She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then she folded her arms, and waited for them.
There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed on her.
They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.
They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her, they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and its own security.
Strong though she was, and swift, and full of courage, she had no power against the numbers who had thrown themselves on her, and borne her backward by dint of their united effort, and held her down to work their worst on her. She could not free herself to return their blows, nor lift herself to wrestle with them; she could only deny them the sweetness of wringing from her a single cry, and that she did. She was mute while the rough hands flew at her, the sticks struck at her, the heavy feet were driven against her body, and the fierce fingers clutched at her hair, and twisted and tore it,—she was quite mute throughout.
"Prick her in the breast, and see if the devil be still in her. I have heard say there is no better way to test a witch!" cried Flandrin's wife, writhing in rage for the outrage to the Petrus.
Her foes needed no second bidding; they had her already prostrate in their midst, and a dozen eager, violent hands seized a closer grip upon her, pulled her clothes from her chest, and, holding her down on the mud floor, searched with ravenous eyes for the signet marks of hell. The smooth, soft skin baffled them; its rich and tender hues were without spot or blemish.
"What matter,—what matter?" hissed Rose Flandrin. "When our fathers hunted witches in the old time, did they stop for that? Draw blood, and you will see."
She clutched a jagged, rusty nail from out the wall, and leaned over her prey.
"It is the only babe that will ever cling to thee!" she cried, with a laugh, as the nail drew blood above the heart.
Still Folle-Farine made no sound and asked no mercy. She was powerless, defenseless, flung on her back amidst her tormentors, fastened down by treading feet and clinching hands; she could resist in nothing, she could not stir a limb; still she kept silence, and her proud eyes looked unquailing into the hateful faces bent to hers.
The muscles and nerves of her body quivered with a mighty pang, her chest heaved with the torture of indignity, her heart fluttered like a wounded bird,—not at the physical pain, but at the shame of these women's gaze, the loathsome contact of their hands.
The iron pierced deeper, but they could not make her speak. Except for her eyes, which glowed with a dusky fire as they glanced to and fro, seeking escape, she might have been a statue of olive-wood, flung down by ruffians to make a bonfire.
"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to that uttermost test.
Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:
"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick—as you love your lives—quick!"
The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.
They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.
The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.
"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.
The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest infant likewise—of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of charity and their bigoted cruelties and superstitions, and they were quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see their work.
"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."
"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's births, and who was a good old man, though stern.
He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be beforehand with him there.
"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.
The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a sullen impatience.
"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Yprès!" they muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That will teach her to leave honest folk alone."
And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.
"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy great-grandmother."
But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at twilight by the bright wood fire.
Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village, and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.
For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.
Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the sanctity of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.
When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest, a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side; but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily justified to the law.
"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil—anything,—except now and then an honest woman."
But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old grandam and the year-old infant.
When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to raise herself from the floor, and had failed.
She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first sharp moment of the persecution.
As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and lustful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.
It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.
She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.
"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known how they pay any good done to them."
She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid with.
She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without her vengeance.
"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she thought—this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its teaching.
She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the ashes of the hearth.
"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that her God was good!"
She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been flung backward on her head.
She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and grasses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through the woods and pastures.
The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull red ray here and there above the woods in the east.
It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.
She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any creature that might need one.
That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow, beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland meadows, starved and stiff.
She did not know;—and had she known, wretched though existence was to her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again—a change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.
By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.
She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which the sheds and storehouses ran.
She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy or remission of her labors.
She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.
She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windlass; and she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there leaning her head on her hands.
The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly against her, purring all the while.
The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her master,—
"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."
The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the courtyard.
"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"
Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her eyes.
"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth; enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than himself.
A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief phrases,—
"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is no matter. But it made me late."
In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an unconscious glimmer of appeal,—a vague fancy that for once she might, perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have had pity and charity where he had lacked them.
He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her bosom had been stained with blood.
"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be the worse for thee."
She obeyed him.
There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.
But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness, without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake her with the kisses of his rough tongue.
She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once spoke to her.
"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon, and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl maddened my dame,—spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image away in a ditch."
"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or were displeased.
Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.
The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use; they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all rousing of their sticks, or of their words.
They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually, thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana, and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended, shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol ringing always through her brain.
The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.
There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned, and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare, and rioted over by furious cross winds.
Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill,—for the first time since they had had to do with her,—she had committed, for the millionth time, a crime.
There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping, and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.
There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless house.
The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering in its light.
There were many dead birds about the paths. Claudis Flamma had thought their famine time a good one in which to tempt them with poisoned grain.
She wondered where the dog was who never had failed to greet her,—a yard farther on she saw him. He was stretched stiff and lifeless beside the old barrel that had served him as a kennel; his master had begrudged him the little straw needful to keep him from the hurricanes of those bitter nights; and he had perished quietly without a moan, like a sentinel slain at his post—frozen to death in his old age after a life of faithfulness repaid with blows.
She stood by him awhile with dry eyes, but with an aching heart. He had loved her, and she had loved him; many a time she had risked a stroke of the lash to save it from his body; many a time she had sobbed herself to sleep, in her earlier years, with her arms curled round him, as round her only friend and only comrade in bondage and in misery.
She stooped down, and kissed him softly on his broad grizzled forehead, lifted his corpse into a place of shelter, and covered it tenderly, so that he should not be left to the crows and the kites, until she should be able to make his grave in those orchards which he had loved so well to wander in, and in which he and she had spent all their brief hours of summer liberty and leisure.
She shuddered as she looked her last on him; and filled in the snow above his tomb, under the old twisted pear-tree, beneath which he and she had so often sat together in the long grasses, consoling one another for scant fare and cruel blows by the exquisite mute sympathy which can exist betwixt the canine and the human animal when the two are alone, and love and trust each other only out of all the world.
Whilst the dog had lived, she had had two friends; now that he slept forever in the old gray orchard, she had but one left. She went to seek this one.
Her heart ached for a kind glance—for a word that should be neither of hatred nor of scorn. It was seldom that she allowed herself to know such a weakness. She had dauntless blood in her; she came of a people that despised pity, who knew how to live hard and to die hard, without murmur or appeal.
Yet, as she had clung to the old mastiff, who was savage to all save herself; so she still clung to the old man Marcellin, who to all save herself was a terror and a name of foul omen.
He was good to her in his own fierce, rugged way; they had the kinship of the proscribed; and they loved one another in a strange, silent, savage manner, as a yearling wolf cub and an aged grizzled bear might love each other in the depths of a forest, where the foot of the hunter and the fangs of the hound were alike against the young and the old.
She had not seen him for six days. She felt ill, and weak, and cold, and alone. She thought she would go to him in his hut, and sit a little by his lonely hearth, and hear him tell strange stories of the marvelous time when he was young, and the world was drunk with a mad sweet dream which was never to come true upon earth.
Her heart was in wild revolt, and a futile hate gnawed ever in it.
She had become used to the indignities of the populace, and the insults of all the people who went to and fro her grandsire's place; but each one pierced deeper and deeper than the last, and left a longer scar, and killed more and more of the gentler and better instincts that had survived in her through all the brutalizing debasement of her life.
She could not avenge the outrage of Rose Flandrin and her sisterhood, and, being unable to avenge it, she shut her mouth and said nothing of it, as her habit was. Nevertheless it festered and rankled in her, and now and then the thought crossed her—why not take a flint and a bit of tow, and burn them all in their beds as they slept in that little hollow at the foot of the hill?
She thought of it often—would she ever do it?
She did not know.
It had a taint of cowardice in it; yet a man that very winter had fired a farmstead for far less an injury, and had burned to death all who had lain therein that night. Why should she not kill and burn these also? They had never essayed to teach her to do better, and when she had tried to do good to one of them the others had set on her as a witch.
In the afternoon of this first day of the year she had to pass through their hamlet to seek Marcellin.
The sun was low and red; the dusky light glowered over the white meadows and through the leafless twilight of the woods; here and there a solitary tree of holly reared itself, scarlet and tall, from the snowdrifts; here and there a sheaf of arrowy reeds pierced the sheets of ice that covered all the streams and pools.
The little village lay with its dark round roofs, cosy and warm, with all the winter round. She strode through it erect, and flashing her scornful eyes right and left; but her right hand was inside her shirt, and it gripped fast the handle of a knife. For such was the lesson which the reward for her charity had taught her—a lesson not lightly to be forgotten, nor swiftly to be unlearned again.
In its simple mode, the little place, like its greater neighbors, kept high festival for a fresh year begun.
Its crucifix rose, bare and white, out of a crown of fir boughs and many wreaths of ruddy berries. On its cabin windows the light of wood cracking and blazing within glowed brightly. Through them she saw many of their interiors as she went by in the shadow without.
In one the children knelt in a circle round the fire, roasting chestnuts in the embers with gay shouts of laughter. In another they romped with their big sheepdog, decking him with garlands of ivy and laurel.
In one little brown room a betrothal party made merry; in another, that was bright with Dutch tiles, and hung round with dried herbs and fruits, an old matron had her arm round the curly head of a sailor lad, home for a short glad hour.
In the house of Flandrin a huge soup-pot smoked with savory odor, and the eyes of his wife were soft with a tender mirth as she watched her youngest-born playing with a Punchinello, all bells and bright colors, and saw the elder ones cluster round a gilded Jesus of sugar.
In the wineshop, the keeper of it, having married a wife that day, kept open house to his friends, and he and they were dancing to the music of a horn and a fiddle, under rafters bedecked with branches of fir, with many-hued ribbons, and with little oil lamps that blew to and fro in the noise of the romp. And all round lay the dark still woods, and in the midst rose the crucifix; and above, on the height of the hill, the little old hut of Manon Dax stood dark and empty.
She looked at it all, going through it with her hand on her knife.
"One spark," she thought, playing with the grim temptation that possessed her—"one spark on the dry thatch, and what a bonfire they would have for their feasting!"
The thought was sweet to her.
Injustice had made her ravenous and savage. When she had tried to do well and to save life, these people had accused her of taking it by evil sorcery.
She felt a longing to show them what evil indeed she could do, and to see them burn, and to hear them scream vainly, and then to say to them with a laugh, as the flames licked up their homes and their lives, "Another time, take care how you awake a witch!"
Why did she not do it? She did not know; she had brought out a flint and tinder in the pouch that hung at her side. It would be as easy as to pluck a sere leaf; she knew that.
She stood still and played with her fancy, and it was horrible and sweet to her—so sweet because so horrible.
How soon their mirth would be stilled!
As she stood thinking there, and seeing in fancy the red glare that would light up that peaceful place, and hearing the roar of the lurid flames that would drown the music, and the laughter, and the children's shouts, out of the twilight there rose to her a small, dark thing, with a halo of light round its head: the thing was little Bernardou, and the halo was the shine of his curling hair in the lingering light.
He caught her skirts in his hands, and clung to her and sobbed.
"I know you—you were good that night. The people all say you are wicked, but you gave us your food, and held my hand. Take me back to gran'mère—oh, take me back!"
She was startled and bewildered. This child had never mocked her, but he had screamed and run from her in terror, and had been told a score of stories that she was a devil, who could kill his body and soul.
"She is dead, Bernardou," she answered him; and her voice was troubled, and sounded strangely to her as she spoke for the first time to a child without being derided or screamed at in fear.
"Dead! What is that?" sobbed the boy. "She was stiff and cold, I know, and they put her in a hole; but she would waken, I know she would, if she only heardus. We never cried in the night but she heard in her sleep, and got up and came to us. Oh, do tell her—do, do tell her!"
She was silent; she did not know how to answer him, and the strangeness of any human appeal made to her bewildered her and held her mute.
"Why are you out in the cold, Bernardou?" she asked him suddenly, glancing backward through the lattice of the Flandrins' house, through which she could see the infants laughing and shaking the puppet with the gilded bells.
"They beat me; they say I am naughty, because I want gran'mère," he said, with a sob. "They beat me often, and oh! if she knew, she would wake and come. Do tell her—do! Bernardou will be so good, and never vex her, if only she will come back!"
His piteous voice was drowned in tears.
His little life had been hard; scant fare, cold winds, and naked limbs had been his portion; yet the life had been bright and gleeful to him, clinging to his grandam's skirts as she washed at the tub or hoed in the cabbage-ground, catching her smile when he brought her the first daisy of the year, running always to her open arms in any hurt, sinking to sleep always with the singing of her old ballads on his ear.
It had been a little life, dear, glad, kindly, precious to him, and he wept for it, refusing to be comforted by sight of a gilded puppet in another's hand, or a sugared Jesus in another's mouth, as they expected him to be.
It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.
"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and fierce temper. "I wish I could."
For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds, and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing be hostile to her.
Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.
As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts, a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside Flandrin's house,—
"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."
The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place and the children in order.
"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."
She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.
Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.
She thought no more of setting their huts in a blaze; the child's words had touched and softened her, she remembered the long patient bitter life of the woman who had died of cold and hunger in her eighty-second year, and yet who had thus died saying to the last, "God is good."
"What is their God?" she mused. "They care for Him, and He seems to care nothing for them whether they be old or young."
Yet her heart was softened, and she would not fire the house in which little Bernardou was sheltered.
His was the first gratitude that she had ever met with, and it was sweet to her as the rare blossom of the edelweiss to the traveler upon the highest Alpine summits—a flower full of promise, born amidst a waste.
The way was long to where Marcellin dwelt, but she walked on through the fields that were in summer all one scarlet group of poppies.
The day was over, the evening drew nigh, the sound of innumerable bells in the town echoed faintly from the distance, over the snow: all was still.
On the night of the new year the people had a care that the cattle in the byres, the sheep in the folds, the dogs in the kennels, the swine in the styes, the old cart-horses in the sheds, should have a full meal and a clean bed, and be able to rejoice.
In all the country round there were only two that were forgotten—the dead in their graves and the daughter of Taric the gypsy.
Folle-Farine was cold, hungry, and exhausted, for the fever had left her enfeebled; and from the coarse food of the mill-house her weakness had turned.
But she walked on steadily.
At the hut where Marcellin dwelt she knew that she would be sure of one welcome, one smile; one voice that would greet her kindly; one face that would look on her without a frown.
It would not matter, she thought, how the winds should howl and the hail drive, or how the people should be merry in their homes and forgetful of her and of him. He and she would sit together over the little fire, and give back hate for hate and scorn for scorn, and commune with each other, and want no other cheer or comrade.
It had been always so since he had first met her at sunset among the poppies, then a little child eight years old. Every new-year's-night she had spent with him in his hovel; and in their own mute way they had loved one another, and drawn closer together, and been almost glad, though often pitcher and platter had been empty, and sometimes even the hearth had been cold.
She stepped bravely against the wind, and over the crisp firm snow, her spirits rising as she drew near the only place that had ever opened its door gladly to her coming, her heart growing lighter as she approached the only creature to whom she had ever spoken her thoughts without derision or told her woes without condemnation.
His hut stood by itself in the midst of the wide pastures and by the side of a stream.
A little light was wont to twinkle at that hour through the crevices of its wooden shutter; this evening all was dark, the outline of the hovel rose like a rugged mound against the white wastes round it. The only sound was the far-off chiming of the bells that vibrated strangely on the rarefied sharp air.
She crossed the last meadow where the sheep were folded for the night, and went to the door and pushed against it to open it—it was locked.
She struck it with her hand.
"Open, Marcellin—open quickly. It is only I."
There was no answer.
She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.
A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is there?"
"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an hour with you. Is anything amiss?"
The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her, peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire, and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.
"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.
"Marcellin, yes—where is he?"
"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my place."
"Died!"
Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.
"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that God would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years for him—you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger than the saints—somehow. You are that thing of Yprès, are you not? Get you gone!"
"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.
Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.
"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what can one do?——and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take your foot from my door!"
Folle-Farine stood motionless.
"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.
"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer—anyways he was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. Nobody would touch him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He died just under the great Calvary—it was like his blasphemy. They have put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared God, and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul fiend for him—they are surely together now."
And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.
"Not but what the devil can get through the chinks," she muttered, as she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.
Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.
"He died alone—he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one friend on earth.
The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness to all the maledictions of men.
The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,—these which were so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on soft unshorn grass, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.
For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a passion-flower in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a hundred years.
For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.
Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and many sighs of shuddering breezes.
The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half the heavens.
There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.
Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward, black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard; blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam; driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.
The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.
Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its face.
A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and, striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing wall within.
It was a wall of gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.
A man watched the spider as it went.
It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the glow of the sunken sun.
It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding, breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve and multiplied.
It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.
This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.
He had been unwise—always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.
For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.
He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and bitter to the rich.
But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his yielding to their torments.
He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of men by what they gained, would have held him accursed—the madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the future who cares,—save the madmen themselves?
He watched the spider as it went.
It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a kingdom—if only in dreams.
This man had no hope; he had a kingdom, indeed, but it was not of earth; and in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain earth alone has dominion and power and worth.
The spider crawled across the gray wall; across the glow from the vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine that strayed over the floor, across the classic shape of a great cartoon drawn in chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.
Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it.
It moved slowly on; fat, lusterless, indolent, hueless; reached at length its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young swarming around, its netted prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.
Through the open casement there came in on the rising wind of the storm, in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth, begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled tropic flower.
It swam in on trembling pinions, and lit on the golden head of a gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones—a moth that should have been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer Night's Dream.
A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate, lustrous-eyed and gossamer-winged.
A creature of woodland waters and blossoming forests; of the yellow chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dewdrops that glistened in the deep-folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on the bosom of a young girl sleeping: to float earthwards on a falling star, to slumber on a lotus-leaf.
A creature that, amidst the still soft hush of woods and waters, tells to those who listen, of the world when the world was young.
The moth flew on, and poised on the fading crocus-leaves which spread out their pale gold on the level of the floor.
It was weary, and its delicate wings drooped; it was storm-tossed, wind-beaten, drenched with mist and frozen with the cold; it belonged to the moon, to the dew, to the lilies, to the forget-me-nots, and the night; and it found that the hard grip of winter had seized it whilst yet it had thought that the stars and the summer were with it.
It lived before its time,—and it was like the human soul, which, being born in the darkness of the world dares to dream of light, and wandering in vain search of a sun that will never rise, falls and perishes in wretchedness.
It was beautiful exceedingly; with the brilliant tropical beauty of a life that is short-lived. It rested a moment on the stem of the pale flower, then with its radiant eyes fastened on the point of light which the lamp thrust upward, it flew on high, spreading out its transparent wings, and floating to the flame, kissed it, quivered once, and died.
There fell among the dust and cinder of the lamp a little heap of shrunken fire-scorched blackened ashes.
The wind whirled them upward from their rest, and drove them forth into the night to mingle with the storm-scourged grasses, the pale, dead violets, the withered snow-flowers, with all things frost-touched and forgotten.
The spider sat aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies, teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of its spawn and of its hoard.
He watched them both: the success of the spider, the death of the moth. Trite as a fable; ever repeated as the tides of the sea; the two symbols of humanity; of the life which fattens on greed and gain, and the life which perishes of divine desire.
Then he turned and looked at the cartoons upon the wall; shapes grand and dim, the children of his genius, a genius denied by men.
His head sank on his chest, his hand tore the shirt away from his breast, which the pangs of a bodily hunger that he scorned devoured indeed, but which throbbed with a pain more bitter than that of even this lingering and ignoble death. He had genius in him, and he had to die like a wolf on the Armorican wolds yonder westward, when the snows of winter hid all offal from its fangs.
It was horrible.
He had to die for want of the crust that beggars gnawed in the kennels of the city; he had to die of the lowest and commonest need of all—the sheer animal need of food. "J'avais quelque chose là!" was, perhaps, the most terrible of all those death-cries of despair which the guillotine of Thermidor wrung from the lips of the condemned. For it was the despair of the bodily life for the life of the mind which died with it.
When the man clings to life for life's sake, because it is fair and sweet, and good to the sight and the senses, there may be weakness in his shudder at its threatening loss. But when a man is loth to leave life, although it be hard, and joyless, and barren of all delights, because life gives him power to accomplish things greater than he, which yet without him must perish, there is the strength in him as there is the agony of Prometheus.
With him it must die also: that deep dim greatness within him which moves him, despite himself; that nameless unspeakable force, which compels him to create and to achieve; that vision by which he beholds worlds beyond him not seen by his fellows.
Weary of life indeed he may be; of life material, and full of subtlety, of passion, of pleasure, of pain; of the kisses that burn, of the laughs that ring hollow, of the honey that so soon turns to gall, of the sickly fatigues and the tired cloyed hunger that are the portion of men upon earth.
Weary of these he may be; but still if the gods have breathed on him and made him mad, with the madness that men have called genius, there will be that in him greater than himself, which he knows—and cannot know without some fierce wrench and pang—will be numbed and made impotent, and drift away, lost for evermore, into that eternal Night which is all that men behold of death.
It was so with this man now.
Life was barren for him of all delight, full of privation, of famine, of obscurity, of fruitless travail and of vain desire; and yet because he believed that he had it in him to be great, or rather because, with a purer and more impersonal knowledge, he believed that it was within his power to do that which when done the world would not willingly let die; it was loathsome to him to perish thus of the sheer lack of food, as any toothless snake would perish in its swamp.
He stood opposite to the great white cartoons on which his soul had spent itself; creations which looked vague and ghostly in the shadows of the chamber, but in which he saw, or at the least believed he saw, the title-deeds of his own heirship to the world's kingdom of fame.
For himself he cared nothing; but for them, he smiled a little bitterly as he looked:
"They will light some bake-house fire to pay those that may throw my body in a ditch," he thought.
And yet the old passion had so much dominance still that he instinctively went nearer to his latest and best-loved creations, and took the white chalks up and worked once more by the dull sullen rays of the lamp behind him.
They would be torn down on the morrow and thrust for fuel into some housewife's kitchen-stove.
What matter?
He loved them; they were his sole garniture and treasure; in them his soul had gathered all its dreams and all its pure delights: so long as his sight lasted he sought to feed it on them; so long as his hand had power he strove to touch, to caress, to enrich them.
Even in such an hour as this, the old sweet trance of Art was upon him.
He was devoured by the deadly fangs of long fast; streaks of living fire seemed to scorch his entrails; his throat and lungs were parched and choked; and ever and again his left hand clinched on the bones of his naked chest as though he could wrench away the throes that gnawed it.
He knew that worse than this would follow; he knew that tenfold more torment would await him; that limbs as strong, and muscles as hard, and manhood as vigorous as his, would only yield to such death as this slowly, doggedly, inch by inch, day by day.
He knew; and he knew that he could not trust himself to go through that uttermost torture without once lifting his voice to summon the shame of release from it. Shame, since release would need be charity.
He knew full well; he had seen all forms of death; he had studied its throes, and portrayed its horrors. He knew that before dawn—it might be before midnight—this agony would grow so great that it would conquer him; and that to save himself from the cowardice of appeal, the shame of besought alms, he would have to use his last powers to drive home a knife hard and sure through his breast-bone.
Yet he stood there, almost forgetting this, scarcely conscious of any other thing than of the passion that ruled him.
Some soft curve in a girl's bare bosom, some round smooth arm of a sleeping woman, some fringe of leaves against a moonlit sky, some broad-winged bird sailing through shadows of the air, some full-orbed lion rising to leap on the nude soft indolently-folded limbs of a dreaming virgin, palm-shadowed in the East;—all these he gazed on and touched, and looked again, and changed by some mere inward curve or deepened line of his chalk stylus.
All these usurped him; appealed to him; were well beloved and infinitely sad; seemed ever in their whiteness and their loneliness to cry to him,—"Whither dost thou go? Wilt thou leaveusalone?"
And as he stood, and thus caressed them with his eyes and touch, and wrestled with the inward torment which grew greater and greater as the night approached, the sudden sickly feebleness of long hunger came upon him; the gravelike coldness of his fireless chamber slackened and numbed the flowing of his veins; his brain grew dull and all its memory ceased, confused and blotted. He staggered once, wondering dimly and idly as men wonder in delirium, if this indeed were death: then he fell backwards senseless on his hearth.
The last glow of day died off the wall. The wind rose louder, driving in through the open casement a herd of withered leaves. An owl flew by, uttering weary cries against the storm.
On high the spider sat, sucking the vitals of its prey, safe in its filth and darkness; looking down ever on the lifeless body on the hearth, and saying in its heart,—"Thou Fool!"
As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin, of fiend and of martyr.
She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with her foot.
The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily, dreamily.
She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats of the land.
Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free effortless backward passage home through the shadows of the water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open casement arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year fragrant in her boddice.
The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and leaning on their swords.
In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the kernels broke the shells; in another, some rosy curly children played at soldiers with the cuirass and saber which their grandsire had worn in the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned glass, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face, bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had charge of, slept and left her a brief space for her own memories, her own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,—only—and therefore hopeless.
All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the water below.
She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.
Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt, these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people, whose god on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling to one another, and in a way be glad.
Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.
As the boat floated under one of the casements, she saw that it stood open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within; there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected and thrice-welcome guest.
She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her, a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.
Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped, she was stirred with a vague, passionate, contemptuous wonder: what was this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet——
There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists were setting in from the sea as the night descended.
She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in round her with the darkness.
The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was the window of the gardener's wife.
At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.
The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells brought to her from the sea.
"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine, looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water with envy at her heart.
She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.
For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry, through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking chestnuts.
It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way, with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed, when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.
She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any creature.
To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone; by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some noxious beast.
Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance; a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her. The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood upon a crime.
It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be; but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and tow-horse,—something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and the dog for their services.
The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime could have made her free she would have seized it.
She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike waste.
The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the desert and the forest was too hot.
What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the air; and passed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;—a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless space, a thing of heaven and of liberty.
The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.
There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong. She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer over a bridge.
There was no other light.
The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe behind her in the still sad air.
There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and spacious, and very strong. Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men who haunted it.
No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.
To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.
The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts, with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and always wondrous beauty in every blade of grass that fed on the dew, and with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.