Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of the oil-lamp burning behind him.
She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a little dust.
The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command like this, yet perish for a crust!—that fusion of omnipotence and powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.
She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.
She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile, the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command, and beneath his touch.
She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him; and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful service, and would not let him do as other men did—tell the world lies, and take its payment out in gold.
Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.
But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.
She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she knew not why, into the deepest shadow.
Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself atonement for her fault—the fault through which those tender little bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the year.
She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had taken.
Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute; she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.
So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses—a spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the past winter.
It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire, that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.
The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests, knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all together in competition but in amity.
Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom amidst tufts of thyme.
The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.
The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they had garnered through all the winter.
Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.
It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill paddles.
In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and a little ruddy wild strawberry.
Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.
"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she passed with her wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have gone this very night to Paris."
"Thou art not alone, Edmée," groaned an old woman, tottering from her egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen—the best sitter I have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noël—just cackled and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog rushed in and killed the blessed bird—killed her in her basket! A great yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again into the earth, like lightning."
"Not worse than she did to my precious Rémy," said a tanner's wife, who drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen, querulous child.
"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.
"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce have known him. You remember?"
"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"
"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."
"Ajettatriceever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.
"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."
"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:—she is a witch; there is no question but she is a witch."
"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.
"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time, and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of water.
"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit the tongue of a quivering starling.
"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.
"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.
"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping green herbs together for salads.
And all the while the girl Edmée clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over it.
"If she were only here," swore Edmée's lover, under his breath.
At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.
She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.
Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free, firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.
She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added impulse to their rage.
They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them. They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech and act.
The lover of Edmée loosened his hand from the silver beads about her throat, and caught up instead a stone.
"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.
"Who lamed my Rémy?" screamed the cripple's mother.
"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.
"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.
"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with the starling.
"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.
"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?" shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.
"Who is a witch?—who dances naked?—who bathes with devils at the full moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at her as she came.
"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no echo.
The old soldier even rebuked her. "Ajettatriceshould be killed for the good of the people," he mumbled.
Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps into their midst; unfaltering.
The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a thing that was devil-begotten.
"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!" cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly, steadily, with her face set against the light.
Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her—a jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest. It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty and their own savage hate.
"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once losing their luminous calm scorn.
The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"
One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then, swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.
Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her invulnerable and possessed.
She moved calmly with a firm tread backward—backward—backward; holding her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps. They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth curled in contemptuous laughter.
"Strikenow!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood still.
But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not so much as a word that answered her.
She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and was still.
At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?
She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side. There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to keep out the sun.
A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all there were here to look on her.
She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it, and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to her to be but little. She had passed through similar scenes before, though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her, except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.
The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.
The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open casement, some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.
The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.
When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the casement into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.
It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted except at earliest dawn.
The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were free to her; she had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed her more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad, cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the gods of Oblivion.
Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the most profound influence on her in their fair, passionless, majestic beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance; like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and the depths of hell; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible in all the universe,—that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there was a great darkness.
So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as brethren, masters, friends—these three immortals who looked down on her in their mute majesty.
They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,—they are the gods who respect not persons nor palaces,—who stay with the exile and flee from the king,—who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a beggar child,—who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and lust, and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the loneliest nights for genius and youth,—they are the gods of consolation and of compensation,—the gods of the orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or with the soul.
And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her only friends,—as the only rulers who ever could loose the bands of her fate and let her forth to freedom—Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.
They were above her where she sank upon the stone floor; the shadows were dark upon the ground; but the sunrays striking through the distant window against the opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet.
She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, the populace that had hooted her abroad, the stripes that awaited her at home. The answering gaze of the gods magnetized her; the poetic virus which had stirred dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered brain. Without knowing what she wanted, she longed for freedom, for light, for passion, for peace, for love.
Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultuous pageantry; the higher instincts of her nature rose and struggled to burst the bonds in which slavery and ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew nothing, knew no more than the grass knew that blew in the wind, than the passion-flower knew that slept unborn in the uncurled leaf; and yet withal she felt, saw, trembled, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all blindly, all in confusion and in pain.
The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, that had never quailed before the fury of any living thing; her head fell on her chest; she wept bitterly,—not because the people had injured her,—not because her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore,—but because a distance so immeasurable, so unalterable, severed her from all of which these gods told her without speech.
The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst the stones on which she sat and her own form were dark in shadow; and as though the bright boy Hypnos pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had compassion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion with it.
The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness of fasting, the fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences of the place, had their weight on her. Crouching there half on her knees, looking up ever in the faces of the three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her and stilled her; its languor stole through her veins; its gentle pressure closed her eyelids; gradually her rigid limbs and her bent body relaxed and unnerved; she sank forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms, and the stillness of a profound sleep encompassed her.
Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, delirious dreams floated through her brain, and peopled her slumber with fairer things than the earth holds, and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were wet.
Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her with his dark sad eyes, and held his finger on his close-pressed lips, as though he said—"Not yet."
Her sleep remained unbroken; there was no sound to disturb it. The caw of a rook in the top of the poplar-tree, the rushing babble of the water, the cry of a field-mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern road that ran broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing of the rats in the network of timbers which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the noises that reached this solitary place, and these were both too faint and too familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slumber heavy, and the forms on which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full of dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows lengthened, the day advanced: nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell rang over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria from the cathedral in the town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned around.
As the chimes died, Arslàn crossed the threshold of the granary and entered the desolate place where he had made his home. For once his labor had been early completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare and precious moments of the remaining light.
He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying beneath his cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused and looked down.
Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all the abandonment of youth and of sleep; her face was turned upward, with quick silent breathings parting the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the linen of her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back from her right arm and shoulder; the whole supple grace and force that were mingled in her form were visible under the light folds of her simple garments. The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor where she was stretched.
As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.
But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for her strange unlikeness to all around her.
He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.
He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which, at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in her for his art.
A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the light fell, he began to sketch her attitude, rapidly, in black and white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins; the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming; while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;—these gave a picture which required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.
He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their mere outline.
Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as little pity, with as cruel exactitude, as that with which the vivisector tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to examine.
The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand tremble a moment in such translation.
To the surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone, from the female corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and to Arslàn the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as sexless, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion. They were the tools for his art: no more.
When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had recorded in his works.
He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant; and he had sought women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always—
"De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle aux trois crayons."
"De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame,De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons,Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, ô mon âme!Rien qu'un dessin fort pâle aux trois crayons."
And for those glowing colors of passion which burned so hotly for an instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance of chastity.
He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient existence.
She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.
She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him than these would have been.
The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.
The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves strained to listen and striving to combat.
For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were from the clamor of her late tormentors.
He turned and looked at her.
"What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of the country.
She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew her disordered dress together, and stood mute, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and the blood coming and going under her transparent skin.
"What do you fear?" he asked again.
"Ifear?"
She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous defiance; the heroism of her nature, which an hour earlier had been lashed to its fullest strength, cast back the question as an insult; but her voice was low and husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.
For she feared him; and for the moment she had forgotten how she had come there and all that had passed, except that some instinct of the long-hunted animal was astir in her to hide herself and fly.
But he stood between her and the passage outward, and pride and shame held her motionless. Moreover, she still listened intently: the confused voices of the children still seemed to her like those of the multitude by whom she had been chased; and she was ready to leap tiger-like upon them, rather than let them degrade her in his sight.
He looked at her with some touch of interest: she was to him only some stray beggar-girl, who had trespassed into his solitude; yet her untamed regard, her wide-open eyes, the staglike grace of her attitude, the sullen strength which spoke in her reply,—all attracted him to closer notice of these.
"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly. "You were asleep here when I came, more than an hour ago."
The color burned in her face: she said nothing.
The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in her.
"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to return to the attitude sketched out upon his easel.
She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined with the apprehensiveness of chastisement which becomes second nature to every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every real or imagined fault.
"I came to seethose," she answered him, with a backward movement of her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the gods above her.
The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom, throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his works.
"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be toyou?"
She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her head drooped; she knew that they were much to her—friends, masters, teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts, and it locked her lips to silence.
Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape and cannot.
Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in her linen left it bare.
"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"
She shook her head.
"It is nothing."
"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"
"The people struck me."
"Struck you? With what?"
"Stones."
"And why?"
"I am Folle-Farine."
She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient reply.
But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence. To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.
"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate you?"
She gave a gesture of assent.
"And you hate them in return?"
She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.
"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I have never killed one yet."
He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed passion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.
"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence against you?"
"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything else.
"Have you no other name?"
"No."
"But you must have a home? You live—where?"
"At the mill with Flamma."
"Does he also ill use you?"
"He beats me."
"When you do wrong?"
She was silent.
"Wrong?" "Right?"
They were but words to her—empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.
Arslàn looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her to return to the attitude necessary to the completion of his picture.
He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to her, and she dreaded its avowal with as passionate a fear as though, in lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had wearied of, and might have wished to lose.
"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.
She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift, which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.
"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever touch.
By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned, had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel. Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished to turn to the purpose of his art—like a flower that he plucked on his way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some vacant nook in a mountain foreground.
"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him, flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarrassed, with her hands nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her sad, lustrous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered fear.
"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."
"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care to come?"
Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was burning.
"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.
He laughed a little; bitterly.
"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your way. Has no one ever told you so?"
"I?"
She glanced at him half wistfully, half despairingly; she thought that he spoke in derision of her.
"You," he answered. "Why not? Look at yourself here: all imperfect as it is, you can see something of what you are."
Her eyes fell for the first time on the broad confused waves of dull color, out of whose depths her own face arose, like some fair drowned thing tossed upward on a murky sea. She started with a cry as if he had wounded her, and stood still, trembling.
She had looked at her own limbs floating in the opaque water of the bathing pool, with a certain sense of their beauty wakening in her; she had tossed the soft, thick, gold-flecked darkness of her hair over her bare shoulder, with a certain languor and delight; she had held a knot of poppies against her breast, to see their hues contrast with her own white skin;—but she had never imagined that she had beauty.
He watched her, letting the vain passion he thus taught her creep with all its poison into her veins.
He had seen such wonder and such awed delight before in Nubian girls with limbs of bronze and eyes of night, who had never thought that they had loveliness,—though they had seen their forms in the clear water of the wells every time that they had brought their pitchers thither,—and who had only awakened to that sweet supreme sense of power and possession, when first they had beheld themselves live again upon his canvas.
"You are glad?" he asked her at length.
She covered her face with her hands.
"I am frightened!"
Frightened she knew not why, and utterly ashamed, to have lain thus in his sight, to have slept thus under his eyes; and yet filled with an ecstasy, to think that she was lovely enough to be raised amidst those marvelous dreams that peopled and made heaven of his solitude.
"Well, then,—let me paint you there," he said, after a pause. "I am too poor to offer you reward for it. I have nothing——"
"I want nothing," she interrupted him, quickly, while a dark shadow, half wrath, half sorrow, swept across her face.
He smiled a little.
"I cannot boast the same. But, since you care for all these hapless things that are imprisoned here, do me, their painter, this one grace. Lie there, in the shadow again, as you were when you slept, and let me go on with this study of you till the sun sets."
A glory beamed over all her face. Her mouth trembled, her whole frame shook like a reed in the wind.
"If you care!" she said, brokenly, and paused. It seemed to her impossible that this form of hers, which had been only deemed fit for the whip, for the rope, for the shower of stones, could have any grace or excellence in his sight; it seemed to her impossible that this face of hers, which nothing had ever kissed except the rough tongue of some honest dog, and which had been blown on by every storm-wind, beaten on by every summer sun, could have color, or shape, or aspect that could ever please him!
"Certainly I care. Go yonder and lie as you were lying a few moments ago—there in the shadow, under these gods."
She was used to give obedience—the dumb unquestioning obedience of the packhorse or the sheepdog, and she had no idea for an instant of refusal. It was a great terror to her to hear his voice and feel his eyes on her, and be so near to him; yet it was equally a joy sweeter and deeper than she had ever dreamed of as possible. He still seemed to her like a god, this man under whose hand flowers bloomed, and sunrays smiled, and waters flowed, and human forms arose, and the gracious shapes of a thousand dreams grew into substance. And yet, in herself, this man saw beauty!
He motioned her with a careless, gentle gesture, as a man motions a timid dog, to the spot over which the three brethren watched hand in hand; and she stretched herself down passively and humbly, meekly as the dog stretches himself to rest at his master's command. Over all her body the blood was leaping; her limbs shuddered; her breath came and went in broken murmurs; her bright-hued skin grew dark and white by turns; she was filled with a passionate delight that he had found anything in her to desire or deem fair; and she quivered with a tumultuous fear that made her nervous as any panting hare. Her heart beat as it had never done when the people had raged in their fury around her. One living creature had found beauty in her; one human voice had spoken to her gently and without a curse; one man had thought her a thing to be entreated and not scorned;—a change so marvelous in her fate transfigured all the world for her, as though the gods above had touched her lips with fire.
But she was mute and motionless; the habit of silence and of repression had become her second nature; no statue of marble could have been stiller, or in semblance more lifeless, than she was where she rested on the stones.
Arslàn noticed nothing of this; he was intent upon his work. The sun was very near its setting, and every second of its light was precious to him. The world indeed he knew would in all likelihood never be the wiser or the richer for anything he did; in all likelihood he knew all these things that he created were destined to moulder away undisturbed save by the rats that might gnaw, and the newts that might traverse, them. He was buried here in the grave of a hopeless penury, of an endless oblivion. They were buried with him; and the world wanted neither him nor them. Still, having the madness of genius, he was as much the slave of his art as though an universal fame had waited his lowliest and lightest effort.
With a deep breath that had half a sigh in it he threw down his brushes when the darkness fell. While he wrought, he forgot the abject bitterness of his life; when he ceased work, he remembered how hateful a thing it is to live when life means only deprivation, obscurity, and failure.
He thanked her with a few words of gratitude to her for her patience, and released her from the strain of the attitude. She rose slowly with an odd dazzled look upon her face, like one coming out of great darkness into the full blaze of day. Her eyes sought the portrait of her own form, which was still hazy and unformed, amidst a mist of varying hues: that she should be elected to have a part with those glorious things which were the companions of his loneliness seemed to her a wonder so strange and so immeasurable that her mind still could not grasp it.
For it was greatness to her: a greatness absolute and incredible. The men had stoned, the women cursed, the children hooted her; but he selected her—and her alone—for that supreme honor which his hand could give.
Not noticing the look upon her face he placed before her on the rude bench, which served in that place for a table, some score of small studies in color, trifles brilliant as the rainbow, birds, flowers, insects, a leaf of fern, an orchid in full bloom, a nest with a blue warbler in it, a few peasants by a wayside cross, a child at a well, a mule laden with autumn fruit—anything which in the district had caught his sight or stirred his fancy. He bade her choose from them.
"There is nothing else here," he added. "But since you care for such things, take as many of them as you will as recompense."
Her face flushed up to the fringes of her hair; her eyes looked at the sketches in thirsty longing. Except the scarlet scarf of Marcellin, this was the only gift she had ever had offered her. And all these reproductions of the world around her were to her like so much sorcery. Owning one, she would have worshiped it, revered it, caressed it, treasured it; her life was so desolate and barren that such a gift seemed to her as handfuls of gold and silver would seem to a beggar were he bidden to take them and be rich.
She stretched her arms out in one quick longing gesture; then as suddenly withdrew them, folding them on her chest, whilst her face grew very pale. Something of its old dark proud ferocity gathered on it.
"I want no payment," she said, huskily, and she turned to the threshold and crossed it.
He stayed her with his hand.
"Wait. I did not mean to hurt you. Will you not take them as reward?"
"No."
She spoke almost sullenly; there was a certain sharpness and dullness of disappointment at her heart. She wanted, she wished, she knew not what. But not that he should offer her payment.
"Can you return to-morrow? or any other day?" he asked her, thinking of the sketch unfinished on the sheet of pinewood. He did not notice the beating of her heart under her folded arms, the quick gasp of her breath, the change of the rich color in her face.
"If you wish," she answered him below her breath.
"I do wish, surely. The sketch is all unfinished yet."
"I will come, then."
She moved away from him across the threshold as she spoke; she was not afraid of the people, but she was afraid of this strange, passionate sweetness, which seemed to fill her veins with fire and make her drunk and blind.
"Shall I go with you homeward?"
She shook her head.
"But the people who struck you?—they may attack you again?"
She laughed a little; low in her throat.
"I showed them a knife!—they are timid as hares."
"You are always by yourself?"
"Always."
She drew herself with a rapid movement from him and sprang into her boat where it rocked amidst the rushes against the steps; in another instant she had thrust it from its entanglement in the reeds, and pulled with swift, steady strokes down the stream into the falling shadows of the night.
"You will come back?" he called to her, as the first stroke parted the water.
"Yes," she answered him; and the boat shot forward into the shadow.
Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.
There was little need to exact the promise from her.
Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which, whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth, and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that hell which none,—once having entered it,—can ever more forsake.
She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from the shore and the stream into the gloom of the night.
He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted shadows.
Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the night.
"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I have nearly enough for remembrance there."
And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of the dead.
From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom, or to fall into the fowler's snare;—what matter which?
The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the gloom.
She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.
She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or a smith's forge.
By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical, silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the multitudes of the city whither it goes.
It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to and fro in his wood-yard.
At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches, and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted, and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.
In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered, puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle; there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter; under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring; on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.
The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslàn.
She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night air lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.
The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray bent brows.
"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth. "Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"
The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.
"I say nothing," she answered.
"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to make thee speak. Nothing!—when three of the clock should have seen thee back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure—in shame and iniquity—in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"
"Since you know, why ask?"
She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.
"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you spawn of hell, or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"
"I have done as I chose."
She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.
"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak—you!—a thing less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose—you!—who have not a rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat, not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine—mine—mine. As you choose.You!—you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you sloth! You are nothing—nothing—less than the blind worm that crawls in the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break your will."
As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that dumb, passive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.
But the creature, silent and stirless, who before had stood to receive his lashes as though her body were of bronze or wood, that felt not, was changed. A leonine and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She started out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure as a willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs back, released, into the air.
She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by a sudden gesture from him, and flung it away to the farther end of the chamber; then she turned on him as a hart turns brought to bay.
Her supple body was erect like a young pine; her eyes flashed with a luster he had never seen in them; the breath came hard and fast through her dilated nostrils.
"Touch me again!" she cried aloud, while her voice rang full and imperious through the stillness. "Touch me again; and by the heaven and hell you prate of, I will kill you!"
So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the old man dropped his hands and stood and gazed at her aghast and staring; not recognizing the mute, patient, doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him in all the royalty of wrath, in all the passion of insurrection.
He could not tell what had altered her, what had wrought this transformation, what had changed her as by sorcery; he could not tell that what had aroused a human soul in her had been the first human voice that she had listened to in love; he could not tell that her body had grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her beautiful, and that her life for the first time had acquired a worth and dignity in her sight because one man had deemed it fair.
He could not tell; he could only see that for the first time his slave had learned somewhere, and in somewise, what freedom meant; and had escaped him. This alone he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid.
She waited, watching him some moments, with cold eyes of disdain, in which a smouldering fire slept, ready to burst into an all-devouring flame.
There was not a sound in the place; the woman spinning stopped her wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, savage fashion; the lean cat ceased its cries; there was only the continual swish of the water in the sluices under the wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black Forest clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in its cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the thyme, and the sage, and the onions hung among the twisted rafters.
Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her hip, her lips curved scornfully and close, her face full of passion, which she kept still as the dead birds hanging on the wall; whilst all the time the tawny smoky hues of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic play over her head and limbs.
Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently, without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble fortitude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as was the daily bread she broke.
But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the gods upon her, now she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslàn.
There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.
Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily in him; some vague remembrance passed over him, that, whatsoever else she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will, with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.
He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard at her in the dusky lamp-light.
He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and trample it under foot, and spit on it.
He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his path, while he struck out the light with his staff.
"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late. To-morrow I will deal with thee."
She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslàn had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to preserve it by death from that indignity.
From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been used to bare her shoulders to the lash, and take the stripes as food and wages; she had no more thought to resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on earth, has to resist his master's blows; the dull habits of a soulless bondage had been too strong on her to be lightly broken, and the resignation of the loyal beasts that were her comrades, had been the one virtue that she had seen to follow.
But now at length she had burst her bonds, and had claimed her freedom.
She had tasted the freshness of liberty, and the blood burned like fire in her face as she remembered the patience and the shame of the years of her slavery.
There was no mirror in her little room in the gabled eaves; all the mirror she had ever known had been that which she had shared with the water-lilies, when together she and they had leaned over the smooth dark surface of the mill-pond. But the moon streamed clearly through the one unshuttered window, a moon full and clear, and still cold; the springtide moon, from which the pale primroses borrow those tender hues of theirs, which never warm or grow deeper, however golden be the sun that may shine.
Its clear colorless crescent went sailing past the little square lattice hole in the wall; masses of gorgeous cloud, white and black, swept by in a fresh west wind; the fresh breath of a spring night chased away the heat and languor of the day; the smell of all the blossoms of the spring rose up from wood and orchard; the cool, drowsy murmuring of the mill-stream beneath was the only sound on the stillness, except when now and then there came the wild cry of a mating owl.
The moonbeams fell about her where she stood; and she looked down on her smooth skin, her glistening shoulders, her lustrous and abundant hair, on which the wavering light played and undulated. The most delicious gladness that a woman's life can know was in tumult in her, conflicting with the new and deadly sense of shame and ignorance. She learned that she was beautiful, at the same time that she awoke to the knowledge of her dumb, lifeless slavish inferiority to all other human things.
"Beautiful!" she muttered to herself, "only as a poppy, as a snake, as a night-moth are beautiful—beautiful and without fragrance, or sweetness, or worth!"
And her heart was heavy, even amidst all its pleasure and triumph, heavy with a sense of utter ignorance and utter worthlessness.
The poppy was snapped asunder as a weed, the snake was shunned and cursed for his poison, the night-moth was killed because his nature had made him dwell in the darkness; none of the three might have any fault in truth in them; all of the three might have only the livery of evil, and no more; might be innocent, and ask only to breathe and live for a little brief space in their world, which men called God's world. Yet were they condemned by men, and slain, being what they were, although God made them.
Even so she felt, without reasoning, had it been and would it be, with herself.