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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 passions,
the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy--who had retained
all the vices of his race whilst losing their virtues of simplicity in
living, and of endurance under hardship--the gall of a sharp poverty
had become unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and
wine, and boastful brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.
The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liébana; in
one of its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and
coursed through by a headlong hillstream, that spread itself into darkling
breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy
lilies and a tangled web of water plants.
He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their
camp-fire lit beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was
welcomed and fed and plied with such as they had, with that mixture of
sullen respect and incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through
all their quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle
and the most faithless of them all.
He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.
When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in
the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at
play.
"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They
showed her to him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough
of ash; the pool beneath
mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced above her in the leaves.
"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.
"In her own fashion,--as a flower in the wind," Phratos
answered him, with a smile; and willing to woo for her the good graces of
her father, he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned
the child.
She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a
fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if
she stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of
liquor.
Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was,
danced.
But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed
theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide
her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds sing
and the young kids gambol.
Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardour beyond
her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the
fire-glow, the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form
flung high in air, like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never
still, never ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet
always with a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.
Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she
dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean
flight.
"She will do," he muttered.
"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.
Taric laughed.
"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he
answered.
Phratos said nothing, but he heard.
After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of
their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if they
should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood
partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a
watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.
Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the
stars were clear in the midnight skies, the woman Zarâ stole out of
her tent to him.
"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice.
"You want the child killed?"
Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.
"Not I; what should I gain?"
"What is it you want, then, with her?"
"I mean to take her, that is all.--See here--a month
ago, on the other side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was
at a wine-shop, hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with
him who danced to his music, and whom the people praised for her beauty,
and who anticked like a dancing dog, and who made a great deal of silver.
We got friends, he and I. At the week's end the brat died:
some sickness of the throat, they said. Her master tore his hair and
raved; the little wretch was worth handfuls of coin to him. For such
another he would give twelve gold pieces. He shall have her. She will
dance for him and me; there is plenty to be made in that way. The women
are fools over a handsome child; they open their larders and their purses.
I shall take her away before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven
days, by starving them and giving them the stick. She will dance while she
is a child. Later on--there are the theatres; she will be strong and
handsome, and in the great cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a
mine of gold ore. I shall take her away by sunrise."
"To sell her?"
The hard fierce heart of Zarâ rebelled against him; she had no
tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray
child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her
race were roused against him by his words.
Taric laughed again.
"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing dog of her for the
peasants' pastime; and in time she will make dancing dogs of the
nobles and the princes for her own sport. It is a brave life--none
better."
The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his
child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less offended
the instincts and prejudices of her clan.
"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.
"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say--or
do? The little beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it
refuse to pipe when we play for it, I will."
The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left
him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a
right to do what he chose with his own. So went down and lay down amongst
her brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.
Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,
lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with
fresh boughs of resinous wood.
When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his
slumber was not one easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and
threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a
dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was
Phratos.
He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and
the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a
thing for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa
than to turn him aside from his purpose.
"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he
stood there, and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with
self-reproach for a crime.
He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he
went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the
skins of Zarâ's tent as they hung over the fir-poles.
The moonbeams slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the
woman, sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her
litter of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the
entrance, the slumbering from of the young daughter of Taric.
She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.
"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the
stifled cry died on her lips.
He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the
curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.
Her eyes had closed again,
and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold feared nothing.
Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a
half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his
dreams with the knife that was thrust in his waist-band.
Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of
the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over
which the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the
night-breeze blew to and fro its chain. No one heard him.
He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,
carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her
hair there were still sequins. They glittered in the white light as he
went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his shoulder,
and struck a faint musical sighing sound from them.
"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.
"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was
content and slept again--the strings of the viol sending a soft
whisper in her drowsy ear, each time that the breeze arose and swept across
them.
When the morning came, it found him far on his road, leaving behind him
the Liébana.
There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as
she had never been.
They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills
and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were never
weary. They rode aloft whist he toiled on. Yet neither was he weary, for
the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the sunshine.
It was late in the year.
The earth and the sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and
gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer
fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been gathered
in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of good
humour.
Sometimes before a wine-shop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad
market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper
coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust
for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but
moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.
He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and
feet were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of
hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood
and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half leafless,
and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid in soft gold
mists of vapour; and saw all these as in a dream, herself borne high in
air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar fraternity of
the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content, like a mole or a
dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never hungry nor cold; no
one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.
It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was
nearly always on foot.
Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some
straw-laden waggon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of
vegetables, that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the
marshy lands, or the poplar lined leagues of the public highways. But as a
rule he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and
shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which he
travelled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy, by his skin and his
garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced
child who ran by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.
"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of
those shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.
She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy
tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance that
they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter
Phratos' hand--half-terrified,
half-triumphant.
The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet
glories of the south and of the west,
their red leafage and purple flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim grey tints of the northerly lands.
The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped
them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,
ethereal as vapour; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that
seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green cultivated
hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds seemed
never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed with
leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow lands, white with snow and
obscure with vapour. For these they had exchanged the pomp of dying
foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the mistral, the
odours of the noël-born violets, the fantastic shapes of the
aloes and olives rasing their dark spears and their silvery network against
the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich south-west.
The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awe-struck, and
disquieted; but she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.
She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly
fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild shapes
of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted with age.
But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had supreme faith in
Phratos.
One night, at the close of a black day in mid-winter, the
sharpest and hardest in cold that hey had ever encountered, they passed
through a little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires
and roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the
poetry and the majesty of a long perished age.
The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice
choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarified
air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;
through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and the
muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their rounds
called out, under the closed houses, that it was the eight of the night in
a heavy snowstorm.
Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot
drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way the wood and
the mill of Yprès.
They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy
of Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.
He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little
town along a road by the river towards the country.
"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness
than common sense in his voice.
The child shivered under her little fur skin, which would not keep out
the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but she
drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."
They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a
dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of
the mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an
intense silence.
He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a
garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were
not closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked
to him--a houseless wanderer from his youth up--strangely warm
and safe and still.
An old man sat on one side of the wide heart; an old woman, who span, on
the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs
smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of the
chimney-place, and dance on the pewter and brass on the shelves;
from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of
onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and
carved wood.
He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be
sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell that
the wooden god was only worshipped in a blind, bigoted, brutal selfishness,
that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other souls to eternal
damnation.
He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth, and comfort; and what
the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.
"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old
people, and prosperous, and alone by their fireside."
It seemed that they must be so.
Any way, there was no other means to save her from Taric.
His hear was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and to
the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the hearth
seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who was not
altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and often in his
own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a woman
child,--and, above all, for a woman child who had such a sire as
Taric.
To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his
tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,
wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found him,
and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way to
secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to place
her with her mother's people.
She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at
the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.
He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the
letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the
Liébana.
"Thou wilt go in there the old man yonder, and sleep by that
pleasant fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou
wilt be good and gentle, and even as thou art to me always; and
to-morrow at noontide I will come and see how it fares with
thee."
Her small hands tightened upon his.
"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken
tongue of the gypsy children.
There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and
storm there, she saw; but theses were nought to her without Phratos. She
struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being thrust
into the cage,--not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid of it
and rebelling by instinct.
He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the
first time kissed her. For Phratos, though
tender to her, had no woman's foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for neither caresses nor compassion--knowing well that to the love child of Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.
"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with
his staff on the wooden door, and lifting its latch, unclosed it; and
thrust the child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the
low entrance place.
Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood
into the gloom and the storm of the night.
He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her
evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the
peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust, and
disdain.
"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to
himself as he faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well
with her--let it be well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we
must seek some lair where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover
her. But it will be hard to f ind; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of
foot and has a far-stretching hand an eyes that are sleepless.
And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to
him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the vow
he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he had
saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the future
of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much in saving
her from her father, and he had done it in the only way the was possible to
him.
Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though
he had thrust some mountain bird with pinions that would cleave the clouds,
and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise with the dawn,
and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into the darkness of a
trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for evermore.
"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless
with a vague remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.
But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which
forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in all
the many years that came.
For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,
lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and
wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert, on
which no single star-ray shone.
The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of
snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen in
their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All lights
were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the tempest of
the winds.
The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.
Above, beneath, around, were the dense rolling clouds of snow. Now and
then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a strange harsh
burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the silence and then
died again.
At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places
standing in the great colourless waste.
But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face
again.
"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and
they drew their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked
their saints that they were safe beneath a roof.
He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the
blast.
A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a
hundred times he failed; and moved round and round vainly, never escaping
the maze of the endless white fields.
Now the night was long, and he was weakly.
In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the
cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered
on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his foot
as he passed her.
"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger.
But the lad lives--save him."
And as she spoke, her lips closed together and her throat rattled, and
she died.
The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.
Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and
worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at the
driving snow.
Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had
nearly covered the body of his mother.
All around him were the fields. There was no light, except from the
lantern on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The
stillness was intense. The bells had ceased to ring, or he had wandered
far from the sound of them.
The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his
limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,
struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and
then he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a
shallow pool of ice.
At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could
bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold upon
the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes beating
on him.
"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she
was a beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him, neither could she
ever bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.
He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it, and
folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew the
little body under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and wrapped it
closely round, and left it there.
It was all that he could do.
Then, with no defence between him and the driving cold, he strove once
more to find his road.
It was quite dark; quite still.
The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was pathless as the
sea.
He stumbled on as a mule may that being blind and bruised yet holds its
way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience.
His veins were frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a
scourge; a sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.
He knew well what it meant.
He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;
and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose
laughter he would fain have heard.
He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers
had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and
dumb: it only sighed in answer.
He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and
put it in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.
Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple and cold to
the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.
There was no light anywhere.
The endless wilderness of the ploughed lands stretched all around him;
where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light could
penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only sound that
rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some perishing flock
locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.
But what he saw and what he heard were not these; going barefoot and
blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the
golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness of
flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the swift
feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in the
desolate courts of the old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons
shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea. These arose and
drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know, and sleep conquered
him; and he dropped down on the earth noiselessly and powerlessly as a leaf
sins; and the snow fell and covered him.
When the morning broke a peasant, going to his labour in the fields
while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both
his body and the child's.
The boy was warm and living, still beneath the shelter of the
sheepskin: Phratos was dead.
The people succoured the child, and nursed and fed him so
that his life was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives the stricken deer.
"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left
him there, and the snow kept him.
His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their
children. But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings.
For the viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.
And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never
again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness; and
never again did the young men and the maidens dance to his bidding, and the
tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the
birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps
cry:--"Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"
When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a
slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his
hammer aside, threw off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of
its heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, and took out hard black
crust and munched it with teeth that were still strong and white.
The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no
rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the air,
with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds were mute
and invisible, doubtless hidden in some delicious shadow, swinging drowsily
on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the roofing of broad chestnut
leaves.
The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless
poplars, standing side by side as sentinels. The fields were all ablaze on
every acre with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the scarlet flame
of innumerable poppies. Here and there they were broken by some little
house, white or black, or painted in bright colours, which lifted up
amongst its leaves a little tower like a sugar-loaf
or a carved gable, and a pointed arch beneath it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with early fruits already ripe, some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.
Through it all the river ran, silver in the light; with shallow fords,
where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient
picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and
moss-embroidered.
The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score
of years; the place had to him the monotony and colourlessness which all
long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.
He was ninety-five; he had to labour for his living; he ate black
bread; he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of
the dead; and he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the
sky, the air and the landscape: why not? They had no loveliness for
him; he only knew that the flies stung him and that the red ants could
crawl through the holes in his shoes, and bite him sharply with their
little piercing teeth.
He sat in such shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his hard
crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were thrown
out as sharply as a sculpture against the golden sunlight, in which the
gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue
piercing eyes that had still something of the fire of their youth; and his
lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.
His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten
time--a time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle
round the sun.
With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the
lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to
kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and because
suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness, but life for all that was over
with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a thing so splendid, so
terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so intense, that the world
seemed now to him to have grown pale and grey and pulseless, with no sap in
its veins, no hue in its suns, no blood in its humanity.
For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White
Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;
the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried
"Marengo!"
He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour
was an agony or a victory; when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;
when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses served also to
cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the child; when
the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the juices of
out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the bodies
of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And how he sat
here by the wayside, in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of the
fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him, because so
long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul and had cursed God and
died.
Through the golden notes of the dancing air and of the quivering
sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road a
girl.
She was bare-footed and bare-throated, lithe of movement,
and straight and supple, as one who passed her life on the open lands and
was abroad in all changes of the weather.
She walked with the free and fearless measure of the country women of
Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia; she had barely entered his
sixteenth year; but her bosom and limbs were full and firm, and moulded
with almost the luxuriant splendor of maturity; her head was not covered
after the fashion of the country, but had a scarlet kerchief wound about,
and on it she bore a great flat basket, filled high with fruits and herbs
and flowers; a mass of colour and of blossom, through whose leaves and
tendrils her dark level brows and her great eyes, blue black as a
tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the sun.
She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet,
that were such feet as a sculptor would give his Cleopatra or his Phryne.
Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet as
a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close to one another,
like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep it--until death.
As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which
for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,
and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.
She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,
small and even, like rows of cowrie shells.
"You are well, Marcellin?"
The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own
keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and
absorbed retrospection will lend.
"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly.
"When will you know that so long as an old man lives so long it
cannot be 'well' with him?"
"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"
She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a
voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any
peasantry. She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against
the trunk of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare
chest.
"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing,"
he said curtly.
Her eyes gleamed with a fierce thirsty longing; she made him no
reply.
He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her
head and motioned it away; yet she was as hungered as any hawk that has
hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed nothing. The
growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her made her need
constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was fed as scantily
as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a galley slave.
The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was
all.
"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is
possible? I do not understand."
The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.
"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is
possible that a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may
be shot as it sings; it is possible that
it may have the honour to die in agony to grace a rich man's table. You see?"
She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but
barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy track
of a metaphorical utterance. But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the
shadow settled over her face again.
"The possible, then, is only--the worse?" she said
slowly.
The old man smiled still grimly.
"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a
'possible' which will give--one day--the fowler who
kills the lark the wings of the lark, and the lark's power to sing
Laus Deo in heaven. I do not
say--they do."
"The priests!"
All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable curled on them, and
a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was unfathomable and
mute.
"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said
bitterly, "if so be that priests hold the gifts of it?"
Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance
fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.
"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman
child, and have beauty: the devil will give you one."
"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in
her echo of the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a
name that is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.
"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the
world is always of men."
His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood
leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless in
the sunlight like a statue of bronze.
"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said
suddenly: "why do they then so hate me?"
The old man stroked his beard.
"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not
believe him."
She mused over the saying; silent still.
The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling
through the air, mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed black against the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which flew down in the track of the lark and seized it ere it gained the shelter of the grass and bore it away within his talons.
Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.
"You see there are many forms of the
'possible'"--
"When it means Death," she added.
The old man took his pipe back and smoked.
"Of-course--Death is the key-note of
creation."
Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the lustre of her
eyes.
"But the lark praised God--why should it be so dealt
with?"
Marcellin smiled grimly.
"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the
steel."
She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons
born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied
had been Cain.
At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and
through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of
scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not from
the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that burned on the
hillside.
There came a cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from it:
a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber wheat,
the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew larger
and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green water meadows
and winding field paths for the great high road.
It was a procession of the Church.
It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it
approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his head
nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl cease to lean for rest against
the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.
The Church passed them; the great gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet
and the white of the robes catch-
ing the sunlight; the silver chains and silver censers gleaming; the fresh young voices of the singing children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of the bells ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.
The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a
choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit air;
the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and pierced
through the noonday silence.
It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were
choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old man
coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting
eyelids.
"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a
smile. "Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded
eyes."
Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.
The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and
pray for rain, and to fell the forests that were the rainmakers."
The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and
winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens for
rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the priest
prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and the eager
steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the grasses and the
bright butterfly dead in the dust.
The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped
eyelids; the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a
little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of
defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the wayside
trees. For the two were both outcasts.
"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to
another one fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun
her little, white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and
fall of the sonorous chaunt as well as she could with her little, lisping
tones.
"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to
another a handsome golden brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow to don his scarlet robes and swing about the censer of his village chapel.
And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched
more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they went;
feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of darkness,
and that they were purer and holier and more exalted, because they had thus
passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their lips, with the
cross as their symbol.
So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of
sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the
river, into the heart of the old brown, quiet town, and about the foot of
the great cathedral, where they kneeled down int he dust and prayed, then
rose and sang the "Angelus."
Then, the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither
under the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and
implored God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of
harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.
The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;
and after a while rising from their knees, many of them in tears, dispersed
and went their ways, muttering to one another:--"We have
had no such harvests as those of old since the men that slew a saint came
to dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We
had never such droughts as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before
the offspring of hell was amongst us."
For the priests had not said to them, "Lo! your mercy is parched
as the earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."
When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's
gold he had seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a
people; he had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live;
he had been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers in
Thermidor: he had raised his flute-like voice from the
tribune, and he had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had
been his playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he
had beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within
kings' palaces; he too had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,
and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white beauty
of the royal women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats that
princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had his youth
in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and all women
martyrs or furies.
And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed
him by cursed him, saying:
"This man slew a king."
For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red
at its dawn was now grey and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for in
all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so
deadly as age.
Years before, in such hot summer weather as this, against which the
Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his little cabin amidst
the fields, had met a little
child coming straight towards him in the full crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all around her.
He hardly knew why he looked at her, but when he had once looked his
eyes rested there.
She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light,
amongst the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's
forms that he had seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness
clothed in the red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the
scaffold as the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over
the land.
The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;
above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple; around
her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as gold by the
long mouths of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders blue and black
from the marks of a thong.
He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a
look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the
look of yore in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he
hated.
"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh, strong
voice. She put her heavy load of faggots down and stared at him.
"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought
she could be hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.
"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"
She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.
"Who beat you?" he pursued.
A cloud of passion swept over her beat face.
"Flamma."
"You were wicked?"
"They said so."
"And what do you do when you are beaten?"
"I shut my mouth."
"For what?"
"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be
glad."
Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen
passionless eyes with a look which, for him who
shunned and was shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.
"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that
will take the fret and the ache out of your bruises."
The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first
creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of his
was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it which only those
can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on
their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world.
Under reviling, and contempt, and constant rejection, she had become
savage as a trapped hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was
obedient and passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and
without a curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human
speech that she had heard.
His little hut was in the midst of those spreading cornfields, set where
two pathways crossed each other, and stretched down the gentle slope of the
cultured lands to join the great highway--a hut of stones and plaited
rushes, with of roof of thatch, where the old republican, hardy of frame
and born of a toiling race, dwelt in solitude, and broke his scanty bitter
bread without lament, if without content.
He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with
water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungently, though his hand was
so rough with labour, and, as men said, had been so often red with
carnage.
Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh, from a
wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his only
evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of woven
wools and eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried life;
lifted the faggots on her back, so that she could carry them with greater
ease; and set her on her homeward way.
"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the
threshold.
The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and
timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a
blow.
"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a
human thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his
doorway looking after her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the poppies.
"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought
the child, who had long known his face, though he had never noted hers; and
it seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's
kingdom--which they called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs
slaked the heat of her bruises; and the draught of milk had slaked the
thirst of her throat.
"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through
the tall red poppies.
And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin
cleaved to one another, being outcasts from all others.
On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of
perpetual chaffering, the town was full of colour, movement, noise, and
population.
The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of
mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing with them the crisp
salt smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own
tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by the
hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes which their forefathers had
bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to adhere.
But at other times when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the
peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at their
labours in the old renaissance mansions, which they had turned into
tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the
place was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely a dog asleep in the sun.
When the crowds had gone the priests laid aside their vestments, and
donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily
avocations in their humble dwellings.
The crosses and the censers were put back upon their altars, and hung up
upon their pillars.
The boy choristers and the little children put their white linen and
their scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender
and sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to
their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to
their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the poor
flies they killed in the sun.
The town became quite still, the market place quite empty; the drowsy
silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places
about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons dwelt;
grey shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken carvings,
and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of
lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.
Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,
there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the
wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.
She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her
burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched
out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun. The heat was
intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a moment, and put
her burning hands under a little rill of water that spouted into a basin in
a niche in the wall. An ancient well, with a stone image of the Madonna
sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone running
around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved loveliness for
its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labour in its service.
She leaned over the fountain, kept so cool by the roofing of the thick
green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain, and
she filled it at the running
thread of water, and stooped her lips to it again and again thirstily.
The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered
limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many
feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket which
now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries, melons, full of
juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had not taken even one
to freshen her dry mouth.
Folle-Farine stooped to the water and played with it, and drank
it, and steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone
bench, with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round
limbs full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther. The coolness,
the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing movement of water,
possess an ineffable charm for natures that are passion-tossed,
feverish, and full of storm.
There was a dreary peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise
for her; in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the grey
lichen-grown walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the
clusters of strange delicate carving beneath and below; in the sculptured
friezes where little nests that the birds had made in the spring still
rested, and in the dense brooding thickness of the boughs which brought the
sweetness and the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled
town.
She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,
a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her
guerdon.
As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters
opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high
fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap, that are the
female note of that especial town.
The old woman wa the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,
shrieked shrilly to her son:
"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is
drinking the blest water!"
The sacristan was hoeing amongst his cabbages in the garden behind his
house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of the
cathedral, that overshadowed it.
He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man,
though stout and strong.
The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable
sanctity attached to it.
According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at
the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St. Jerome,
who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth century, and
dwelt for a while near the cathedral, working at the honourable trade of a
cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles throughout the district. It
was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the fountain,
and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day, in full faith
and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and purified
of bodily diseases.
Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry flocked in from all sides,
and crowded round it, and drank; to the benefit of the sacristan in charge,
if not to that of their souls and bodies.
Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified
spring.
"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child
of hell! How durst you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God
struck water from the stone for such as you?"
Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her
audacious eyes, and laughed; then tossed her head again, and plunged it
into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the
rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.
The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,
shrieked aloud.
"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint
the gift of a saint with the lips of the devil!"
And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the
other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her head
in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her lofty
head-gear and her wrinkled face from out of the door, screamed to
him to show he was a man, and have no mercy.
As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow
across her, Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her beautiful fierce face.
She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift
movement from his hold, and catching his head under her left arm, rained
blows on him from his own weapon with a sudden gust of breathless rage
which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular limbs, the strength and
force of man. Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung
him from her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of
the court; caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the
water over him where he lay, and turning from him without a word, walked
across the courtyard slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the carriage
of her bare limbs, and the folds of her ragged garments; bearing the empty
osier-basket on her head, deaf as the stones around to the screams
of the sacristan and his mother.
In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were
sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old
woman's voice remained unheard.
The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their
niches in that sultry noontide; except the baying of a chained dog aroused,
there was no answer to the outcry, and Folle-Farine passed out into
the market place unarrested, and not meeting another living creature.
As she turned into one of the squares that led to the open country, she
saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of the town moving
quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace shining in the sun,
and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones. She laughed a little as
she saw.
"They will not come after me," she said to
herself. "Thy are too afraid of the devil."
She judged rightly; they did not come.
She crossed the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in the
glare of the sun.
There was nothing in sight except a stray cat prowling in a corner, and
three sparrows quarrelling over a foul-smelling heap of refuse.
The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed
like tired eyelids over their little dim, aged,
orbs of windows. The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys, and carved parapets, pointed motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound except for the cawing of some rooks, who built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles of the cathedral.
Undisturbed she crossed the square, and took her way down the crooked
street that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,
twisting, dusky place, with the water flowing through its centre as its
only roadway; and in there were the oldest houses of the town, all of
timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fantasies and
grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing
beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom to be
dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honour and
honesty to a noble offspring.
The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound
that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, in many of its antique
mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls. In one of
these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and colour.
The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted
pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow
casements; a breadth of many-coloured saxifrage, with leaves of
green and rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony
rail, which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and
a little yellow song bird made music in the empty niche from which the
sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.
From the window a woman looked, leaning with folded arms above the
rose-tipped saxifrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.
She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, and she had silver pins in
her amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to
Folle-Farine,
"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"
Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous
eyes.
"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly.
All beautiful things head a fascination for her. This woman above was
very fair to see, and she looked at her
as she looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at spring-time; at the laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she passed a lattice pane that the snow-drift had not blocked; at all the things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had no part or likeness.
She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the
jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above
there in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells
of the pins shaking in her yellow tresses.
"You are old Flamma's grand-daughter," cried
the other from her leafy nest above. "You work for him all day long
at the mill?"
"Yes."
"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to
and fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool.
Your father was the devil, they say; why do you not make him give you good
things?"
"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily; had she not
besought him endlessly with breathless prayers?
"Will he not? Wait a year--wait a year."
"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick
startled breath.
"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they
say."
"He hears you?"
The fair woman above laughed:
"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet," and
she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the rosy foam
of the saxifrage through and through with it; for she was but a
gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.
"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will thrown a
stone at you, you witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may
strike me blind if you stare so."
Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy
heart. That picture in the casement head had made
that passage bright to her many a time; and when at last that picture had moved and spoken, it had only mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.
The street was dark for her like all the others now.
The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the
vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.
"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she
thought; and the thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair
woman.
Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street with her
head dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the
stones.
She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and
usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen, fierce
defiance. But from this woman they had wounded her; for that bright bower
of golden leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray
beam of light might wander even to her.
She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,
where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts and
fortifications, useless and decayed from age.
The country roads and paths, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,
the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the
fields in which the white-capped peasant women and the brindled oxen
were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the
scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.
Here and there a wayside crucifix rose dark against the sun; here and
there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The
cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers; the
dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.
At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a
spreading chestnut tree, weaving lace upon her knee.
Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and
pretty, and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out around the
bobbins, keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.
The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.
A little way farther on there was winehouse by the roadside, built of
wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briars
of its garden.
Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on
her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from
under the tower of her white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a
student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a beard
yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her white wrist
as he caught the red flower.
Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and
a nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?
Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a
sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall
twisted stone chimneys, and a beurré pear covering with branch and
bloom its old grey walls. An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and
a young one was sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing
gaily as she swept.
"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to
look tenderly at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the
sycamore leaves were playing.
The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee bowl.
"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."
She was happy though she was blind.
Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of
honeysuckle.
"How odd it must be to have anyone to care to hear your voice like
that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and
corn, half softened, half enraged.
Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or
take gladness in her life? or was she greater than they because all human
delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?
Down a pathway fronting her, which ran midway between the yellowing seas
of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, and over which a swarm of bees was
murmuring, there came a
country-woman, crushing the herbage under her heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails as she went to the herds on the hillside. She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half asleep, with his curly head against her breast.
As she passed, the woman drew her kerchief over her bosom, and over the
brown rosy face of the child.
"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered.
"Her look withered Rémy's little limb." And she
covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she should tread a
separate pathway through the clover, and needed not to brush the garments
of the one she was compelled to pass.
Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.
She knew of what the woman was thinking.
In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the
western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in
haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,
hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had
heard his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and
looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.
But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had
slipped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his left
leg at the knee.
The limb, unskilfully dealt with, and enfeebled by a tendency to
disease, had never been restored, but hung limp, crooked, useless, withered
from below the knee. Through all the country side the little cripple,
Rémy, creeping out into the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out
in a passionate pity as the object of her sorcery, the victim of her
vengeance.
When she had heard what they said she had laughed as she laughed now,
drawing together her straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.
All the momentary softness died in her now as the peasant covered the
boy's face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud, and
swept on through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious,
majestic movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or
the antelope; singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the
sigh of the wind, which were all the language
which lingered in her memory from the land that had seen her birth.
To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of
even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the
community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription
without wonder and without resistance.
Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth
hold?
In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries and
the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.
Few of the people could read, and fewer still could write. They knew
nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to believe.
They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock crew:
they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and to the
conscription as their lambs to the slaughter.
They understood that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered
it only as the best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their
skins. Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at
night; though their lives were content and mirthful, and for the most part
pious. They went out into the summer meadows chaunting aves, in seasons of
drought to pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity
with which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and
chaunting dirges to gain a blessing at seed time on their bleak black
fallows.
The beauty and the faith of the old Mediæval life were with them
still; and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty likewise.
They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest, and
amongst themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of colour, of
costume, of idiosyncracy, because apart from the hueless communism and
characterless monotony of modern cities.
But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in legend
and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest superstitions of dead
ages
still found home and treasury in their hearts and at their hearths.
Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable
against her; and thought that in being so they did their duty.
They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race; the strong poetic reverence of their forefathers, which had
symbolised itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or buttress in
their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a
weather-vane could gleam against the sun, was still in their blood;
the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.
Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open
square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in
brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the cross,
and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism of the
sword in the red days of revolution.
They were the same people still; industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,
wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of
heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with the
brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this
outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.
When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,
mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift amongst
strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly
tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make
friends with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the
mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around
her in the glad green world of summer.
But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;
at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into
terror.
She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than
understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her own
kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures of the
fields an the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and the
water.
"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed
the youths in the market-place against her as the little child went amongst them, carrying a load for her grandsire, heavier than her arms knew how to bear.
"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the
old man himself, as she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of
his storehouses, carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever
there chanced to need such convoy.
"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the
six-year old infants at play by the river when she waded in
amidst them to reach with her lither arms the far-off
water-flower which they were too timorous to pluck, and tendered it
to the one who had desired it.
"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesterday after thou
hadst laid hands upon her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick
as she went near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad
dockleaf the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.
So, cursed when she did her duty and driven away when she tried to do
good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute, callous,
isolated.
There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so
tender of heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonised, that had
compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad
gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the noble
frank faith of the dog, in the soft bounding glee of the lamb, in the
unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she had
sympathy and she had example.
She loved them and they loved her.
She saw that they were sinless, diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal
servers of base masters; loving greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten,
overtasked, slaughtered.
She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter
hatred.
So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in
a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.
The priest had striven to turn her soul what they had termed heavenward;
but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would have none of
them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had availed; she would be
starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they
would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit herself to their religion.
As years went on they found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned her
to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the whole
province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or
known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an
exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the byepaths
of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.
Where had she learnt these?
They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.
Who had he been?
Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in that
dimness.
She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,
nor in what land they had dwelt.
But that wondrous free life remained on her remembrance as a thing never
to be forgotten or to be known again; a life odorous with bursting fruits
and budding flowers; full of strangest and of sweetest music; spent for
ever under green leaves and suns that had no setting; for ever beside
fathomless waters and winding forests; for ever rhymed to melody and
soothed to the measure of deep winds and drifting clouds.
For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the
old gypsy life of the Liébana remained with her only as some stray
fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now an
exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature, in her
bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her anguish of vain
desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds than those amidst
which she toiled.
At times she remembered likewise the songs and the melodies of Phratos;
remembered them when the moon rays swept across the white breadth of water
lilies, or the breath of the spring stole through the awakening woods; and
when she remembered them she wept--wept bitterly, where none could
look on her.
She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a
human form, and was now lying dead in an earthly
grave. Her memory of him was as of some nameless creature half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice for ever singing; clad in goat's hair, gigantic and gay: a creature that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice, that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth, or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to save the bare feet from flintstones, and naked shoulders from the stick, and an empty body from hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the Piræus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars, to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.
This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the
priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful scarlet
lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though she hated
men she told them never a lie, and asked of them never alms.
She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on
her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert women,
and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.
She was friendless and desolate; she was ill-fed, she was heavily
tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much
knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a
future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words; hunger,
and thirst, and chastisement.
Yet for all that she sang;--sang because the vitality in her made
her dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made
her glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the
soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalised, could not wholly
cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze, the
liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.
Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was
breaking his stones.
His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and
hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust,
where the tramp of the people had raised it, was still thick on the leaves
and the herbage; and the prayers and the chaunts had failed as yet to bring
the slightest cloud, the faintest rain mist, across the hot unbroken azure
of the skies.
Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one
another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly; when
they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one hand.
Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any proscription over
long.
The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a
curious, lifeless, bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who had
grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to
believe that he had served hell.
With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the
people had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found
each other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love
between them.
"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her as
she passed him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.
"The birds in cages sing," she answered him. "But,
think you they are glad?"
"Are they not?"
She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
straying over into the corn beyond.
"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the
great south road; far away from her. The house was empty; the people, no
doubt, were gone to labour in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging
to the wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his
head; his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried
every drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing
how? In torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood
started, crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall.
His song
was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle was glad?"
"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking his
stones with a monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.
"I took the cage down and opened the door."
"And he?"
"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the
grasses, where a little brook which the drought had not dried was still
running; and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy
of the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying among the leaves
on a bough over the river; but then he was silent."
"And what do you mean by that?"
Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
herself, but it was beyond her to express it. All things of nature had
voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid and her mind was
dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for
her to be able to shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction.
The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he
had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was
not gladness, and neither was silence pain.
Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also
knew.
"And what, think you, the people said when they went back and
found the cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers
by the ringing sound of the falling hammer.
A smile curled her lips.
"That was no though of mine." she said carelessly.
"They had done wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have
pulled down their thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."
"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over
his harsh lean face.
He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and
left.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his
keen gaze swept over her.
"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half
wonderingly; she could not understand it in connection with herself.
A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig tree, working
her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice tossing
a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the open porch of
their house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was a woman who
strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her child at her
breast.
She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she, a
beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless; an animal made to fetch
and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope, neither
past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious hate, a
certain dim pleasure in labour and indifference to pain.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once
more. "You might be a man worth something; but a woman!--a
thing that has no medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save
to sit by the hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to
go out into the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them.
Which will you do in the future?"
"What?"
She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw that the female
creatures round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with
their peach-like cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last
year's nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise;
but of a future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too
ignorant to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which
the low-lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in
upon her.
She had one desire, indeed--a desire vague yet fierce--the
desire for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed
had known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence, only; her mind
was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of hope
she knew nothing.
The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He
smiled with a certain bitter pity.
"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot
have a future. But yet--"
Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of
her own splendours, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as
great as that of a lustrous eastern-eyed passion-flower; and
he knew that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in
its hand the tender of at least one future--one election, one kingdom,
one destiny.
"Women are loved," she said suddenly; "will any one
love me?"
Marcellin smiled bitterly.
"Many will love you, doubtless--as the wasp loves the peach
that he kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the
stem!"
She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in
the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which it
implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she now
was, a body servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.
"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak
apple," she said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me,
even as the wasp loves the peach?"
Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer--
"Wait!"
She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her
thoughts--strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as
incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.
"The future?" she said, at last. "That means
something that one has not, and that is to come--is it so?"
"Something that one never has, and that never comes,"
muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something
that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time
that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always--sees even when
one lies a-dying, they say--for men are fools."
Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the
handles of her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes
watching a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through
the hot, pale, sickly dust.
"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted
the wounded insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."
Marcellin smiled.
"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what
foolish things, called poets, do."
"What is a poet?"
"A foolish thing--I tell you--mad enough to believe that
men will care to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a
God who never looks and never listens."
"Ah!"
She was so accustomed to be told, that all she did was unlike to others,
and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the
simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat
quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by the
many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the dawn.
"I dream beautiful things," she pursued slowly. "In
the moonlight most often. I seem to remember, when I dream--so much!
so much!"
"Remember--what should you remember? You were but a baby
when they brought you hither."
"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's
kingdom. In the devil's kingdom? Why not?"
"Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is
why we all, through all our lives, hanker to get back to it!"
"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to
hear."
"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes
by a woman."
"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no
likeness and no fitness with herself.
A woman--she!--a creature made to be beaten, and worn at, and
shunned, and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!
"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a
moment, and wiping the sweat from his brow. "I have lived in this
vile place forty years. I remember the woman that they say bore
you--Reine Flamma. She was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and
noble, and innocent. She wearied God incessantly. I have seen her
stretched for
hours at the foot of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard--and replied."
"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"
Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knee, and his voice rose clear and
strong; as it had rung of yore from the tribune.
"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his
following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.
"That is his wisdom, see you.
"So often the poor little weak human soul, striving to find the
right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.
"The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets
of the world.
"It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like
the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the
shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets, where
every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbour. It is
hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is perplexed,
it is afraid.
"It cries often, but God and man leave it to itself.
"Then the devil, who hearkens always, and who, though all the
trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honour, yet
is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in distress--since
of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest--comes to the little
soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards the paths of
gladness, and fills it s lips with the bread of sweet passions, and its
nostrils with the savour of fair vanities, and blows in its ear the empty
breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems divinest
music.
"Then is the soul dazzled and captured, and made the devil's
for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its weakness; but
chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its cries while yet it
was sinless and only astray."
He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint
stones.
She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her
night-like eyes dilated. In the years of his youth the old man had
possessed that rare power which can tip words with fire, and send them
burning and keen into the coldest heart; and the power was still there,
when it woke up from the stupor of a life of toil, and the silence of a
harsh old age. In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world
of men, he had known how to utter the words that charmed to stillness a
raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this eloquence at such rare
times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the unforgotten
memories of a life long dead.
He would speak thus to her, but to no other.
Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her eyes uplifted to
the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of
purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though she
likewise were human; and she followed his words with dumb unquestioning
faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.
"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered at length.
He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly,
which now, freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a
foxglove in the hedge growing near him, and held it against the light.
What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its
eyes, and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the
orchid's honey, and in the lime-tree's
leaves?"
"I do not know; but I know that I can kill it--with one grind
of my heel."
"So much we know of the soul--no more."
She freed it from his hand.
"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much
power, why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you
always?"
"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand
years--since the world began--without an answer. Because the law
of all creation is cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always
the breath of life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and
lives again in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little.
The worms destroy; the grasses nourish.
Few great men do more than the first, or as much as the last."
"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his
parable; "it is two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way
you pay for it with your body. Begone."
She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and
yet she knew, in a way, that he cared for her; moreover, she rejoiced in
that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man amidst them, held
all men.
His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its
natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of
knowledge--something, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from
sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in idiocy
or in self-murder.
She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight
white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her
home.
There was a gentler lustre in her eyes and her mouth had the faint light
of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it never seemed
possible to her that her fate could be other than it was, since so long the
messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had been silent and
leaden-footed to her call.
Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not
two mouths that day bidden her "wait"?
She entered at length the little wood of
Yprès, and heard that rush and music
of the deep mill water, which was the sole thing she had learned to love in
all the place.
Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered
Claudis Flamma back full recompense for the toil they cost
him--recompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that
poverty which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so tightly on him.
Both were now rich in all their mature abundance, since the stream which
rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long
drought so severely felt in other districts. The cherry trees were scarlet
with their latest fruit; the great pumpkins glowed amongst their leaves in
tawny orange heaps; little russet-breasted bullfinches beat their
wings vainly at the fine network that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall
apricots; a grey cat was stealing amongst the
delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown and white and grey, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny summer joys.
Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower garden stretched,
spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of
lichens; and the whole earth was full of colour from the crimson and the
golden gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the
deep-blue lupins, and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green
slender stems, and the pure white cups, of the virginal lilies; and from
the gorgeous beetles, with their purple tunics and their shields of bronze,
like Grecian hoplites in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet
glad garden world, the butterflies, purple and jewelled, the
red-starts in their ruby coats, the dainty azure-winged
blue-warblers, the golden-girdled wasp with his pinions light
as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his pleasant harvest song,
flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising, praising, rejoicing.
The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow,
where the river tumbled down in tow or three short breaks and leaps which
broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a sheet of
dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of the
mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.
The wooden house itself also was picturesque, in the old fashion common
when men built their dwellings slowly and for love; with all its countless
carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque human
likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the green cups
of stoneworks, and its high roof with deep shelving eave bright with
diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day with curling
swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.
It was beautiful; and the heart of Reine Flamma's young daughter
doubtless would have clung to it, with all a child's instinct of love
and loyalty to its home, had it not been to her only a prison-house
wherein three bitter gaolers for ever ruled her with a rod of
iron--bigotry and penury and cruelty.
She flung herself down a moment in the garden, on the long grass under a
mulberry tree, ere she went in to give her account of the fruit sold and
the monies brought by her.
She had been on foot since four o'clock in the dawn of that sultry
day; her only meal had been a bowl or cold milk and a hunch of dry bread
crushed in her strong small teeth. She always toiled hard at such bodily
labour as was set to her; to domestic work, to the work of the distaff and
spindle, of the stove and the needle, they had never been able to break
her; they had found that she would be beaten black and blue ere she would
be bound to it; but against open air exertion she had never rebelled, and
she had in her all the strength and the swiftness of the nomadic race of
the Liébana, and had nought of their indolence and their
dishonesty.
She was very hungry, she was again thirsty; yet she did not break off a
fruit from any bough about her; she did not steep her hot lips in any one
of the cool juicy apricots which studded the stones of the wall beyond
her.
No one had ever taught her honesty, except indeed in that dim dead time
when Phratos had closed her small hands in his whenever they had stretched
out to some forbidden thing, and had said, "Take the goods the gods
give thee, but steal not from men." And yet honest she was, by reason
of the fierce proud savage independence in her, and her dim memories of
that sole friend loved and lost.
She wanted many a thing, many a time;--nay, nearly every hour that
she lived, she wanted those sheer necessaries which make life endurable;
but she had taught herself to do without them rather than owe them by
prayer or plunder to that human race which she hated, and to which she
always doubted her own kinship.
Buried in the grass, she now abandoned herself to the bodily delights of
rest, of shade, of coolness, of sweet odours: the scent of the fruits
and flowers was heavy on the air; the fall of the water made a familiar
tempestuous music on her ear; and her fancy, poetic still, though deadened
by a life of ignorance and toil, was stirred by the tender tones of the
numberless birds that sang about her.
"The earth and the air are good," she thought, as she lay
there watching the dark leaves sway in the foam and the wind, and the bright-bosomed birds float from blossom to blossom.
For there was latent in her, all untaught, that old pantheistic instinct
of the divine age, when the world was young, to behold a sentient
consciousness in every leaf unfolded to the light; to see a soul in every
created thing the day shines on; to feel the presence of an eternal life in
every breeze that moves, in every grass that grows; in every flame that
lifts itself to heaven; in every bell that vibrates on the air; in every
moth that soars to reach the stars.
Pantheism is the religion of the poet; and nature had made her a poet,
though man as yet had but made of her an outcast, a slave, and a beast of
burden.
"The earth and the air are good," she thought, watching the
sun-rays pierce the purple heart of a passion-flower, the
shadows move across the deep brown water, the radiant butterfly alight upon
a lily, the scarlet-throated birds dart in and out, through the
yellow feathery blossoms of the limes.
All birds were her friends.
Phratos had taught her in her infancy many notes of their various songs,
and many ways and means of luring them to come and rest upon her shoulder
and peck the berries in her hands. She had lived so much in the open
fields and amongst the woods that she had made her chief companions of
them. She could emulate so deftly all their voices, from the call of the
wood dove to the chant of the blackbird, and from the trill of the
nightingale to the twitter of the titmouse, that she could summon them
all to her at will, and have dozens of them fluttering around her head and
swaying their pretty bodies on her wrist.
It was one of her ways that seemed to the peasantry so weird and
magical; and they would come home from their fields on a spring
day-break and tell their wives in horror how they had seen the
devil's daughter in the red flush of the sunrise, ankle-deep
in violets, and covered with birds from head to foot, hearing their
whispers, and giving them her messages to carry in return.
One meek-eyed woman had dared once to say that St. Francis had
done as much, and it had been accredited to him as a fair action and
virtuous knowledge; but she was
frowned down and chattered down by her louder neighbours, who told her that she might look for some sharp judgment of heaven for daring to couple together the blessed name of the holy saint and the accursed name of this foul spirit.
But all they could say could not break the charmed communion between
Folle-Farine and her feathered companions.
She loved them and they her. In the hard winter she had always saved
some of her scanty meal for them, and in the springtime and the summer
they always rewarded her with floods of songs and soft caresses from their
nestling wings.
There were no rare birds, no birds of moor and mountain, in that
cultivated and populous district; but to her all the little
home-bred things of pasture and orchard were full of poetry and of
character.
The robins, with that pretty air of boldness with which they veil their
real shyness and timidity; the strong and saucy sparrows, powerful by the
strength of all mediocrities and majorities; all the dainty families of
finches in their gay apparellings; the plain brown bird that filled the
night with music; the gorgeous oriole ruffling in gold, the gilded
princeling of them all; the little blue warblers, the violets of the air;
the kingfishers who had hovered so long over the
forget-me-nots upon the rivers that they had caught the
colours of the flowers on their wings; the bright black-caps green
as the leaves, with their yellow waistcoats and velvet hoods, the innocent
freebooters of the woodland liberties: all these were her friends and
lovers, various as any human crowds of court or city.
She loved them; they and the fourfooted beasts were the sole things that
did not flee from her; and the woeful and mad slaughter of them by the
peasants was to her a grief passionate in its despair. She did not reason
on what she felt; but to her a bird slain was a trust betrayed, an
innocence defiled, a creature of heaven struck to earth.
Suddenly on the silence of the garden there was a little shrill sound of
pain; the birds flew high in air, screaming and startled; the leaves of a
bough of ivy shook as with a struggle.
She rose and looked; a line of twine was trembling against the foliage;
in its noosed end the throat of the
mavis had been caught; it hung tremblingly and clutching at the air convulsively with its little drawn up feet. It had flown into the trap as it had ended its joyous song and soared up to join its brethren.
There were a score of such traps set in the miller's garden.
She unloosed the cord from about its tiny neck, set it free, and laid it
down upon the ivy: the succour came too late; the little gentle body
was already without breath; the feet had ceased to beat the air; the small
soft head had drooped feebly on one side; the lifeless eyes had started
from their sockets; the throat was without song for evermore.
"The earth would be good but for men," she thought, as she
stood with the little dead bird in her hand.
Its mate, which was poised on a rose bough, flew straight to it, and
curled round and round about the small slain body, and piteously bewailed
its fate, and mourned, refusing to be comforted, agitating the air with
trembling wings, and giving out vain cries of grief.
Vain; for the little joyous life was gone; the life that asked only of
God and Man a home in the green leaves; a drop of dew from the cup of a
rose; a bough to swing on in the sunlight; a summer day to celebrate in
song.
All the winter through, it had borne cold and hunger and pain without
lament; it had saved the soil from destroying larvæ, and purified the
trees from all foul germs; it had built its little home unaided, and had
fed its nestlings without alms; it had given its sweet song lavishly to the
winds, to the blossoms, to the empty air, to the deaf ears of men; and now
it lay dead in its innocence; trapped and slain because human greed
begrudge it a berry worth the thousandth part of a copper coin.
Out from the porch of the mill-house Claudis Flamma came, with a
knife in his hand and a basket, to cut lilies for one of the choristers of
the cathedral, since the morrow would be the religious feast of the
Visitation of Mary.
He saw the dead thrush in her hand, and chuckled to himself as he went
by.
"The tenth bird trapped since sunrise," he said, thinking
how shrewd and how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set
in the grass and the leaves.
She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he
came in sight in the distance.
She knelt down and scraped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it and
put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with
handsful of fallen rose leaves and with a spring or two of thyme.
Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad
cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who
now should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should
sit with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the
leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark,
to feel the dawn break, ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the
unborn day?
When the white lily sheaves had been borne away, kept fresh in wet moss,
by the young chorister who had been sent for them, the miller turned to
her.
"Where is the money?"
She, standing beside the buried bird, undid the leathern thong about her
waist, opened the pouch, and counted out the coins, one by one, on the flat
stone of a water tank amongst the lilies and the ivy.
There were a few silver pieces of slight value and some dozens of copper
ones. The fruit had been left at various stalls and houses in small
portions, for it was the custom to supply it fresh each day.
He caught them up with avidity, bit and tested each, counted them again
and again, and yet again; after the third enumeration he turned sharply on
her.
"There are two pieces too little: what have you done with
them?"
"There are two sous short," she answered him curtly.
"Twelve of the figs for the tanner Florian were rotten."
"Rotten!--they were but over ripe."
"It is the same thing."
"You dare to answer me?--animal! I say they had only tasted
a little too much of the sun. It only made them the sweeter."
"They were rotten."
"They were not. You dare to speak! If they had been rotten, they
lay under the others; he could not have seen--"
"I saw."
"You saw! Who are you?--a beggar--a beast--a foul
offspring of sin. You dared to show them to him, I will
warrant?"
"I showed him that they were not good."
"And gave him back the two sous?"
"I took seven sous for what were good. I took nothing for the
rotten ones."
"Wretch! you dare to tell me that!"
A smile careless and sarcastic curled her mouth; her eyes looked at him
with all their boldest, fiercest lustre.
"I never steal--not even from you, good Flamma."
"You have stolen now!" he shrieked, his thin and feeble
voice rising in fury at his lost coins and his discovered treachery.
"It is a lie that the figs were rotten; it is a lie that you took but
seven sous. You stole the two sous to buy you bread and honey in the
streets, or to get a drink at the wine shops. I know you; I know you; it
is a devil's device to please your gluttonous appetite. The figs
rotten!--not so rotten as is your soul would they be though they were
black as night and though they stank as river mud! Go back to Denis
Florian and bring me the two sous, or I will thrash you as a
thief."
She laughed a hard, scornful, reckless laughter.
"You can thrash me; you cannot make me a thief."
"You will not go back to Florian?"
"I will not ask him to pay for what was bad."
"You will not confess that you stole the money?"
"I should lie if I did."
"Then strip."
She set her teeth in silence; and without a moment's
hesitation unloosened the woollen sash knotted round her waist, and pushed down the coarse linen tunic from about her throat.
The white folds fell from off the perfect curves of her brown arms, and
left bare her shining shoulders, beautiful as any sculptured
Psyche's.
She was not conscious of degradation in her punishment; she had been
bidden to bow her head and endure the lash from the earliest years she
could remember. According to the only creed she knew, silence and
fortitude and strength were the greatest of all virtues.
She stood now in the cross lights among the lilies as she had stood when
a little child, erect, unquailing, and ready to suffer; insensible of
humiliation because unconscious of sin; and so tutored by severity and
exposure that she had as yet none of the shy shame and the fugitive
shrinking of her sex. She had only the boldness to bear, the courage to be
silent, which she had had when she had stood amongst the same tall lilies,
in the same summer radiance, in the years of her helpless infancy.
She uncovered herself to the lash as a brave hound crouches to it; not
from inborn cowardice, but simply from the habit of obedience and of
endurance.
He had used her as the Greeks the Helots; he always beat her, when she
was at fault, to teach her to be faultless; and, when without offence, beat
her to remind her that she was the offspring of humiliation, and a
slave.
He took, as he had taken in an earlier time, a thick rope which lay
coiled upon the turf ready for the binding of some straying boughs; and
struck her with it, slowly. His arm had lost somewhat of its strength,
and his power was unequal to his will. Still rage for the loss of his
copper pieces, and the sense that she had discovered the fraudulent
intention of his small knavery, lent force to his feebleness; as the
scourge whistled through the air and descended on her shoulders it left
bruised, swollen marks to stamp its passage, and curling,
adder-like, bit and drew blood.
Yet to the end she stood mute and motionless, as she had stood in her
childhood; not a nerve quivered, not a limb flinched: the colour
rushed over her bent face and her bare chest, but she never made a
movement; she never gave a sound.
When his arm dropped from sheer exhaustion, she still said not one word;
she drew tight once more the sash about her waist, and fastened afresh the
linen of her bodice.
The bruised and wounded flesh smarted and ached and throbbed; but she
was used to such pain, and bore it as their wounds were borne by the women
of the Spartan games.
"Your two sous have brought you bitterness," he muttered
with a smile. "You will scarce find my fruit rotten again in haste.
There are bread and beans within; go get a meal; I want the mule to take
flour to Barbizène."
She did not go within to eat; the bruises and the burning of her skin
made her feel sick and weak. She went away and cast herself at full length
in the shade of the long grasses of the orchard; resting her chin upon her
hands, cooling her aching breast against the soft damp moss; thinking,
thinking, thinking, of what she hardly knew, except, indeed, that she
wished that she were dead, like the bird she had covered with the
leaves.
He did not leave her long to even so much peace as this; his shrill
voice soon called her from her rest; he bade her get ready the mule and
go.
She obeyed.
The animal was saddled with his wooden pack; as many sacks as he could
carry were piled upon the framework; she put her hand upon his bridle, and
set out to walk to Barbizène which was two leagues away.
"Work is the only thing to drive the devil that begat her out of
her," muttered the miller, as he watched the old mule pace down the
narrow, tree-shadowed road that led across the fields: and he
believed that he did rightly in this treatment of her.
It gratified the sharp hard cruelty of temper in him, indeed, but he did
not think that in such self-indulgence he ever erred. He was a
bitter, cunning, miserly old man, whose solitary tenderness of feeling and
honesty of pride had been rooted out for ever when he had learned the
dishonour of the woman whom he had deemed a saint. In the ten years of
time which had passed since first the little brown large-eyed child
had been sent to seek asylum with
him, he had grown harder and keener and more severe with each day that rose.
Her presence was abhorrent to him, though he kept her, partly from a
savage sense of duty, partly from the persuasion that she had the power in
her to make the strongest and the cheapest slave he had ever owned. For
the rest, he sincerely and devoutly believed that the devil, in some
witchery of human guise, had polluted his daughter's body and soul,
and that it was by the foul fiend and by no earthly lover that she had
conceived and borne the creature who now abode with him.
Perhaps, also, as was but natural, he sometime felt more furious against
this offspring of hell because ever and again some gleam of fantastic
inborn honour, some strange savage instinct of honesty, would awake in her
and oppose him, and make him ashamed of those small and secret sins of
chicanery wherein his soul delighted, and for which he compounded with his
gods.
He had left her mind a blank, because he thought the body laboured
hardest when the brain was still asleep, which is true; she could not read;
she could not write; she knew absolutely nothing.
Yet there was a soul awake in her; there were innumerable thoughts and
dreams brooding in her fathomless eyes; there was a desire in her, fierce
and unslaked, for some other life than this life of the packhorse and of
the day labourer which alone she knew.
He had done his best to degrade and to brutalise her, and in much he had
succeeded; but he had not succeeded wholly. There was a liberty in her
that escaped his thraldom; there was a soul in her that resisted the
deadening influence of her existence.
She had none of the shame of her sex; she had none of the timorous
instincts of womanhood. She had a savage stubborn courage, and she was
insensible of the daily outrages of her life. She would strip bare to his
word obediently, feeling only that it would be feeble and worthless to
dread the pain of the lash. She would bathe in the woodland pool,
remembering no more that she might be watched by human eyes than does the
young tigress that has never beheld the face of man.
In all this she was brutalised and degraded by her tyrant's
bondage: in other things she was far higher than he, and escaped him.
Stupefied as her mind might be by the exhaustion of severe physical
labour, it had still irony and it had still imagination; and under the
hottest heats of temptation there were two things which by sheer instinct
she resisted, and resisted so that neither of them had ever been forced on
her--they were falsehood and fear.
"It is the infamous strength of the devil!" said Claudis
Flamma, when he found that he could not force her to deviate from the
truth.
The world says the same of those who will not feed it with lies.
The prayers of the priests and peoples failed to bring down rain. The
wooden Christs gazed all day long on parching lands and panting cattle.
Even the broad deep rivers shrank and left their banks to bake and stink in
the long drought.
The orchards sickened for lack of moisture, and the peasants went about
with feverish faces, ague-stricken limbs, and trembling hearts. The
corn yielded ill in the hard scorched ground, and when the winter came it
was a time of dire scarcity and distress.
Claudis Flamma and a few others like him alone prospered.
The mill-house at Yprès served many purposes. It was a
granary, a market, a baker's shop, an usurer's den, all in
one.
It looked a simple and innocent place. In the summer time it was
peaceful and lovely, green and dark and still, with the blue sky above it,
and the songs of birds all around; with its old black timbers, and its
many-coloured orchards, and its pretty leafy gardens, and its grey
walls
washed by the hurrying stream. But in the winter it was very dreary, utterly lonely. The water roared, and the leafless trees groaned in the wind, and the great leaden clouds of rain or fog enveloped it duskily.
To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it
with aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible. They
dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master--the hardest
and the shrewdest and the closest fisted Norman of them all.
For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter
subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with
their labour or their suffering; with the best of all their wool, or oil,
or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom for
five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old pitcher
under their apple tree to be the nest egg of their little pet
daughter's dowry.
And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit
them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well
with the good saints and with holy Church:--a wise man, in a
word, with whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and
avarice.
For the most part the population around Yprès was thrifty and
thriving in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and, by
this portion of it, the silent old miser was much honoured as man laborious
and penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must
have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or
under the bricks of his kitchen.
By the smaller section of it--poor, unthrifty, loose-handed
fools--who belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to
spend and slow to save, and who therefore fell into want and famine and had
to borrow of others their children's bread, the old miller was hated
with a hate deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit,
to cringe, and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless
debtor.
In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn these and their
like fell farther in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and beg
of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living. They
knew
that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they could do no better.
It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and
being never quit of his hold, his debtors never could try for aid
elsewhere.
The weather towards the season of Noel became frightfully severe; the
mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped
pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open
country, and several of the sheep perished in snow storms on the higher
lands.
There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare
harvests of a district, usually so opulent in the riches of the soil,
brought trouble and dearth in their train.
Sickness prevailed because the old people and the children in their
hunger ate berries and roots unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the
ice melted, and many homes were flooded, and some even swept away.
Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never
stopped work, and famine prices could be asked for in this extremity.
Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after
month, with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being
left her that she could claim as her own.
She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in
frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even the
young men amongst them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face of
hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the golden
glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness; and if they did
note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the marks of a vagrant
and accursed race.
She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never
dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she went
by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well with the
free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.
The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her
head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the sullen fire and
fierce dreams in her musing eyes,--all these were so unlike themselves
that they saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.
Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except
such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her. So
had every winter gone since she had come there--a time so long ago
that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often doubted
if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.
Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of
the mule and the bullocks: indifferent and knowing no better, and
only staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty
night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever
come to her--those splendid and familiar yet unknown things that
looked on all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not
seem to care.
Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were
together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor suffered
immeasurably.
A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and
a score of time saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog,
pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire deny
them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times its
value for some niggard grant of food.
"Why should I think of it, why should I care?" she said to
herself; and yet she did both, and could not help it.
There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from
the mill, by name Manon Dax.
She was a little old hardy brown woman, shrivelled and bent, yet strong,
with bright eyes like a robin's, and a tough frame, eighty years
old.
She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone cutter; he had been
dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their
offspring die too; and had now, left on her hand to rear, four young
great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her
for food as new-born birds cry in their nests.
She washed a little, when she could get any linen to wash, and she span,
and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot of
ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes and
herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four nestlings,
and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and worked in hail
and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained, but said that God
was good to her.
She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live
long--that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God
would take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought
her to do, and was content.
Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of
the winter fell like a knife.
She was only one amongst thousands. Nobody noticed her; still it was
hard.
All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was
no well nearer than half a league; and half a league out and half a league
back every other day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two
heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has only
a wisp of woollen serge between the wind and one's withered
limbs.
The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her
fiercely by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a time coming in which their
pigs would be ill-fed. The roots in her little garden plot were all
black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and stewed
and eaten.
The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were
ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by reivers younger and more
agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.
The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for
food, and she had none to give them.
"If it were only myself!" she thought, stopping her ears not
to hear them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to
creep away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the
cold froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and
tired,
and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was good, and so to let death come--content.
But it was not only herself.
The poor are seldom so fortunate--they themselves would say so
unhappy--as to be alone in their homes.
There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish
things she had loved,--small lives that had been rosy even on so much
hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful even at
the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of mouldy crusts,
or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been--until now, when even
so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay were soaked
through with snow-water; now--when they were quite silent,
except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.
"I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was
born asked man or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper
coin," she thought, sitting by her black hearth, across which the
howling wind drove, and stopping her ears to shut out the children's
cries.
She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter
living,--she had scores of times in her long years been as famished as
this, and as cold, and her house had been as desolate.
Yet she had borne it all and never asked for an alms, being strong and
ignorant, and being also in fear of the world, and holding a debt a great
shame.
But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish;
being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in
their strength before her.
The struggle was long and hard with her.
She would have to die soon, she knew, and she had striven all her
lifetime so to live that she might die saying, "I have asked nothing
of any man."
This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a
feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten.
Any way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something;
or else those four small things, that were like a cluster of red berries on
a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.
"It is bitter, but I must do it," she thought. "Sure
it is strange that the good God cares to take any of us to himself through
so sharp a way as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say,
'Not heaven for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little
wood.'"
And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on
which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all of
them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.
"Be still, my treasures," she said to them, striving to
speak cheerily, and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born;
"I go away for a little while to try and get you food. Be good,
Bernardou, and take care of them till I come back."
Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of
the little black door of the hut into the white road and the rushing
winds.
"I will go to Flamma," she said to herself.
It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at the season of midwinter.
The business of the day was done.
The people had come and gone, favoured or denied, according to such
sureties as they could offer.
The great wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill
sat against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in
his ledger--crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to
understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his
pen.
All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of
every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were
hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had
saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to
know that he held all that, and also withheld it.
It moved him with a certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful
eyes of the peasants stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their
white lips faltered out an entreaty--which he denied. It was what he
liked; to sit there and count his gains after his fashion, and look at his
stores and listen to the howling wind and driving hail, and to chuckle to
think how lean and cold and sick they were outside--those fools who
had mocked him because his saint had been a gipsy's leman.
To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be
implored with tears of supplication, and to answer with a grim jest; to see
a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the big
brass pans full of milk, and say to her, "All that makes butter for
Paris," and then to see her go away wailing and moaning that her
child would die, and tottering feebly through the snow--all this was
sweet to him.
Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man,
yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had been
aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an angel,
every fibre in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the poignancy
of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to wound, and to
see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only pleasure life had
left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly, according to his
light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and his God and his trust
had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had turned to gall.
The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut
and the water-mill.
They were roads which passed through meadows and along
corn-fields, beside streamlets, and amongst little belts of
woodland, lanes and paths green and pleasant in the summer, but now a
slough of frozen mud, and whistled through by north-east winds. She
held on her way steadily, stumbling often, and often slipping and going
slowly, for she was very feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity
of the cold drove through and through her frame.
Still she held on, bravely, in the teeth of the rough winds and of the
coming darkness, though the weather was so wild that the poplar trees were
bent to the earth, and the little light in the Calvary lamp by the river
blew to and fro, and at last died out. Still she held on, a little dark
tottering figure, with a prayer on her lips and a hope in her heart.
The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring
in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast grey
waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times to
and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she
groped her
way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength, or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached the mill-house.
Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores
of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to Phratos,
a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from the inclement
night.
She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma,
who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which
represented to him his earthly wealth.
She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face
working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an
intense anxiety of appeal.
"Flamma," she said simply to him, "we have been
neighbours fifty years and more--thou and I, and many have borrowed of
thee to their hurt and shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I
never in my days asked anything of man or woman or child. But I come
to-night to ask bread of you,--bread for the four little
children at home. I have heard them cry three days, and have had nothing
to give them save a berry or two off the trees. I cannot bear it any
more. So I have come to you."
He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbours, as she
had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the same
altar, side by side.
"What dost want?" he asked simply.
"Food," she made answer; "food and fuel. They are so
cold--the little ones."
"What canst pay for them?" he asked.
"Nothing--nothing now. There is not a thing in the house
except the last hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a
little--just a little--while the weather is so hard, I will find
means to pay when the weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash
and spin. I will pay faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin
to any man. But I am so old, and the children are so
young--"
Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen. Her
eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing.
Where he went there stood pans of new milk, baskets of
eggs, rolls of bread, piles of faggots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.
He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a thorn
tree.
"Give these to thy children's children," he said, with
a dark smile. "For these--and for no more--will they
recompense thee when they shall grow to maturity."
She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant
but a stern jest.
"Good Flamma, you mock me," she murmured, trembling;
"the babes are little and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for
God's sake! A jest is well in season, but to an empty body and a
bitter heart it is like a stripe."
He smiled, and answered her in this harsh grating voice,
"I give thee the only thing given without payment in this
world--advice. Take it or leave it."
She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and
her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense in
them.
"You jest, Flamma! You only jest!" she muttered.
"The little children starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for
them? Just a little bread? I will pay as soon as the weather
breaks."
"I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor," he answered
her, with the habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again,
and went on counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his
books.
His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease
her work, nor intercede by a word.
The poor can be better to the poor than any princes; but the poor can
also be more cruel to the poor than any slave drivers.
The old woman's head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and
felt her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the
air.
It was already dark with the darkness of descending night.
The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone: all was
cold--cold as death.
She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children
were alone. The winds blew and drove the snow
flakes in a white cloud against her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the roar of the mill-water filled the air.
There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden;
beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way.
She fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but
lay still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the storm
beating together upon her.
"The children! the children!" she moaned feebly, and then
was still: she was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not
lift herself nor see what was around her; she thought that she was in her
bed at home, and felt as though she would soon sleep.
Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly moving shape,
that flew as silently and as quickly as a night bird, and paused as though
on wings beside her.
A voice that was at one timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to
her through the clouds of driven snow spray.
"Hush, it is I! I--Folle-Farine. I have brought you
my food. It is not much--they never give me much. Still it will help
a little. I heard what you said--I was in the loft. Flamma must not
know; he might make you pay. But it is all mine, truly mine, take
it."
"Food--for the children!"
The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a
little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to
her. But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a
groan--her limb was broken.
Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a
hawk's through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.
"You cannot get up; you are old," she said, abruptly.
"See--let me carry you home. The children! yes, the children
can have it. It is not much; but it will serve."
She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion.
What was it to her, whether any of these people lived or died? They had
always mocked and hated her.
"If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their
corpses," she thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her oriental blood.
Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for
strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to the
bone, and was devoured with a ravenous hunger.
Why did she do it?
She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this
woman, so poor and brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly
denied in her extremity.
Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer
them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.
"I cannot rise," she murmured; "my leg is broken, I
think. But it is no matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are,
you are good, and have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I
have lived my life--any way. It will soon be over. I am not in
pain--indeed."
Folle-Farine stood in silence a moment, then she stooped and
lifted the old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy
burden set out on her way in the teeth of the storm.
She had known the woman, and the little ones, by sight and name long and
well.
Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart,
but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbours, had
drawn the children closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak, lest
the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner's youngest born, should
fall on them, and harm them in like manner.
Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as
Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through
the frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the
sack of corn, which she was so well used to carry to and fro like a
packhorse.
Manon Dax did not stir, she did not even strive to speak again; she was
vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement, of a close soft
pressure that sheltered her from the force of the winds, of a subtle warmth
that stole through her emaciated aching frame, and made her drowsy and
forgetful, and content to be still.
She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.
Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and
listened.
"Did you speak?"
Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.
"God is good," she muttered, like one speaking in a
dream.
Folle-Farine held on her way, as before her Phratos had once held
on his; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow, pierced by the blasts of the
hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a reindeer, and sure of eye in
the dark as a night-hawk.
"Are you in pain?" she asked once of the burden she
carried.
There was no answer.
"She is asleep," she thought; and went onward.
The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and
inured to all hardships of the weather; yet it cost her an hour to travel
it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with snow-water, blown back
continually by the opposing winds, and forced to stagger and to pause by
the fury of the storm.
At last she reached the hut.
The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children
echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep,
cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in unchecked;
all was quite dark.
She felt her way within over the heaps of the snow, and being used by
long custom to see in the gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and
birds can see, she found the bed of hay, and laid her burden gently down on
it.
The children ceased their wailing; the two eldest ones crept up close to
their grandmother; and pressed their cheeks to hers, and whispered to her
eagerly, with their little famished lips:
"Where is the food, where is the food?"
But there was still no answer.
The clouds drifted a little from the moon which had been so long
obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapour of the heavy sky; the
whitened ground threw back the rays
increased tenfold; the pale gleam reached the old still face of Manon Dax.
There was a feeble smile upon it--the smile with which her last
words had been spoken in the darkness; "God is good!"
She was quite dead.
The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow
that had fallen through the roof, from which its elders had been too small
and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided. She laid it, stiff already
in the cold night, beside the body of its old grandam, who had perished in
endeavouring to save it; they lay together, the year-old child and
the aged woman, the broken bud and the leafless bough. They had died of
hunger, as the birds die on the moors and plains; it is a common fate.
She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and
quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not
taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter
tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of it
for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the door,
from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all night long,
though in an hour the snow ceased to fall.
Now and then the clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray
in; and then she could see the quiet faces of the old woman and the
child.
"They die of famine--and they die saying their 'God is
good,'" she thought; and she pondered on it deeply, with the
bitter and melancholy irony which life had already taught her.
The hours of the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the
trembling hovel; the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by
the warmth of the
sheepskin, in which they crept together like young birds in a nest.
She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner
of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she
had surrendered.
She hated the human race, whose hand was always against her. She had no
single good deed to thank them for, nor any single gentle word. Yet she
was sorry for that old creature, who had been so bitterly dealt with all
her years through, who had died saying "God was good." She was
sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving animals, who had lost
the only life that could labour for theirs.
She forgave--because she forgot--that in other winters this
door had been shut against her as against an accursed thing, and these
babes had mocked her in their first imperfect speech.
The dawn broke; the sharp grey winter's day came; the storm had
lulled; but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, the
air was piercing, the sky dark and overcast.
She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labour at the mill;
she knew that if when the sun rose she were found to be absent, she and
they too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She
had no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never
spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating
for its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the ploughed
clods.
Between her, and all those around her, there were perpetual enmity and
mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common
humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they
disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected all claim to it.
At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist, a peasant going
to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude
hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.
She rose and called to him.
He stared and stood still.
She went to the doorway and signed to him.
"Old Manon is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are
here, alone, and they starve."
"Manon Dax dead?" he echoed stupidly: he was her
nearest neighbour, and he had helped her to fetch her washing-water
sometimes from the well half a league away, and when his wife had been
down, with fever and ague, the old woman had nursed her carefully and well
through many a tedious month.
"Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had
broken her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one.
The little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too."
It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that
addressed him, but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to her,
he recognised the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight brow, the
fathomless eyes.
He feared her, with a great fear rising there suddenly before him, out
of that still white world of dawn and shadow.
He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the
darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he had
gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the sleeping
children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.
The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice
of the roads would allow.
His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a
few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop
made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its wide spreading
orchards and their excellence of fruits.
Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the
people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds; women
were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the
sleepy eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers played
with the fanciful encrustations of the frost.
The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the
ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins flew
to and fro songless.
His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.
"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.
"What of that?" said his wife, shouldering her broom; a
great many had died that winter, and they were so poor
and sharp-set with famine themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.
"This of that!' cried the old man, doggedly, and full of the
excitement of his own terrors. "The young devil of Yprès has
killed her, that I am sure. She is there in the hut in the dark, with her
eyes glaring like coals. And for what should she be there if not for
evil? Tell me that."
"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing
to believe.
The girl left her ducks, the wineshop-keeper his door, the women
their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange
news: very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day
was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it
than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse
had fared with the swelling in the throat.
They were very dull there from year's end to year's end;
once a month, may be, a letter would come in from some soldier-son
or brother, or a pedlar coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray
rumour from the outer-world;--beyond this there was no change,
they heard nothing, and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that
stone crucifix, round which their homes were clustered.
The man Flandrin had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be
challenged, in the twilight and the snow, by a creature of such evil omen.
But when he had got an audience, he was too true an orator, and not such a
fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly matter as the truth; and his
tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears and fancies had conceived,
until he had talked himself and his listeners into the full belief that
Manon Dax being belated had encountered the evil glance of the daughter of
all evil, and had been slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.
Now, in the whole neighbourhood, there was nothing too foul to be
credible of the begotten of the fiend--a fiend whom all the grown men
and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come to ruin
poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels, and his
strength passing the strength of all men.
The people listened, gaping, and wonderstruck, and forgetting the
bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials of
foul suspicion and of gratified
hatred. Some went off to their daily labour, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women who had nothing to occupy them remained about Flandrin.
A shrivelled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in
the village, and who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected
and deferred to by her neighbours, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his
tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two
hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning
meal.
"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has
been struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children
are there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We--good
Christians and true--should not let such things be. Go, and drive her
out and bring the young ones hither."
Flandrin stood silent.
It was very well to say that the devil should be driven out, but it was
not so well to be the driver.
"That is as it should be," assented the other woman.
"Go, Flandrin, and we--we will take the little souls in for this
day, and then give them to the public charity, better cannot be done.
Go."
"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine,
sharply!" cried his wife.
"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and
flee," said another.
"Not she," grumbled an old dame, whose son was a priest.
"One day my blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced
her with his cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it,
and said, 'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world,
and say you are safe to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed
and went on. What are you to do with a witch like
that--eh?"
"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus, "Go!
Every minute you waste the little angels are nearer to hell!"
"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly.
"I will not go after those infants, it is not a man's
work."
In his own mind he was musing on a story which his priests had often
told him, of swine into which exorcised
devils had entered, and despatched swiftly down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black, fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market.
Better, he mused, that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the
devil's prey, than those, his choicest, swine.
The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But
vainly--he would not move alone. He had become possessed of the
terrors of his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for all
their imprecations.
"Let us go ourselves, then!" screamed his wife at length,
flourishing above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow.
"Men are ever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left
those babes to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the
fire!"
There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to
emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a
broom, a pig-stick, each whatever came uppermost, and dragging
Flandrin in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe
of poplars.
They were not very sure in their own minds, why they went, nor for what
they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and pious, and
they had a great hate in their hearts against the child. They sped as fast
as the slippery road would let them, and their tongues flew still faster
than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made them sharp and keen on their
prey, as the air was on themselves; they screamed fable on fable hoarsely,
their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the
creaking of the trees, and they inflamed each other with ferocious belief
in the sorcery they were to punish.
They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little; they
toiled hard from their birth to their grave; they were most of them chaste
wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they slaved in
fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were narrow of soul,
greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, when they thought
themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable.
They were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn
others for another creed.
It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the priests and
lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that it is a creed
holy and honourable--how can the people know that it is at once
idiotic and hellish?
Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof,
and watched the open door.
The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned
and caught her hand, and held it.
She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the
woodstock, or their grandam's skirts, a hundred times when they had seen
her on the road or in the orchard.
But she was sorry for them; almost as sorry as she was for the little
naked woodpigeons when their nests were scattered on the ground in a
tempest, or for the little starveling rabbits when they screamed in their
holes for the soft white mother that was lying, tortured and twisted, in
the jaws of a steel-trap.
She was sorry for them--half roughly, half tenderly
sorry--with some shame at her own weakness, and yet too sincerely
sorry to be able to persuade herself to leave them to their fate there, all
alone with their dead. For in the savage heart of Taric's daughter
there was an innermost corner wherein her mother's nature slept.
She sat there quite still, watching the porch, and listening for
footsteps.
The snow was driven in encircling clouds by the winds, the dense fog of
the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the
trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard-by
there wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin's cattle,
deserted of their master, and hungry in their wooden sheds.
She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet
she had resolved not to leave the children all alone, though Flamma should
come and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So
she sat still, and waited.
After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen
snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused
clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter
morning.
The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little
passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the hill
with Flandrin in their midst.
She rose, and looked out at them, quietly.
For a minute they paused--irresolute, silent, perplexed: at
the sight of her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the
crime they came to bring against her.
The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the
onslaught.
"What!" she screamed, "nine good Christians fearful of
one daughter of hell? Fie! for shame! Look; my leaden Peter is round my
neck! Is he not stronger than she any day?"
In a moment more, thus girded at and guarded at the same time, they were
through the door and stood on the mud floor of the hearth, close to her,
casting hasty glances at the poor dead body on the hearth, whose fires
they had left to die out all through that bitter winter.
They came about her in a fierce, gesticulating, breathless troop,
flourishing their sticks in her eyes, and casting at her all their various
charges in one breath. Flandrin stood a little aloof, sheepishly on the
threshold, wishing that he had never said a word of the death of Manon Dax
to his good wife and neighbours.
"You met that poor saint and killed her in the snow with your
witcheries!" one cried.
"You have stifled that poor babe where it lay!" cried
another.
"A good woman like that!" shrieked a third, "who was
well and blithe and praising God only a day ago, for I saw her myself come
down the hill for our well water!"
"It is as you did with the dear little Rémy, who will be
lame all his life, through you," hissed a fourth. "You are not
fit to live; you spit venom like a toad."
"Are you alive, my angels?" said a fifth, waking the three
children noisily, and rousing their piercing cries. "Are you alive
after that witch has gazed on you? It is a miracle! The Saints be
praised!"
Folle-Farine stood mute and erect for the moment, not
comprehending why they thus with one accord fell upon her. She pointed to
the bodies on the hearth, with one of
those grave and dignified gestures which were her birthright from the old oriental race.
"She was cold and hungry," she said curtly, her mellow
accent softening and enriching the provincial tongue which she had learned
from those amidst whom she dwelt. "She had fallen, and was dying. I
brought her here. The young child was killed by the snow. I stayed with
the rest because they were frightened and alone. There is no more to
tell. What of it?"
"Thou hast better come away. What canst thou prove?"
whispered Flandrin to his wife.
He was afraid of the storm he had invoked, and would fain have stilled
it. But that was beyond his power. The women had not come forth half a
league in the howling winds of a midwinter daybreak only to go back with a
mere charity done, and with no vengeance taken.
They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused
her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a thousand
tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck her with their sticks; and she
stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of Manon Dax which lay
upward in the dim light.
The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had
seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him,
and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long
and dreary night. The woman covered his eyes with a scream.
"Ah--h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child
is bewitched! It is horrible!"
"Look on that;--oh infernal thing!" cried
Flandrin's wife, lifting up her treasured figure of Peter.
"You dare not face that blessed image. See--see all of
you--how she winces, and turns white!"
Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called to her.
Its gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her
in any human thing.
She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She
saw it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devotedly cherished. She
stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it
through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then she
folded her arms, and waited for them.
There was a loud shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they
rushed on her.
They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted
hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were
strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, they abhorred her, they
believed no child of theirs safe in its bed while she walked abroad alive.
Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and they hyæna
are as the lamb and the dove.
They set on her with furious force, flung her, trod on her, beat her,
kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the malignant fury of
the female animal that fights for its offspring's and its own
security.
Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power
against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her
backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their
worst on her.
She could not free herself nor return their blows, nor lift herself to
wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of wringing from
her a single cry, and that much she did.
She was mute while the rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at
her, the heavy feet were driven against her body, the fingers clutched at
her long hair, and twisted and tore at it--she was quite mute
throughout.
"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I
have heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried
Flandrin's wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.
Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in
their midst, and a dozen eager hands seized a closer grip upon her, pulled
her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud floor,
searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell.
The smooth skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without
spot or blemish.
"What matter; what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin.
"When our fathers hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for
that? Draw blood, and you will see."
She clutched a jagged rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her
prey.
"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she
cried, with a laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.
Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy.
She was powerless, defenceless, flung on her back amidst her
tormentors, fastened down by treading feet and clenching hands; she could
resist in nothing, she could not stir a limb, still she kept silence, and
her proud eyes looked unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.
The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her
chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a
wounded bird--not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these
women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their reckless touch. The
iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak.
Except for her eyes, that glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to
and fro, seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive wood, flung
down by ruffians to make a bonfire.
"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not
feel!" cried the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost,
to put her to the uttermost test.
Suddenly from the doorway Flandrin raised an alarm:
"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule!
Hist! Come out quickly. You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us
ever to try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick--as you love
your lives--quick!"
The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a
name of awe to them, for he was a severe man, but just.
They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the
hut door behind them, and moved down the hill; the children wailing sadly,
and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.
The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the
little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.
"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping
his favourite grey mule at sight of the little calvacade.
The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest
infant likewise--of cold, in the night, as
they supposed. They dared to say no other thing, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see their work.
"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and
told us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing
little Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we
have taken the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give
them food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back
and do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."
"That is well. That is good and neighbourly of you," said
the notary, who liked them all, having married them all, and registered
their children's births, and who was a good old man though stern;
kindly and very honest.
He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by
the church should be done for their old lost neighbour, and then urged his
fat mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick
bed in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should
be beforehand with him there.
"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread
enough for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange
mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues sometimes
be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.
The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a
sullen impatience.
"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of
Yprès!" they muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is
one thing, she will not get over the hurt for days. Her bones will be
stiff for many a week. That will teach her to leave honest folk
alone."
And they traversed the road slowly; muttering to one another.
"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's
wife, pushing Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you,
or I will put you in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy
great-grandmother."
But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or
terrified into silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old kindly quavering voice croone him country ballads and cradle songs at twilight by the bright wood fire.
Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery
slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village,
and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.
For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice
and blind of eye, much as are the cities.
Their tongues, and those of their neighbours, clacked all day long,
noisily and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the
sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one.
True, they had left all their house and field work half
done;--"but the Holy Peter will finish it in his own good time,
and avenge himself for his outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin,
sorrowing over her lost Petrus in the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of
little Bernardou, as he huddled in her chimney corner, to make him cease
from weeping.
When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon
Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they
should find their victim there, and lest she should lift her voice in
accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest,
a cobbler's son, and almost as ignorant as themselves, would be, they
knew, on their own side; but they were sensible that they had let their
fury hurry them into acts which could easily be applauded by their
neighbours, but not so easily justified to the law.
"For the law is over good," said Rose Flandrin, "and
takes the part of all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a
brigand, a bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil--anything,--except
now and then an honest woman."
But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered
it had no tenants except the lifeless famished bodies of the old grandam
and the year-old infant.
When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of
her tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried
vainly several times to raise herself from the floor, and had failed.
She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that
her brain had been deadened, and her sense had gone for the first sharp
moment of the persecution.
As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the
blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what
had happened to her; and her face grew savage and dark, and her eyes fierce
and lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his
lair.
It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and
outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.
She stood awhile looking at the dead face of the woman she had
aided.
"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I
might have known how they pay any good done to them."
She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course
of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment with which she had been
repaid.
She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she
hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and
pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed and
on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without her
vengeance.
"I will never come abroad without a knife in my girdle
again," she thought--this was the lesson that her charity had
brought her as its teaching.
She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into
the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or
token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the ashes
of the hearth.
"She lied, even in her last breath!" thought
Folle-Farine. "She said that her God was good!"
She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were
stiff and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin
deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her
ears were filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been
flung backward on her head.
She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had
done; and one of the peasants had carried the youngest away in it. The
sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled through
a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and grasses,
beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through the woods
and pastures.
The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a
dull red ray here and there above the woods in the east.
It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still
rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over the
fields. She could only move very slowly, very stiffly; the thorns tearing
her, the snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she
moved.
She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil,
when he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then
tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any creature
that might need one.
That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence
was not awake enough to see that she need not have borne its burden one
hour more, so long as there had been one pool in the woods deep enough to
drown her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night.
Nay,--that she had but to lie down, then and there, where she was,
beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed so
heavily on her eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an
end of all for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed
the upland meadows, starved and stiff.
She did not know;--and had she known, wretched though existence was
to her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be
slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike
again--a change that would not give her vengeance could have had no
sweetness and no succour for her. The change she wanted was to live, not
to die.
By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of
the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame,
bleeding, cold and miserable, with her eyes burning, and her hands and her head hot with fever.
She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her
first morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the
beasts and for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round
which the sheds and storehouses ran.
She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy
or remission of her labours. She set to work at once, but for the only
time since Phratos had brought her thither, the strength and vigour of her
frame had been beaten.
She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass;
and she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there
leaning her head on her hands.
The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the
meal flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty
fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly against
her, purring all the while. The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out
of the window to her master.
"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been a'
bed all night."
The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the
courtyard.
"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou
says thou hast not lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"
Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in
the look of her eyes.
"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
"And where hast been then?" he asked, through his clenched
teeth; enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and ear than
himself.
A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its
stupor and langour, as she replied to him with effort in brief phrases.
"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in
the road, and I carried her home. And the youngest child was dead too. I
stayed there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told
him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had
killed old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is no matter. But it made me late."
In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an
unconscious glimmer of appeal, a vague fancy that for once she might,
perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and
contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any
compassion, and yet a dim unuttered hope was in her heart, that for once he
might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since
first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost
ashamed of his denial to his old neighbour, and had almost feared, that it
would lose him the good will of that good heaven which sent him so
mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it
infuriated him, to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have had
pity and charity, where he had lacked them.
He looked at her and saw with grim glee, that she was black and blue
with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her bosom
had been stained with blood.
"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he
said, in answer to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at
night, they deal rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she
may tell them of feigned alms-giving to cover her vices from their
sight. I thank them that they did so much of my work for me. They might
well prick thee for a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy
breast, as to be able to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and
work, or it will be worse for thee."
She obeyed him.
There during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured,
with her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice, like a
dead thing, on the snow of the court, and the floors of the sheds. But she
lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness, without
aid; in those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the dog, who
came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake her with the
kisses of his rough tongue.
She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once
spoke to her.
"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day,
good Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that
afternoon, and fearful of offending the shrewd old man who had so many of
his neighbours in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss?
The girl maddened my dame--spitting on her Peter, and throwing the
blessed image away in a ditch."
"The woman did well," said Flamma coldly, driving his grey
mare onward through the fog.
Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or were displeased.
Claudis Flamma hardly knew which he was, himself; he held her as the
very spawn of hell itself, and yet it was loathsome to him, that his
neighbours should also know, and say, that a devil had been the only fruit
of that fair offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a
saint.
The next day and the next, and the next again after that, she was too
ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use; they
could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all rousing of
their sticks, or of their words.
They were obliged to let her be. She stayed for nearly four days in
the hay in her loft; devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in
pain. She had a pitcher of water by her and drank continually, thirstily,
like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold spring water, she
recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the hours, and had
dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liébana, and of the
old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended, shivering and
fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned to her.
She rose on the fifth day weaker, but otherwise little the worse; with the
soft sad songs of her old friend the viol ringing always through her
brain.
The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new
year.
There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked
fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned, and
the country was white with
snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare, and rioted over by furious cross winds.
Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked
up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill--for the first time since
they had had to do with her,--she had committed, for the millionth
time, a crime.
There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a
spark of fire was allowed to brighten the heart, and where the hens,
straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping,
and where the Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the
intense cold.
There was no welcome for her--she went out into the air, thinking
the woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was the cheerless
house.
The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white
roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees, were
glittering in its light.
There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought
their famine-time a good one, in which to tempt them with poisoned
grain.
She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet
her,--a yard farther on she saw him.
He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside the old barrel that had
served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged him the little straw
needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those bitter nights; and he had
perished quietly, without a moan, like a sentinel slain at his
post--frozen to death in his old age after a life of faithfulness
repaid with blows.
She stood by him a while with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He
had loved her, and she had loved him; and many a time she had risked a
stroke of the lash to save it from his body; and many a time she had sobbed
herself to sleep in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as
round her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.
She stooped down; kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead, and
lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so that
he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should be able
to make his grave in
those orchards in which he had loved so well to wander, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of summer liberty and leisure.
She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow
above his tomb, under the old twisted pear tree, beneath which, he and she
had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another for
scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can exist
betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone, and love
and trust each other, only, out of all the world.
Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept
for ever in the old grey orchard, she had but one left.
She went to seek this one.
Her heart ached for a kind glance--for a word that should be
neither of hatred or of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to
know such a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people
that despised pity, and who knew how to live hard, and to die hard, without
murmur or appeal. Yet she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to
all save herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin who to all
save herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.
He was good to her in his own fierce and rugged way; and they had the
kinship of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent,
savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might love
each other in the depths of forest, where the foot of the hunter and the
fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.
She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold,
and alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by
his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous time
when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream which had
never come true upon earth.
Her heart was in wild revolt, and a fierce futile hate gnawed ever in
it. She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the
insults of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place;
but each one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer
scar, and
killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts which had survived in her through all the brutalising debasement of her life.
She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood,
and being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of it,
as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her; and now and
then the thought crossed her--why not take a flint and a bit of tow,
and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow at the
foot of the hill?
She thought of it often--would she ever do it? She did not
know.
It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired
a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had
lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also?
They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried to
do good to one of them, the others had set on her as a witch.
In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through
their hamlet to seek Marcellin.
The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows
and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a solitary
tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the snowdrifts; here
and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of ice that covered
all the streams and pools.
The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with
all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her
scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her skirt. For
such was the lesson which the reward for her charity had taught her--a
lesson not lightly to be forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.
In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbours, kept
high festival for a fresh year begun.
Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and many
wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood cracking
and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many of their
interiors as she went by in the shadow without.
In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire,
roasting chestnuts in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another, they romped with their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.
In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that
was bright with Dutch tiles, and hug round with dried herbs and fruits, an
old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for a
short glad hour.
In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savoury
odour, and the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she
watched her youngest-born playing with a Punch, all bells and bright
colours, and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.
In the wine-shop, the keeper of it, having taken to himself a
wife that day, kept open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing
to the music of a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches
of fir, with many-hued ribands, and with little oil-lamps
that blew to and fro in the noise of the romp. And all round were the dark
still woods, and in the midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height
of the hill, the little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.
She looked at it all, going through it, with her hand on her knife.
"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation
that possessed her--"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a
bonfire they would have for their feasting!"
The thought was sweet to her.
Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do
well, and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil
sorcery.
She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to
see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them with
a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives,
"Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"
Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint
and tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to
pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.
She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet
to her--so sweet because so horrible.
How soon their mirth would be stilled!
As she stood thinking, there, and in her fancy seeing the red glare that
would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid
flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the
children's shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small dark
thing, with a halo round its head: the thing was Bernardou, and the
halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.
He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.
"I know you--you were good that night. The people all say
you are wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back
to gran'mère--oh, take me back!"
She was startled and bewildered.
This child had never mocked her, but he had screamed and run from her in
terror, and had been told a score of stories that she was a devil, who
could kill his body and soul.
"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice
was troubled, and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time
to a child without being derided or screamed at in fear.
"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff
and cold, I know, and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know
she would, if she only heard us. We never cried in the night
but she heard in her sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell
her--do, do tell her!"
She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness
of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and made her mute.
"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him
suddenly, glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins'
house, through which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the
puppet with gilded bells.
"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want
gran'mère," he said, with a sob. "they beat me
often, and oh! if she knew, she would wake and come. Do tell
her--do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex her, if only she
will come back!"
His piteous voice was drowned in tears.
His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs
had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him,
clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in
the cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first
daisy of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to
sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.
It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he
wept for it; refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in
another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they
expected him to be.
It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and
they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.
"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" Folle-Farine
murmured, with a momentary softness that was exquisitely tender in its
contrast to her haughty and fierce temper. "I wish I
could."
For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds,
and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away and
away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which she
knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the
snow-filled ditch.
But the thought passed unuttered; she knew neither where to go nor what
to do.
Her few early years in the Liébana were too dream-like and
too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the world seemed only to
her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and dismal, in which every hand
would be against her, and every living thing be hostile to her. Beside,
the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that eats into
the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without many an effort.
As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her
skirts, a shrill voice called from the woodstack and dung-heap
outside Flandrin's house:
"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What
dost do out there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."
The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched
him away; she was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place and the children in order.
"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost
dare talk to the witch that killed they grandmother? Thou shalt hie to
bed, and sup on a fine whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital
tomorrow! Thou woudst bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our
alms to thee."
She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed
above the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about
the tinselled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that
stewed them a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.
Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clenched on her
knife; then she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its
carols and carousings behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.
She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's
words had touched and softened her; she remembered the long patient bitter
life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her
eighty-second year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last,
"God is good."
"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for him,
and he seems to care nothing for them whether they be old or
young."
Yet her heat was softened, and she would not fire the house in which
little Bernardou was sheltered.
His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet
to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveller upon the
highest Alpine summits--a flower full of promise, born amidst a
waste.
The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the
fields that were in summer all one scarlet glow of poppies, and were now a
white sheet of frozen water.
The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells
in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was
still.
On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in
the byers, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in
the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal
and a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.
In all the country round there were only two that were
forgotten--the dead in their graves, and the daughter of Taric.
Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had
left her enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her
weakness had turned.
But she walked on steadily.
At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one
welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that
would look on her without a frown.
It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail
drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of
her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and
give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each other,
and want no other cheer or comrade.
It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset amongst the
poppies, then a little child of eight years old. Every
new-year's night she had spent with him in his hovel; and in
their own mute way they had loved one another, and drawn closer together,
and been almost glad, though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and
sometimes even the hearth had been cold.
She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her
spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its
door gladly to her coming; her heart growing lighter as she approached the
only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without derision or
told her woes without condemnation.
His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures, and by the
side of a stream.
A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of
its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel
rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only sound
was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on the
rarefied sharp air.
She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night,
and went to the door and pushed against it to open it--it was
locked.
She struck it with her hand.
"Open, Marcellin--open quickly. It is only I."
There was no answer.
She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.
A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull
light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is
there?"
"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not
night. I am come to be an hour with you. Is anything amiss?"
The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her,
peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire,
and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.
"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.
"Marcellin, yes--where is he?"
"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about
my place."
"Died!"
Folle-Farine stood erect, without a quiver in her face or in her
limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich and
golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.
"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure
men said that God would never him die, because he killed St. Louis; but
myself I never thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a
hundred years for him--you can never cheat the devil, and he always
seems stronger than the saints--somehow. You are that thing of
Yprès, are you not? Get you gone!"
"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.
Her right hand was clenched on the door-post, and her right foot
was set on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.
"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell
where he dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation.
"I stood out a whole day, but when one is poor and the place is
offered quit of rent, what can one do?--and it is roomy and airy for
the fowls, and the priest has flung holy water about and purified it, and I
have a Horse-shoe nailed up, and a St. John in the corner. But be
off with you, and take your foot from my door."
Folle-Farine stood motionless.
"When did he die; and how?" she asked in her teeth.
"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth
night from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own
tongue, yet dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been
hungered, I do not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any
longer; anyways, he was dead--the hammer in his hand. Max
Liében, the man that travels with the wooden clocks, found him. He
lay there all night. Nobody would touch him. They say they saw the mark
of the devil's claws on him. At last they got a dung-cart,
and took him away before the sun rose. He died just under the great
Calvary--it was like his blasphemy. They have put him in the common
ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a saint be in the same
grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God, and were Christians
though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you gone, you be as vile as
he. If you want him go ask your father the foul fiend for him--they
are surely together now."
And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly
within.
"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she
muttered, as she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.
Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her
way through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.
"He died alone--he died alone," she muttered, a
thousand times, as she crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that
now her own fate was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone
without one friend on earth.
The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness
to all the maledictions of men; the shameful bier made at night on the
dung-cart, amidst loathing glances and muttered curses; the nameless
grave in the common ditch with the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the
murderer;--these, which were so awful to all others, seemed to her as
sweet as to sink to sleep on soft unshorn grass, whilst rose leaves are
shaken in the wind, and fall as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.
For she in her youth and in the splendour of her strength, and in the
blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-
flower in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the public road, hated by his kind, and weighted with the burden of nigh a hundred years.
Since his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her
life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are
deaf.
The sun had sunk, leaving lone tracks of blood-red light across
one-half the heavens.
There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and
the dulness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and
the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendour.
Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward,
black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew
hard; blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into
foam; driving the wintry leaves, which still strewed the earth thickly,
hither and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered the
winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and
the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden ways.
The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose
new life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards
by the plough, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat went
down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark early, and
people used to the river read a threat of flood on its face.
A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and
striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp reached the opposing wall
within.
It was a wall of grey stone, dead and lustreless like the wall of a
prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colourless as itself
dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the
place, which was an old tower, of which the country folk told strange
tales, where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
A man watched the spider as it went.
It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
glow of the sunken sun.
It was fat, well-nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky
silver hung on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor for
the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve and
multiplied.
It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who
rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
This man knew that was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
also; wise with the only wisdom which is honoured of other men.
He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood watching the sun
die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only been
able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For twenty
hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher on his tressel
was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.
He might have found some to fill it for him no doubt. He lived amidst
the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and bitter
to the rich. But he did not open either his lips or his hands. He
consumed
his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his yielding to their torments.
He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what
they gained, would have held him, accursed;--the madness that starves
and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the
gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for
the future who cares,--save these madmen themselves?
He watched the spider as it went.
It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
kingdom,--if only in dreams.
This man had no hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth;
and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion over
power and worth.
The spider crawled across the grey wall; across the glow from the
vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine, that strayed
loosed through the floor; across the classic shapes of a great cartoon
drawn in chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.
Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it. It
moved slowly on; fat, lustreless, indolent, hueless; reached at length its
den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young swarming
around, its prey held in its forceps, its nest cast about.
Through the open casement there came on the rising wind of the storm, in
the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail
exiled tropical flower.
It swam in on trembling pinions, and alighted on the golden head of a
gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
Night's Dream.
A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
lustrous-eyed, and gossamer-winged.
A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow
chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that glistened
in the deep folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the dreaming eyes
of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl
sleeping: to float earthwards on a fallen star, to slumber on a lotus life.
A creature that amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters still
tells, to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
The moth flew on, and poised on the faded crocus leaves which spread out
their pale gold on the level of the grey floor.
It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was
storm-tossed, wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with
the cold; it belonged to the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the
forget-me-nots, and to the night; and it found that the hard
grip of winter had seized it whilst yet it had thought that the stars and
the summer were with it. It lived before its time,--and it was like
the human soul, which being born in the darkness of the world dares to
dream of light, and, wandering in vain search of a sun that will never
rise, falls and perishes in wretchedness.
It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a
life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the
pale flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light
which the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high; and, spreading out its
transparent wings and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and
died.
There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of
shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.
The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into
the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale dead
violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things
frost-touched and forgotten.
The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies,
teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plentitude;
in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its body and its hoard.
He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the
moth; trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two
symbols of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the
life which perishes of divine desire.
Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand
and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.
His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his
breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned, devoured,
indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even this
lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to die like
a wolf on the Armorican wolds, yonder westward, when the snows of winter
hid all offal from its fangs.
It was horrible.
He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels
of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of
all--the sheer animal need of food.
"J'avais quelque chose
là!" was, perhaps, the most terrible of all those
death-cries of despair which the guillotine of Thermidor wrung from
the lips of the condemned. For it was the despair of the bodily life for
the life of the mind which died with it.
When a man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and
sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his
shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to lose life,
although it be hard and joyless and barren of all delights, because this
life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which yet
without him must perish, there is the strength in him, as there is the
agony, of Prometheus.
With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him
which moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which
compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds
worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety;
of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs
that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly
fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon
earth. Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on
him and made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there
will be that in him greater than himself, which he knows,--and cannot
know without some fierce wrench and pang,--will be numbed and made
impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which
is all that men behold of death.
It was so with this man now.
Life was barren of all delight for him, full of privation, of famine, of
obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; yet because he believed
that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a purer and more
impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his power to do that
which, when done, the world would not willingly let die, it was loathsome
to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any toothless snake
would perish in its swamp.
He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had
spent itself; creations which seemed but vague and ghostly in the shadows
of the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the
title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of
fame.
For himself he cared nothing; but for them--he smiled bitterly as
he looked: "They will light some bakehouse fire to pay those
that may throw my body in a ditch," he thought.
And yet the old passion had so much dominion still that he instinctively
went nearer to his latest and best-beloved creations, and took the
white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of the lamp
behind him.
They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some
housewife's kitchen-stove. What matter?
He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his
soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long
as his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had
power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.
Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon
him.
He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire
seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and
choked; and ever and again his left hand clenched on the bones of his naked
chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it. He knew
that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more torment would
await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and manhood as
vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this slowly, doggedly,
inch by inch, day by day. He knew; and he knew that he could not trust
himself to go through that uttermost torture without once lifting his voice
to summon
the shame of release from it. Shame--since release would needs be charity.
He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its
throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn--it might
be before midnight--this agony would grow so great that it would
conquer him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the
shame besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a
knife hard and sure through his breast-bone. Yet he stood there,
almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any other thing than of the
passion that ruled him.
Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a
sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some
broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some
full-orbed lion rising to leap on the nude soft
indolently-folded limbs of a dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed
in the East;--all these he gazed on and touched, and looked again, and
changed by some more inward curve or deepened line of his chalk stylus.
All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely
sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to
him,--"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leave us
alone?"
And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and
wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the
night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon
him; the grave-like coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and
numbed the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory
ceased, confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly
as men wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell
backwards senseless on his hearth.
The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving
in through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by,
uttering weary cries against the storm.
On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its
filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the hearth,
and saying in its heart,--"Thou Fool!"
She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller rope
with her foot.
The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river
inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were
seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she
glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily,
dreamily.
She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber
and grain for her taskmaster, and his fellow farmers, at the river wharf at
the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders,
with their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce sea
winds, gathered for traffic with the corn barges and the egg-boats
of the land.
Her day's labour was done, and she was repaid for it by the free
effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the
water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon,
some lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement
arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old
creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings
of some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year
fragrant in her bodice.
The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the
dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely
interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which
brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted
and leaning on their swords.
In one of them there was a group of young men and
maidens gathered round the wood nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at soldiers with the cuirass and sabre which their grandsire had won in the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding wreath upon her fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high oak chair; in another, a sister of charity, with a fair Madonna's face, bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, of whom she had charge, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart--only--and therefore hopeless.
All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom
of the water below.
She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned
them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures of
the home and hearth she envied no more that she envied the imprisoned bird
its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.
Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt,
these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and
enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always
together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people,
whose God on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who
toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and
scantily; yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and content,
and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling to one
another, and in a way be glad.
Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, encrusted
with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince-bishop's
palace; it was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace weavers and
of ivory workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.
As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw
that it stood open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within; there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected and thrice-welcome guest.
She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white
cap, and a peach-like cheek and throat, and her arms folded against
her blue 'kerchief crossed upon her chest.
Into the chamber, unseen by her, a young man stole across the shadows,
and came unheard behind her and bent his head to hers, and kissed her ere
she knew that he was there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed
him away with pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the
chamber; he shut-to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection
from within shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.
Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head
dropped, she was stirred with a mournful, passionate, contemptuous wonder;
what was this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she
had no share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and
yet--
There had come a great darkness on the river, a surly roughness in the
wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the
water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth
that severed them, and met and blended in the twilight.
The close of this day was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly; the
heavy raw mists were setting in from the sea as the night descended. She
did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the rush of
a chill wind amongst her hair, and the moisture of blown spray upon her
face; she loved the manifold phantasies of the clouds, and the melodies of
the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved the swirl and
rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in round her with the
darkness.
The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other
place the light glowed through the un-
shuttered lattices that were ruddy and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was the window of the gardener's wife.
At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor carnation; but
some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy laden berries had replaced
them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.
The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown
shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror
before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both
hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells brought
to her from the sea.
"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought
Folle-Farine, looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the
sluggish water with envy at her heart.
She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more
like some dumb fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and hates
the sound of every voice.
Since the night that they had pricked her for a witch, the people had
been more cruel to her than ever; they cast bitter names at her as she went
by; they hissed and hooted her as she took her mule through their villages,
or passed them on the road with her back bent under some load of faggots,
or of winter food; once or twice they stoned her, and chance alone had
saved her from injury.
For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had
killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious
people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry, through
the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her bright red girdle and the
flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on
her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves and told each other for
the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking
chestnuts.
It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a
desperate vengeance.
Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten by the quicklime in
the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so stern as his to bid her
a good morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark repute and bitter tongue;
but in
his way he had loved her; in his way, with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed, when men had been as gods and giants, and women either horrible as the Medusa or sublime as the Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind; to arouse her hopes; to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead; and she was alone; and was abandoned utterly to herself.
She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more
despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any
creature.
To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone;
by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge and
the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her brain, the
tears swelled in her throat; she hated with a hatred that consumed her, and
was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people who had shunned him in
his life, and in his death derided and insulted him, and given him such
burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some noxious beast.
Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have given her vengeance; a
dull cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her; the
injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage into
cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood upon a
crime.
It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within
her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be; but
to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and
tow-horse, something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass
and the dog for their services.
The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury
inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race;
if a crime could have made her free she would have seized it.
She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked
out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without
one blossom of love, one well-spring of charity, rising in its
deathlike waste.
The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures that had
been so strong in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the desert and the forest was too hot.
What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor bird did that she
had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its mighty
wings outstretched in the calm grey weather; which came none knew whence,
and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and stirless against
the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to its mate, and
waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows where the sea lay;
and with him rose yet higher and higher in the air; and passed westward,
cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;--a queen of the wind, a
daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of victory, of tireless
movement, and of boundless space, a thing of heaven and liberty.
* * * * *
The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.
There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.
She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness of
the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the storm wrack,
here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer over a bridge.
There was no other light.
The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe
behind her in the still sad air.
There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong
tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many
tales of horror. It was of ancient date, spacious, and very strong. Its
upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned
it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river had
been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because legend
had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men who
haunted it.
No man or woman in all the country round dared venture
to it after nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.
To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.
The unconscious pantheism breathed into her earliest thoughts, with the
teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and always wondrous
beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and with the light,
rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold in bright brook
waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream that leaping and
laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that wailing went over the
sickness of the weary world.
For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no mystery of life
or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created
thing has in it a divine life and an eternal mystery.
As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with
fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew
wilder yet.
There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of
tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghost-like in the
gloom. The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the
north; the boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its
edges were submerged.
She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all
that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it
should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the river
reeds. For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and,
for her own sport, had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew
that to Claudis Flamma the boat was an honoured treasure, since to replace
it would have cost him many a hard-earned and well loved piece of
money.
As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel, against the
darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been
placed so low down against the shore that its front walls, strong of hewn
stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the dense growth
of
the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of one of the seven latticed windows had been blown wide open; a broad square casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted by a sickly glimmer of the moon.
Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by
a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes
entangled it; it grounded on the sand; there was no chance, she knew, of
setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the
sand, and use her force to push it off into the current.
She leaped out without a moment's thought amongst the rushes, with
her kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the
sand, and stood to her waist in the water.
But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when
it lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked
and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her boat,
dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.
She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had
time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window behind
her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird had
come.
She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp
within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively
she paused, drew closer, and forgot the boat.
The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays
of the tall reeds an the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level
with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain
fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this
legend-haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with
stone; dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt, and with the night-birds
flying to and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters
and in the capitals of its columns.
No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its
way unheeded; and stood there at gaze like a forest doe.
She had passed this grain tower with every day or night
that she had gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors in the cold scorn of an intrepid courage.
Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed--believed
that the dead lived and gathered there.
White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all
motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible
loveliness of death.
In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the
tombs of the kings of the east.
Her colour paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a
leaf; yet she was not afraid. An ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the
dull misery of her life. She saw at last another world than the world of
toil in which she had laboured without sigh and without hope, as the
blinded ox laboured in the brick-field, treading his endless circles
in the endless dark, and only told that it was day by blows.
She had no fear of them--these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the
lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the sons
of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture and
with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if
these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal
homes--whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?
It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.
She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself
lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the floor
within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world. Stood motionless,
gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw breath with any
audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven from their
presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected back from
the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy light on all
the forms around her.
"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood
amongst them; and she stayed there with her arms folded on her breast to
still its beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing
lower than the dust--a mortal amidst this great immortal host.
The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with
a sea of dim and subtle vapour, through which they looked white and
implacable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge of
the world in a grey, quiet dawn.
They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to
her they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they
seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of
silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which she
dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to the skies
at night from a sleepless bed.
They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the
earth was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and
were not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives; and
when in every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in
the west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the
sacred cedar groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that
grew purple by the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the
gods were felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.
They were indeed the dead: the dead who--dying earliest,
whilst yet the earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives, to
embalm them, to remember them, and to count them worthy of
lament--perished in their bodies, but lived for ever immortal in the
traditions of the world.
From every space of the sombre chamber some one of these gazed on her
through the mist.
Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron jaws of
the dark sea-gates; here the white Io wandered, in exile and
unresting, for ever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the
genius in him.
Here the glad god whom all the woodlands loved, played in the moonlight,
on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds of
daffodils and asphodel. Here over a darkened land the great Demeter moved,
bereaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the fig trees stay
fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows lie strengthless to multiply
and fill the sickles with the ripe increase.
Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless
nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that
heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin. Here at this labour,
in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest wrought
as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kingship
that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which empty air
could make in a hollow reed.
Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos and Oneiros, and Thanatos;
their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern,
and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old
sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the same
winged feet which yet fall so softly, that no human ears hear their coming;
the gods that most of all have pity on men, the gods of the Night and of
the Grave.
These she saw; not plainly, but through the wavering shadows, and the
halo of the vapours which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from the
misty river.
Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, and yet
they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them, she knew that they
were gods, and yet were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-god, who
piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos look on her with their
tender laughter and their unforgotten love.
Just so had he looked so long ago--so long!--in the deep woods
at moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping
waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.
They had called him an outcast--and lo!--she found him a
god.
She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands, and
wept--wept with grief for the living lost for ever, wept with joy that
the dead for ever lived.
Tears had rarely sprung to her proud rebellious eyes; she deemed them
human things, things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back and
bitten her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather
than that men should be able to see them and exult. The passion had its
way for once, and spent itself, and passed; she rose trembling and pale;
with her eyes wet and dimmed in
lustre, like stars that shine through rain. She looked around her fearfully.
She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as
mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.
As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body
of a man.
It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare;
upon the breast the right hand was clenched close and hard; the limbs were
in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the moon;
the face was calm and colourless, and full of sadness.
In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a
statue, in that passionless rest, that dread repose.
Instinctively she drew nearer to him; breathless and allured she bent
forward and looked closer on his face.
He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead--not as they
were dead, with eyes that still rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns,
and with lips that still smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal
love,--but dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with
their breath frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts
eternally the burden of their sin and woe.
She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him--sorrowful,
because, he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had the
shadow of mortality upon him.
Looking thus she saw that his hands were clenched upon his chest, as
though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and wrench
out a heart that ached beneath them; she saw that this was not a divine,
but a human form,--dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a
man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men
love to call the "act of heaven," whereby they mean the
self-sown fruits of their own faults and follies.
Had the gods slain him--being a mortal--for his entrance
there?
Marcellin in legends had told of her of such things.
He was human; with a human beauty; which yet white was cold and golden,
full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder,
and very strange to her whose eyes
had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and rugged faces of the populace around her.
That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of
that humanity which she hated. He was too her like some noble forest
beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some
murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its
fall.
"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like to
themselves," she thought, "else he could not be so
beautiful,--he,--only a man, and dead?"
The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time
or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic phantasies
seem possible to her as truth.
Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the
immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an
infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet,
having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.
She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she
stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe, but
infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the
breath of her rose-like mouth; she touched him, stroked him, gazed
on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide of the
stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the lily.
A subtle, vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved
her,--for he was beautiful, and he was dead.
"If they would give him back his life?" she thought; and she
looked for the glad forest god playing on his reed amidst the amber
asphodels, he who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could
see his face no more.
The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the
flame of the lamp; the storm had broken and the rain fell: she saw
nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence to
his lips.
On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness,
saying:
"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for
that dead man--perish."
She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the
force of an irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.
She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods,
if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned; whilst
he whom they had slain there--though so still, so white and mute, so
powerless,--he looked a king amongst men, though the gods for his
daring had killed him.
"Let him live!" she murmured. "As for me,--I am
nothing--nothing. Let me die as the Dust dies--what
matter?"
The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone
through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.
He alone heard. He--the only friend who, come he early or late,
fails no living thing at the last.
He alone remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the
gods--for this man's sake--she chose.
He was dead still;--or so she thought;--she watched him with
dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.
She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the
closed and blue-veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against
his heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had
brought back to him.
It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a
stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a
nameless wondrous mystic force and splendour to which she had given back
the pulse of
existence, the light of day; which was no more the gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of love; but hers--hers--shared only with the greatness she had bought for him.
Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart;
she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.
His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or lustre
in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.
"To die--of hunger--like a rat in a trap!" he
muttered in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless,
striking his head upon the stones.
She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his
cold lips as she would have touched the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to
her feet. She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the
lives of all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated
brain, as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from
altar fires of sacrifice.
The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of
her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.
"To die--of hunger!"
She muttered the phrase after him--shaken from her stupor by its
gaunt and common truth.
It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs.
Her heart rebelled even against her newly found immortal masters, since,
being in wrath, they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but
had killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had
gathered there as to a festival to see him die.
As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous
odour, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chests of one who has
long fasted, almost unto death.
She had known that famine odour many a time ere then; in the hut of
Manon Dax, and by the hedge rows, and in the ditches, that made the sick
beds of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against
alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all that
country side suffered continually from the hunger
torment; she had often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying fever stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to quiet the gnawing of their entrails.
She stood still beside him, and thought.
All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes
were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of the
winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head; this
colourless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the feebly
beating heart;--these she saw still as she would have seen the white
outlines of a statue in the dark.
He moved a little, with a hollow sigh.
"Bread,--bread,--bread!" he muttered. "To
die for bread!--"
At the words, all the quick resource and self reliance which the hard
life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst the dreams
and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her poetic
ignorance.
The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she
had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for him; that
was well--if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it? The
blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone, she swore
to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.
In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black
bread. It had lain in the mud, none claiming it: a sulky lad passed
it in scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his
crutch; she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or
some jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.
That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing
towards saving him, could be of no more use to pass those clenched teeth,
and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand gathered up from
the river shore. Neither could there be any wood, which, if brought in and
lit, would burn. All the timber was green and full of sap, and all, for a
score square leagues around, was at that hour drenched with water.
She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly
dampness in the air, the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of that fell disease.
There was not a creature in all the world, who would have given her so
much as a loaf or a faggot; even if the thought of seeking human aid had
ever dawned on her.
As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human hand,--to the
rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child,--was always clenched
against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a lot of snakes, or
sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, than have begged mercy or aid at
any human hearth.
She knew nothing, either, of an social laws that might have made such
need as this, a public care on public alms. She was used to see men,
women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the land
that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work hard
for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst multitudes who
did the same; she knew nothing of any public succour to which appeal could
in such straits be made.
If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of
it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of fate,
against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.
What could she do? she pondered. Whatever she would do, she knew that
she had to do quickly. Yet she stood irresolute.
To do anything, she had to stoop herself down to that sin to which no
suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.
In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.
All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued
with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most
harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to her
as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood her in
the stead of virtue.
With an instinctive cynicism which moved her con-
tinually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to see the children and the maidens,--those who held her accursed, and were themselves held so innocent and just,--steal the ripe cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie softly to the old greyheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a soldier's rough salute, whilst she, the daughter of hell, pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch,--kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched.
It was a pride to her, to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than
they," when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the
lying word on their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will
with which she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could
have reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched
and her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone,
though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with which
she struck aside in disdain, the insolent eyes, and mocking mouths of the
youths, who would fain have taught her, that if beggared of all other
things, she was at least rich in form and hue.
She hated sin, for sin seemed to her only a human word for utter
feebleness; she had never sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to
serve this man, on whose face she had never looked before that night, she
was ready to stoop to the thing which she abhorred.
She had been so proud of her freedom for all those frailties of passion,
and greed, and self pity, with which the souls of the maidens around her
were haunted;--so proud, with the chaste, tameless arrogance of the
women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and taught them as their
first duty, by the oriental and jealous laws of their vengeful and indolent
masters.
She had been so proud!--yet the cleanliness of hand and heart, this
immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had
worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, which she had girded about
her as a zone of purity more precious than gold--this, the sole
treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a
stranger.
It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than this mortal life
she had offered for his to his gods.
As she kneeled on the stone floor beside him, her heart was torn with a
mute and violent struggle; her bent face grew dark and rigid, her haughty
brows knit together in sadness and conflict.
In the darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that
burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.
"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food
thrown to swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason
that shone through the delirium of his brain.
The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate; but they stung
her to action as the spur stings a horse.
She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open
portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee deep in water.
She lost her footing and fell, entangled in the rushes; but she rose and
climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched into
the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and the
obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.
It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by
her all the way; the path was flooded; she was up to her ankles in water at
every step, and was often forced to wade through channels a foot deep.
She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue,
of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the black
night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of
marsh, some brook that, in the rising of the river, ran hissing and
swelling to twice its common height.
All she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory
that seemed to give her the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet
with the weight of lead,--the memory of that white and senseless face,
lying beneath the watch of the cruel gods.
She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as
a dog does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the
driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for
even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts
had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard,
stole through the trees, and took her way in an impenetrable gloom, with
the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as familiar by
night as day.
The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The
shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still.
Flamma and his serving people were all gone to their beds, that they might
save by sleep the cost of wood and candle.
She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network
of a tree of ivy, and without much labour loosed the fastenings of her own
loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the body of
the house.
Opening the door of the landing-place noiselessly, she stole down
the staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses
to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a
miser were near at hand; but even they were not aroused; and she passed
down unheard.
She went hardily, fearlessly, her mind once set upon the errand. She
did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done,
that being half starved, and paid not at all, as recompense for strong and
continual labour, she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair
wage long overdue. She only resolved to take what another needed by a
violence which she had never employed to serve her own needs, and having
resolved went to execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness
that was bred in her, flesh and bone.
Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly
found her way to the store chambers where such food and fuel as were wanted
in the house were stored.
The latter was burnt and the former eaten sparingly and grudgingly, but
the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant.
It had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all
communication with the outer world by floods that had reached its upper
casements, and Claudis
Flamma was provided against any such accidents; the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats floating below when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.
Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the store-room and let
in the faint grey glimmer from the clearing skies.
A bat which had been resting from the storm among the rafters fluttered
violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the chimney in the
hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a twittering outcry.
She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly
forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket that
hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food as was to
be found there--loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a flask of
the richest wine--wine of the south, of the hue of the violet, sold
under secrecy at a high charge and profit.
That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of
faggots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square,
and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and
lowered it carefully to the ground; she followed them herself with the
agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.
She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then
threw the mass of faggots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the
osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.
She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.
She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bore, and to
walk under them unassisted fro many leagues to the hamlets and markets
round about. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she felt
frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her limbs
were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and unpausing, over
the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the reeds, keeping
always by the side of the stream, that was so angry in the darkness; by the
side of the grey flooded sands, and the rushes that were blowing with a
sound like the sea.
She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet,
holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.
Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow
against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her.
It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes as
used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the
outline of the Calvary, towering high and weird-like above the edge
of the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the
boatmen could abase themselves and do it honour
as they passed the banks.
The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no light
upon the path she followed.
At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy;
the reflection of its rays streamed across to the opposing shore, and gave
help to a boat load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little
creek.
She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely
road.
"How like their god is to them!" she thought: the
wooden crucifix was the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and
mocked her, who flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because
she was not of their people.
The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her; it was in
Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the dung
and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had avenged
on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in Christ's
name that Flamma had scourged her because she would not pass rotten figs
for sweet. For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the
peasant who cheats his neighbour of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who
massacres a nation for a throne.
She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on
through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load: in Christ's
name they would have seized her as a thief.
The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight
was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower, and
by means of the length of rope let, by degrees, the firewood and the basket
through the open portion of the window on to the floor below, then again followed them herself.
Her heart thrilled as she entered.
Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her
absence had brought no change there.
The gods had not kept faith with her, they had not raised him from the
dead.
"They have left it all to me," she thought, with the old
strange sweet yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with
her own.
She first flung the faggots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on
fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a
little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop
through his colourless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a
rush of new blood; under her hand his heart moved with firmer and quicker
movement.
She broke bread in the wine and put the soaked morsels to his mouth as
softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made nestless by
the hurricane.
He was unconscious still, but he swallowed what she held to him, without
knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a
strong shudder shook him. His eyes looked dully at her through a film of
exhaustion and of sleep.
"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered,
incoherently, his voice rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself
a little on one arm. "J'avais quelque chose là!"
and with a sigh he fell back once more--his head tossing in uneasiness
from side to side.
Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with
him--that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died
like a dog, powerless to save them. The saddest dying words that the air
ever bare on its breath--the one bitter vain regret of every genius
that the common herds of men stamp out under leaden hoofs, as they slay
their mad cattle or their drunken mobs--stayed on the blurred
confusion of his mind, which, in its stupor and its helplessness, still
knew that once it had been strong to create--that once it had been
clear to record--that once it had dreamed the dreams that save men
from the life of the swine--that once it had told to the world the truth divested of lies,--and that none had seen, none had listened to, none had believed.
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken
brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its
reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have
passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an
arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp;
like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, over-soon
ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys
of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but still alive to the sting of
the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the
theft of the parasite.
She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and
reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it,
but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the
prophet's agony.
For the first time, the intellect in her consciously awoke. For the
first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its
wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
"I am yours! Shall I perish with the body? Why
have you ever bade me desire the light and seek it, if for ever you must
thrust me into the darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing?--like
the muscle that rots, like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that
turns to ashes, and blows in a film on the winds? Shall I die so?
I?--the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"
Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the
darkness, over the expanse of the flood.
The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and
moan of the tossed rushes, and of the water birds, awakened and afraid,
came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation of
the haunted chamber. Grey owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge from
the night. Rats hurried noiseless and eager over the stones of the floor,
seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the granaries
above.
She noticed none of these things; she never looked up nor around:
all she heard was the throb of the delirious words
on the silence, all she saw was the human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the flame.
The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing
eyes of Pan, Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the majesty of the
Lykegênês toiling in the ropes that bound him to the
mill-stones to grind bread, for the mortal appetites and the
ineloquent lips of men.
But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human
form beside her.
She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half sitting: her
clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of air froze, her;
she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the day; but she had no
other remembrance than of this life which had the beauty of the
sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
He lay long, restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at
times of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious,
words of rebellion against his fate, of a despairing lament for the soul in
him that would be with the body quenched.
After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice grew lower and less
frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire, and
to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer time he
ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder; he grew quite
still, his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, and he sank to a
deep sleep.
The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed
creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an
instant. That there was any strangeness in her action, any peril in this
solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric,
could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and visionary,
her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of those
suspicions, which would fall on and chastise an act like hers; suspicions,
such as would have made women less pure and less dauntless tremble at that
lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate which she had taken
into her own hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil might be
the issue thereof.
To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him
from death, and he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have found frozen in the woods of winter.
His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture
that gave him easiest rest. With a touch so light that it could not awaken
him, she stroked the lustreless gold of his hair, and from time to time
felt for the inaudible beating of his heart.
Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, as
the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses
and half soothes some sleeper in a grey drowsy summer dawn.
For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died for ever from
off her ear she was happy.
She did not ask wherefore,--neither of herself nor of the gods did
she question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.
She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched this stranger
as he slept, and was content.
So the night passed.
Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of
waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.
Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen
world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.
He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as
it hung above him, like some drooped rose heavy with the too great
sweetness of a summer shower.
It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted
with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close in
its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been
conscious;--under it a sudden flush passed over her, as the life stirs
in the young woodlands at the near coming of the spring. For the first
time since her birth she became wholly human.
A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly
from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.
It was not the gods whom she feared, it was herself. She
had never once known that she had beauty, any more than the flower knows it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious, only thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and dared not, because her teeth were strong.
She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as
she saw it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed amidst the
water-lilies; but it had been only such an instinctive and unstudied
pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine back to her,
on the glassy current adown which she sails.
Now,--as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the
hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the
sun was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot
shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.
She looked down on herself, and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted
above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the
boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water,
and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the shore;
and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her arms bare to
the shoulders, and showed, through its rents, the gleam of her warm brown
skin and the curves of her shining shoulders.
A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as
she was;--wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like
the rushes, outcast and ashamed.
She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even
as she was, she had an exquisite grace in her savage loveliness, as
storm-birds have in theirs against the thunder-cloud and the
lightning blaze of their water-world in tempest.
She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more
conscious gaze; a sudden agony of shy dread, and longing to hide herself
under the earth, or take refuge in the depths of the waters, rather than
meet the eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in
abhorrence and in scorn. That he could have any other look for her, she
had no thought.
She had been an outcast amongst an alien people too long to dream that
any human love or gratitude or praise could ever fall on her. She had been
too long cursed by every tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever
arise in honour or in welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.
For the gift which she had given this man too would only live to curse
her;--that she had known when she had offered it.
She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall,
through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was
flushed as with some great guilt.
With the rising of the day all her new joy was dead. With the waking of
the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy and shame. The mere
timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on her ear,
calling on her to rise and go and toil with the beasts of the share and the
shaft, as the creature of labour, of exile, of namelessness, and of
despair, that men had made her.
At the casement, she turned and cast one lingering glance upon him where
he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky watery mists
of the cold dawn.
She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in its
flight.
The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness
and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.
He dreamed indeed, of a woman's form, half-bare, golden of
hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined, and flushed to changing rose
heats, like an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender,
gleaming wet with water, and brown arched feet shining with silvery sands;
with mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded; and a mouth
like the half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to
breathe upon him the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer
rains, of honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond
blossoms shed like snow against a purple sea; of all things
air-born, sun-fed, fair and free.
But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened
they had passed.
Though still dark from mists and heavy clouds, the dawn
grew on to morning as she went noiselessly away over the grey sands, the wet shore paths, the sighing rushes.
The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the
road was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the
ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in
any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the
half-merged bushes through it on the homeward tracks to
Yprès.
The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent-bells
of all the country-side rang through the mists. The day was very
young as yet; but the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the
birds were. Boats went by on the current, bearing a sad freightage of
sheep drowned in the night, and ruined peasants, whose little wealth of
stack and henhouse had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the
fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its
fold, or some pretty breadth of garden, just welcome to their sight with
snowdrops and with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed
away.
Through the clouds of vapour that curled in a dense opaque smoke from
the wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns
sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air there was an
odour from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath of the herds
lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken primrose roots
sailing by on the brown rough river.
A dying bush of grey lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh
earth of its lost garden home still about it; and in its stems a robin had
built her little nest. The nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the wind,
the robin flew above the wreck fluttering and uttering shrill notes of
woe.
Folle-Farine saw nothing.
She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of
long habit. Her mind was in a trance: she was insensible of pain or
cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.
Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the
place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any
other thing than blows.
As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it,
though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in the
same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of honesty
and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a slave's
hatred, mute and enduring, that nothing could have changed; but all the
same she served him faithfully. She was an untamed animal indeed, that he
had yoked to his ploughshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly;
and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and
thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or
not.
It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all
creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her
right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be beholden
for it for one single hour to any charity.
The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.
Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he
was weighing corn for the grinding.
"You have been away all night long!"
She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.
He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the
same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.
"Where is the boat?--that is worth more than your body. And
soul you have none."
She raised her head and looked upward.
"I have lost the boat."
She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she
had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part of the cost of this vessel,
he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for many a
week. But she looked up quietly, standing there amongst the dripping
bushes and the cheerless grassy ways.
That she never told a lie, he above in the loft knew by long proof; but
this was in his sight only a piece with the strength born in her from the
devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the confusion of
the saints of God.
"Drifted where?"
"I do not know--on the face of the flood,--with the
tide."
"You had left it loose?"
"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot
it. It went adrift."
"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"
She was silent.
"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred
stripes!"
"You can."
"I can! you shall know truly that I can! Go, get the
boat--find it above or below water--or to the town prison you go
as a thief."
The word smote her with a sudden pang. For the first time her courage
failed her. She turned and went in silence at his bidding.
In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets,
she searched for the missing vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely
less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon
the cross worked no miracles for her;--a child of sin.
For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched, ready to drop with
exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink upon the
road.
She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in their barges,
children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as the water might have
flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens, and the few riverside
cabins, which it had invaded in the night. She asked tidings of the boat
from none of these. What she could not do for herself, it never occurred
to her that others could do for her. It was an ignorance that was
strength.
At length, to her amaze, she found it; saved for her by the branches of
a young tree, which, being blown down, had fallen into the stream, and had
caught the boat hard and fast as in a net.
At sore peril to herself she dislodged it with infinite labour from the
entanglement of the boughs, and at scarce less peril, rowed on her homeward
way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against the tide which
again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar, away to the
northward, in the full sunrise.
It was far on in the forenoon, as she drew near the orchards of
Yprès, brown in their leaflessness, and with grey lichens blowing
from their boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the
icy breaths of charity.
She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and
delving in the red and chilly day.
She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river
reeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.
"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her
voice was faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her
head for once was bowed.
He turned with his billhook in his hands. There was a leap of gladness
at his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he
showed such welcome neither in his eye nor words.
"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter
meaning. "I will spare you half the
stripes:--strip."
Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the grey shadow
of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough
garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness, drew
herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.
"I am guilty--this time," she said to herself as the
lash fell:--she was thinking of her theft.
It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter
world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding leaves
and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds, fanning the tender
primrose into being, and wooing the red Alpine rose to blossom.
The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen
and of fishers; men who kept their goat flocks on the steep sides of the mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it stretched at the northern end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself, but gifted with a native eloquence; half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land, raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and who spoke against these with a fervour and force which, to the unlearned and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a genius heaven-sent.
When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the
mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any
sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way
beautiful, had come upon him.
He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations;
and to raise up his voice against those passions whose fury had never
assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never
tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village;
mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the
dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which
thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had in it, at times, almost the
menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.
He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and
very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on
the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its
sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under the
spell of his tender and flute-like voice.
Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the green
fiords and the dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye
could reach, he preached, now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen, and
foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the force
of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to princes and to conquerors.
He told them of what he had seen in the great cities through which he
had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness, and the wantonness; of
the greed in which the days and the years of men's lives were spent;
of the amassing of riches for which alone the nations cared, so that all
loveliness, all simplicity, all high endeavour, all innocent pastime, were
abjured and derided amongst them. His voice was sweet and full as the
swell of the music as he spoke to them, telling them one of the many fables
and legends, of which he had gathered a full harvest, in the may lands that
had felt his footsteps.
This was the parable he set before them that day, whilst the rude
toilers of the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children,
hearkening with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down
behind the purple pines.
"There lived once in the east, a great king; he dwelt far away,
amongst the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never
set.
"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and
the people as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves,
'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies
still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are culled for
him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn,
are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people
were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was
sore. For he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended on him
as wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he ha been long plauged with
heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation
that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new
marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which his
heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty
treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might
turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician
long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved; and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in the short space of a single summer-day.
"But it was bought with a price.
"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed
in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When
he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love
words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of
metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup bearer for drink, the
red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the
pulse and pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo! at
eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying,
'here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the
couch whereon his best beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all
he drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all
that met his own.
"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear
this agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him
was wealth.
"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it
will barter its life away.
"Look you,--this thing is certain--I say that the world
will perish, even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the
curse of its own fulfilled desire.
"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their
prayer to men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.
"When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's
lust of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick,
and piles of wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere;
and no rain ever falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and
all the rivers reek with poison:--when forest and stream, and
moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished
and forgotten:--when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush,
of air and water, has been killed, because it robbed them of a berry or a
fruit:--when the earth is one vast city, whose young children
behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky; and hear no
song but the hiss of the stream, and
know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."
His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the
sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on
the shore.
The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had
spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were words of truth.
Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang,
clear, scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of
youth.
"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or
bird, or rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and
mass my armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered?
You are mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you
know not, and that never has smiled upon you."
The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his
hand; he was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that
curled loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed
like steel in their scorn.
The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which
blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash
doubter from that sacred audience place, but the Preacher stayed their
hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.
"Is it thee, Arslàn--dost thou praise gold?--I
thought thou hadst greater gods."
The boy hung his head and his face flushed.
"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And
without power what is life?"
And he went on his way out from the people with his dead bird, which he
had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mystery of its
silvery hues.
The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.
"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured.
"For there is that in him greater than gold, which will not let him
sell it, if he would."
It had long been day when he awoke.
The wood smouldered, still warming the stone chamber. The owls that
nested in the ceiling of the hall were beating their wings impatiently
against the closed casements, blind with the light and unable to return to
their haunts and homes. The food and the wine stood beside him on the
floor; the fire had scared the rats from theft.
He raised himself slowly, and by sheer instinct ate and drank with the
avidity of long fast. Then he stared around him blankly, blinded like the
owls.
It seemed to him that he had been dead; and had risen from the
grave.
"It will be to suffer it all over again in a little space,"
he muttered dully.
His first sensation was disappointment, anger, weariness. He did not
reason. He only felt.
His mind was a blank.
Little by little a disjointed remembrance came to him. He remembered
that he had been famished in the coldness of the night, had endured much
torment of the body, had
fallen headlong and lost his consciousness. This was all he could recall.
He looked stupidly for awhile at the burning logs; at the pile of
brambles; at the flask of wine, and the simple stores of food. He looked
at the grey closed window, through which a silvery daylight came. There
was not a sound in the house; there was only the cracking of the wood and
the sharp sealike smell of the smoking pine boughs, to render the place
different from what it had been when he last had seen it.
He could recall nothing, except that he had starved for many days; had
suffered, and must have slept.
Suddenly his face burned with a flush of shame. As sense returned to
him, he knew that he must have swooned from weakness produced by cold and
hunger; that some one must have seen and succoured his necessity; and that
the food which he had half unconsciously devoured must have been the food
of alms.
His limbs writhed and his teeth clenched as the thought stole on
him.
To have gone through all the aching pangs of winter in silence, asking
aid of none, only to come to this at last! To have been ready to die in
all the vigour of virility, in all the strength of genius, only to be saved
by charity at the end! To have endured, mute and patient, the travail of
all the barren years, only at their close to be called back to life by aid
that was degradation!
He bit his lips till the blood started, as he thought of it. Some eyes
must have looked on him, in his wretchedness. Some face must have bent
over him in misery. Some other human form must have been near his in this
hour of his feebleness and need, or this thing could never have been. He
would have died alone and unremembered of man, like a snake in its swamp or
a fox in its earth. And such a death would have been to him tenfold
preferable to a life restored to him by such means as these.
Death before accomplishments is a failure, yet withal may be great; but
life saved by alms is a failure, and a failure for ever inglorious.
So the shame of this ransom for death far outweighed with him the
benefit.
"Why could they not let me be?" he cried in his soul
against those unknown lives which had weighed his own with the fetters of obligation. "Rather death than a debt! I was content to die; the bitterness was passed. I should have known no more. Why could they not let me be!"
And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only
birthright--freedom.
Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would sooner
have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his
wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some
miser at prayers, for a bag of gold:--rather crime than the debt
of a beggar.
So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced
humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal craving,
he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his own.
He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad
only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against
this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease
and ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes
in his teeth so long as his life should last.
He arose slowly, and staggered to the casement.
He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so
long desired. He knew that he had been starving long--how long? Long
enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively
he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine flask, the
wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life;
they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.
Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.
That was his only thanksgiving.
The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon
the rising day--a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness,
after the deluge of the rains.
The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed
over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists
floated before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave
back, as in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries
and the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.
On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to
drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes,
the great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and
pursuing their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in
the twilight of the damp grey vapour; a world half seen, half shrouded,
lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden
powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its
visions of the future.
"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled
wearily as he said it.
Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague
light: in that cloud-like mist, wherein the earth met
heaven.
Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of
moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It was
beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no sound
except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapour, whence
sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery air; the land
to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every
common and familiar form became transfigured.
It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely
by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.
Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and
things full of anguish, had their being:--cattle in the
slaughter-houses; the drunkards in the hovels; disease and debauch
and famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the
hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the
inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent, cramped,
and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured, for ever
blameless, yet for ever accursed:--all these were there beneath
that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender shafts
of spires and the chimes of half heard bells.
He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the
vapours shifted away, and the pale sun-rays shone clearly over a
disenchanted world, where roof
joined roof and casement answered casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went forth to their field work; and all the charm was gone.
Then he turned away.
The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven
out the dull, delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple
truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in
his necessity and succoured.
He was thankless; like the sick, to whom unwelcome aid denies the refuge
of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his shoulders the
discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.
He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labour, this
abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being derided
for his pains, while other men prostituted their powers to base use and
public gain, receiving as their wages honour and applause; he had grown
tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew them not
when it beheld them.
He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had
passion, and had manhood. Tired--utterly, because he was destitute of
all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.
"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any
worth." It does not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be
lying dying in old age to know thus much in all truth and all
bitterness.
"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart,
as he turned aside from the risen sun.
He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of
existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by
death ere we can set it straight.
He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling
greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been
fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had been
never reached.