For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.
As she and the boat passed out into the loneliness of the country, with fitful moon gleams to light its passage, the weather and the stream grew wilder yet.
There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom. The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were submerged.
She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the river reeds.
For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.
As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the darkness and the winds, she passed the solitary building; it had been placed so low down against the shore, that its front walls, strong of hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square casement, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted by a sickly glimmer of the moon.
Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the land, and use her force to push it off into the current.
She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the sand, and stood to her waist in the water.
But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.
She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird had come.
She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.
The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone; dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in the capitals of its columns.
No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.
She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.
Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed—believed that the dead lived and gathered there.
White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible loveliness of death.
In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the tombs of the kings of the East.
Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a leaf; yet she was not afraid.
A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and only told that it was day by blows.
She had no fear of them—these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal homes—whether of heaven or of hell, what mattered it?
It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.
She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world—stood motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy light on all the forms around her.
"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower than the dust—a mortal amidst this great immortal host.
The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.
They were but the creations of an artist's classic dreams, but to her they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to the skies at night from a sleepless bed.
They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were not afraid. When their gods were with them in their daily lives, when in every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the gods were felt, the footfall and the voice of the gods were heard.
They were indeed the dead: the dead who—dying earliest, whilst yet the earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to remember them, and to count them worthy of lament—perished in their bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.
From every space of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her through the mist.
Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of the dark sea-gates.
Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.
Here the glad god whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight, on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds of daffodils and asphodel.
Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe increase.
Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithæron in the mad moonless nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.
Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which empty air could make in a hollow reed.
Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos; their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,—the gods of the Night and of the Grave.
These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them; she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten love.
Just so had he looked so long ago—so long!—in the deep woods at moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.
They had called him an outcast,—and lo!—she found him a god.
She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,—wept with grief for the living lost forever,—wept with joy that the dead forever lived.
Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them human things,—things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain, and looked around her fearfully.
She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.
As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body of a man.
It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare; upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.
In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a statue, in that passionless rest,—that dread repose.
Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent forward and looked closer on his face.
He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,—not as they were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,—but dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the burden of their sin and woe.
She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,—sorrowful, because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had the shadow of mortality upon him.
Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a divine, but a human form,—dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of their own faults and follies.
Had the gods slain him—being a mortal—for his entrance there?
Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.
He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden, full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and rugged faces of the populace around her.
That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its fall.
"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,—he,—only a man, and dead?"
The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies seem possible to her as truth.
Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet, having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.
She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe, but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the lily.
A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved her,—for he was beautiful, and he was dead.
"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's face no more.
The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence to his lips.
On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:
"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that dead man—perish."
She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.
She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods, if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned; whilst he who lay dead—though so still and so white, and so mute and so powerless,—he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring had killed him.
"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,—I am nothing—nothing. Let me die as the Dust dies—what matter?"
The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.
He alone heard. He—the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods—for this man's sake—she chose.
When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.
He was dead still;—or so she thought;—she watched him with dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.
She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had brought back to him.
It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of love; but hers—hers—shared only with the greatness she had bought for him.
Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart; she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.
His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.
"To die—of hunger—like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the stones.
She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her feet.
She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain, as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from altar fires of sacrifice.
The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.
"To die—of hunger!"
She muttered the phrase after him—shaken from her stupor by its gaunt and common truth.
It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had gathered there as to a festival to see him die.
As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has long fasted, almost unto death.
She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to quiet the gnawing of their entrails.
She stood still beside him, and thought.
All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head; this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the feebly beating heart;—these she saw as she would have seen the white outlines of a statue in the dark.
He moved a little with a hollow sigh.
"Bread—bread—bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"
At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her poetic ignorance.
The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for him—that was well—if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it? The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone, she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.
In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread. It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch; she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.
That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood, which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that hour drenched with water.
She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air, the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of that fell disease.
There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human hand—to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child—was always clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged mercy or aid at any human hearth.
She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men, women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to which appeal could in such straits be made.
If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.
What could she do? she pondered.
Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she stood irresolute.
To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.
In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.
All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to see the children and the maidens—those who held her accursed, and were themselves held so innocent and just—steal the ripe cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched.
It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they," when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone, though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to the thing which she abhorred.
She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens around her were haunted;—so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of their vengeful and indolent masters.
She had been so proud!—and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.
It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she had offered for his to the gods.
She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.
"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in the delirium of his brain.
The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung her to action as the spur stings a horse.
She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water; she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.
It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot deep.
She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue, of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of lead,—the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the watch of the cruel gods.
She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard, stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom, with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as familiar by night as day.
The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.
She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the body of the house.
Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.
She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done, that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor, she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue. She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred in her, blood and bone.
Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were wanted in the house were stored.
The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly, but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents; the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.
Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint gray glimmer from the clearing skies.
A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a twittering outcry.
She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food as was to be found there—loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a flask of the richest wine—wine of the south, of the hue of the violet, sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.
That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square, and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.
She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.
She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.
She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were blowing with a sound like the sea.
She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet, holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.
Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her. It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.
The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays upon the path she followed.
At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy; the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little creek.
She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.
"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her; it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten figs for sweet.
For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres a nation for a throne.
She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load:—in Christ's name they would have seized her as a thief.
The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower, and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below, then again followed them herself.
Her heart thrilled as she entered.
Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with her, they had not raised him from the dead.
"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.
She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made nestless by the hurricane.
He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a strong shudder shook him.
His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.
"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.
"J'avais quelque chose là!" and with a sigh he fell back once more—his head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.
Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with him—that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died like a dog, powerless to save them.
The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath—the one bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs—stayed on the blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create—that once it had been clear to record—that once it had dreamed the dreams which save men from the life of the swine—that once it had told to the world the truth divested of lies,—and that none had seen, none had listened, none had believed.
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the theft of the parasite.
She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it, but was pure as the patriot's despair, impersonal as the prophet's agony.
For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.
For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
"I amyours! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on the winds? Shall I die so? I?—the mind of a man, the breath of a god?"
Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the darkness over the expanse of the flood.
The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, awakened and afraid, came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the granaries above.
She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.
The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the Lykegènés toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.
But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious, words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.
After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire, and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he sank to a deep sleep.
The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.
To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have found frozen in the woods of winter.
His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture that gave him easiest rest.
With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the lusterless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the inaudible beating of his heart.
Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.
For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from off her ear she was happy.
She did not ask wherefore,—neither of herself or of the gods did she question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.
She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he slept, and was content.
So the hours passed.
Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.
Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.
He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too great sweetness of a summer shower.
It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been conscious;—under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly human.
A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.
It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.
She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious, thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and dared not, because her teeth were strong.
She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.
Now,—as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.
She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water, and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin and the curves of her shining shoulders.
A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as she was;—wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes, outcast and ashamed.
She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their water-world in tempest.
She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in abhorrence and in scorn;—and that he could have any other look, for her, she had no thought.
She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.
For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;—that she had known when she had offered it.
She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall, through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was flushed as with some great guilt.
With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.
With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy and shame.
The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men had made her.
At the casement, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky and watery mists of the cold dawn.
She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her flight.
The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.
He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed, fair and free.
But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened they had passed.
Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the sighing rushes.
The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Yprès.
The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.
Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.
A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill notes of woe.
Folle-Farine saw nothing.
She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.
Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any other thing than blows.
As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it, though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a passion fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly; and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or not.
It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.
The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.
Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he was weighing corn for the grinding.
"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.
She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.
He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.
"Where is the boat?—that is worth more than your body. And soul you have none."
She raised her head and looked upward.
"I have lost the boat."
She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel, he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes and the cheerless grassy ways.
That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the confusion of the saints God.
"Drifted where?"
"I do not know—on the face of the flood,—with the tide."
"You had left it loose."
"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It went adrift."
"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"
She was silent.
"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"
"You can."
"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat—find it above or below water—or to the town prison you go as a thief."
The word smote her with a sudden pang.
For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in silence at his bidding.
In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets, she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the god upon the cross worked no miracles for her;—a child of sin.
For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink upon the road. She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men in their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.
She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze, she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and fast as in a net.
At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar, away to the northward, in the full sunrise.
It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Yprès, brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their boughs, like hoary beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy breaths of charity.
She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and delving in the red and chilly day.
She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.
"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for once was bowed.
He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed such weakness neither in his eye nor words.
"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will spare you half the stripes:—strip."
Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness, drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastisement.
"I am guilty—this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:—she was thinking of her theft.
A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with fervent and rapturous oratory.
It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to blossom.
The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty subsistence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave, even in a manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself, but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land, raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned and impressionable multitudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a genius heaven-sent.
When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way beautiful, had come upon him.
He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations; and to raise his voice up against those passions whose fury had never assailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village; mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times, the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.
He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.
Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the force of wealth, and the lust of possession, as though he preached to princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of men's lives were spent; of the amassing of riches for which alone the nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them, telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.
This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the purple pines:
"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves, 'Verily, this man is as a god; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For he had been long bitterly harassed by foes who descended upon him as wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury, with all his might prayed to the gods that all he touched might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in other ages. And the gods gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in the short space of a single summer-day.
"But it was bought with a price.
"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met his own.
"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him was wealth.
"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will barter its life away.
"Look you,—this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish, even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its own fulfilled desire.
"The future of the world is written. For God has granted their prayer to men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.
"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's lust of gain:—when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood and iron:—when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever falls:—when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with poison:—when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:—when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed, because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:—when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field, nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace:—when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man:—then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:—gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly:—gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, holiness and liberty:—gold that is one vast grave."
His voice sank, and the silence that followed was only filled with the sound of the winds in the pine-woods, and the sound of the sea on the shore.
The people were very still and afraid; for it seemed to them that he had spoken as prophets speak, and that his words were the words of truth.
Suddenly on the awe-stricken silence an answering voice rang, clear, scornful, bold, and with the eager and fearless defiance of youth:
"If I had been that king, I would not have cared for woman, or bird, or rose. I would have lived long enough to enrich my nation, and mass my armies, and die a conqueror. What would the rest have mattered? You are mad, O Preacher! to rail against gold. You flout a god that you know not, and that never has smiled upon you."
The speaker stood outside the crowd with a dead sea-bird in his hand; he was in his early boyhood, he had long locks of bright hair that curled loosely on his shoulders, and eyes of northern blue, that flashed like steel in their scorn.
The people, indignant and terrified at the cold rough words which blasphemed their prophet, turned with one accord to draw off the rash doubter from that sacred audience-place, but the Preacher stayed their hands with a gesture, and looked sadly at the boy.
"Is it thee, Arslàn? Dost thou praise gold?—I thought thou hadst greater gods."
The boy hung his head and his face flushed.
"Gold must be power always," he muttered. "And without power what is life?"
And he went on his way out from the people, with the dead bird, which he had slain with a stone that he might study the exquisite mysteries of its silvery hues.
The Preacher followed him dreamily with his glance.
"Yet he will not give his life for gold," he murmured. "For there is that in him greater than gold, which will not let him sell it, if he would."