
+
+She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.
+
+"I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen."
+
+"And that is----"
+
+"I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain,
+so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round,--and I knew its birth
+was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false
+thing that would poison all that should eat of it."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well--when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the
+toadstool that springs from their breath?"
+
+"Who taught you so much suspicion?"
+
+Her face darkened in anger.
+
+"Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am
+afraid of nothing."
+
+"So it would seem."
+
+He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a
+gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them
+because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He
+tried to tempt her otherwise.
+
+She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta.
+She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color
+and for grace. There was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom.
+She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with
+such passion for another.
+
+He had various treasures shown to her,--treasures of jewels, of gold and
+silver, of fine workmanship, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as
+the wing of a butterfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her
+eyes had rested on such things all her days.
+
+"They are beautiful, no doubt," she said simply. "But I marvel that
+you--being a man--care for such things as these."
+
+"Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me,--as
+one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at
+least out of these to keep in remembrance of me."
+
+Her eyes burned in anger.
+
+"If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think
+to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?"
+
+"You are very perverse," he said, relinquishing his efforts with regret.
+
+He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of
+temptation: gold was a forcing-heat--slow, but sure.
+
+She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and
+yet a vague apprehension.
+
+"Are you the Red Mouse?" she said suddenly.
+
+He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he
+laughed--his little low cynical laugh.
+
+"What makes you think that?"
+
+"I do not know. You look like it--that is all. He has made one sketch of
+me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and
+it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant
+by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same
+triumph in your eye."
+
+He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.
+
+"He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I
+shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead--if I am indeed,
+the Red Mouse."
+
+She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of
+aversion.
+
+"I must go," she said abruptly. "The mules wait. Remember him, and I
+will remember you."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when
+it unlocks your eagle's cage and unbinds his wings?"
+
+"What?"
+
+She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no
+memory of her own fate had retarded or hastened her footsteps.
+
+"Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?"
+
+"I?"
+
+"Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?"
+
+A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face.
+
+"Ah, yes!" she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb
+triumph in her eyes. "He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live
+as the rose lives, on his canvas--a thing of a day that he can make
+immortal!"
+
+The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had
+found what he wanted--as he thought.
+
+"And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the
+world's sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can
+understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of
+the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra."
+
+"Farnarina? What is that?"
+
+"Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day's life of a rose, and who
+got eternal life for it,--as you think to do."
+
+She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over the dauntless
+brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.
+
+"I?" she murmured. "Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a
+little place--anywhere--wherever my life can live with his on the
+canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each
+other, 'See, it is true--he thought her worthy of _that_, though she was
+less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,' it will be
+enough for me--more than enough."
+
+The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his
+eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.
+
+She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite
+yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph
+which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.
+
+She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly,
+as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.
+
+He waited awhile; then he spoke:
+
+"But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if
+you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would
+lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter
+yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one
+wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast
+as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that
+his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me
+turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?"
+
+She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a
+smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of
+memory, so pitiful of his doubt.
+
+She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had
+bought his life back for him, with her own, from the gods. For the pact
+was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.
+
+But of it her lips never spoke.
+
+"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will
+see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty,
+and I will give you gratitude. Farewell."
+
+Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side,
+and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the
+gardens without.
+
+He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but
+vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades
+in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native
+forest.
+
+The old man sat silent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to
+slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded
+lands.
+
+She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters
+had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for
+her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight
+for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought
+left--the gold that she had gained.
+
+The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen
+words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her
+for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be
+not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the
+grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed.
+The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her
+long a prey to any thought of her own fate.
+
+She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.
+
+"What will it matter how or when the gods take my life, so only they
+keep their faith and give me his?" she thought.
+
+And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart
+content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.
+
+She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the
+human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those
+nine gold pieces.
+
+"A little gold," he had said; and here she had it--honest, clean, worthy
+of his touch and usage.
+
+Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth
+which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden
+haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as
+young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the
+shade of angels above their heads.
+
+When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been
+sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye
+bread that she had carried in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that
+she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink
+there.
+
+Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their
+own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the
+house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk
+of the falling night.
+
+She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only
+a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings,
+and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which
+flew by her over the fields.
+
+"A little gold," he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green
+chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering
+pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love,
+all honor, all peace, and all fealty?
+
+"Phratos would have wished his gift to go so," she thought to herself,
+with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.
+
+For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their
+hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed
+them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood
+alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the grass, and
+the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.
+
+"A little gold!--a little gold!" she murmured, and she laughed aloud in
+her great joy, and blessed the gods that they had given her to hear the
+voice of his desire.
+
+"A little gold," he had said, only; and here she had so much!
+
+No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed
+on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma's eyes she had
+seen glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of an
+emperor's treasury.
+
+She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds
+silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air,
+past the dark Christ who would not look,--who had never looked, or she
+had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved
+Thanatos.
+
+Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and
+lightly as a swallow on the wing passed through the dreary portals into
+Arslan's chamber.
+
+His lamp was lighted.
+
+He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there
+with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces,
+with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as
+soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the
+yellow sunshine of her first-born's curls.
+
+His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, with a sadness
+sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes
+those dreams which went so far--so far--into worlds whose glories his
+hand could portray for no human sight.
+
+He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.
+
+"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the
+squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the
+fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end--since
+you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to
+bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not,
+and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of
+his ideals,--save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms
+to it vainly, and die?"
+
+There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some
+eager bird.
+
+She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a
+radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous
+and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had
+been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.
+
+"Here is the gold!" she cried.
+
+Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.
+
+"Gold?"
+
+He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her
+sudden presence there.
+
+"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and
+full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A
+little gold,' you said, you remember?--'only a little.' And this is
+much. Take it--take it! Do you not hear?"
+
+"Gold?" he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and
+comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had
+spoken in his solitude.
+
+"Yes! It is mine," she said, her voice broken in its tumult of
+ecstasy--"it is mine--all mine. It is no charity, no gift to me. The
+chain was worth it, and I would only take what it was worth. A little
+gold, you said; and now you can make the Barabbas live forever upon
+canvas, and compel men to say that it is great."
+
+As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, she drew the green
+leaf with the coins in it from her bosom, and thrust it into his hand,
+eager, exultant, laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of
+her nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy possessing
+her.
+
+The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands stung him to
+comprehension; his face flushed over all its pallor; he thrust it away
+with a gesture of abhorrence and rejection.
+
+"Money!" he muttered. "What money?--yours?"
+
+"Yes, mine entirely; mine indeed!" she answered, with a sweet, glad ring
+of victory in her rejoicing voice. "It is true, quite true. They were
+the chains of sequins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his
+music in the mountains; and I have sold them. 'A little gold,' you said;
+'and the Barabbas can live forever.' Why do you look so? It is all mine;
+all yours----"
+
+In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, and sank low,
+with a dull startled wonder in it.
+
+Why did he look so?
+
+His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the language his glance
+spoke was one plain to her. It terrified her, amazed her, struck her
+chill and dumb.
+
+In it there were disgust, anger, loathing,--even horror; and yet there
+was in it also an unwonted softness, which in a woman's would have shown
+itself by a rush of sudden tears.
+
+"What do you think that I have done?" she murmured under her breath.
+"The gold is mine--mine honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I
+got it as I say. Why will you not take it? Why do you look at me so?"
+
+"I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?"
+
+She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her
+innocent rapture frozen into terror.
+
+"I have done nothing wrong," she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and
+wonder--"nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not
+take it--for their sake?"
+
+He turned on her with severity almost savage:
+
+"It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you
+think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?"
+
+His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.
+
+He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt
+her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible
+to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own
+abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he
+had difficulty to control--being touched by her ignorance and by her
+gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.
+
+She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light
+had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated
+strangely.
+
+For some moments there was silence between them.
+
+"You will not take it?" she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice,
+like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes
+all quiet around it.
+
+"Take it!" he echoed. "I could sooner kill a man out yonder and rob him.
+Can you not understand? Greater shame could never come to me. You do not
+know what you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no doubt,
+but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I frightened you? I did not
+mean to frighten you. You mean well and nobly, no doubt--no doubt. You
+do not know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter,
+and sap the strength of the receiver; but from woman to man they are--to
+the man shameful. Can you not understand?"
+
+Her face burned duskily; she moved with a troubled, confused effort to
+get away from his gaze.
+
+"No," she said in her shut teeth. "I do not know what you mean. Flamma
+takes all the gold I make. Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?"
+
+"Flamma is your grandsire--your keeper--your master. He has a right to
+do as he chooses. He gives you food and shelter, and in return he takes
+the gains of your labor. But I,--what have I ever given you? I am a
+stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I could be base
+enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. I make no disguise with
+you,--you know too well how I live. But can you not see?--if I were mean
+enough to take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more worthy
+of the very name of man. It is for the man to give to the woman. You
+see?"
+
+She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the confused pain on
+it of one who has fallen or been struck upon the head, and half forgets
+and half remembers.
+
+"I do not see," she muttered. "Whoever has, gives: what does it matter?
+The folly in me was its littleness: it could not be of use. But it was
+all I had."
+
+"Little or great,--the riches of empires, or a beggar's dole,--there
+could be no difference in the infamy to me. Have I seemed to you a
+creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put such shame
+upon me?"
+
+Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel than he had
+consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped to speech, and stung her as
+scorpions sting.
+
+She said nothing; her teeth clinched, her face changed as it had used to
+do when Flamma had beaten her.
+
+She said nothing, but turned away; and with one twist of her hand she
+flung the pieces through the open casement into the river that flowed
+below.
+
+They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.
+
+He caught her wrist a second too late.
+
+"What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the
+river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay
+you back in their stead! I did not mean to hurt you; it was only the
+truth,--you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity
+that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me
+with debts that I cannot pay--with gifts that I would die sooner than
+receive. But, then, how should you know?--how should you know? If I
+wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong."
+
+There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he
+spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not
+change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to
+her throat as though she choked.
+
+"You cannot do wrong--to me," she muttered, true, even in such a moment,
+to the absolute adoration which possessed her.
+
+Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled
+out from his presence into the dusk of the night.
+
+The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside
+above the sands where the gold had sunk.
+
+A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for
+it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust,
+from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might
+desire, a thing that a breeze might break.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In
+the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground,
+while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild
+flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits
+filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the
+fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled
+down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples
+down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on
+the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The
+chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed
+in the rolling woods.
+
+An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow
+of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She
+was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her
+eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips
+murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven
+palpitating breaths.
+
+It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing,
+and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather.
+The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and
+autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus
+of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy
+wooden shoe on his right foot.
+
+"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at
+day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle
+feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."
+
+She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and
+looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and
+rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience
+begotten by long slavery.
+
+There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had
+wandered sleepless all night long.
+
+"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at
+her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall
+have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver
+bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not
+mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only
+thing worth a rush in the house."
+
+She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats
+against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy
+dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she
+went, "A little gold! a little gold!"
+
+"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant,
+shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut
+ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say
+the devil-begotten never bleed."
+
+The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it
+was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any
+should blame the slayer.
+
+The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy
+warmth of the early morning.
+
+She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among
+his fellows--and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest
+shame that his life had ever known.
+
+"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out
+against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked,
+she had laid on him the debt of life.
+
+If ever he should know----
+
+She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the
+night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn
+of his reproaches.
+
+He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in
+intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the
+old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves,
+to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter
+end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as
+Adrastus upon Atys.
+
+On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the
+water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms
+of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in
+waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth,
+chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian
+skies.
+
+She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on
+the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the
+scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
+
+She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of
+herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies
+asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of
+a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the
+willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great
+guilt was on her soul.
+
+Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of
+the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat.
+She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and
+luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslan.
+
+Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who
+had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes
+of death as children in their mother's.
+
+The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like
+fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange
+mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing
+apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed
+from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her
+and beyond her.
+
+All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its
+pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the
+passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was
+buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as
+the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel,
+broke the silence.
+
+The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky
+woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the
+gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which
+her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those
+beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her--mysterious,
+unreal.
+
+She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead.
+And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide
+from his and every eye.
+
+She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
+
+The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her
+with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the
+barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the
+frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
+
+She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say
+hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things
+of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music
+arisen,"--and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
+
+Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets
+of elder and thorn--where she had made her bed in her childhood many a
+summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the
+mill-house;--there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to
+her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to
+slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out
+of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars
+throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
+
+In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that
+she slept folded close in the arms of Arslan, and in her dreams she felt
+the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.
+
+Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early
+day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and
+muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed
+when the sun breaks?"
+
+She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled
+in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her;
+her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with
+music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.
+
+Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad
+dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.
+
+She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she
+obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Ypres
+by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which
+takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways
+to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and
+unbidden.
+
+Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing
+in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver
+wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.
+
+"I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!" she said bitterly in her
+heart, "but I am not worthy--even to die."
+
+For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this--to be cut
+down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world
+might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.
+
+She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old
+mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head;
+the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the
+wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then
+fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from
+the high towers and spires of the town.
+
+At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had
+arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was
+still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the
+casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers
+under the roof.
+
+The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and
+fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees.
+The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with
+wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands
+to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A
+dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of
+timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle
+down above his head upon the breeze.
+
+The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no
+noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around
+stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as
+though it were still night.
+
+She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
+
+"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"
+
+The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned,
+and answered on his hands, "Flamma is _almost_ dead, they say."
+
+And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural
+noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of
+laughter.
+
+She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the
+stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant
+in unison.
+
+He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for
+generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so
+callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her--and to the country
+round--that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with
+him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the
+latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a
+little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the
+sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even
+by age or death?--it seemed to her impossible.
+
+All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the
+morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a
+strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the
+mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those
+wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
+
+She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat
+mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the
+bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered
+with a scared face out from her master's chamber.
+
+"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy
+grandsire lies a-dying."
+
+"Dying?"
+
+"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he
+came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as
+good as dead. You are glad."
+
+"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost
+step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for;
+and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her
+and hurt her.
+
+She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of
+the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor
+coming--coming--coming--through so many winters to beg bread, and going
+away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this
+death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.
+
+Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.
+
+"Will he leave her the gold or no?" she questioned in herself; musing
+whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit
+all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world--who could say
+which?
+
+After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went
+into the room.
+
+It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and
+a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The
+square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro;
+a linnet sang.
+
+On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of
+his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to
+life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon
+her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible
+effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone
+had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:
+
+"She was a saint--a saint: God took her. So I said:--and was proud.
+While all the while man begot on her _that_!"
+
+Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed
+again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking--awfully.
+
+Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on
+him.
+
+"You mean--my mother?"
+
+It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice
+lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.
+
+He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for
+the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.
+
+She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.
+
+She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to
+him.
+
+"Try and speak to me of my mother--once--once," she murmured, with a
+pathetic longing in her voice.
+
+A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on
+her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief,
+memory, fear--she could not tell.
+
+Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from
+its hole.
+
+"Ask where the money is hid," she hissed in a shrill whisper.
+"Ask--ask--while he can yet understand."
+
+He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a
+moment.
+
+Folle-Farine did not hear.
+
+"Tell me of my mother;--tell me, tell me," she muttered. Since a human
+love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother
+whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.
+
+His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay
+silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment
+remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.
+
+It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell,
+mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.
+
+A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear
+voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet;
+there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the
+dying man.
+
+They turned her from the chamber.
+
+The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.
+
+She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she
+went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on
+her hands.
+
+The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the
+murmurs of the priest's words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism.
+A great bitterness came on her mouth.
+
+"One crust in love--to them--in the deadly winters, had been better
+worth than all this oil and prayer," she thought. And she could see
+nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the
+moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, "God is good."
+
+The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a
+stillness as of cold.
+
+Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill,--
+
+"I loved her! Oh, God!--_Thou_ knowest!"
+
+She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the
+death-chamber.
+
+He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the
+gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal
+agony, a passion of reproach.
+
+With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests
+had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it,
+and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.
+
+"Even _Thou_ art a liar!" he cried,--it was the cry of the soul leaving
+the body,--with the next moment he fell back--dead.
+
+In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had
+shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had
+broken and shown no wound.
+
+For what agony had been like unto his?
+
+Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure
+white soul he had believed in once? Yea--who? Not man; not even God.
+
+Therefore had he suffered without hope.
+
+She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy
+noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down
+upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.
+
+All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.
+
+From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of
+the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the
+pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit
+harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.
+
+Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof,
+had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on
+bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore
+for him; and judged him without hatred.
+
+All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her;
+and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became
+sanctified in her sight.
+
+She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only
+that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his
+faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the
+darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every
+other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, "O
+Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"
+
+And now he was dead.
+
+What did it matter?
+
+Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died
+forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?--the little
+fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved
+in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for
+some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their
+famine by his greed and gain?
+
+It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the
+hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe
+to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his
+heart would never soften.
+
+Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had
+let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and
+lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his
+death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
+
+"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry
+eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
+
+And she had reason.
+
+For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever
+its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one
+narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh,
+drowns him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the
+precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness
+seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth,
+lest she should meet the eyes of Arslan.
+
+The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired
+watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned
+beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was
+closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the
+scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People
+came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Ypres
+was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not
+lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in
+the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead--at
+last."
+
+No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down
+by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the
+good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.
+
+The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she
+sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of
+the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and
+varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.
+
+No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left
+in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear
+is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at
+noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some
+simple meal of crusts and eggs.
+
+"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to
+herself,--"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if
+so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to
+seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."
+
+For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for
+pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.
+
+"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant
+muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at
+noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.
+
+"The wealth,--whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She
+had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft,
+and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible
+inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been
+too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his
+heir.
+
+"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with
+her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious
+eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always
+done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his
+wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot
+for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he
+has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass
+of gold hid away somewhere or another--the notary knows, I suppose--it
+is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money
+far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with
+never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the
+thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And,
+maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so
+near. Where think you it will go?"
+
+A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.
+
+"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of
+their hearts and their bodies."
+
+"Then you have no hope for yourself:--you?"
+
+"I?"
+
+She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and
+stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of
+Pitchou.
+
+"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away
+through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of
+hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other
+hope than the hope of the gold! Well,--as for me,--I never pretend to
+lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the
+gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's
+mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."
+
+She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet
+shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.
+
+Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to
+her with the woman's words of greed.
+
+Before another day had sped, it was possible,--so even said one who
+hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at
+the miser's board,--possible that she would enter into the heritage of
+all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered
+together.
+
+One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her
+with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslan, and
+there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would
+have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do
+as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I
+will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer
+than kings!"
+
+But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She
+would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with
+her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."
+
+She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen,
+unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said,
+"You have no right to burden me with debt"?
+
+Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great
+mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface
+that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the
+day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been
+set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her
+sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.
+
+If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought,
+to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of
+his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for
+the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped
+gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind
+and hand.
+
+And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to
+rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in
+its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held
+it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love,
+she submitted without question to its cruelty.
+
+At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little.
+The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time
+willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,--"who can say?
+She may yet get it all, who knows?"
+
+At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her
+eyes.
+
+"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought
+was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal.
+She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it
+would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.
+
+With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood.
+She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming
+and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and
+none sought her.
+
+All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.
+
+Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash
+of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white
+robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the
+little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden
+bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the
+people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had
+stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the
+living a fair savor.
+
+No one came to her. What had they to do with her,--a creature
+unbaptized, and an outcast?
+
+She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory
+of the fields.
+
+She did not think of herself--since Arslan had looked at her, in his
+merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.
+
+It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no
+longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to
+the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could
+not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and
+fortune.
+
+She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be
+free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could
+not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was
+like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that
+when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds
+uncompanioned.
+
+She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds;
+she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they
+were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached--she thought
+always:
+
+"If only I might die for him,--as the reed for the god."
+
+The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they
+and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude
+had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.
+
+The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the
+waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was
+a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown,
+and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.
+
+From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to
+her ear in the shadow of the solitude.
+
+"Folle-Farine,--I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to
+stay me. Say--do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave
+of the Snakes?"
+
+She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw
+shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the
+eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they
+noted the change in her since the last sun had set.
+
+"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.
+
+She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face;
+she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price
+for her chain of coins.
+
+He laughed a little softly.
+
+"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to
+sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!--female things, with
+eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"
+
+She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her
+head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her
+intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's
+probe.
+
+"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but
+one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."
+
+She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:
+
+"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the
+river."
+
+She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its
+degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him
+strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery
+to any debt or burden of a service done.
+
+The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves,
+looked at her long and thoughtfully.
+
+"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"
+
+She gave a sign of assent.
+
+"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and
+shut together.
+
+"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."
+
+"You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold
+because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."
+
+A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.
+
+"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."
+
+"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then--this god of yours?"
+
+She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her
+faith would not be turned.
+
+"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth;
+"because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."
+
+"You are very truthful."
+
+She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
+
+The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have
+watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of
+wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which
+made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never
+allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her
+limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the
+cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young
+desert mare.
+
+"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the
+same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of
+scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on
+the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my
+many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen
+sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is
+Arslan blind, or is he only tired?"
+
+But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the
+prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight
+of the curled lasso.
+
+"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for
+your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons?
+It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will
+bleed many a day."
+
+She lifted her head.
+
+"Have I complained?--have I asked your pity, or any man's?"
+
+"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's
+wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."
+
+"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him
+for that?"
+
+"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you
+still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What, still?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be
+shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken
+yourself, is shaken from his feet!"
+
+"No doubt."
+
+She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood
+unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her
+eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still
+upon the reaches of the river.
+
+"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man
+is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye
+and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always;
+he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will
+be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give
+this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which
+shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you
+be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him?
+Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that
+you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on
+to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so
+much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage,
+or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form
+to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women
+have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her
+charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will
+displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free--to
+forget you?"
+
+She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other
+days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her
+master.
+
+"He shall be free--to forget me."
+
+The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were
+echoed through her locked teeth.
+
+The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet
+he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the
+torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a
+female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs
+quiver, and those bare nerves heave.
+
+"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong
+though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's sex,
+Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than
+your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are
+beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with
+a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If
+his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be
+yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without
+some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your
+Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by
+poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness
+on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at
+least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and
+who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light
+beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be
+the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach
+of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of
+any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you
+doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I
+have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against
+it to withstand it--this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily
+beauty of a woman."
+
+His voice ceased softly in the twilight--this voice of
+Mephistopheles--which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of
+straining this strength to see if it should break--of deriding this
+faith to see if it would bend--of alluring this soul to see if it would
+fall.
+
+She stood abased in a piteous shame--the shame that any man should thus
+read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all
+innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased
+to bear the gaze of any human eyes,--to bear the light of any noonday
+sun.
+
+And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle
+force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood--the
+ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with
+her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved
+for one single day,--to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms
+hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a
+hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned,
+and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,--
+
+"I have lived: it is enough!"
+
+He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled
+through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.
+
+He might be hers--all her own--each pulse of his heart echoing hers,
+each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!--she hid her
+face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her
+and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.
+
+She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one
+idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she
+would have given her body and her soul. Her soul--if the gods and man
+allowed her one--her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one
+single day of Arslan's love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they
+would--but his?
+
+Not for this had she sold her life to the gods--not for this; not for
+the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.
+
+What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in
+him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in
+his stead to die.
+
+"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze
+smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in
+solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the
+cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by
+the river?"
+
+The reeds by the river.
+
+The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the
+bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the
+river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life
+might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her
+faith,--to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius
+perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know
+delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man
+heart-sick and heart-broken?
+
+She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would
+have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was
+once more strong.
+
+"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce
+glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your
+word; set him free. His freedom let him use--as he will."
+
+Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of
+the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.
+
+Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully
+and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood,
+along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people
+waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and
+alone.
+
+"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime
+unreason--that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold,
+as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe
+yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it
+drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that
+though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh,
+at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was
+twisting.
+
+He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the
+public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and
+fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had
+once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill
+scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
+
+It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from
+the porch.
+
+In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily
+through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the
+house.
+
+She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance
+of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a
+man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought
+ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?--forget
+quite--when he is free?"
+
+The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat
+rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under
+the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of
+the doorway.
+
+Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her
+eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet,
+leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind
+her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its
+wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.
+
+She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated
+for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the
+pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke
+so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through
+the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and
+stupor.
+
+"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told,
+and her heart breaks for the gold."
+
+The thought was sweet to her--precious with the preciousness of
+vengeance.
+
+"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give
+thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a
+Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no
+longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."
+
+Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that
+she spoke.
+
+"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude
+coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.
+
+"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now;
+and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they
+eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do
+for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all
+men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn
+as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."
+
+Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending;
+scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength
+spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had
+assailed her.
+
+"You mean," she muttered, "you mean----What would you tell me? I do not
+know."
+
+The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the
+carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof
+seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate
+of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."
+
+All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth
+shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:----and Pitchou,
+looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's
+treasure!
+
+She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose
+crushed brain there was only one thought--"Will he forget--forget
+quite--when he is free?"
+
+The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager,
+hissing, tumultuous words:
+
+"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for,
+but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the
+love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all
+his land and household things. God rest his soul! He was a man. He
+forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all
+that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle
+boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money
+go--eh, eh? Canst guess?"
+
+"Go?"
+
+Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:
+
+"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did
+ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the
+lands, and the things--every coin, every inch, every crumb--is willed
+away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for
+the will of God and the glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said
+for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as
+good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is
+old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and
+manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney
+corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night,
+but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church
+will scarce go to roost together."
+
+Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not
+understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in
+the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its
+familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.
+
+"Go!"--she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a
+vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the
+creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.
+
+"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I
+serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it
+fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed
+as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night--I would not be
+overharsh--but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost
+hear?"
+
+Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.
+
+The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away
+down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and
+vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and
+of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in
+her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured
+her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for
+the loss of the sequins.
+
+"How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint's-day!" she
+thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church
+and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.
+
+Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her
+sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments
+which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and
+went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across
+the bridge into the woods.
+
+She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a
+tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse,
+like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the
+trance of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any
+sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty
+fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were,
+yet been all the difference between home and homelessness--between
+existence and starvation.
+
+She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.
+
+She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the
+mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables
+and its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and
+wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet
+chestnut woods.
+
+She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded
+them.
+
+She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only
+pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself
+was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its
+dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and
+feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,--these had been
+her consolations often,--these, in a way, she loved.
+
+Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its
+cool pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart
+clove to it in this moment when she left it--forever. She looked once at
+it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her way.
+
+She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds
+fluttered about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that
+had befallen her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no
+canopy but the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the ripe
+wheat-ears.
+
+The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe
+of the lonely death that she had witnessed, wore on her too heavily, and
+with too dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her
+thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.
+
+Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on
+her. She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though
+she walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as
+through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she
+meant to do, or whither she desired to go.
+
+The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and
+their day at the town-market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of
+them cast some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all
+the countryside that Flamma's treasure was gone to Holy Church.
+
+They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless
+arrows of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and
+laughed, and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so
+much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she,
+nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and her heart hardened, and
+her blood burned.
+
+Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they marched by
+through the purpling leaves or the tall seed-grasses. Not one of them,
+mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember
+that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay her head that night
+than any sick hart driven from its kind.
+
+She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in the fruit-hung
+ways, along the edge of the meadows: fathers with their little children
+running by them, laden with plumes of meadow-sweet; mothers bearing
+their youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young
+lovers talking together as they drove the old cow to her byre; old
+people counting their market gains cheerily; children paddling knee-deep
+in the brooks for cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for
+her;--all had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her so much
+as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much as a brief
+good-night.
+
+"She will quit the country now; that is one good thing," she heard many
+of them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying,
+how pure as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God!
+
+The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating
+sought its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came
+out under the lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the
+distance there came the sound of voices singing together; now and then
+there fell across her path two shadows turning one to the other.
+
+She only was alone.
+
+What did she seek to do?
+
+She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water
+in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream.
+None desired her--none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a
+little, for love's sake."
+
+"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she
+thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against
+them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her
+with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The
+visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the
+thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking
+world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had
+been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him--she
+felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a
+thousand deaths.
+
+What was she to him?--a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose
+very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.
+
+"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be
+fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of
+horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one
+religion, this--her love.
+
+She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an
+old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.
+
+The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the
+plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All
+was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and
+of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were
+but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night.
+White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim
+world.
+
+She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.
+
+She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had
+no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.
+
+Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the
+gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a
+human hand; Arslan came out from the darkness of the woods before her.
+
+With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by
+passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from
+the only eyes she loved.
+
+Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their
+blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud
+and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the
+midnight of calamity.
+
+Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown
+limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red
+girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.
+
+Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses,
+caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A
+tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps
+failed her. She faltered and fell.
+
+Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was
+in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the
+stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the
+night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the
+moon shone.
+
+She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor
+of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks,
+from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was
+beautiful with the beauty of women.
+
+"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the
+song of the reed by the river!
+
+But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that
+was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on
+a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a
+thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on
+his way.
+
+He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake
+to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of
+her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had
+scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all
+that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the
+passion of love in a man to a woman.
+
+So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no
+light in his own eyes.
+
+"Do not fly from me," he said to her. "I have sought you, to ask your
+forgiveness, and----"
+
+She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest
+in the posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was hidden in
+the shadow; her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and
+was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of her homelessness he had
+heard nothing.
+
+"I was harsh to you," he said, gently. "I spoke, in the bitterness of
+my heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;--I forgot that you
+could not know. Can you forgive?"
+
+"The madness was mine," she muttered. "It was I, who forgot----"
+
+Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not
+look up; she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young
+tree which has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She
+knew well what his words would say.
+
+"You are generous, and you shame me--indeed--thus," he said with a
+certain softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its
+coldness and serenity.
+
+This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this
+silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to
+utter one reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but
+see that this nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any
+common nobility of any human thing.
+
+"I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much," he
+said slowly. "I feel base and unworthy; for--I have sought you to bid
+you farewell."
+
+She had awaited her death-blow; she received its stroke without a sound.
+
+She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing
+there her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all
+her beauty changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.
+
+She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands
+crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.
+
+His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love
+for her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude
+savage women who had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined
+Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and plain,
+who had come on here before him in the light of the East, and had passed
+as the shadows passed, and, like them, were forgotten.
+
+She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think--all this
+mighty love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy
+loveliness would die out here, as the evening colors had died out of the
+skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.
+
+He knew that he had but to say to her, "Come!" and she would go beside
+him, whether to shame or ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and
+rejoicing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them
+the gates of paradise.
+
+He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could
+make her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he
+could bid her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he
+knew that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death
+he told her; he knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his
+side would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or
+heaven. And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice
+with such love as this.
+
+Yet,--he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the
+death-stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet
+surely home--to the heart.
+
+"A stranger came to me an hour or more ago," he said to her; and it
+seemed even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and
+stronger than his own,--"an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his
+face--far away, long ago--I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He
+seemed a man of knowledge, and a man critical and keen. That study of
+you--the one among the poppies--you remember--took his eyes and pleased
+him. He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of paper
+money--money enough to take me back among men--to set me free for a
+little space. Oh child! you have seen--this hell on earth kills me. It
+is a death in life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I
+must hurt something, or go mad."
+
+She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was
+like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored,
+broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.
+
+He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this
+creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,--it was wearying to
+him; all he desired was power among men.
+
+"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded
+you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my
+foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"
+
+"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor
+did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh
+metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.
+
+He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were
+pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been
+pitiless to her--with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is
+born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the
+senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne
+to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he
+himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and
+so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe
+music through its shattered grace again.
+
+"When do you go?" she asked.
+
+Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift
+the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;--all the
+ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field
+where men have fought and died.
+
+He answered her, "At dawn."
+
+"And where?"
+
+"To Paris. I will find fame--or a grave."
+
+A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the
+darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the
+poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The
+purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken;
+but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in
+silence.
+
+He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.
+
+He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the
+dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all
+warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him,
+to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot--as he chose.
+
+"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base
+to you,--brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;--yet I would have
+loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all
+the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is
+dead in me, I think, otherwise----"
+
+She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain
+reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under
+the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms
+about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that
+strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss
+the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they
+never again will rest.
+
+Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields,
+and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows
+it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
+
+He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was
+tender. He had no love for her; and yet--now that he had thrown her from
+him forever--he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again
+in their terrible eloquence upon his own.
+
+But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.
+
+He went back to his home alone.
+
+"It is best so," he said to himself.
+
+For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his
+coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing--a reed of
+the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.
+
+He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the
+creations that alone he loved.
+
+"They shall live--or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war
+to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?
+
+That night Hermes had no voice for him.
+
+Else might the wise god have said, "Many reeds grow together by the
+river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one
+reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that
+reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long,--yea, all the years
+of his life."
+
+But Hermes that night spake not.
+
+And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by
+the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither
+she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had
+dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in
+its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little
+from her mouth.
+
+It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl
+on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving
+things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green
+and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light
+anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.
+
+No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole
+frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of
+the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many
+hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the
+grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and
+wondered what had chanced to her.
+
+The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon.
+She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick
+and dull.
+
+A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of
+the river-shore; her eyes vacantly followed the insect's aimless
+circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly
+and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his
+maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of
+it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She
+shivered and was cold.
+
+The sun rose--a globe of flame above the edge of the world.
+
+Memory flashed on her with its light.
+
+She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of
+blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains
+from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent,
+flowing water.
+
+Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and thought, and
+thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that
+it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even
+when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.
+
+She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by
+weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through
+it as with tongues of flame.
+
+The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand.
+He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and
+trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile;
+then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had
+fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth--that in his last embrace
+he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof
+he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.
+
+Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would
+have suffered far less if he had killed her.
+
+He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed
+her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other
+driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.
+
+The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.
+
+Gold!--such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the
+corners of the streets!
+
+The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself.
+Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not
+have cast this shame upon her.
+
+She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching
+eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.
+
+Her heart was breaking.
+
+Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword,
+and killed forever.
+
+She did not reason--all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who
+loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there
+long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring
+instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as
+eternally as though his grave had closed on him.
+
+She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too
+perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right
+to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best
+might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had
+deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.
+
+She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went
+along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as
+she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning
+air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her
+slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have
+sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.
+
+Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet
+orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge
+than the lizard at her feet.
+
+Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all
+youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them
+was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the
+summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was
+resolute to follow him,--to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his
+footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across
+his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and
+by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to
+share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.
+
+To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as
+it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.
+
+She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she
+hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would
+have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn
+asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor
+by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a
+thing that was vile.
+
+But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to
+her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at
+once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as
+the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands,
+but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.
+
+She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.
+
+He had said that he would leave at dawn.
+
+In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast
+ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some
+league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the
+river where he dwelt.
+
+She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too,
+she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She
+wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his
+eyes would kill her.
+
+It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and
+feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the
+ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the
+stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that
+the place was desolate.
+
+The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the
+pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the
+figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light
+fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the
+stone.
+
+She entered and looked at them.
+
+She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there--alone.
+
+The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute
+and content;--and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread
+winged King,--the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden
+apples in their hands,--the women dancing upon Cithaeron in the
+moonlight,--the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,--all the
+familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old
+sweet life of the heroic times, were there--left to the rat and the
+spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no
+heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.
+
+The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights
+would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the
+skies, and they would be there--alone.
+
+To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up
+with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one
+brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as
+the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.
+
+She held them in a passionate tenderness--these, the first creatures who
+had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness
+of her life.
+
+She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them
+in an agony of prayer--prayed for them that the hour might come, and
+come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would
+remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in
+worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to
+whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart,
+towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and
+consolation.
+
+Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving
+them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To
+have them live, she would have given her own life.
+
+Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first
+time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the
+floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.
+
+When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and
+Thanatos--the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.
+
+They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet
+their look struck coldly to her heart.
+
+Sleep, Dreams, and Death,--were these the only gifts with which the
+gods, being merciful, could answer prayer?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+At the little quay in the town many boats were lading and unlading, and
+many setting their sails to go southward with their loads of eggs, or of
+birds, of flowers, of fruit, or of herbage; all smelling of summer rain,
+and the odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest of the
+lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them.
+
+Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and learned what she
+needed without any asking, in turn, question of her.
+
+Arslan had sailed at sunrise.
+
+There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded with Russian
+violets from a flower-farm. The old man was angered and in trouble: the
+lad who steered for him had failed him, and the young men and boys on
+the canals were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage for the
+wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and leaned towards him.
+
+"Do you go the way to Paris?"
+
+The old man nodded.
+
+"I will steer for you, then," she said to him; and leaped down among his
+fragrant freight. He was a stranger to her, and let her be. She did for
+him as well as another, since she said that she knew those waters well.
+
+He was in haste, and, without more words, he loosened his sail, and cut
+his moor-rope, and set his little vessel adrift down the water-ways of
+the town, the violets filling the air with their odors and blue as the
+eyes of a child that wakes smiling.
+
+All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and dim passages,
+all the ropes on which the lanterns and the linen hung, all the wide
+carved stairways water-washed, all the dim windows that the women filled
+with pots of ivy and the song of birds,--she was drifting from them with
+every pulse of the tide, never again to return; but she looked at them
+without seeing them, indifferent, and having no memory of them; her
+brain, and her heart, and her soul were with the boat that she followed.
+
+It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat-bottomed boats were
+coming in at sunrise, in each some cargo of green food or of farm
+produce; a strong girl rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the
+white glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds' eggs,
+children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, old women nursing a
+wicker cage of cackling hens or hissing geese, mules and asses, shaking
+their bells and worsted tassels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin
+saddles,--these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, or
+on the broad highroad that ran for a space by the water's edge.
+
+All of these knew her well; all of these some time or another had jeered
+her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled from her. But no one stopped her.
+No one cared enough for her to care even to wonder whither she went.
+
+She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew so well, along the
+line of the wood and the orchards of Ypres. But what at another time
+would have had pain for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad
+familiarity, now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great
+passion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all slighter memories.
+
+All day long they sailed.
+
+At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust as part of her
+wage; she tried to eat them, knowing she would want all her strength.
+
+They left the course of the stream that she knew, and sailed farther
+than she had ever sailed; passed towns whose bells were ringing, and
+noble bridges gleaming in the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome,
+and bright orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. She
+knew none of them. There were only the water flowing under the keel, and
+the blue sky above, with the rooks circling in it, which had the look of
+friends to her.
+
+The twilight fell; still the wind served, and still they held on; the
+mists came, white and thick, and stars rose, and the voices from the
+shores sounded strangely, with here and there a note of music or the
+deep roll of a drum.
+
+So she drifted out of the old life into an unknown world. But she never
+once looked back. Why should she?--He had gone before.
+
+When it was quite night, they drew near to a busy town, whose lights
+glittered by hundreds and thousands on the bank. There were many barges
+and small boats at anchor in its wharves, banging out lanterns at their
+mast-heads. The old man bade her steer his boat among them, and with a
+cord he made it fast.
+
+"This is Paris?" she asked breathlessly
+
+The old man laughed:
+
+"Paris is days' sail away."
+
+"I asked you if you went to Paris?"
+
+The old man laughed again:
+
+"I said I came the Paris way. So I have done. Land."
+
+Her face set with an anger that made him wince, dull though his
+conscience was.
+
+"You cheated me," she said, briefly; and she climbed the boat's side,
+and, shaking the violets off her, set her foot upon the pier, not
+stopping to waste more words.
+
+But a great terror fell on her.
+
+She had thought that the boat would bring her straight to Paris; and,
+once in Paris, she had thought that it would be as easy to trace his
+steps there as it had been in the little town that she had left. She had
+had no sense of distance--no knowledge of the size of cities; the width,
+and noise, and hurry, and confusion of this one waterside town made her
+helpless and stupid.
+
+She stood like a young lost dog upon the flags of the landing-place, not
+knowing whither to go, nor what to do.
+
+The old man, busied in unlading his violets into the wicker creels of
+the women waiting for them, took no notice of her; why should he? He had
+used her so long as he had wanted her.
+
+There were incessant turmoil, outcry, and uproar round the
+landing-stairs, where large cargoes of beetroot, cabbages, and fish were
+being put on shore. The buyers and the sellers screamed and swore; the
+tawny light of oil-lamps flickered over their furious faces; the people
+jostled her, pushed her, cursed her, for being in the way. She shrank
+back in bewilderment and disgust, and walked feebly away from the edge
+of the river, trying to think, trying to get back her old health and her
+old force.
+
+The people of the streets were too occupied to take any heed of her.
+Only one little ragged boy danced before her a moment, shrieking, "The
+gypsy! the gypsy! Good little fathers, look to your pockets!"
+
+But she was too used to the language of abuse to be moved by it. She
+went on, as though she were deaf, through the yelling of the children
+and the chattering and chaffering of the trading multitude.
+
+There was a little street leading off the quay, picturesque and ancient,
+with parquetted houses and quaint painted signs; at the corner of it sat
+an old woman on a wooden stool, with a huge fan of linen on her head
+like a mushroom. She was selling roasted chestnuts by the glare of a
+little horn lantern.
+
+By this woman she paused, and asked the way to Paris.
+
+"Paris! This is a long way from Paris."
+
+"How far--to walk?"
+
+"That depends. My boy went up there on foot last summer; he is a young
+fool, blotting and messing with ink and paper, while he talks of being a
+great man, and sups with the rats in the sewers! He, I think, was a week
+walking it. It is pleasant enough in fair weather. But you--you are a
+gypsy. Where are your people?"
+
+"I have no people."
+
+She did not know even what this epithet of gypsy, which they so often
+cast at her, really meant. She remembered the old life of the Liebana,
+but she did not know what manner of life it had been; and since Phratos
+had left her there, no one of his tribe or of his kind had been seen in
+the little Norman town among the orchards.
+
+The old woman grinned, trimming her lantern.
+
+"If you are too bad for them, you must be bad indeed! You will do very
+well for Paris, no doubt."
+
+And she began to count her chestnuts, lest this stranger should steal
+any of them.
+
+Folle-Farine took no notice of the words.
+
+"Will you show me which is the road to take?" she asked. Meanwhile the
+street-boy had brought three or four of his comrades to stare at her;
+and they were dancing round her with grotesque grimace, and singing,
+"Houpe la, Houpe la! Burn her for a witch!"
+
+The woman directed her which road to go as well as she could for the
+falling darkness, and she thanked the woman and went. The
+street-children ran at her heels like little curs, yelling and hissing
+foul language; but she ran too, and was swifter than they, and
+outstripped them, the hardy training of her limbs standing her in good
+service.
+
+How far she ran, or what streets she traversed, she could not tell; the
+chestnut-seller had said "Leave the pole-star behind you," and the star
+was shining behind her always, and she ran south steadily.
+
+Great buildings, lighted casements, high stone walls, groups of people,
+troopers drinking, girls laughing, men playing dominoes in the taverns,
+women chattering in the coffee-houses, a line of priests going to a
+death-bed with the bell ringing before the Host, a line of soldiers
+filing through great doors as the drums rolled the _rentree au
+caserne_,--thousands of these pictures glowed in her path a moment, with
+the next to fade and give place to others. But she looked neither to the
+right nor left, and held on straightly for the south.
+
+Once or twice a man halloed after her, or a soldier tried to stop her.
+Once, going through the gateway in the southern wall, a sentinel
+challenged her, and leveled his bayonet only a second too late. But she
+eluded them all by the swiftness of her flight and the suddenness of her
+apparition, and she got out safe beyond the barriers of the town, and on
+to the road that led to the country,--a road quiet and white in the
+moonlight, and bordered on either side with the tall poplars and the dim
+bare reapen fields which looked to her like dear familiar friends.
+
+It was lonely, and she sat down on a stone by the wayside and rested.
+She had no hesitation in what she was doing. He had gone south, and she
+would go likewise; that she might fail to find him there, never occurred
+to her. Of what a city was she had not yet any conception; her sole
+measurement of one was by the little towns whither she had driven the
+mules to sell the fruits and the fowls.
+
+To have been cheated of Paris, and to find herself thus far distant from
+it, appalled her, and made her heart sink.
+
+But it had no power to make her hesitate in the course she took. She had
+no fear and no doubt: the worst thing that could have come to her had
+come already; the silence and the strength of absolute despair were on
+her.
+
+Besides, a certain thrill of liberty was on her. For the first time in
+all her life she was absolutely free, with the freedom of the will and
+of the body both.
+
+She was no longer captive to one place, bond-slave to one tyranny; she
+was no longer driven with curses and commands, and yoked and harnessed
+every moment of her days. To her, with the blood of a tameless race in
+her, there was a certain force and elasticity in this deliverance from
+bondage, that lifted some measure of her great woe off her. She could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open sky was above her, and
+the smell of the fields about her, and on her face the breath of the
+blowing winds.
+
+She had that love which is as the bezoar stone of fable--an amulet that
+makes all wounds unfelt, and death a thing to smile at in derision.
+
+Without some strong impulsion from without, she might never have cut
+herself adrift from the tyranny that had held her down from childhood;
+and even the one happiness she had known had been but little more than
+the exchange of one manner of slavery for another.
+
+But now she was free--absolutely free; and in the calm, cool night--in
+the dusk and the solitude, with the smell of the fields around her, and
+above her the stars, she knew it and was glad,--glad even amidst the woe
+of loneliness and the agony of abandonment. The daughter of Taric could
+not be absolutely wretched so long as the open air was about her, and
+the world was before her wherein to roam.
+
+She sat awhile by the roadside and counted his gold by the gleam of the
+stars, and put it away securely in her girdle, and drank from a brook
+beside her, and tried to eat a little of the bread which the old boatman
+had given her as her wages, with three pieces of copper money.
+
+But the crust choked her; she felt hot with fever, and her throat was
+parched and full of pain.
+
+The moon was full upon her where she sat; the red and white of her dress
+bore a strange look; her face was colorless, and her eyes looked but the
+larger and more lustrous for the black shadows beneath them, and the
+weary swollen droop of their lids.
+
+She sat there, and pondered on the next step she had best take.
+
+A woman came past her, and stopped and looked.
+
+The moonlight was strong upon her face.
+
+"You are a handsome wench," said the wayfarer, who was elderly and of
+pleasant visage; "too handsome, a vast deal, to be sitting alone like
+one lost. What is the matter?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered.
+
+The old reserve clung to her and fenced her secret in, as the prickles
+of a cactus-hedge may fence in the magnolia's flowers of snow.
+
+"What, then? Have you a home?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Eh! You must have a lover?"
+
+Folle-Farine's lips grew whiter, and she shrunk a little; but she
+answered steadily,--
+
+"No."
+
+"No! And at your age; and handsome as a ripe, red apple,--with your skin
+of satin, and your tangle of hair! Fie, for shame! Are the men blind?
+Where do you rest to-night?"
+
+"I am going on--south."
+
+"And mean to walk all night? Pooh! Come home with me, and sup and sleep.
+I live hard by, just inside the walls."
+
+Folle-Farine opened her great eyes wide. It was the first creature who
+had ever offered her hospitality. It was an old woman, too; there could
+be nothing but kindness in the offer, she thought; and kindness was so
+strange to her, that it troubled her more than did cruelty.
+
+"You are good," she said, gratefully,--"very good; but I cannot come."
+
+"Cannot come? Why, then?"
+
+"Because I must go on to Paris; I cannot lose an hour. Nevertheless, it
+is good of you."
+
+The old woman laughed roughly.
+
+"Oh-ho! the red apple must go to Paris. No other market grand enough! Is
+that it?"
+
+"I do not know what you mean."
+
+"But stay with me to-night. The roads are dangerous. There are vagrants
+and ill-livers about. There are great fogs, too, in this district; and
+you will meet drunken soldiers and beggars who will rob you. Come home
+with me. I have a pretty little place, though poor; and you shall have
+such fare as I give my own daughters. And maybe you will see two or
+three of the young nobles. They look in for a laugh and a song--all
+innocent: my girls are favorites. Come, it is not a stone's throw
+through the south gate."
+
+"You are good; but I cannot come. As for the road, I am not afraid. I
+have a good knife, and I am strong."
+
+She spoke in all unconsciousness, in her heart thankful to this, the
+first human creature that had ever offered her shelter or good nature.
+
+The woman darted one sharp look at her, venomous as an adder's bite;
+then bade her a short good-night, and went on her way to the gates of
+the town.
+
+Folle-Farine rose up and walked on, taking her own southward road.
+
+She was ignorant of any peril that she had escaped. She did not know
+that the only animals which prey upon the young of their own sex and
+kind are women.
+
+She was very tired; long want of sleep, anguish, and bodily fatigue made
+her dull, and too exhausted to keep long upon her feet. She looked about
+her for some place of rest; and she knew that if she did not husband her
+strength, it might fail her ere she reached him, and stretch her on a
+sick-bed in some hospital of the poor.
+
+She passed two or three cottages standing by the roadside, with light
+gleaming through their shutters; but she did not knock at any one of
+them. She was afraid of spending her three copper coins; and she was too
+proud to seek food or lodging as an alms.
+
+By-and-by she came to a little shed, standing where no house was. She
+looked into it, and saw it full of the last season's hay, dry and
+sweet-smelling, tenanted only by a cat rolled round in slumber.
+
+She crept into it, and laid herself down and slept, the bright starry
+skies shining on her through the open space that served for entrance,
+the clatter of a little brook under the poplar-trees the only sound upon
+the quiet air.
+
+Footsteps went past twice or thrice, and once a wagon rolled lumbering
+by; but no one came thither to disturb her, and she sank into a fitful
+heavy sleep.
+
+At daybreak she was again afoot, always on the broad road to the
+southwest.
+
+With one of her coins she bought a loaf and a draught of milk, at a
+hamlet through which she went. She was surprised to find that people
+spoke to her without a curse or taunt, and dealt with her as with any
+other human being.
+
+Insensibly with the change of treatment, and with the fresh, sweet air,
+and with the brisk movement that bore her on her way, her heart grew
+lighter, and her old dauntless spirit rose again.
+
+She would find him, she thought, as soon as ever she entered Paris; and
+she would watch over him, and only go near him if he needed her. And
+then, and then----
+
+But her thoughts went no further. She shut the future out from her; it
+appalled her. Only one thing was clear before her--that she would get
+him the greatness that he thirsted for, if any payment of her body or
+her soul, her life or her death, could purchase it.
+
+A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no personal terrors
+can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. Hunger, thirst, fatigue,
+hardship, danger,--these were all in her path, and she had each in turn;
+but not one of them unnerved her.
+
+To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked through flames, or
+fasted forty days.
+
+For two days and nights she went on--days cloudless, nights fine and
+mild; then came a day of storm--sharp hail and loud thunder. She went on
+through it all the same; the agony in her heart made the glare of
+lightning and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an April
+breeze over a primrose bank.
+
+She had various fortunes on her way.
+
+A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and tried to insult her;
+she showed them her knife, and, with the blade bare against her throat,
+made them fall back, and scattered them.
+
+A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry ditch under a
+tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join with them and share their
+broken food. She eluded them with disgust; they were not like the
+gitanos of the Liebana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as,
+indeed, they were.
+
+At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy face, spoke softly
+and cheerily to her, and bade her rest awhile on the bench in the porch
+under the vines; and brought out some white pigeons to show her; and
+asked her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her fierceness
+and her shyness, was touched, and wondered greatly that any female thing
+could be thus good.
+
+She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a monkey on his
+shoulder. He was old and infirm. She carried his organ for him awhile,
+as they went along the same road; and he was gentle and kind in return,
+and made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, with a
+shake of his head, that Paris would be either hell or heaven to such as
+she. And she, hearing, smiled a little, for the first time since she had
+left Ypres, and thought--heaven or hell, what would it matter which, so
+long as she found Arslan?
+
+Of Dante she had never heard; but the spirit of the "_questi chi mai da
+me non piu diviso_" dwells untaught in every great love.
+
+Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having watched her count the
+gold and notes which she carried in her girdle. He dragged her to a
+lonely place, and snatched at the red sash, grasping the money with it;
+but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a fashion that
+he slunk away limping, and told his fellows to beware of her; for she
+had the spring of a cat, and the stroke of a swan's wing.
+
+On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it had done: the men
+were seldom insolent, taking warning from the look in her flashing eyes
+and the straight carriage of her flexile frame; and the women more than
+once were kind.
+
+Many peasants passed her on their market-mules, and many carriers' carts
+and farm-wagons went by along the sunny roads.
+
+Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and gave her a lift of
+a league or two on their piles of grass, of straw, or among their crates
+of cackling poultry, as they made their slow way between the lines of
+the trees, with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of their
+uncouth harness.
+
+All this while she never touched the gold that he had given her. Very
+little food sufficed to her: she had been hardily reared; and for the
+little she had she worked always, on her way.
+
+A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood hewn and stacked, a
+crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug or watered, these got her the
+simple fare which she fed on; and for lodging she was to none indebted,
+preferring to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or under
+a stack against some little blossoming garden.
+
+The people had no prejudice against her: she found few foes, when she
+had left the district that knew the story of Reine Flamma; they were, on
+the contrary, amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with
+the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it chanced to her to
+get no tasks of any sort to do, and at these times she went without
+food: touch his gold she would not. On the road she did what good she
+could; she walked a needless league to carry home a child who had broken
+his leg in a lonely lane; she sought, in a foggy night, for the straying
+goat of a wretched old woman; she saved an infant from the flames in a
+little cabin burning in the midst of the green fields: she did what came
+in her path to do. For her heart was half broken; and this was her way
+of prayer.
+
+So, by tedious endeavor, she won her passage wearily towards Paris.
+
+She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at times, and having
+often wearily to retrace her steps.
+
+On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a green hollow
+amidst woods.
+
+It had an ancient church; the old sweet bells were ringing their last
+mid-day mass, _Salutaris hostia_; a crumbling fortress of the Angevine
+kings gave it majesty and shadow; it was full of flowers and of trees,
+and had quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made her
+think of the streets round about the cathedral of her mother's
+birthplace, away northwestward in the white sea-mists.
+
+When she entered it, noon had just sounded from all its many clocks and
+chimes. The weather was hot, and she was very tired. She had not eaten
+any food, save some berries and green leaves, for more than forty hours.
+She had been refused anything to do in all places; and she had no
+money--except that gold of his.
+
+There was a little tavern, vine-shaded and bright with a Quatre Saisons
+rose that hid its casements. She asked there, timidly, if there were any
+task she might do,--to fetch water, to sweep, to break wood, to drive or
+to stable a mule or a horse.
+
+They took her to be a gypsy; they ordered her roughly to be gone.
+
+Through the square window she could see food--a big juicy melon cut in
+halves, sweet yellow cakes, warm and crisp from the oven, a white
+chicken, cold and dressed with cresses, a jug of milk, an abundance of
+bread. And her hunger was very great.
+
+Nine days of sharper privation than even that to which she had been
+inured in the penury of Ypres had made her cheeks hollow and her limbs
+fleshless; and a continual consuming heat and pain gnawed at her chest.
+
+She sat on a bench that was free to all wayfarers, and looked at the
+food in the tavern kitchen. It tempted her with the terrible animal
+ravenousness begotten by long fast. She wanted to fly at it as a starved
+dog flies. A rosy-faced woman cut up the chicken on a china dish,
+singing.
+
+Folle-Farine, outside, looked at her, and took courage from her smiling
+face.
+
+"Will you give me a little work?" she murmured. "Anything--anything--so
+that I may get bread."
+
+"You are a gypsy," answered the woman, ceasing to smile. "Go to your own
+folk."
+
+And she would not offer her even a plate of broken victuals.
+
+Folle-Farine rose and walked wearily away. She could not bear the sight
+of the food; she felt that if she looked at it longer she would spring
+on it like a wolf. But to use his gold never occurred to her. She would
+have bitten her tongue through in famine ere she would have taken one
+coin of it.
+
+As she went, being weak from long hunger and the stroke of the sunrays,
+she stumbled and fell. She recovered herself quickly; but in the fall
+the money had shaken itself from her sash, and been scattered with a
+ringing sound upon the stones.
+
+The woman in the tavern window raised a loud cry!
+
+"Oh-he! the wicked liar!--to beg bread while her waistband is stuffed
+with gold like a turkey with chestnuts! What a rogue to try and dupe
+poor honest people like us! Take her to prison."
+
+The woman cried loud; there were half a dozen stout serving-wenches and
+stable-lads about in the little street, with several boys and children.
+Indignant at the thought of an attempted fraud upon their charity, and
+amazed at the flash and the fall of the money, they rushed on her with
+shrieks of rage and scorn, with missiles of turf and stone, with their
+brooms raised aloft, or their dogs set to rage at her.
+
+She had not time to gather up the coins and notes; she could only stand
+over and defend them. Two beggar-boys made a snatch at the tempting
+heap; she drew her knife to daunt them with the sight of it. The people
+shrieked at sight of the bare blade; a woman selling honeycomb and pots
+of honey at a bench under a lime-tree raised a cry that she had been
+robbed. It was not true; but a street crowd always loves a lie, and
+never risks spoiling, by sifting, it.
+
+The beggar-lads and the two serving-wenches and an old virago from a
+cottage door near set upon her, and scrambled together to drive her away
+from the gold and share it. Resolute to defend it at any peril, she set
+her heel down on it, and, with her back against the tree, stood firm;
+not striking, but with the point of the knife outward.
+
+One of the boys, maddened to get the gold, darted forward, twisted his
+limbs round her, and struggled with her for its possession. In the
+struggle he wounded himself upon the steel. His arm bled largely; he
+filled the air with his shrieks; the people, furious, accused her of his
+murder.
+
+Before five minutes had gone by she was seized, overpowered by numbers,
+cuffed, kicked, upbraided with every name of infamy, and dragged as a
+criminal up the little steep stony street in the blaze of the noonday
+sun, whilst on each side the townsfolk looked out from their doorways
+and their balconies and cried out:
+
+"What is it? Oh-he! A brawling gypsy, who has stolen something, and has
+stabbed poor little Freki, the blind man's son, because he found her
+out. What is it? _Au violon!--au violon!_"
+
+To which the groups called back again:
+
+"A thief of a gypsy, begging alms while she had stolen gold on her. She
+has stabbed poor little Freki, the blind cobbler's son, too. We think he
+is dead." And the people above, in horror, lifted their hands and eyes,
+and shouted afresh, "_Au violon!--au violon!_"
+
+Meanwhile the honey-seller ran beside them, crying aloud that she had
+been robbed of five broad golden pieces.
+
+It was a little sunny country-place, very green with trees and grass,
+filled usually with few louder sounds than the cackling of geese and the
+dripping of the well-water.
+
+But its stones were sharp and rough; its voices were shrill and fierce;
+its gossips were cruel and false of tongue; its justice was very small,
+and its credulity was measureless. A girl, barefoot and bareheaded, with
+eyes of the East, and a knife in her girdle, teeth that met in their
+youngsters' wrist, and gold pieces that scattered like dust from her
+bosom,--such a one could have no possible innocence in their eyes, such
+a one was condemned so soon as she was looked at when she was dragged
+among them up their hilly central way.
+
+She had had money on her, and she had asked for food on the plea of
+being starved; that was fraud plain enough, even for those who were free
+to admit that the seller of the honey-pots had never been overtrue of
+speech, and had never owned so much as five gold pieces ever since her
+first bees had sucked their first spray of heath-bells.
+
+No one had any mercy on a creature who had money, and yet asked for
+work; as to her guilt, there could be no question.
+
+She was hurried before the village tribune, and cast with horror into
+the cell where all accused waited their judgment.
+
+It was a dusky, loathsome place, dripping with damp, half underground,
+strongly grilled with iron, and smelling foully from the brandy and
+strong smoke of two drunkards who had been its occupants the previous
+night.
+
+There they left her, taking away her knife and her money.
+
+She did not resist. It was not her nature to rebel futilely; and they
+had fallen on her six to one, and had bound her safely with cords ere
+they had dragged her away to punishment.
+
+The little den was visible to the highway through a square low grating.
+Through this they came and stared, and mouthed, and mocked, and taunted,
+and danced before her. To bait a gypsy was fair pastime.
+
+Everywhere, from door to door, the blind cobbler, with his little son,
+and the woman who sold honey told their tale,--how she had stabbed the
+little lad and stolen the gold that the brave bees had brought their
+mistress, and begged for food when she had had money enough on her to
+buy a rich man's feast. It was a tale to enlist against her all the
+hardest animosities of the poor. The village rose against her in all its
+little homes as though she had borne fire and sword into its midst.
+
+If the arm of the law had not guarded the entrance of her prison-cell,
+the women would have stoned her to death, or dragged her out to drown in
+the pond:--she was worse than a murderess in their sight; and one weak
+man, thinking to shelter her a little from their rage, quoted against
+her her darkest crime when he pleaded for mercy for her because she was
+young and was so handsome.
+
+The long hot day of torment passed slowly by.
+
+Outside there were cool woods, flower-filled paths, broad fields of
+grass, children tossing blow-balls down the wind, lovers counting the
+leaves of yellow-eyed autumn daisies; but within there were only foul
+smells, intense nausea, cruel heats, the stings of a thousand insects,
+the buzz of a hundred carrion-flies, muddy water, and black mouldy
+bread.
+
+She held her silence. She would not let her enemies see that they hurt
+her.
+
+When the day had gone down, and the people had tired of their sport and
+left her a little while, an old feeble man stole timidly to her,
+glancing round lest any should see his charity and quote it as a crime,
+and tendered her through the bars with a gentle hand a little ripe
+autumnal fruit upon a cool green leaf.
+
+The kindness made the tears start to eyes too proud to weep for pain.
+
+She took the peaches and thanked him lovingly and gratefully; cooled her
+aching, burning, dust-drenched throat with their fragrant moisture.
+
+"Hush! it is nothing," he whispered, frightenedly, glancing over his
+shoulder lest any one should see. "But tell me--tell me--why did you say
+you starved when you had all that gold?"
+
+"I did starve," she answered him.
+
+"But why--with all that gold?"
+
+"It was another's."
+
+The old man stared at her, trembling and amazed.
+
+"What--what! die of hunger and keep your hands off money in your
+girdle?"
+
+A dreary smile came on her face.
+
+"What! is that inhuman too?"
+
+"Inhuman?" he murmured. "Oh, child--oh, child, tell any tale you will,
+save such a tale as that!"
+
+And he stole away sorrowful, because sure that for his fruit of charity
+she had given him back a lie.
+
+He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should see the little thing
+which he had done.
+
+She was left alone.
+
+It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, and her head
+throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, and all the agony of thought in
+which she had struggled on her way, had their reaction on her. She
+shivered where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast upon the
+stones; and strange noises sang in her ears, and strange lights
+glimmered and flashed before her eyes. She did not know what ailed her.
+
+The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early robin sang a
+twilight song in an elder-bush near. These were the only things that had
+any pity on her.
+
+By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the grated door and
+thrust in another captive, a vagrant they had found drunk or delirious
+on the highroad, whom they locked up for the night, that on the morrow
+they might determine what to do with him.
+
+He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in by the old soldier
+whose place it was to guard the miserable den.
+
+She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, and crouched there,
+breathing heavily, and staring with dull, dilated eyes.
+
+She thought,--surely they could not mean to leave them there alone, all
+the night through, in the horrible darkness.
+
+The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the old soldier, as he
+turned the rusty key in the lock, grumbled that the world was surely at
+a pretty pass, when two tramps became too coy to roost together. And he
+stumbled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own little
+chamber; and there, smoking and drinking, and playing dominoes with a
+comrade, dismissed his prisoners from his recollection.
+
+Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell was stretched where
+he had fallen, drunk or insensible, and moaning heavily.
+
+She, crouching against the wall, as though praying the stones to yield
+and hold her, gazed at him with horror and pity that together strove in
+the confusion of her dizzy brain, and made her dully wonder whether she
+were wicked thus to shrink in loathing from a creature in distress so
+like her own.
+
+The bright moon rose on the other side of the trees beyond the grating;
+its light fell across the figure of the vagrant whom they had locked in
+with her, as in the wild-beast shows of old they locked a lion with an
+antelope in the same cage--out of sport.
+
+She saw the looming massive shadow of an immense form, couched like a
+crouching beast; she saw the fire of burning, wide-open, sullen eyes;
+she saw the restless, feeble gesture of two lean hands, that clutched at
+the barren stones with the futile action of a chained vulture clutching
+at his rock; she saw that the man suffered horribly, and she tried to
+pity him--tried not to shrink from him--tried to tell herself that he
+might be as guiltless as was herself. But she could not prevail: nature,
+instinct, youth, sex, sickness, exhaustion, all conquered her, and broke
+her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable agony of that horrible
+probation; she sprang to the grated aperture, and seized the iron in her
+hands, and shook it with all her might, and tore at it, and bruised her
+chest and arms against it, and clung to it convulsively, shriek after
+shriek pealing from her lips.
+
+No one heard, or no one answered to her prayer.
+
+A stray dog came and howled in unison; the moon sailed on behind the
+trees; the old soldier above slept over his toss of brandy; at the only
+dwelling near they were dancing at a bridal, and had no ear to hear.
+
+The passionate outcries wailed themselves to silence on her trembling
+mouth; her strained hands gave way from their hold on the irons; she
+grew silent from sheer exhaustion, and dropped in a heap at the foot of
+the iron door, clinging to it, and crushed against it, and turning her
+face to the night without, feeling some little sense of solace in the
+calm clear moon;--some little sense of comfort in the mere presence of
+the dog.
+
+Meanwhile the dusky prostrate form of the man had not stirred.
+
+He had not spoken, save to curse heaven and earth and every living
+thing. He had not ceased to glare at her with eyes that had the red
+light of a tiger's in their pain. He was a man of superb stature and
+frame; he was worn by disease and delirium, but he had in him a wild,
+leonine tawny beauty still. His clothes were of rags, and his whole look
+was of wretchedness; yet there was about him a certain reckless majesty
+and splendor still, as the scattered beams of the white moonlight broke
+themselves upon him.
+
+Of a sudden he spoke aloud, with a glitter of terrible laughter on his
+white teeth and his flashing eyes. He was delirious, and had no
+consciousness of where he was.
+
+"The fourth bull I had killed that Easter-day. Look! do you see? It was
+a red Andalusian. He had wounded three picadors, and ripped the bellies
+of eight horses,--a brave bull, but I was one too many for him. She was
+there. All the winter she had flouted over and taunted me; all the
+winter she had cast her scorn at me--the beautiful brown thing, with her
+cruel eyes. But she was there when I slew the great red bull--straight
+above there, looking over her fan. Do you see? And when my sword went up
+to the hilt in his throat, and the brave blood spouted, she laughed such
+a little sweet laugh, and cast her yellow jasmine flower at me, down in
+the blood and the sand there. And that night, after the red bull died,
+the rope was thrown from the balcony! So--so! Only a year ago; only a
+year ago!"
+
+Then he laughed loud again; and, laughing, sang--
+
+    "Avez-vous vu en Barcelonne
+      Une belle dame, au sein bruni,
+    Pale comme un beau soir d'automne?
+      C'est ma maitresse, ma lionne,
+        La Marchesa d'Amagui."
+
+The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a
+groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it
+with his empty hands.
+
+"Wine!--wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain
+on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old
+feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so
+cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.
+
+Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by
+discord--their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of
+lewd riot and of amorous verse.
+
+Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white
+face of the moon.
+
+After awhile he mocked it--the cold, chaste thing that was the meek
+trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.
+
+Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous
+melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the
+wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague
+memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests
+whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing
+torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows
+flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by
+the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women
+with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled
+anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where
+the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble
+pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the
+wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight
+thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy
+hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire
+of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance
+of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in
+endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the
+ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the
+people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never
+set:--all these memories floated before her and only served to make her
+fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.
+
+There he lay delirious--a madman chained at her feet, so close in the
+little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely
+keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air,
+from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.
+
+And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except
+the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.
+
+She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were the first cries
+that had ever broken from her lips for human aid; and they were vain.
+
+The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a dotard's dreams. The
+village was not aroused. What cared any of its sleepers how these
+outcasts fared?
+
+She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony had spent itself in
+the passion of appeal.
+
+The night--would it ever end?
+
+Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage of her old life
+seemed like peace and freedom.
+
+Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunkard struck her--all
+unconscious of the blow--across her eyes, and fell, contorted and
+senseless, with his head upon her knees.
+
+He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt his lustful
+triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, and babbled with a strange
+sound, low and fast and inarticulate.
+
+"In the little green wood--in the little green wood," he muttered.
+"Hark! do you hear the mill-water run? She looked so white and so cold;
+and they all called her a saint. What could a man do but kill _that_?
+Does she cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie--be you devil
+or god. You sit on a great white throne and judge us all. So they say.
+You can send us to hell?... Well, do. You shall never wring a word from
+her to _my_ hurt. She thinks I killed the child? Nay--that I swear.
+Phratos knew, I think. But he is dead;--so they say. Ask him.... My
+brown queen, who saw me kill the red bull,--are you there too? Ay. How
+the white jewels shine in your breast! Stoop a little, and kiss me. So!
+Your mouth burns; and the yellow jasmine flower--there is a snake in it.
+Look! You love me?--oh-ho!--what does your priest say, and your lord?
+Love!--so many of you swore that. But she,--she, standing next to her
+god there,--I hurt her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, they found the
+sightless face of the dead man lying full in the light of the sun:
+beside him the girl crouched with a senseless stare in the horror of her
+eyes, and on her lips a ghastly laugh.
+
+For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her Father's kingdom.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+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
+Arslan.
+
+"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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+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 Arslan'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-chretien, 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 Arslan 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--Arslan 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 Arslan'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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+AT sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a
+smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a
+scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed
+his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery
+sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water's edge.
+
+The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and
+rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the
+basement walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the
+garden palace, where the bird of Here dwelt.
+
+Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peacock swept in
+the light, there was an open casement, a narrow balcony of stone; a
+group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the
+night--the night wet and moonless,--waters a fathom deep,--a bed of sand
+treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be
+save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid
+yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.
+
+On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have
+told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of
+the Brocken.
+
+But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long
+in the breast of the women whom men love.
+
+The Sun came from the east, and passed through the pale stricken faces
+that watched from the casement, and came straight to where the Red Mouse
+sat amidst the poppies.
+
+"Have you let a female soul escape you?" said the Sun.
+
+The Red Mouse answered:
+
+"Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards
+the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch,
+and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to
+me."
+
+Said the Sun:
+
+"That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has told me oftentimes
+that Eros is your pander--always."
+
+"Anteros only," said the Red Mouse.
+
+The Sun, wondering, said again:
+
+"And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into every female soul
+you enter at birth, and dwell there unto death. Is it, then, not so?"
+
+The Red Mouse answered:
+
+"The boast is not mine; it is man's."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she thought, would
+prove her grave; but the waters, with human-like caprice, had cast her
+back upon the land with scarce an effort of her own. Given back thus to
+life, whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled to her
+feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy night through the
+grassy stretches of the unknown gardens and lands in which she found
+herself.
+
+She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with lead, but she was made
+swift by terror and hatred, as though Hermes for once had had pity for
+anything human, and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals.
+
+She ran on and on, not knowing whither; only knowing that she ran from
+the man who had tempted her by the strength of the rod of wealth.
+
+The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the dense mist no
+lights far or near, of the city or planets, of palace or house were
+seen. She did not know where she went; she only ran on away and away,
+anywhere, from the Red Mouse and its master.
+
+When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she paused, and trembling
+crept into a cattle-shed to rest and take breath a little. She shrank
+from every habitation, she quivered at every human voice; she was
+afraid--horribly afraid--in those clinging vapors, those damp deathly
+smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those indistinct and
+unfamiliar creatures of a country strange to her.
+
+That old man with the elf's eyes, who had tempted her, was he a god too,
+she wondered, since he had the rod that metes power and wealth? He might
+stretch his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her.
+
+The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for her, and humbly
+welcomed her. She hid herself among their beds of hay, and in the warmth
+of their breath and their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any
+half-drowned dog; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, and
+hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. She slept from sheer
+exhaustion of mind and body. The cattle could have trodden her to death,
+or tossed her through the open spaces of their byres, but they seemed to
+know, they seemed to pity; and they stirred so that they did not brush a
+limb of her, nor shorten a moment of her slumbers.
+
+When she awoke the sun was high.
+
+A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails,
+kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest
+there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place passively, not
+well knowing what she did.
+
+The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping
+with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a
+delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of
+the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a
+wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.
+
+The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the
+porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf--f--f! get out, you
+drowned rat."
+
+She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force
+to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with
+her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember--and be
+thankful--that in the night that was past she had been strong.
+
+The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint;
+she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with
+weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had
+looked again on the face of Arslan.
+
+She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept
+into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.
+
+She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and
+rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by
+one, as the death tears of the llama fall.
+
+This was the young year round her; that she knew.
+
+The winter had gone by; its many months had passed over her head whilst
+she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken
+the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary
+season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine
+might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body
+might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot
+fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and
+dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless
+worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to
+serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from
+which a toad would turn. Oh, God! would death never take her likewise?
+Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of
+the dead?
+
+That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so
+full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's
+only friend":--even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned
+her.
+
+Vague memories of things which she had heard in fable and tradition, of
+bodies accursed and condemned to wander forever unresting and wailing;
+of spirits, which for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that
+they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world itself
+endured; creatures that the very elements had denied, and that were too
+vile for fire to burn, or water to drown, or steel to slay, or old age
+to whither, or death to touch and take in any wise. All these memories
+returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered if she were such a
+one as these.
+
+She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great sin; she had done
+none willingly, and yet all people called her vile, and they must know.
+
+Even the old man, mocking her, had said:
+
+"Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, soon or late. And
+your fate is shame; it was your birth-gift, it will be your
+burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? No. But you can make it potent as
+gold, and sweet as honey if you choose, Folle-Farine."
+
+And she had not chosen; yet of any nobility in the resistance she did
+not dream. She had shut her heart to it by the unconscious instinct of
+strength, as she had shut her lips under torture, and shut her hands
+against life.
+
+She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friendless, and every
+human creature was against her. Her tempter had spoken only the bare and
+bleak truth. A dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living
+thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more desolate than
+herself.
+
+The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless sky, but in the
+little wood it was cool and shady, and had the moisture of a heavy
+morning dew. Millions of young leaves had uncurled themselves in the
+warmth. Little butterflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, danced
+in the light. Brown rills of water murmured under the grasses, the
+thrushes sang to one another through the boughs, and the lizard darted
+hither and thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter.
+
+A little distance from her there was a group of joyous singers who
+looked at her from time to time, their laughter hushing a little, and
+their simple carousal under the green boughs broken by a nameless
+chillness and involuntary speculation. She did not note them, her face
+being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the thrushes' song or
+of the human singers' voices rousing her from the stupefaction of
+despair which drugged her senses.
+
+They watched her long; her attitude did not change.
+
+One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a step or two
+forwards; a girl with winking feet, clad gayly in bright colors, though
+the texture of her clothes was poor.
+
+She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly.
+
+"Are you in trouble?"
+
+The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes.
+
+Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver.
+
+"It is no matter, I am only--tired."
+
+"Are you all alone?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the damp and the gloom; we
+are so pleasant and sunny there. Come."
+
+"You are good, but let me be."
+
+The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily rose and came.
+
+"Heaven! she is handsome!" the men muttered to one another.
+
+She looked straight at them all, and let them be.
+
+"You are all alone?" they asked her again.
+
+"Always," she answered them.
+
+"You are going--where?"
+
+"To Paris"
+
+"What to do there?"
+
+"I do not know."
+
+"You look wet--suffering--what is the matter?"
+
+"I was nearly drowned last night--an accident--it is nothing."
+
+"Where have you slept?"
+
+"In a shed: with some cattle."
+
+"Could you get no shelter in a house?"
+
+"I did not seek any."
+
+"What do you do? What is your work?"
+
+"Anything--nothing."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Folle-Farine."
+
+"That means the chaff;--less than the chaff,--the dust."
+
+"It means me."
+
+They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.
+
+They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock
+had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror
+and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were,
+the very current of the young blood in her veins.
+
+They were silent a little space. Then whispered together.
+
+"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We
+follow art. We will befriend you."
+
+She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing.
+But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their
+bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the
+great city.
+
+In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were
+going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she
+would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with
+them--fearing the Red Mouse.
+
+They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they
+followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and
+alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly
+her step, her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant still
+even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these
+he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless
+value in the world, and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris.
+
+"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next
+town. Will you take a part?"
+
+Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she
+started at his voice.
+
+"I do not know what you mean?"
+
+"I mean--will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It
+will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall
+do shall be to stand and be looked at--you are beautiful, and you know
+it, no doubt?"
+
+She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she
+were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty
+that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory
+to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been
+strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse
+a throb of passion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any
+lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslan.
+
+He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought,
+who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her
+own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.
+
+That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across
+the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.
+
+It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with
+lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great
+fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded
+cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets
+were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.
+
+As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.
+
+They were well known and well liked there; the people clustered by
+dozens round them, the women greeting them with kisses, the children
+hugging the dogs, the men clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink
+and be merry.
+
+They bade her watch them at their art in a rough wooden house outside
+the wine tavern.
+
+She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, while the mimic
+life of their little stage began and lived its hour.
+
+To the mind which had received its first instincts of art from the cold,
+lofty, passionless creations of Arslan, from the classic purity and from
+the divine conception of the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage
+could seem but poor and idle mimicry; gaudy and fragrantless as any
+painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem.
+
+The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure idealism of her
+mind and temper revolted in contempt from the visible presentment and
+the vari-colored harlequinade of the actor's art. To her, a note of
+song, a gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were enough to
+unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, a paradise of faith
+and of desire; and for this very cause she shrank away, in amazement and
+disgust, from this realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left
+nothing for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue than
+the common language of human hopes and fears. It could not touch her,
+it could not move her; it filled her--so far as she could bring herself
+to think of it at all--with a cold and wondering contempt.
+
+For to the reed which has once trembled under the melody born of the
+breath divine, the voices of mortal mouths, as they scream in rage, or
+exult in clamor, or contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the
+emptiest of all the sounds under heaven.
+
+"That is your art?" she said wearily to the actors when they came to
+her.
+
+"Well, is it not art; and a noble one?"
+
+A scornful shadow swept across her face.
+
+"It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. There is neither
+heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth."
+
+They were sharply stung.
+
+"What has given you such thoughts as that?" they said, in their
+impatience and mortification.
+
+"I have seen great things," she said simply, and turned away and went
+out into the darkness, and wept,--alone.
+
+She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who had heard the songs
+of Pan amidst the rushes by the river, and had listened to the charmed
+steps of Persephone amidst the flowers of the summer;--could she honor
+lesser gods than these?
+
+"They may forget--they may forsake, and he likewise, but I never," she
+thought.
+
+If only she might live a little longer space to serve and suffer for
+them and for him still; of fate she asked nothing higher.
+
+That night there was much money in the bag. The players pressed a share
+upon her; but she refused.
+
+"Have I begged from you?" she said. "I have earned nothing."
+
+It was with exceeding difficulty that they ended in persuading her even
+to share their simple supper.
+
+She took only bread and water, and sat and watched them curiously.
+
+The players were in high spirits; their chief ordered a stoup of bright
+wine, and made merry over it with gayer songs and louder laughter, and
+more frequent jests than even were his wont.
+
+The men and women of the town came in and out with merry interchange of
+words. The youths of the little bourg chattered light amorous nonsense;
+the young girls smiled and chattered in answer; whilst the actors
+bantered them and made them a hundred love prophecies.
+
+Now and then a dog trotted in to salute the players' poodles; now and
+then the quaint face of a pig looked between the legs of its master.
+
+The door stood open; the balmy air blew in; beyond, the stars shone in a
+cloudless sky.
+
+She sat without in the darkness, where no light fell among the thick
+shroud of one of the blossoming boughs of pear-trees, and now and then
+she looked and watched their laughter and companionship, and their gay
+and airy buffoonery, together there within the winehouse doors.
+
+"All fools enjoy!" she thought; with that bitter wonder, that aching
+disdain, that involuntary injustice, with which the strong sad patience
+of a great nature surveys the mindless merriment of lighter hearts and
+brains more easily lulled into forgetfulness and content.
+
+They came to her and pressed on her a draught of the wine, a share of
+the food, a handful of the honeyed cates of their simple banquet; even a
+portion of their silver and copper pieces with which the little leathern
+sack of their receipts was full,--for once,--to the mouth.
+
+She refused all: the money she threw passionately away.
+
+"Am I a beggar?" she said, in her wrath.
+
+She remained without in the gloom among the cool blossoming branches
+that swayed above-head in the still night, while the carousal broke up
+and the peasants went on their way to their homes, singing along the
+dark streets, and the lights were put out in the winehouse, and the
+trill of the grasshopper chirped in the fields around.
+
+"You will die of damp, roofless in the open air this moonless night,"
+men, as they passed away, said to her in wonder.
+
+"The leaves are roof enough for me," she answered them: and stayed there
+with her head resting on the roll of her sheepskin; wide awake through
+the calm dark hours; for a bed within she knew that she could not pay,
+and she would not let any charity purchase one for her.
+
+At daybreak when the others rose she would only take from them the crust
+that was absolutely needful to keep life in her. Food seemed to choke
+her as it passed her lips,--since how could she tell but what his lips
+were parched dry with hunger or were blue and cold in death?
+
+That morning, as they started, one of the two youths who bore their
+traveling gear and the rude appliances of their little stage upon his
+shoulders from village to village when they journeyed thus--being
+oftentimes too poor to permit themselves any other mode of transit and
+of porterage--fell lame and grew faint and was forced to lay down his
+burden by the roadside.
+
+She raised the weight upon her back and head as she had been wont to do
+the weights of timber and of corn for the mill-house, and bore it
+onward.
+
+In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not yield, but carried the
+wooden framework and the folded canvases all through the heat and
+weariness of the noonday.
+
+"You would have me eat of your supper last night. I will have you accept
+of my payment to-day," she said, stubbornly.
+
+For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and even full of
+honor, whatever men might say: had not Helios himself been bound as a
+slave in Thessaly?
+
+They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit highways, and under
+the shadows of green trees. The fields were green with the young corn
+and the young vines; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs
+nodded in their footsteps; the skies were blue; the earth was fragrant.
+
+At noonday the players halted and threw themselves down beneath a
+poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat their noonday meal of bread
+and a green cress salad.
+
+The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from rain-drops still
+wet upon the grasses, and the budding rose vines. The hedge was full of
+honeysuckle and tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed
+cattle came and looked at them; little redstarts picked up their
+crumbs; from a white vine-hung cottage an old woman brought them salt
+and wished them a fair travel.
+
+But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she asked always,--"Where
+is Paris?"
+
+At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud upon the purple
+haze of the horizon.
+
+She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and thanked the gods that
+they had thus given her to behold the city of his desires.
+
+The chief of the mimes watched her keenly.
+
+"You look at Paris," he said after a time. "There you may be great if
+you will."
+
+"Great? I?"
+
+She echoed the word with weary incredulity. She knew he could but mock
+at her.
+
+"Ay," he made answer seriously. "Even you! Why not? There is no dynasty
+that endures in that golden city save only one--the sovereignty of a
+woman's beauty."
+
+She started and shuddered a little; she thought that she saw the Red
+Mouse stir amidst the grasses.
+
+"I want no greatness," she said, slowly. "What should I do with it?"
+
+For in her heart she thought,--
+
+"What would it serve me to be known to all the world and remembered by
+all the ages of men if he forget--forget quite?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and
+fruitful zone of the city--one of the fragrant and joyous
+pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls
+came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the
+light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened
+violets in each other's breasts.
+
+The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.
+
+"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.
+
+She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslan had
+declared that fame--or death--should come to him.
+
+The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.
+
+A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its
+gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the
+labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises
+of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of
+her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to
+daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the
+glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush
+of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive,
+with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the
+palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.
+
+The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so
+incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they
+searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of
+bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that
+her eyes never lost that look.
+
+"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest
+of them asked her.
+
+She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which
+it was?--whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she
+would light on at the last?
+
+She was a mystery to them.
+
+She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water
+and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore
+bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to
+care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the
+bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether
+the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored
+aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.
+
+She was silent always, and she never smiled.
+
+"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.
+
+By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient,
+enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne
+that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to
+the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and
+alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never
+ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslan's was
+not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too
+tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.
+
+So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very
+strange and wondrous to her.
+
+The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which
+the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep
+browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all
+gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise,
+change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun,
+walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs,
+various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and
+discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets,
+and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of
+anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless
+revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.
+
+For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all
+about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from
+it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless
+seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of
+birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence
+and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."
+
+"You are not happy?" one man said to her.
+
+"Happy!"
+
+She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested
+golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a
+showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped
+head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the
+bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.
+
+"Show your beauty once--just once amidst us on the stage, and on the
+morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of
+heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.
+
+But she refused always.
+
+Her beauty--it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or
+death, for him.
+
+The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending
+vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched
+the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of
+the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could
+never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to
+face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more
+unending, than a great city.
+
+She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the
+strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her
+sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no
+other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every
+accent of persuasion or of passion.
+
+When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in
+the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them
+to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in
+the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and
+called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them
+with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold
+mute weariness of contempt.
+
+One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of
+money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you
+will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she
+showed him the edge of her hidden knife.
+
+One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that
+alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and
+watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old
+market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude,
+and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many
+colors.
+
+"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a
+name of power, if only you will come."
+
+"Come whither?" she asked him.
+
+"Come with me--only to my supper-table--for one hour; my horses wait."
+
+She threw the chain of stones at her feet.
+
+"I have no hunger," she said, carelessly. "Go, ask those that have to
+your feast."
+
+And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the many honeyed and
+persuasive words with which in vain he urged her, that night and many
+another night, until he wearied.
+
+One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by under a gilded
+gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, and hung with delicate
+draperies, there looked out the fair head of a woman, with diamonds in
+the ears, and a shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling
+scornful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose; and a woman's voice called to
+her, mockingly:
+
+"Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk barefoot in the
+dust on the stones, and let the sun beat on your head? O fool! there is
+gold in the air, and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here,
+for a woman!"
+
+And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of the gardener's
+wife of the old town by the sea.
+
+She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sorrowful, musing
+eyes, full of startled courage: soon she comprehended; and then her gaze
+gave back scorn for scorn.
+
+"Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the trellised vine?"
+she said, with her voice ascending clear in its disdain. "And are those
+stones in your breast any brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your
+child?"
+
+The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, and withdrew from the
+casement.
+
+She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down in the dust. It
+was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless--an emblem of pleasure and
+wealth. She left it where it lay, and went onward.
+
+The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she might take as
+easily as she could have taken the rose from the dust, had no power to
+allure her.
+
+The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the ears, the purple
+draperies, the ease and the affluence and the joys of the sights and the
+senses, these to her were as powerless to move her envy, these to her
+seemed as idle as the blow-balls that a child's breath floated down the
+current of a summer breeze.
+
+When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the gods by night steal
+through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound
+anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass,
+and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness
+imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.
+
+"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a
+smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell
+them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the
+other?"
+
+There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the
+gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe
+their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw
+in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven
+for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.
+
+By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right
+errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal
+it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from
+passion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her
+when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they
+betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable
+reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.
+
+They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his
+soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all
+time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of
+resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or
+the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult
+rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed
+her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and
+of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the
+dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.
+
+It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at
+the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much
+crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous,
+hopeless class that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent--so silent
+that no one notices when death replaces life.
+
+Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a
+high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed
+almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so
+fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close
+about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost
+there.
+
+In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very
+barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of
+dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the
+rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of
+the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar
+sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs.
+And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were
+something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought
+a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of
+it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was
+yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.
+
+She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live
+there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those
+offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer
+than themselves.
+
+They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours'
+toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever
+they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with
+any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long
+as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the
+sparrows in the dark.
+
+She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen,
+roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm
+herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of
+their crust, a little copper piece,--anything that they could afford or
+she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the reveilleuse of the
+quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:--"Her eyes have
+no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.
+
+It was a strange trade--to rise whilst yet for the world it was night,
+and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the
+staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons
+and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew.
+So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the
+bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in
+her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter
+those mercies of the night.
+
+It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in
+the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house,
+from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp
+alone burning.
+
+They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to
+call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty
+of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.
+
+Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them
+also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their
+starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over
+the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up
+in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or
+the potato-fields outside the walls,--she could neither fear them nor
+hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate,
+wondering grief.
+
+She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin,
+suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being
+in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of
+its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and
+that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on
+her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all
+strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It
+was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair
+that had closed around her.
+
+And some of these in turn loved her.
+
+Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued,
+flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark
+stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking
+low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike
+dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
+
+"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she
+always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a
+distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the
+children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that
+had closed about her heart.
+
+It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry
+nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her
+throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the
+thirst of overdriven cattle.
+
+All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the
+while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
+
+She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so
+surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever
+sleep. She sought for him always;--sought the busy crowds of the living;
+sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
+
+As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she
+passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of
+the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories
+that it treasured; it became clearer to her--this thing of his desires,
+this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a
+world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and
+endlessly yearned.
+
+The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible
+and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let
+me only die as the reed died,--what matter,--so that only the world
+speak his name!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons
+had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far
+below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm
+altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great
+silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of
+the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
+
+The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it,
+seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with
+dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on
+the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,--how long?"
+
+Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,--
+
+"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"
+
+Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute
+and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail
+life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips
+the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with
+gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and
+poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is
+but one god now,--that god is gold."
+
+"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance.
+"You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and
+poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden
+pear. It was not wise."
+
+He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced
+her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned
+against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment
+paralyzed.
+
+"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I
+bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for
+naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they
+betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."
+
+She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by
+the snake.
+
+"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"
+
+"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not
+know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me.
+But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very
+weak, of course;--you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you
+on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,--and you will
+plunge after it,--and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you
+cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her
+lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures
+soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and
+are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
+
+"You came--to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.
+
+"Nay--I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I----My
+golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than
+his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags----"
+
+She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under
+enforced composure.
+
+"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's
+quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with
+clean hands."
+
+He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which
+stung her so ruthlessly.
+
+"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may,
+shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You--a thing
+beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be
+innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you
+choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice.
+Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it
+with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue
+will envy you the red robe bitterly then."
+
+Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the
+look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the
+side of the rushing mill-water.
+
+"You came--to say this?"
+
+"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon
+tired, I say; but I----Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he
+motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the
+wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur
+of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night
+air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the
+slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the
+beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin;
+you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while,
+and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy
+and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful
+fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the
+reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most
+bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but
+she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than
+was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels
+for a woman who sells her soul--at a loss. You see?--ah, surely, you
+see, Folle-Farine?"
+
+She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous
+moonlight about her. She saw--she saw now!
+
+And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and,
+by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of
+alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty,
+and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least
+believe--believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and
+her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is
+kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that
+through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and
+merciless gift.
+
+"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's
+voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you
+have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who
+has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you
+last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it--know it, at least,
+enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you
+took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,--to stand homeless
+under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the
+rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace
+gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one
+smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a
+little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired,
+Folle-Farine!"
+
+She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming
+to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights
+shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
+
+Tired!--ah, God!--tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he
+spake.
+
+"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the
+world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as
+your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by
+horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded
+gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of
+flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only
+chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a
+priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring
+you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!--what
+vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the
+swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!--what
+retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and
+magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the
+Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you
+can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance--so
+symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to
+wither at your birth,--a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the
+snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your
+fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed
+out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no
+anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way,
+you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more
+beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is
+the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of
+gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it
+high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will
+find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest
+vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of
+your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men;
+and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in
+triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;--nothing as you
+are, Folle-Farine!"
+
+She heard in silence to the end.
+
+On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam
+close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness,
+in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all
+creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted
+in the spaces of the stones.
+
+As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she
+reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow
+wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the
+void of the darkness.
+
+"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you,
+and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that
+tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."
+
+And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though
+the deed she spake of tempted her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+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 Arslan.
+
+"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 Arslan.
+
+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 Arslan.
+
+"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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+That night the moon found the Red Mouse, and said,--
+
+"Did I not declare aright? Over every female thing you are
+victorious--soon or late?"
+
+But the Red Mouse answered,--
+
+"Nay, not so. For the soul still is closed against me; and the soul
+still is pure. But this men do not see, and women cannot know;--they are
+so blind."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+Ere another year had been fully born, the world spoke in homage and in
+wonder of two things.
+
+The one, a genius which had suddenly arisen in its midst, and taken
+vengeance for the long neglect of bitter years, and scourged the world
+with pitiless scorn until, before this mighty struggle which it had
+dared once to deride and to deny, it crouched trembling; and wondered
+and did homage; and said in fear, "Truly this man is great, and truth is
+terrible."
+
+The other,--the bodily beauty of a woman; a beauty rarely seen in open
+day, but only in the innermost recesses of a sensualist's palace; a
+creature barefooted, with chains of gold about her ankles, and loose
+white robes which showed each undulation of the perfect limbs, and on
+her breast the fires of a knot of opal; a creature in whose eyes there
+was one changeless look, as of some desert beast taken from the freedom
+of the air and cast to the darkness of some unutterable horror; a
+creature whose lips were forever mute, mute as the tortured lips of
+Laena.
+
+One day the man whom the nations at last had crowned, saw the creature
+whom it was a tyrant's pleasure to place beside him now and then, in the
+public ways, as a tribune of Rome placed in his chariot of triumph the
+vanquished splendor of some imperial thing of Asia made his slave.
+
+Across the clear hot light of noon the eyes of Arslan fell on hers for
+the first time since they had looked on her amidst the pale poppies, in
+the noonrise, in the fields.
+
+They smiled on her with a cold, serene, ironic scorn.
+
+"So soon?" he murmured, and passed onward, whilst the people made way
+for him in homage.
+
+He had his heart's desire. He was great. He only smiled to think--all
+women were alike.
+
+Her body shrank, her head dropped, as though a knife were thrust into
+her breast.
+
+But her lips kept their silence to the last. They were so strong, they
+were so mute; they did not even once cry out against him, "For thy
+sake!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+In the springtime of the year three gods watched by the river.
+
+The golden willows blew in the low winds; the waters came and went; the
+moon rose full and cold over a silvery stream; the reeds sighed in the
+silence. Two winters had drifted by, and one hot, drowsy summer; and all
+the white still shapes upon the walls of the granary already had been
+slain by the cold breath of Time. The green weeds waved in the empty
+casements; the chance-sown seeds of thistles and of bell-flowers were
+taking leaf between the square stones of the paven floors; on the
+deserted threshold lichens and brambles climbed together; the filmy ooze
+of a rank vegetation stole over the loveliness of Persephone and
+devoured one by one the immortal offspring of Zeus; about the feet of
+the bound sun-king in Phaeros and over the calm serene mockery of Hermes'
+smile the gray nets of the spiders' webs had been woven to and fro,
+around and across, with the lacing of a million threads, as Fate weaves
+round the limbs and covers the eyes of mortals as they stumble blindly
+from their birthplace to their grave. All things, the damp and the dust,
+the frost and the scorch, the newts and the rats, the fret of the
+flooded water, and the stealing sure inroad of the mosses that
+everywhere grew from the dews and the fogs had taken and eaten, in
+hunger or sport, or had touched and thieved from, then left gangrened
+and ruined.
+
+The three gods alone remained, who, being the sons of eternal night, are
+unharmed and unaltered by any passage of the years of earth,--the only
+gods who never bend beneath the yoke of Time, but unblenchingly behold
+the nations wither as uncounted leaves, and the lands and the seas
+change places, and the cities and the empires pass away as a tale that
+is told, and the deities that are worshiped in the temples change name
+and attributes and cultus at the wanton will of the age that begat them.
+
+In the still, cold moonlit air they stand together hand in band, looking
+outward through the white night-mists. Other gods perished with the
+faith of each age as it changed; other gods, lived by the breath of
+men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice; but they--their
+empire is the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of
+life, rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every
+creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood
+to the nest-bird cradled in its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a
+sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And
+Thanatos--to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to
+come; beneath his foot all generations lie, and in the hollow of his
+hand he holds the worlds. Though the earth be tenantless, and the
+heavens sunless, and the planets shrivel in their courses, and the
+universe be desolate in an endless night, yet through the eternal
+darkness Thanatos still will reign, and through its eternal solitudes he
+alone will wander and he still behold his work.
+
+Deathless as themselves, their shadows stood; and the worm and the
+lizard and the newt left them alone and dared not wind about their calm
+clear brows, and dared not steal to touch the roses at their
+lips,--knowing that ere the birth of the worlds these were, and when the
+worlds shall have perished they still will reign on,--the slow, sure,
+soundless, changeless ministers of an eternal rest, of an eternal
+oblivion.
+
+A little light strayed in from the gray skies, pale as the
+primrose-flowers that grow among the reeds upon the shore, and found its
+way to them trembling, and shone in the far-seeing depths of their
+unfathomable eyes.
+
+To eyes which spake and said: "Sleep, Dreams, and Death;--we are the
+only gods that answer prayer."
+
+With the faint gleam of the tender evening light there came across the
+threshold a human form, barefooted, bareheaded, with broken links of
+golden chains gleaming here and there upon her limbs, with white robes
+hanging heavily, soaked with dews and rains; with sweet familiar smells
+of night-born blossoms, of wet leaves, of budding palm-boughs, of rich
+dark seed-sown fields, and the white flower-foam of orchards shedding
+their fragrance from about her as she moved.
+
+Her face was bloodless as the faces of the gods; her eyes had a look of
+blindness, her lips were close-locked together; her feet stumbled often,
+yet her path was straight.
+
+She had hidden by day, she had fled by night; all human creatures had
+scattered from her path, in terror of her as of some unearthly thing:
+she had made her way blindly yet surely through the sweet cool air,
+through the shadows and the grasses, through the sighing sounds of
+bells, through the leafy ways, through the pastures where the herds were
+sleeping, through the daffodils blowing in the shallow brooks;--through
+all the things for which her life had been athirst so long and which she
+reached too late,--too late for any coolness of sweet grass beneath her
+limbs to give her rest; too late for any twilight song of missel-thrush
+or merle to touch her dumb dead heart to music; too late for any kiss of
+clustering leaves to heal the blistering shame that burned upon her lips
+and withered all their youth. And yet she loved them,--loved them never
+yet more utterly than now when she came back to them, as Persephone to
+the pomegranate-flowers of hell.
+
+She crossed the threshold, whilst the reeds that grew in the water by
+the steps bathed her feet and blew together softly against her limbs,
+sorrowing for this life so like their own, which had dreamed of the
+songs of the gods and had only heard the hiss of the snakes.
+
+She fell at the feet of Thanatos. The bonds of her silence were
+loosened; the lips dumb so long for love's sake found voice and cried
+out:
+
+"How long?--how long? Wilt thou never take pity, and stoop, and
+say, 'Enough'? I have kept faith, I have kept silence, to the end. The
+gods know. My life for his; my soul for his: so I said. So I have given.
+I would not have it otherwise. Nay,--I am glad, I am content, I am
+strong. See,--I have never spoken. The gods have let me perish in his
+stead. Nay, I suffer nothing. What can it matter--for me? Nay, I thank
+thee that thou hast given my vileness to be the means of his glory. He
+is immortal, and I am less than the dust:--what matter? He must not
+know; he must never know; and one day I might be weak, or mad, and
+speak. Take me whilst still I am strong. A little while agone, in the
+space in the crowds he saw me. 'So soon?' he said,--and smiled. And yet
+I live! Keep faith with me; keep faith--at last. Slay me
+now,--quickly,--for pity's sake! Just once,--I speak."
+
+Thanatos, in answer, laid his hand upon her lips, and sealed them, and
+their secret with them, mute, for evermore.
+
+She had been faithful to the end.
+
+To such a faith there is no recompense, of men or of the gods, save only
+death. On the shores of the river the winds swept through the reeds,
+and, sighing amidst them, mourned, saying, "A thing as free as we are,
+and as fair as the light, has perished; a thing whose joys were made,
+like ours, from song of the birds, from sight of the sun, from sound of
+the waters, from smell of the fields, from the tossing spray of the
+white fruit-boughs, from the play of the grasses at sunrise, from all
+the sweet and innocent liberties of earth and air. She has perished as a
+trampled leaf, as a broken shell, as a rose that falls in the public
+ways, as a star that is cast down on an autumn night. She has died as
+the dust dies, and none sorrow. What matter?--what matter? Men are wise,
+and gods are just,--they say."
+
+The moon shone cold and clear. The breath of the wild thyme was sweet
+upon the air. The leaves blew together murmuring. The shadows of the
+clouds were dark upon the stream. She lay dead at the feet of the Sons
+of Night.
+
+The Red Mouse sat without, and watched, and said, "To the end she hath
+escaped me." The noisome creatures of the place stole away trembling;
+the nameless things begotten by loneliness and gloom glided to their
+holes as though afraid; the blind newts crept into the utter darkness
+afar off; the pure cool winds alone hovered near her, and moved her
+hair, and touched her limbs with all the fragrance of forest and plain,
+of the pure young year and the blossoming woodlands, of the green
+garden-ways and the silvery sea. The lives of the earth and the air and
+the waters alone mourned for this life which was gone from amidst them,
+free even in basest bondage, pure though every hand had cast defilement
+on it, incorrupt through all corruption--for love's sake.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+In the springtime of the year three reapers cut to the roots the reeds
+that grew by the river.
+
+They worked at dawn of day: the skies were gray and dark; the still and
+misty current flowed in with a full tide; the air was filled with the
+scent of white fruit-blossoms; in the hush of the daybreak the song of a
+lark thrilled the silence; under the sweep of the steel the reeds fell.
+
+Resting from their labors, with the rushes slain around them, they,
+looking vacantly through the hollow casements, saw her body lying there
+at the feet of the gods of oblivion.
+
+At first they were shaken and afraid. Then the gleam of the gold upon
+her limbs awakened avarice; and avarice was more powerful than fear.
+They waded through the rushes and crossed the threshold, and, venturing
+within, stood looking on her in awe and wonder, then timorously touched
+her, and turned her face to the faint light. Then they said that she was
+dead.
+
+"It is that evil thing come back upon us!" they muttered to one another,
+and stood looking at one another, and at her, afraid.
+
+They spoke in whispers; they were very fearful; it was still twilight.
+
+"It were a righteous act to thrust her in a grave," they murmured to one
+another at the last,--and paused.
+
+"Ay, truly," they agreed. "Otherwise she may break the bonds of the
+tomb, and rise again, and haunt us always: who can say? But the
+gold----"
+
+And then they paused again.
+
+"It were a sin," one murmured,--"it were a sin to bury the pure good
+gold in darkness. Even if it came from hell----"
+
+"The priests will bless it for us," answered the other twain.
+
+Against the reddening skies the lark was singing.
+
+The three reapers waited a little, still afraid, then hastily, as men
+slaughter a thing they dread may rise against them, they stripped the
+white robes from her and drew off the anklets of gold from her feet, and
+the chains of gold that were riven about her breast and limbs. When they
+had stripped her body bare, they were stricken with a terror of the dead
+whom they thus violated with their theft; and, being consumed with
+apprehension lest any, as the day grew lighter, should pass by there and
+see what they had done, they went out in trembling haste, and together
+dug deep down into the wet sands, where the reeds grew, and dragged her
+still warm body unshrouded to the air, and thrust it down there into its
+nameless grave, and covered it, and left it to the rising of the tide.
+
+Then with the gold they hurried to their homes.
+
+The waters rose and washed smooth the displaced soil, and rippled in a
+sheet of silver as the sun rose over the place, and effaced all traces
+of their work, so that no man knew this thing which they had done.
+
+In her death, as in her life, she was friendless and alone; and none
+avenged her.
+
+The reeds blew together by the river, now red in the daybreak, now white
+in the moonrise; and the winds sighed through them wearily, for they
+were songless, and the gods were dead.
+
+The seasons came and went; the waters rose and sank; in the golden
+willows the young birds made music with their wings; the soft-footed
+things of brake and brush stole down through the shade of the leaves and
+drank at the edge of the shore, and fled away; the people passed down
+the slow current of the stream with lily sheaves of the blossoming
+spring, with ruddy fruitage of the summer woods, with yellow harvest of
+the autumn fields,--passed singing, smiting the frail songless as they
+went.
+
+But none paused there.
+
+For Thanatos alone knew,--Thanatos, who watched by day and night the
+slain reeds sigh, fruitless and rootless, on the empty air,--Thanatos,
+who by the cold sad patience of his gaze spoke, saying,--
+
+"I am the only pity of the world. And even I--to every mortal thing I
+come too early or too late."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Transcriber's Note: Hyphen variations left as printed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+OUIDA'S WORKS.
+
+
+GRANVILLE DE VIGNE
+
+STRATHMORE
+
+CHANDOS
+
+IDALIA
+
+UNDER TWO FLAGS
+
+TRICOTRIN
+
+PUCK
+
+CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE
+
+RANDOLPH GORDON
+
+BEATRICE BOVILLE
+
+These Novels are universally acknowledged to be the most powerful and
+fascinating works of fiction which the present century, so prolific in
+light reading, has produced.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Folle-Farine, by Ouida
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLE-FARINE ***
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