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(illus)
By
Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black
spot in the living daytime; a colourless 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 mill-stones.
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 thistledown, 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 humour of her
bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it,
and answered to it as others to their birth-names.
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 whilst 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 wet timbers above the wheel,
and watched with her great sorrowful 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 little short white linen kirtle, knotted around
her waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure
to the sun, to a golden brown colour, though in texture it was soft as
velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep
grass, with the 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 forest of Naxos, or conceived by Persephone, in the
eternal
night of hell, whilst 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 labour drearily and stupidly, like the cattle of the field, and
without their strength, and with barely so much even as their scant 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: the department of Calvados. 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 the late summer: she was panting and burning
with 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, amongst 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 towards her. He had caught up a piece of rope
with which he had been about to tie his 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 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 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 amongst the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure
snow-like whiteness of the lilies.
"Two!"
She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a
purple-winged butterfly lighting one 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 amongst 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 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 chaunt 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 fibre 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
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 amongst the beans.
After a while 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 water foam and
eddy below.
The hours went away; the golden day died; the greyness of evening stole
the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the 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 uncarried 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 pile, slowly,
her hands 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 wa a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean
as a watercress, filled with the pungent odour of dried herbs, and
furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, with pinewood
tressels, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of saints. On
one of the tressels 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 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 he 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 sense awake, to the noises of the house. There
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 a while 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 grafted 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
which 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 house dog, 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 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 eërie 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 lotus; through the air there
passed, now and then, the soft, grey, 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 odour; the mosses that clothed many of the branches hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and web-like phantasies.
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 flights 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 infinitely sweet to her with the sweetness of freedom, of
love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never known;
so dumbly 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 ghost-like 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, filmy-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 charm 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 ecstacy, 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.
"Oh 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, oh great Lord, and I will praise thee and love thee
always."
She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, flattering
language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the earth
and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, whilst 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 immortal
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 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, of measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable,
seemed to come to her and bathe her in its heat and colour. 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 fireless 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 splendour, so
Folle-Farine, standing by the water's side in the light of the
moon, desolate, ignorant, brute-like, 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.
Its centre 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 they 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 head-dress of the women workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west there
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 dim stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the
river ran, and wither 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 chaunting 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 odours 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
galeries of its opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning on
one could stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter egg across to her
neighbour 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 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 coloured 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, untrammelled 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 the missal
painters, and the flush of colour form mellow wall-fruits and
grape-clusters 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 watched 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
harbour 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 grey 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 which she still
saw through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched
and trembling, "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
which 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 amongst the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of
whom 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 out-
skirt 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 millwheels that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The millhouse 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 parqueted 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 judgement; harshly strong, yet ignorantly
weak; a race holding dearer its heirloom 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, of in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.
Claude 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 may will honour 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 neighbours 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 grey eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips. Reprimand, homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all 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 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 amongst 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
amongst 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 grey 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 chirping 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 neighbours,
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 rumour 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. This honour which had
befallen his first-begotten shed both sanctity and splendour on his
cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,
they cleared from this 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 embedded 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 hindrance 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 on
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 women who
was beautiful was ever a saint as well. And some thought that this old
creature, Marie Pitchou, who had 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
tressel. 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
engrained 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 savour; 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 hood that covered,
gipsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold,
ghost-like figure, but out of the 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 our from a pile of drifted snow.
The miler 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 stranger aside to a dusky corner of an inner
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 lustre 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 young waif 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 shaped 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 small shapely head there hung a 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 in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she
fought--fought with all the breath and 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 metal 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 thus 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 burnt 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 had risen, and 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 could not read, by 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 cyphers that had no tongue for him,
and yet seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all
the fair honour 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 shirt 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 muttered a word and smiled, a little
dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not
what.
He clenched 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 our across the threshold and into the night, with the
letter still clenched 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.
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 staunched 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 the 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, sun-fed, 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 one, 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 townsfolk 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 labour 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 round 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 labouring 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 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 own
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 labour.
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 labours, 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 breast 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 first 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 fearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the people amongst 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 beetles 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
and 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 the 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 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 mill on
their various errands, stared at this child and wondered amongst 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."
They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors.
But when they went away, and gossiped amongst 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 humoured the miller because he was aged and in
his dotage. Whilst one old woman, a withered and witch-like crone,
who had toiled in from the fishing village with a kreel 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, seven years through, said
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 gipsy, 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!"
She mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well
knowing that indeed no creature amongst them had ever been esteemed so
pure, so chaste, and so honoured of heaven as had been the miller's
daughter.
Many remembered the "gipsy with the jewelled eyes," and was
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 whist 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
confusion 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 not 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 sea-board, 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
grey 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-defence, 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; de-
siring 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 his 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 clothe her, if scantily; he fed her, if
meagrely; 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
fulfil 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 labour 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 mill-ditch, foul and foetid, 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.
A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down on that
bitter night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of
colour, broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green
beechwoods 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 greenways of grey 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, spire-like, 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 splendours 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 Liébana.
Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of Spanish 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 labour 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 woman 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.
Amongst 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 welcomed him ragged, famished,
and foot-weary, 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 quarrelled 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 labour, 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 this 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 favoured 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 one 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 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
without offence, and with a savage candour.
"No--that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look
at her if you like. I loved hr 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 few wolves in the Liébana. 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 coney, 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.
Amongst 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 forest and rivers; he loved music, and
could make it, in all its innumerable signs 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 for ever
laughed and was glad.
Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight
in his wits, yet his kin honoured 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 road-side Calvaries.
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 candour,
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 wine-
house 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
bloodstained 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 amongst 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 woman 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 whist 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-coloured 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 a 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 for ever, through rain and
sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and the
flush of 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
serve 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 a
while, 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
worshipped--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 a 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 I 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 Liébana, from a tribe we
fell in with on the other side of the mountains, and so we travelled her 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' music.
"Then have pity on the 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 defence 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' 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' 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 Liébana 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 quarrelled with them violently concerning
some division of a capture of wineskins, and went on his own way to distant
provinces and cities; to the gambling and the roystering, the
woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that his soul lusted
after always.
His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the
defence of Phratos.
Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two amongst 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 he from him, thinking that, 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 nought 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 Liébana; for
beside them there was Phratos.
Phratos never abandoned her.
Under the wolfskin and pine boughs 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 sheep-skin 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 sheep-skin 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 amongst them on their
fern bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liébana
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
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 mid-summers, when
they gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of
hill-side paths and along the rough stones of dried-up
watercourses, 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 the 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 her such glad and bouyant tunes that the laughter
seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple amongst the swinging
boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard
from his hole to frolic. And when they 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 travelled; 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 humour and half pathos, that
soothed her tired sense 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 Liébana 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
sweet, fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, and 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 lotus
leaf in the hush of the night.
In the Liébana 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 Liébana 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 splendour of face and
form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and in
his gem-like 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 passion