The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground, while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed in the rolling woods.
An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven palpitating breaths.
It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing, and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather. The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy wooden shoe on his right foot.
"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."
She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience begotten by long slavery.
There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had wandered sleepless all night long.
"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only thing worth a rush in the house."
She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she went, "A little gold! a little gold!"
"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant, shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say the devil-begotten never bleed."
The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any should blame the slayer.
The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy warmth of the early morning.
She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among his fellows—and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest shame that his life had ever known.
"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked, she had laid on him the debt of life.
If ever he should know——
She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn of his reproaches.
He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves, to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as Adrastus upon Atys.
On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth, chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian skies.
She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of a leaf, under a night-bird's passage, every motion of the water, as the willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great guilt was on her soul.
Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat. She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.
Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes of death as children in their mother's.
The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her and beyond her.
All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel, broke the silence.
The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her—mysterious, unreal.
She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead. And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide from his and every eye.
She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music arisen,"—and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets of elder and thorn—where she had made her bed in her childhood many a summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the mill-house;—there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.
Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed when the sun breaks?"
She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her; her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.
Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.
She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Yprès by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and unbidden.
Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.
"I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!" she said bitterly in her heart, "but I am not worthy—even to die."
For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this—to be cut down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.
She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head; the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from the high towers and spires of the town.
At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers under the roof.
The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees. The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle down above his head upon the breeze.
The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as though it were still night.
She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"
The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned, and answered on his hands, "Flamma isalmostdead, they say."
And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of laughter.
She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant in unison.
He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her—and to the country round—that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even by age or death?—it seemed to her impossible.
All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered with a scared face out from her master's chamber.
"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy grandsire lies a-dying."
"Dying?"
"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as good as dead. You are glad."
"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for; and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her and hurt her.
She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor coming—coming—coming—through so many winters to beg bread, and going away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.
Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.
"Will he leave her the gold or no?" she questioned in herself; musing whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world—who could say which?
After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went into the room.
It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro; a linnet sang.
On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:
"She was a saint—a saint: God took her. So I said:—and was proud. While all the while man begot on herthat!"
Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking—awfully.
Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on him.
"You mean—my mother?"
It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.
He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.
She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.
She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to him.
"Try and speak to me of my mother—once—once," she murmured, with a pathetic longing in her voice.
A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief, memory, fear—she could not tell.
Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from its hole.
"Ask where the money is hid," she hissed in a shrill whisper. "Ask—ask—while he can yet understand."
He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a moment.
Folle-Farine did not hear.
"Tell me of my mother;—tell me, tell me," she muttered. Since a human love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.
His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.
It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell, mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.
A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet; there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the dying man.
They turned her from the chamber.
The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.
She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on her hands.
The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the murmurs of the priest's words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism. A great bitterness came on her mouth.
"One crust in love—to them—in the deadly winters, had been better worth than all this oil and prayer," she thought. And she could see nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, "God is good."
The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a stillness as of cold.
Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill,—
"I loved her! Oh, God!—Thouknowest!"
She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the death-chamber.
He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal agony, a passion of reproach.
With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it, and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.
"EvenThouart a liar!" he cried,—it was the cry of the soul leaving the body,—with the next moment he fell back—dead.
In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had broken and shown no wound.
For what agony had been like unto his?
Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure white soul he had believed in once? Yea—who? Not man; not even God.
Therefore had he suffered without hope.
She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.
All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.
From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.
Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof, had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore for him; and judged him without hatred.
All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her; and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became sanctified in her sight.
She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, "O Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!"
And now he was dead.
What did it matter?
Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain?—the little fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their famine by his greed and gain?
It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his heart would never soften.
Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
And she had reason.
For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;—the Faith, whatever its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh, drowns him.
The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth, lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.
The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Yprès was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead—at last."
No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.
The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.
No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some simple meal of crusts and eggs.
"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to herself,—"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."
For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.
"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.
"The wealth,—whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft, and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his heir.
"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass of gold hid away somewhere or another—the notary knows, I suppose—it is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And, maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so near. Where think you it will go?"
A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.
"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of their hearts and their bodies."
"Then you have no hope for yourself:—you?"
"I?"
She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of Pitchou.
"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other hope than the hope of the gold! Well,—as for me,—I never pretend to lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."
She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.
Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to her with the woman's words of greed.
Before another day had sped, it was possible,—so even said one who hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at the miser's board,—possible that she would enter into the heritage of all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered together.
One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslàn, and there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer than kings!"
But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."
She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen, unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said, "You have no right to burden me with debt"?
Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.
If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought, to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind and hand.
And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love, she submitted without question to its cruelty.
At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little. The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,—"who can say? She may yet get it all, who knows?"
At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her eyes.
"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal. She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.
With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood. She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and none sought her.
All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.
Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the living a fair savor.
No one came to her. What had they to do with her,—a creature unbaptized, and an outcast?
She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory of the fields.
She did not think of herself—since Arslàn had looked at her, in his merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.
It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and fortune.
She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds uncompanioned.
She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds; she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached—she thought always:
"If only I might die for him,—as the reed for the god."
The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.
The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown, and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.
From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to her ear in the shadow of the solitude.
"Folle-Farine,—I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to stay me. Say—do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave of the Snakes?"
She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they noted the change in her since the last sun had set.
"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.
She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face; she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price for her chain of coins.
He laughed a little softly.
"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!—female things, with eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"
She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's probe.
"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."
She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:
"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the river."
She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery to any debt or burden of a service done.
The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves, looked at her long and thoughtfully.
"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"
She gave a sign of assent.
"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and shut together.
"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."
"You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."
A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.
"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."
"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then—this god of yours?"
She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her faith would not be turned.
"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth; "because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."
"You are very truthful."
She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young desert mare.
"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?"
But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight of the curled lasso.
"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons? It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will bleed many a day."
She lifted her head.
"Have I complained?—have I asked your pity, or any man's?"
"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."
"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him for that?"
"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"
"Yes."
"What, still?"
"Why not?"
"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken yourself, is shaken from his feet!"
"No doubt."
She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still upon the reaches of the river.
"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always; he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him? Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage, or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free—to forget you?"
She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her master.
"He shall be free—to forget me."
The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were echoed through her locked teeth.
The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs quiver, and those bare nerves heave.
"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's sex, Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against it to withstand it—this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily beauty of a woman."
His voice ceased softly in the twilight—this voice of Mephistopheles—which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of straining this strength to see if it should break—of deriding this faith to see if it would bend—of alluring this soul to see if it would fall.
She stood abased in a piteous shame—the shame that any man should thus read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased to bear the gaze of any human eyes,—to bear the light of any noonday sun.
And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood—the ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved for one single day,—to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned, and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,—
"I have lived: it is enough!"
He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.
He might be hers—all her own—each pulse of his heart echoing hers, each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!—she hid her face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.
She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she would have given her body and her soul. Her soul—if the gods and man allowed her one—her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one single day of Arslàn's love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they would—but his?
Not for this had she sold her life to the gods—not for this; not for the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.
What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in his stead to die.
"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by the river?"
The reeds by the river.
The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her faith,—to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man heart-sick and heart-broken?
She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was once more strong.
"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your word; set him free. His freedom let him use—as he will."
Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.
Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood, along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and alone.
"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime unreason—that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold, as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh, at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was twisting.
He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from the porch.
In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the house.
She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?—forget quite—when he is free?"
The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the doorway.
Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.
She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and stupor.
"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told, and her heart breaks for the gold."
The thought was sweet to her—precious with the preciousness of vengeance.
"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."
Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that she spoke.
"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.
"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now; and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell-spawn as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."
Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending; scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had assailed her.
"You mean," she muttered, "you mean——What would you tell me? I do not know."
The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."
All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:——and Pitchou, looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's treasure!
She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose crushed brain there was only one thought—"Will he forget—forget quite—when he is free?"
The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager, hissing, tumultuous words:
"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for, but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all his land and household things. God rest his soul! He was a man. He forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money go—eh, eh? Canst guess?"
"Go?"
Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:
"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the lands, and the things—every coin, every inch, every crumb—is willed away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for the will of God and the glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night, but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church will scarce go to roost together."
Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.
"Go!"—she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.
"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night—I would not be overharsh—but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost hear?"
Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.
The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for the loss of the sequins.
"How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint's-day!" she thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.
Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across the bridge into the woods.
She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse, like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the trance of sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were, yet been all the difference between home and homelessness—between existence and starvation.
She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.
She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables and its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard-blossom, white and wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet chestnut woods.
She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded them.
She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,—these had been her consolations often,—these, in a way, she loved.
Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its cool pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart clove to it in this moment when she left it—forever. She looked once at it long and lingeringly; then turned and went on her way.
She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds fluttered about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that had befallen her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no canopy but the clear sky, and no food but the grain rubbed from the ripe wheat-ears.
The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe of the lonely death that she had witnessed, wore on her too heavily, and with too dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her thoughts for the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.
Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on her. She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though she walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as through the familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she meant to do, or whither she desired to go.
The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and their day at the town-market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of them cast some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all the countryside that Flamma's treasure was gone to Holy Church.
They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless arrows of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and laughed, and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she, nevertheless, was stung by them to the core, and her heart hardened, and her blood burned.
Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they marched by through the purpling leaves or the tall seed-grasses. Not one of them, mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, or paused to remember that she was homeless, and knew no more where to lay her head that night than any sick hart driven from its kind.
She met many in the soft gray and golden evening, in the fruit-hung ways, along the edge of the meadows: fathers with their little children running by them, laden with plumes of meadow-sweet; mothers bearing their youngest born before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young lovers talking together as they drove the old cow to her byre; old people counting their market gains cheerily; children paddling knee-deep in the brooks for cresses. None of them had a kindly glance for her;—all had a flouting word. There was not one who offered her so much as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much as a brief good-night.
"She will quit the country now; that is one good thing," she heard many of them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying, how pure as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God!
The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating sought its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came out under the lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the distance there came the sound of voices singing together; now and then there fell across her path two shadows turning one to the other.
She only was alone.
What did she seek to do?
She paused on a little slip of moss-green timber that crossed the water in the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream. None desired her—none remembered her; none said to her, "Stay with us a little, for love's sake."
"Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!" she thought; and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against them could lie. That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her with the setting of the last day's sun, had with the sun sunk away. The visions which had haunted her sleep under the thorn-tree whilst the thrush sang, had been killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking world. She wondered, while her face burned red with shame, what she had been mad enough to dream of in that sweet cruel slumber. For him—she felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a thousand deaths.
What was she to him?—a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose very service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.
"I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be fair in his sight one hour!" she thought; and she was conscious of horror or of impiety in the ghastly desire, because she had but one religion, this—her love.
She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an old oak on the edge of the fields of poppies.
The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the plain. The cresset-lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All was purple and gray and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and of wild thymes, and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were but patches of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night. White sea-mists, curling and rising, chased each other over the dim world.
She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.
She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had no home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.
Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the gloom. A rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a human hand; Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.
With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from the only eyes she loved.
Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the midnight of calamity.
Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.
Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses, caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps failed her. She faltered and fell.
Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the moon shone.
She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks, from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was beautiful with the beauty of women.
"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the song of the reed by the river!
But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on his way.
He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the passion of love in a man to a woman.
So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no light in his own eyes.
"Do not fly from me," he said to her. "I have sought you, to ask your forgiveness, and——"
She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest in the posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was hidden in the shadow; her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of her homelessness he had heard nothing.
"I was harsh to you," he said, gently. "I spoke, in the bitterness of my heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;—I forgot that you could not know. Can you forgive?"
"The madness was mine," she muttered. "It was I, who forgot——"
Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not look up; she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young tree which has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She knew well what his words would say.
"You are generous, and you shame me—indeed—thus," he said with a certain softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its coldness and serenity.
This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this silence, which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to utter one reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but see that this nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any common nobility of any human thing.
"I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much," he said slowly. "I feel base and unworthy; for—I have sought you to bid you farewell."
She had awaited her death-blow; she received its stroke without a sound.
She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing there her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all her beauty changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.
She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.
His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love for her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude savage women who had sat to his art on the broken steps of ruined Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures of desert and plain, who had come on here before him in the light of the East, and had passed as the shadows passed, and, like them, were forgotten.
She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think—all this mighty love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy loveliness would die out here, as the evening colors had died out of the skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.
He knew that he had but to say to her, "Come!" and she would go beside him, whether to shame or ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and rejoicing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which were to them the gates of paradise.
He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could make her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he could bid her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he knew that for one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death he told her; he knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his side would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or heaven. And he knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice with such love as this.
Yet,—he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the death-stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet surely home—to the heart.
"A stranger came to me an hour or more ago," he said to her; and it seemed even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and stronger than his own,—"an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his face—far away, long ago—I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He seemed a man of knowledge, and a man critical and keen. That study of you—the one among the poppies—you remember—took his eyes and pleased him. He bore it away with him, and left in its stead a roll of paper money—money enough to take me back among men—to set me free for a little space. Oh child! you have seen—this hell on earth kills me. It is a death in life. It has made me brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I must hurt something, or go mad."
She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored, broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.
He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,—it was wearying to him; all he desired was power among men.
"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"
"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.
He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been pitiless to her—with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe music through its shattered grace again.
"When do you go?" she asked.
Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;—all the ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field where men have fought and died.
He answered her, "At dawn."
"And where?"
"To Paris. I will find fame—or a grave."
A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken; but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in silence.
He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.
He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him, to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot—as he chose.
"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base to you,—brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;—yet I would have loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is dead in me, I think, otherwise——"
She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they never again will rest.
Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields, and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was tender. He had no love for her; and yet—now that he had thrown her from him forever—he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in their terrible eloquence upon his own.