"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I should be free; and with methese."
The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he thought himself alone.
This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.
So little!—just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons, fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;—and having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still continue to deny him other victories.
It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a strong and hardy mountain-people.
It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes of wild weather.
In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had passed a winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.
None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.
"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so little—ever so little!"
For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the highest tributes that the multitude can give to the genius that arises amidst it.
There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that wove in the darkness among the timbers.
It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes, and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the shore; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.
Otherwise it was intensely silent.
In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of the tower, the market-boat of Yprès glided by, and the soft splash of the passing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.
But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through the open casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.
She heard and understood.
Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.
"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his sake.
She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past—of all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and the habits of the world—nothing of the world's pleasures and the world's triumphs.
To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the simplicity of it, seemed noble, and all that the heart of a man could desire from fate.
Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea, and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud, the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the leaves; or to lie still on the grass or the sand by the shore, and see the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams of worlds beyond the stars;—such a life as this seemed to her beyond any other beautiful.
A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a street—a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,—it seemed to her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was freest, simplest, and highest.
She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.
Of these she knew nothing.
She had no conception of them—of the weakness and the force that twine one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.
But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.
Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads and cabins which had been her only world.
"A little gold!—a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase any pleasure for his appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse circumstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the caged eagle.
"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the air.
"A little gold!"
It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary for him as she went.
"What use for the gods to have given him back life," she thought, "if they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless desire?"
It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality which they had given to Tithonus.
"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.
Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslàn now. No gifts would she give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.
When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and glad in her eyes.
A thought had come to her.
In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together, under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden produce.
"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."
"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms, and he wanted to plant a young cherry."
"There must have been a mass of coin?"
"No,—only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time—whatever he might mean by that."
"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if one buried a brass button only long enough, he would give one a bank-note for it."
"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a god. To worship old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like that,—how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the edge of the road."
"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."
"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."
Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:
"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"
The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the mill of Yprès.
"He is a great noble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.
"And where is his dwelling?"
"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"
She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with a glow at her heart.
"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse with the devil's daughter.
An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:
"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces than for old coins; and—how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"
She had passed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.
"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope, that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not wholly hatred.
That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors, she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.
It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a casement that was never unclosed.
On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of leaden beads.
On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces, muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the sweet sins of her life and of her master's.
She cared for her soul—cared very much, and tried to save it; but cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the tenth of a cherry.
Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the sleeper.
"Wake! I want a word with you."
Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in horrible fear.
Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.
"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head. Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."
The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.
Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.
It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master should discover and claim it.
Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed—a quiet cold laugh—at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her in her infancy.
"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?" she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst of the reckoning."
And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.
It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.
She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of hay in the loft.
There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern clouds.
She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.
As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a strong emotion came over her.
The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment revived for her.
The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music, the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,—all arose to her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile had buried them.
The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins, she thought of Phratos.
She had never known his fate.
The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.
Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.
All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father's race had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made no plunder.
The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the smile and the voice of Phratos.
"I would never part with them for myself," she thought; "I would die of hunger first—were it only myself."
And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little treasure—the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her, even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.
The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.
At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslàn, she spoke to him, timidly,—
"I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I might do there—for you?"
"Do? What should you do?" he answered her, with inattention and almost impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of inaction.
She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her lips.
She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.
"If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps," she said to herself.
So she kept silence.
On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the two mules, to Rioz.
It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in either hand.
The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of a pastoral country in late summer.
She met few people; a market-woman or two on their asses, a walking peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd—these were all.
The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only sound in the silence.
It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell, surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble and the gorse grew wild.
But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore; she herself grew tired and fevered.
She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway, where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her brass pails on the ground.
She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered them.
The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky, half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she would bring her food and drink.
But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches, refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.
The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the market-women had said, "What does the like of you want with the Prince?"
"I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will," she answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.
The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.
"What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?" she muttered, watching the form of the girl as it passed up the steep sunshiny street.
"Some evil, no doubt," answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb,bon plaisir, and the philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as acajote."
Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:
"No one would ask the roadtherefor any good; that is sure. No doubt she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all the Arts!"
Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.
In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things—girls' faces, coils of foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown waters;—things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of genius.
She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded slopes,—those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince Sartorian.
One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry, looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his wife:
"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his velvet-lined cupboards."
And the wife laughed in answer,—
"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."
The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could mean; but she would not turn back to ask.
Her feet were weary, like her mules'; the sun scorched her; she felt feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp ascent that rose in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river ran.
At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and shields. She pushed one open—there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the domain which they guarded.
At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were green, the grass long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to her.
Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver breasts of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood here and there amidst the leavy darkness.
She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.
She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.
A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great, fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it, wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.
A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it, thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted, silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer's kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while, always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.
At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush and the lotos, and the white pampas-grass, and the flamelike flowering reed, of the East and of the West.
All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace. A door stood open near. She entered it.
She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear in her whole temper.
Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the wonders that are gathered together by the world's luxury were for the first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the rich lived.
She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.
On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on the moss of the orchard at Yprès. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups, the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were folded.
It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by the dazzle of mere wealth. She walked through the splendid and lonely rooms wondering, indeed, and eager to see more; but there was no spell here such as the gardens had flung over her. To the creature free born in the Liebana no life beneath a roof could seem beautiful.
She met no one.
At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, she paused before a great picture in a heavy golden frame; it was the seizure of Persephone. She knew the story, for Arslàn had told her of it.
She saw for the first time how the pictures that men called great were installed in princely splendor; this was the fate which he wanted for his own.
A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, stood before it: she recalled the words of the woman in the market-place; in her ignorance, she thought the picture was worshiped as a divinity, as the people worshiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with something of gloomy contempt in her eyes, at the painting which was mantled in massive gold, with purple draperies opening to display it; for it was the chief masterpiece upon those walls.
"And he cares forthat!" she thought, with a sigh half of wonder, half of sorrow.
She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his works were greater hanging on their bare walls where the spiders wove.
"Who is 'he'?" a voice asked behind her.
She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, humorous eyes, and an elfin face, delicate in its form, malicious in its meaning.
She stood silent, regarding him; herself a strange figure in that lordly place, with her brown limbs, her bare head and feet, her linen tunic, her red knotted girdle.
"Who are you?" she asked him curtly, in counter-question.
The little old man laughed.
"I have the honor to be your host."
A disappointed astonishment clouded her face.
"You! are you Sartorian?" she muttered—"the Sartorian whom they call a prince?"
"Even I!" he said with a smile. "I regret that I please you no more. May I ask to what I am indebted for your presence? You seem a fastidious critic."
He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuff whilst he looked at the lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, as he thought her, whom he had found thus astray in his magnificent chambers.
She amused him; finding her silent, he sought to make her speak.
"How did you come in hither? You care for pictures, perhaps, since you seem to feed on them like some wood-pigeons on a sheaf of corn?"
"I know of finer than yours," she answered him coldly, chilled by the amused and malicious ridicule of his tone into a sullen repose. "I did not come to see anything you have. I came to sell you these: they say in Yprès that you care for such bits of coin."
She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and tendered them to him.
He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no sort of value; such things as he could buy for a few coins in any bazaar of Africa or Asia. But he did not say so.
He looked at her keenly, as he asked:
"Whose were these?"
She looked in return at him with haughty defiance.
"They are mine. If you want such things, as they say you do, take them and give me their value—that is all."
"Do you come here to sell them?"
"Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman from near Rioz say that you liked such things. Take them, or leave them."
"Who gave them to you?"
"Phratos."
Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still loved the memory of Phratos.
"And who may Phratos be?"
Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning.
"That is none of your business. If you think that I stole them, say so. If you want them, buy them. One or the other."
The old man watched her amusedly.
"You can be very fierce," he said to her. "Be gentle a little, and tell me whence you came, and what story you have."
But she would not.
"I have not come here to speak of myself," she said obstinately. "Will you take the coins, or leave them?"
"I will take them," he said; and he went to a cabinet in another room and brought out with him several shining gold pieces.
She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily.
"Here is payment," he said to her, holding them to her.
Her eyes fastened on the money entranced; she touched it with a light, half-fearful touch, and then drew back and gazed at it amazed.
"All that—all that?" she muttered. "Is it their worth? Are you sure?"
"Quite sure," he said with a smile. He offered her in them some thirty times their value.
She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good fortune, then darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and took them and put them to her lips, and laughed a sweet glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her bosom.
"I am grateful," she said simply; but the radiance in her eyes, the laughter on her mouth, the quivering excitement in all her face and form, said the same thing for her far better than her words.
The old man watched her narrowly.
"They are not for yourself?" he asked.
"That is my affair," she answered him, all her pride rising in arms. "What concerned you was their value."
He smiled and bent his head.
"Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for? Wherever you came from, is this all that brought you here?"
She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought the sketches from their hiding-place. She placed them before him.
"Look at those."
He took them to the light and scanned them slowly and critically; he knew all the mysteries and intricacies of art, and he recognized in these slight things the hand and the color of a master. He did not say so, but held them for some time in silence.
"These also are for sale?" he asked at length.
She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense expectation, her longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips quivering with eagerness. That he was a stranger and a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth; she saw he had perception.
"See here!" she said, swiftly, the music of her voice rising and falling in breathless, eloquent intonation. "Those things are to the great works of his hand as a broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a breadth of sand, a woman's face, and under his hand it grows glorious and gracious. He dreams things that are strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods, and he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he works for his bread, and in the gray night he wanders where none can follow him; and he brings back marvels and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories that are like the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees the things of his hand; and he is sick of his life, because the days go by and bring no message to him, and men will have nothing of him; and he has hunger of body and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. But to him it is bitter that it is only seen by the newt, and the beetle, and the night-hawk. It wears his soul away, because he is denied of men. 'If I had gold, if I had gold!' he says always, when he thinks that none can hear him."
Her voice trembled and was still for a second; she struggled with herself and kept it clear and strong.
The old man never interrupted her.
"He must not know: he would kill himself if he knew; he would sooner die than tell any man. But, look you, you drape your pictures here with gold and with purple, you place them high in the light; you make idols of them, and burn your incense before them. That is what he wants for his: they are the life of his life. If they could be honored, he would not care, though you should slay him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you idols of his: they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart is sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I would not care; but he cares, so that he perishes."
She shivered as she spoke; in her earnestness and eagerness, she laid her hand on the stranger's arm, and held it there; she prayed, with more passion than she would have cast into any prayer to save her own life.
"Where is he; and what do you call him?" the old man asked her quietly.
He understood the meaning that ran beneath the unconscious extravagance of her fanciful and impassioned language.
"He is called Arslàn; he lives in the granary-tower, by the river, between the town and Yprès. He comes from the north, far away—very, very far, where the seas are all ice and the sun shines at midnight. Will you make the things that he does to be known to the people? You have gold; and gold, he says, is the compeller of men."
"Arslàn?" he echoed.
The name was not utterly unknown to him; he had seen works signed with it at Paris and at Rome—strange things of a singular power, of a union of cynicism and idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world, and too pure for the other half.
"Arslàn?—I think I remember. I will see what I can do."
"You will say nothing to him of me."
"I could not say much. Who are you? Whence do you come?"
"I live at the water-mill of Yprès. They say that Reine Flamma was my mother. I do not know: it does not matter."
"What is your name?"
"Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust."
"A strange namesake."
"What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff of breath—less than the dust, anyhow."
"Is it? I see, you are a Communist."
"What?"
"A Communist—a Socialist. You know what that is. You would like to level my house to the ashes, I fancy, by the look on your face."
"No," she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, "I do not care to do that. If I had cared to burn anything it would have been the Flandrins' village. It is odd that you should live in a palace and he should want for bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So it is even, perhaps."
The old man smiled, amused.
"You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. Come in another chamber and take some wine, and break your fast. There will be many things here that you never saw or tasted."
She shook her head.
"The thought is good of you," she said, more gently than she had before spoken. "But I never took a crust out of charity, and I will not begin."
"Charity! Do you call an invitation a charity?"
"When the rich ask the poor—yes."
He looked in her eyes with a smile.
"But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is young and beautiful, on which side lies the charity then?"
"I do not favor fine phrases," she answered curtly, returning his look with a steady indifference.
"You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. Well, come hither, a moment at least."
She hesitated; then, thinking to herself that to refuse would seem like fear, she followed him through several chambers into one where his own mid-day breakfast was set forth.
She moved through all the magnificence of the place with fearless steps, and meditative glances, and a grave measured easy grace, as tranquil and as unimpressed as though she walked through the tall ranks of the seeding grasses on a meadow slope.
It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice adornment, the unnumbered treasures, and the familiar luxuries of a great noble's residence; but such things as these had no awe for her.
The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations of luxury, could not impress her for an instant; she passed through them indifferent and undaunted, thinking to herself, "However they may gild their roofs, the roofs shut out the sky no less."
Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet cast in the visible shape of sculpture or of painting, did her glance grow reverent and humid; only when she recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured stories, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith as pure and true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian child, did she falter and pause a little to gaze there with a tender homage in her eyes.
The old man watched her with a musing studious glance from time to time.
"Let me tempt you," he said to her when they reached the breakfast-chamber. "Sit down with me and eat and drink. No? Taste these sweetmeats at the least. To refuse to break bread with me is churlish."
"I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin now," she answered obstinately, indifferent to the blaze of gold and silver before her, to the rare fruits and flowers, to the wines in their quaint flagons, to the numerous attendants who waited motionless around her.
She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits assailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.
She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby glass, rimmed with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.
"Your denial is very churlish," he said, after many a honeyed entreaty, which had met with no other answer from her. "How shall you bind me to keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?"
She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.
"A word that needs compelling," she answered him curtly, "is broken by the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root, to put faith in a man that needs a bond."
He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amusement.
"Where have you got all your wisdom?" he asked.
"It is not wisdom; it is truth."
"And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well."
She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.
"I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen."
"And that is——"
"I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain, so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round,—and I knew its birth was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false thing that would poison all that should eat of it."
"Well?"
"Well—when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the toadstool that springs from their breath?"
"Who taught you so much suspicion?"
Her face darkened in anger.
"Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am afraid of nothing."
"So it would seem."
He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He tried to tempt her otherwise.
She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta. She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color and for grace. There was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom. She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with such passion for another.
He had various treasures shown to her,—treasures of jewels, of gold and silver, of fine workmanship, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as the wing of a butterfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her eyes had rested on such things all her days.
"They are beautiful, no doubt," she said simply. "But I marvel that you—being a man—care for such things as these."
"Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me,—as one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at least out of these to keep in remembrance of me."
Her eyes burned in anger.
"If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?"
"You are very perverse," he said, relinquishing his efforts with regret.
He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of temptation: gold was a forcing-heat—slow, but sure.
She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and yet a vague apprehension.
"Are you the Red Mouse?" she said suddenly.
He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he laughed—his little low cynical laugh.
"What makes you think that?"
"I do not know. You look like it—that is all. He has made one sketch of me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same triumph in your eye."
He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.
"He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead—if I am indeed, the Red Mouse."
She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of aversion.
"I must go," she said abruptly. "The mules wait. Remember him, and I will remember you."
He smiled.
"Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when it unlocks your eagle's cage and unbinds his wings?"
"What?"
She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no memory of her own fate had retarded or hastened her footsteps.
"Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?"
"I?"
"Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?"
A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face.
"Ah, yes!" she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb triumph in her eyes. "He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live as the rose lives, on his canvas—a thing of a day that he can make immortal!"
The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had found what he wanted—as he thought.
"And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the world's sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra."
"Farnarina? What is that?"
"Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day's life of a rose, and who got eternal life for it,—as you think to do."
She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over the dauntless brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.
"I?" she murmured. "Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a little place—anywhere—wherever my life can live with his on the canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each other, 'See, it is true—he thought her worthy ofthat, though she was less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,' it will be enough for me—more than enough."
The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.
She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.
She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly, as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.
He waited awhile; then he spoke:
"But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?"
She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of memory, so pitiful of his doubt.
She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had bought his life back for him, with her own, from the gods. For the pact was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.
But of it her lips never spoke.
"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty, and I will give you gratitude. Farewell."
Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side, and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the gardens without.
He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native forest.
The old man sat silent.
When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded lands.
She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought left—the gold that she had gained.
The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed. The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her long a prey to any thought of her own fate.
She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.
"What will it matter how or when the gods take my life, so only they keep their faith and give me his?" she thought.
And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.
She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those nine gold pieces.
"A little gold," he had said; and here she had it—honest, clean, worthy of his touch and usage.
Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the shade of angels above their heads.
When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye bread that she had carried in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink there.
Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk of the falling night.
She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings, and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which flew by her over the fields.
"A little gold," he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love, all honor, all peace, and all fealty?
"Phratos would have wished his gift to go so," she thought to herself, with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.
For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the grass, and the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.
"A little gold!—a little gold!" she murmured, and she laughed aloud in her great joy, and blessed the gods that they had given her to hear the voice of his desire.
"A little gold," he had said, only; and here she had so much!
No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma's eyes she had seen glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of an emperor's treasury.
She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air, past the dark Christ who would not look,—who had never looked, or she had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved Thanatos.
Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and lightly as a swallow on the wing passed through the dreary portals into Arslàn's chamber.
His lamp was lighted.
He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces, with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the yellow sunshine of her first-born's curls.
His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, with a sadness sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes those dreams which went so far—so far—into worlds whose glories his hand could portray for no human sight.
He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.
"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end—since you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not, and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of his ideals,—save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms to it vainly, and die?"
There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some eager bird.
She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.
"Here is the gold!" she cried.
Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.
"Gold?"
He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her sudden presence there.
"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A little gold,' you said, you remember?—'only a little.' And this is much. Take it—take it! Do you not hear?"
"Gold?" he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had spoken in his solitude.
"Yes! It is mine," she said, her voice broken in its tumult of ecstasy—"it is mine—all mine. It is no charity, no gift to me. The chain was worth it, and I would only take what it was worth. A little gold, you said; and now you can make the Barabbas live forever upon canvas, and compel men to say that it is great."
As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, she drew the green leaf with the coins in it from her bosom, and thrust it into his hand, eager, exultant, laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of her nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy possessing her.
The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands stung him to comprehension; his face flushed over all its pallor; he thrust it away with a gesture of abhorrence and rejection.
"Money!" he muttered. "What money?—yours?"
"Yes, mine entirely; mine indeed!" she answered, with a sweet, glad ring of victory in her rejoicing voice. "It is true, quite true. They were the chains of sequins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his music in the mountains; and I have sold them. 'A little gold,' you said; 'and the Barabbas can live forever.' Why do you look so? It is all mine; all yours——"
In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, and sank low, with a dull startled wonder in it.
Why did he look so?
His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the language his glance spoke was one plain to her. It terrified her, amazed her, struck her chill and dumb.
In it there were disgust, anger, loathing,—even horror; and yet there was in it also an unwonted softness, which in a woman's would have shown itself by a rush of sudden tears.
"What do you think that I have done?" she murmured under her breath. "The gold is mine—mine honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I got it as I say. Why will you not take it? Why do you look at me so?"
"I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?"
She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her innocent rapture frozen into terror.
"I have done nothing wrong," she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and wonder—"nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not take it—for their sake?"
He turned on her with severity almost savage:
"It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?"
His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.
He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he had difficulty to control—being touched by her ignorance and by her gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.
She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated strangely.
For some moments there was silence between them.
"You will not take it?" she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice, like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes all quiet around it.
"Take it!" he echoed. "I could sooner kill a man out yonder and rob him. Can you not understand? Greater shame could never come to me. You do not know what you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no doubt, but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I frightened you? I did not mean to frighten you. You mean well and nobly, no doubt—no doubt. You do not know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter, and sap the strength of the receiver; but from woman to man they are—to the man shameful. Can you not understand?"
Her face burned duskily; she moved with a troubled, confused effort to get away from his gaze.
"No," she said in her shut teeth. "I do not know what you mean. Flamma takes all the gold I make. Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?"
"Flamma is your grandsire—your keeper—your master. He has a right to do as he chooses. He gives you food and shelter, and in return he takes the gains of your labor. But I,—what have I ever given you? I am a stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I could be base enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. I make no disguise with you,—you know too well how I live. But can you not see?—if I were mean enough to take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more worthy of the very name of man. It is for the man to give to the woman. You see?"
She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the confused pain on it of one who has fallen or been struck upon the head, and half forgets and half remembers.
"I do not see," she muttered. "Whoever has, gives: what does it matter? The folly in me was its littleness: it could not be of use. But it was all I had."
"Little or great,—the riches of empires, or a beggar's dole,—there could be no difference in the infamy to me. Have I seemed to you a creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put such shame upon me?"
Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel than he had consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped to speech, and stung her as scorpions sting.
She said nothing; her teeth clinched, her face changed as it had used to do when Flamma had beaten her.
She said nothing, but turned away; and with one twist of her hand she flung the pieces through the open casement into the river that flowed below.
They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.
He caught her wrist a second too late.
"What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay you back in their stead! I did not mean to hurt you; it was only the truth,—you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me with debts that I cannot pay—with gifts that I would die sooner than receive. But, then, how should you know?—how should you know? If I wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong."
There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to her throat as though she choked.
"You cannot do wrong—to me," she muttered, true, even in such a moment, to the absolute adoration which possessed her.
Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled out from his presence into the dusk of the night.
The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside above the sands where the gold had sunk.
A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust, from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might desire, a thing that a breeze might break.