In the room below, the old Norman woman, who did not fear her taskmaster, unbarred the shutter to let the moon shine in the room, and by its light put away her wheel and work, and cut a halved lettuce up upon a platter, with some dry bread, and ate them for her supper.
The old man knelt down before the leaden image, and joined his knotted hands, and prayed in a low, fierce, eager voice, while the heavy pendulum of the clock swung wearily to and fro.
The clock kept fitful and uncertain time; it had been so long imprisoned in the gloom there among the beams and cobwebs, and in this place life was so dull, so colorless, so torpid, that it seemed to have forgotten how time truly went, and to wake up now and then with a shudder of remembrance, in which its works ran madly down.
The old woman ended her supper, munching the lettuce-leaves thirstily in her toothless mouth, and not casting so much as a crumb of the crusts to the cat, who pitifully watched, and mutely implored, with great ravenous amber-circled eyes. Then she took her stick and crept out of the kitchen, her wooden shoes clacking loud on the bare red bricks.
"Prayer did little to keep holy the other one," she muttered. "Unless, indeed, the devil heard and answered."
But Claudis Flamma for all that prayed on, entreating the mercy and guidance of Heaven, whilst the gore dripped from the dead rabbit, and the silent song-birds hung stiff upon the nail.
"Thou hast a good laborer," said the old woman Pitchou, with curt significance, to her master, meeting him in the raw of the dawn of the morrow, as he drew the bolts from his house-door. "Take heed that thou dost not drive her away, Flamma. One may beat a saddled mule safely, but hardly so a wolf's cub."
She passed out of the door as she spoke with mop and pail to wash down the paved court outside; but her words abode with her master.
He meddled no more with the wolf's cub.
When Folle-Farine came down the stairs in the crisp, cool, sweet-smelling spring morning that was breaking through the mists over the land and water, he motioned to her to break her fast with the cold porridge left from overnight, and looking at her from under his bent brows with a glance that had some apprehension underneath its anger, apportioned her a task for the early day with a few bitter words of command; but he molested her no further, nor referred ever so faintly to the scene of the past night.
She ate her poor and tasteless meal in silence, and set about her appointed labor without protest. So long as she should eat his bread, so long she said to herself would she serve him. Thus much the pride and honesty of her nature taught her was his due.
He watched her furtively under his shaggy eyebrows. His instinct told him that this nameless, dumb, captive, desert animal, which he had bound as a beast of burden to his mill-wheels, had in some manner learned her strength, and would not long remain content to be thus yoked and driven. He had blinded her with the blindness of ignorance, and goaded her with the goad of ignominy; but for all that, some way her bandaged eyes had sought and found the light, some way her numbed hide had thrilled and swerved beneath the barb.
"She also is a saint; let God take her!" said the old man to himself in savage irony, as he toiled among his mill-gear and his sacks.
His heart was ever sore and in agony because his God had cheated him, letting him hold as purest and holiest among women the daughter who had betrayed him. In his way he prayed still; but chiefly his prayer was a passionate upbraiding, a cynical reproach. She—his beloved, his marvel, his choicest of maidens, his fairest and coldest of virgins—had escaped him and duped him, and been a thing of passion and of foulness, of treachery and of lust, all the while that he had worshiped her. Therefore he hated every breathing thing; therefore he slew the birds in their song, the insects in their summer bravery, the lamb in its gambols, the rabbit in its play amidst the primroses. Therefore he cried to the God whom he still believed in, "Thou lettest that which was pure escape me to be defiled and be slaughtered, and now Thou lettest that which is vile escape me to become beautiful and free and strong!" And now and then, in this woe of his which was so pitiful and yet so brutal, he glanced at her where she labored among the unbudded vines and leafless fruit trees, and whetted a sickle on the whirling grindstone, and felt its edge, and thought to himself. "She was devil-begotten. Would it not be well once and for all to rid men of her?" For, he reasoned, being thus conceived in infamy and branded from her birth upward, how should she be ever otherwise than to men a curse?
Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the bushes and by the glancing water, she saw the steel hook and caught his sideway gaze, and read his meditation.
She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, "He shall not do it till I have been backthere."
Before the day was done, thither she went.
He had kept her close since the sunrise.
Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the country, which had a certain pleasure to her, because she gained by them liberty and air, and the contentment of swift movement against fresh blowing winds. Nor did he send her to the town. He employed her through ten whole hours in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and carrying from his yard to his lofts, always within sight of his own quick eye, and within call of his harsh voice.
She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do swiftly and well. There was no fault to find in any of her labors.
When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, the last burden borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her roughly go indoors and winnow last year's wheat in the store chambers till he should bid her cease.
She came and stood before him, her eyes very quiet in their look of patient strength.
"I have worked from daybreak through to sunset," she said, slowly, to him. "It is enough for man and beast. The rest I claim."
Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone wall that parted the timber-yard from the orchard, and was out of sight, flying far and fast through the twilight of the boughs.
He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped on his breast, his hands worked restlessly on the stone coping of the wall, his withered lips muttered in wrath.
"There is hell in her," he said to himself. "Let her go to her rightful home. There is one thing——"
"There is one thing?" echoed the old woman, hanging washed linen out to dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed almond-shrubs.
He gave a dreary, greedy, miser's chuckle:
"One thing;—I have made the devil work for me hard and well ten whole years through!"
"The devil!" mumbled the woman Pitchou, in contemptuous iteration. "Dost think the devil was ever such a fool as to work for thy wage of blows and of black bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how should he rule unless he paid his people well?"
Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, through the pastures where the leek herds dreamed their days away, through the young wheat and the springing colza, and the little fields all bright with promise of the spring, and all the sunset's wealth of golden light.
The league was but as a step to her, trained as her muscles were to speed and strength until her feet were as fleet as are the doe's. When she had gained her goal then only she paused, stricken with a sudden shyness and terror of what she hardly knew.
An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards a little grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose water never stirred, save by a pigeon's rosy foot, or by a timid plover's beak, was motionless and clear as any mirror.
Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, and taught her eyes to seek her own reflection. It had a certain wonder in it to her now that fascinated her with a curious indefinable attraction. For the first time in her life she had thought of it, and done such slight things as she could to make it greater. They were but few,—linen a little whiter and less coarse—the dust shaken from her scarlet sash; her bronze-hued hair burnished to richer darkness; a knot of wild narcissi in her bosom gathered with the dew on them as she came through the wood.
This was all; yet this was something; something that showed the dawn of human impulses, of womanly desires. As she looked, she blushed for her own foolishness; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood-flowers into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, though only a moment earlier she had gathered them, so senseless and so idle to have decked herself with their borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these he cared!
Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.
Arslàn stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle of wood.
He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face, closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his hold like lead.
She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty nor terror.
It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and threw a black cloth over the trestle.
"Do not look there," he said to her. "I had forgotten you. Otherwise——"
"I have looked there. It is only a dead woman."
"Only! What makes you say that?"
"I do not know. There are many—are there not?"
He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or curiosity was true and not assumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread, and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory of death were wholly absent from her.
"There are many indeed," he made answer, slowly. "Just there is the toughest problem—it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds of human ephemeræ, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is thenumbersthat kill one's dreams of immortality!"
She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.
"It is Fortis, the ragpicker's daughter," she said, indifferently, and dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its calm limbs.
"Yes," he answered her. "It is his daughter. She died twenty hours ago,—of low fever, they say—famine, no doubt."
"Why do you have her here?" She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born; she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.
"The dead sit to me often," he said, with a certain smile that had sadness and yet coldness in it.
"Why?"
"That they may tell me the secrets of life."
"Do they tell them?"
"A few;—most they keep. See,—I paint death; I must watch it to paint it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the riverside last night. He said to me, 'You like studying the dead, they say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving;—and it cannot hurt her.' So I gave him the coin—though I am as poor as he—and I took the dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl shall go to her grave when I have done with her."
She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious pain.
She did not care for the body lying there—it had been but the other day that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past it; but there passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she, likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.
The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to lay her down in the cool water and let it take her to long sleep and to complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner, she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his thought.
Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.
She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;—this seemed to her the most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's daughter lying there in such calm content.
"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no harm; if I did, what would she know?"
"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often thought of it lately."
He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they gained from their study but little.
For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical development, but mindless as any clod of earth.
He did not know how to answer her.
"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so bitter to you?"
She stared at him.
"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"
"But you are so young,—and you are handsome, and a woman?"
She laughed a little.
"A woman! Marcellin said that."
"Well! What is there strange in saying it?"
She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.
"That was a woman—a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I am a devil, they say."
His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and whose irony escaped her.
"What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call you so?"
Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.
"You do not believe that I am a devil?"
"How should I tell? If you covet the title claim it,—you have a right,—you are a woman!"
"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.
"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. "And there is your creator."
"He!"
She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.
"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words out of the empty wind. Hephæstus made her heart, fusing for it brass and iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages. But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night, and tell me your story while I work."
She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.
The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a likeness to his own.
It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body and of the senses.
As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests, and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion: these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?
And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, and stirs in the strangelovesof wind-borne plants, and hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of water that ripples in a brook—to these the mortal life of man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent; tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:—the horse staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of men,—these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.
But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased. It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast broadcast.
Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her—that she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid attitudes, in her curt, unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides, although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship of boors, with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme poverty in which the latter months of his life had been passed, had excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who had brought the dead girl to him for a few brass coins, had been the only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made such change in it worse than its continuance.
In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless, hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance, he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.
He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.
The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once streaming across the darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out again among his fellows, then—the spider is left to miss the human love that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still locked they are much.
Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world's neglect, and they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.
And in these, in their bondage, there were little patience, or sympathy, or softness, and to them, even nature itself at times looked horrible, though never so horrible, because never so despicable, as humanity. Yet, still even in these an instinct of companionship abided; and this creature, with a woman's beauty, and an animal's fierceness and innocence, was in a manner welcome.
"Why were women ever made, then?" she said, after awhile, following, though imperfectly, the drift of his last words, where she lay stretched obedient to his will, under the shadow of the wall.
He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he has heard from the raving lips of some friend fever-stricken.
"Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in the desert. He was content in his solitude: he was holy and at peace: the honey of the wild bee and the fruit of the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him; the lions were his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves; the eagle flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms were his messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and the soul alone had dominion; and day and night, upon the lonely air, he breathed the praise of God.
"Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he said to himself, 'I have lived content; so shall I die purified, and ready for the kingdom of heaven.' For it was in the day when that wooden god, who hangs on the black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but had a name of power and of might, adjuring which, his people smiled under torture, and died in the flame, dreaming of a land where the sun never set, and the song never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest.
"So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was glad and at peace.
"One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain torrents fell, to the door of his cave there came a wayfarer, fainting, sickly, lame, trembling with terror of the desert, and beseeching him to save her from the panthers.
"He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, for he said, 'Wheresoever a woman enters, there the content of a man is dead.' But she was in dire distress, and entreated him with tears and supplications not to turn her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and he felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened the door to her, and bade her enter and be at sanctuary there in God's name.
"But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and want fell from off her, her eyes grew as two stars, her lips were sweet as the rose of the desert, her limbs had the grace of the cheetah, her body had the radiance and the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And she laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, 'Thou thinkest thou hast lived, and yet thou hast not loved! Oh, sage! oh, saint! oh, fool, fool, fool!' Then into his veins there rushed youth, and into his brain there came madness; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity loathsome since passionless; and he stretched his arms to her and sought to embrace her, crying, 'Stay with me, though I buy thee with hell.' And she stayed.
"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.
"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to die."
He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters, the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of passionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial, with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into picture-like formations.
She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.
No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.
"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.
"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."
Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with the new light that broke in on her.
"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"
Arslàn rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic smile.
"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's kingdom of heaven!"
She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had understood the parable of his narrative, yet the passion of it had passed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.
"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.
"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse through which he has walked—himself sane—in a bygone time.
"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong, half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want—I want to have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and they pray."
"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his god. "Who does not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."
A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not, since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the passion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.
"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has none."
"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but it is your god only whom in their hearts they worship. See how the Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."
"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none to the devil?"
"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret god. Look you: I will tell you another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to all the various deities of all the peoples that worshiped under the sun. There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense before its divinity.
"Now, no nation would look at the god of another; and each people clustered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying out, 'There is no god but this god.'
"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king, whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought nothing but discord and war.'
"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar whereat all men shall worship, leaving their own gods.'
"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man, but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.
"And each man forsook his god, and came and kneeled before this nameless altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in solitude. The poor forsaken gods stood naked and alone; there was not one man left to worship one of them."
She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.
She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken God on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that worship them.
"If I had a god," she said, suddenly, "if a god cared to claim me—I would be proud of his worship everywhere."
Arslàn smiled.
"All women have a god; that is why they are at once so much weaker and so much happier than men."
"Who are their gods?"
"Their name is legion. Innocent women make gods of their offspring, of their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples. Others—less innocent—make gods of their own forms and faces; of bright stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and fine linen, of passions, and vanities, and desires; gods that they consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat, and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these gods will be yours?"
She thought awhile.
"None of them," she said at last.
"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"
She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.
"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that God is deaf. He must be deaf—or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no God pities and makes an end of the earth. I would—if I were He. Look—at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth; the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only scream—scream—scream. All in vain. Its God never heard. When I got it free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a god since all gods let these things be?"
Arslàn smiled as he heard.
"Child,—men care for a god only as a god means a good to them. Men are heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make life hell to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them. You do not understand that,—tut! You are not human, then. If you were human, you would begrudge a blade of grass to a rabbit, and arrogate to yourself a lease of immortality."
She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him, and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity. It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to gratify the appetites or the avarice of humanity—these sufferings were horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,—a crime for which she hated God and Man.
"There is no god pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no god—not one?"
"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three brethren that watched above her.
"Are they your gods?"
A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him passed a moment over his mouth.
"My gods?—No. They are the gods of youth and of age—not of manhood."
"What is yours, then?"
"Mine?—a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen hands I have put them and myself—forever."
She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he passed his years in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous shapes that rose and bloomed around him.
"Those are gentler gods?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the brethren above her. "Do you never—will you never—worship them?"
"I have ceased to worship them. In time—when the world has utterly beaten me—no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one, see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."
"And that god is——"
"Death!"
She was silent.
Was this god not her god also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?
"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.
And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the secrets of men,—he who alone of all the gods reads the truths of men's souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling what lies he will to please the world a little space. Thanatos holds silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all things fall at last.
When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know—and had he known would not have heeded—that instead of going on her straight path back to Yprès she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the riverside.
It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing snatches of a republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in which all their metal tongues joined musically.
She remained there undisturbed among the long grasses and the tufts of the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the gods, the black shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead body, and the bending figure of Arslàn as he stooped above the corpse and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of death.
To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make death—men's conqueror—his servant and his slave; she only begrudged every passionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.
He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the darkness.
He worked more than half the night—worked until the small store of oil he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon his lungs.
The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever on the colorless lips; of the passion blushes that had died out forever on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had neither sex nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of poverty and of obscurity.
The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.
Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim wildly and weakly?"
He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only that one dead woman shared.
He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought, until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once despairs of itself as self-deception.
Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told himself, it must be so.
He paused by the open casement, and looked outward, scarcely knowing what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of which paused by his tomb.
It grew horrible to him—this death in life, to which in the freshness of manhood he found himself condemned.
"Oh, God!" he, who believed in no God, muttered half aloud, "let me be without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long—let me be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days. Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men cannot, if they wish, let die."
Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say? Daily and nightly, through all the generations of the world, the human creature implores from his Creator the secrets of his existence, and asks in vain. There is one answer indeed; but it is the answer of all the million races of the universe, which only cry, "We are born but to perish; is Humanity a thing so high and pure that it should claim exemption from the universal and inexorable law?"
One mortal listener heard, hidden among the hollow sighing rushes, bathed in the moonlight and the mists; and the impersonal passion which absorbed him found echo in this inarticulate imperfect soul, just wakened in its obscurity to the first faint meanings of its mortal life as a nest-bird rouses in the dawn to the first faint pipe of its involuntary cry.
She barely knew what he sought, what he asked, and yet her heart ached with his desire, and shared the bitterness of his denial. What kind of life he craved in the ages to come; what manner of remembrance he yearned for from unborn races of man; what thing it was that he besought should be given to him in the stead of all love, all peace, all personal woes and physical delights, she did not know; the future to her had no meaning; and the immortal fame that he craved was an unknown god, of whose worship she had no comprehension; and yet she vaguely felt that what he sought was that his genius still should live when his body should be destroyed, and that those mute, motionless, majestic shapes which arose at his bidding should become characters and speak for him to all the generations of men when his own mouth should be sealed dumb in death.
This hunger of the soul which unmanned and tortured him, though the famine of the flesh had had no power to move him, thrilled her with the instinct of its greatness. This thirst of the mind, which could not slake itself in common desire or sensual satiety, or any peace and pleasure of the ordinary life of man, had likeness in it to that dim instinct which had made her nerves throb at the glories of the changing skies, and her eyes fill with tears at the sound of a bird's singing in the darkness of dawn, and her heart yearn with vain nameless longing as for some lost land, for some forgotten home, in the radiant hush of earth and air at sunrise. He suffered as she suffered; and a sweet newborn sense of unity and of likeness stirred in her amidst the bitter pity of her soul. To her he was as a king: and yet he was powerless. To give him power she would have died a thousand deaths.
"The gods gave me life for him," she thought. "His life instead of mine. Will they forget?—Will they forget?"
And where she crouched in the gloom beneath the bulrushes she flung herself down prostrate in supplication, her face buried in the long damp river-grass.
"Oh, Immortals," she implored, in benighted, wistful, passionate faith, "remember to give me his life and take mine. Do what you choose with me; forsake me, kill me; cast my body to fire, and my ashes to the wind; let me be trampled like the dust, and despised as the chaff; let me be bruised, beaten, nameless, hated always; let me always suffer and always be scorned; but grant me this one thing—to give him his desire!"
Unless the gods gave him greatness, she knew that vain would be the gift of life—the gift of mere length of years which she had bought for him.
Her mind had been left blank as a desert, whilst in its solitude dreams had sprung forth windsown, like wayside grasses, and vague desires wandered like wild doves: but although blank, the soil was rich and deep and virgin.
Because she had dwelt sundered from her kind she had learned no evil: a stainless though savage innocence had remained with her. She had been reared in hardship and inured to hunger until such pangs seemed to her scarce worth the counting save perhaps to see if they had been borne with courage and without murmur. On her, profoundly unconscious of the meaning of any common luxury or any common comfort, the passions of natures, more worldly-wise and better aware of the empire of gold, had no hold at any moment. To toil dully and be hungry and thirsty, and fatigued and footsore, had been her daily portion. She knew nothing of the innumerable pleasures and powers that the rich command. She knew scarcely of the existence of the simplest forms of civilization: therefore she knew nothing of all that he missed through poverty; she only perceived, by an unerring instinct of appreciation, all that he gained through genius.
Her mind was profoundly ignorant; her character trained by cruelty only to endurance: yet the soil was not rank but only untilled, not barren but only unsown; nature had made it generous, though fate had left it untilled; it grasped the seed of the first great idea cast to it and held it firm, until it multiplied tenfold.
The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good things of which no man had taught her in anywise.
Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters, the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.
He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual delight, but only this one thing—a name that should not perish from among the memories of men.
And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his body should be destroyed.
It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his, though weakened.
The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air, and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest-land and water-world are audible.
He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his life, and honored it without doubt or question.
No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.
She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not dare to say her nay.
A new and wondrous and exquisite life was shortly opening to her; the life of the imagination.
All these many years since the last song of Phratos had died off her ear, never again to be heard, she had spent with no more culture and with no more pleasure than the mule had that she led with his load along the miry ways in the sharp winter-time. Yet even through that utter neglect, and that torpor of thought and feeling, some wild natural fancy had been awake in her, some vague sense stir that brought to her in the rustle of leaves, in the sound of waters, the curling breath of mists, the white birth of lilies, in all the notes and hues of the open-air world, a mystery and a loveliness that they did not bear for any of those around her.
Now in the words that Arslàn cast to her—often as idly and indifferently as a man casts bread to frozen birds on snow, birds that he pities and yet cares nothing for—the old religions, the old beliefs, became to her living truths and divine companions. The perplexities of the world grew little clearer to her, indeed; and the miseries of the animal creation no less hideous a mystery. The confusion of all things was in nowise clearer to her; even, it might be, they deepened and grew more entangled. He could imbue her with neither credulity nor contentment; for he possessed neither, and despised both, as the fool's paradise of those who, having climbed a sand-hill, fancy that they have ascended Zion.
The weariness, the unrest, the desire, the contempt of such a mind as his can furnish anodynes neither to itself nor any other. But such possessions and consolations—and these are limitless—as the imagination can create, he placed within her reach. Before she had dreamed—dreamed all through the heaviness of toil and the gall of tyranny; but she had dreamed as a goatherd may upon a mist-swept hill, by the western seas, while all the earth is dark, and only its dim fugitive waking sounds steal dully on the drowsy ear. But now, through the myths and parables which grew familiar to her ear, she dreamed almost as poets dream, bathed in the full flood of a setting sun on the wild edge of the Campagna; a light in which all common things of daily life grow glorious, and through whose rosy hues the only sound that comes is some rich dulcet bell that slowly swings in all the majesty and melody of prayer.
The land was no more to her only a hard and cruel place of labor and butchery, in which all creatures suffered and were slain. All things rose to have their story and their symbol for her; Nature remaining to her that one sure solace and immeasurable mystery which she had feebly felt it even in her childhood, was brought closer to her, and made fuller of compassion. All the forms and voices of the fair dead years of the world seemed to grow visible and audible to her, with those marvelous tales of the old heroic age which little by little he unfolded to her.
In the people around her, and in their faiths, she had no belief; she wanted a faith, and found one in all these strange sweet stories of a perished time.
She had never thought that there had been any other generation before that which was present on earth with her; any other existence than this narrow and sordid one which encircled her. That men had lived who had fashioned those aerial wonders of the tall cathedral spires, and stained those vivid hues in its ancient casements, had been a fact too remote to be known to her, though for twelve years her eyes had gazed at them in reverence of their loveliness.
Through Arslàn the exhaustless annals of the world's history opened before her, the present ceased to matter to her in its penury and pain; for the treasury-houses of the golden past were opened to her sight. Most of all she loved the myths of the Homeric and Hesiodic ages; and every humble and homely thing became ennobled to her and enriched, beholding it through the halo of poetry and tradition.
When aloft in the red and white apple-blossoms two sparrows pecked and screamed and spent the pleasant summer hours above in the flower-scented air in shrill dispute and sharp contention, she thought that she heard in all their noisy notes the arrogant voices of Alcyone and Cyx. When the wild hyacinths made the ground purple beneath the poplars and the pines, she saw in them the transformed loveliness of one who had died in the fullness of youth, at play in a summer's noon, and died content because stricken by the hand of the greatest and goodliest of all gods, the god that loved him best. As the cattle, with their sleek red hides and curling horns, came through the fogs of the daybreak, across the level meadows, and through the deep dock-leaves, they seemed to her no more the mere beasts of stall and share, but even as the milk-white herds that grazed of yore in the blest pastures of Pieria.
All night, in the heart of the orchards, when the song of the nightingales rose on the stillness, it was no longer for her a little brown bird that sang to the budding fruit and the closed daisies, but was the voice of Ædon bewailing her son through the ages, or the woe of Philomela crying through the wilderness. When through the white hard brilliancy of noonday the swift swallow darted down the beams of light, she saw no longer in it an insect-hunter, a house-nesting creature, but saw the shape of Procne, slaughter-haunted, seeking rest and finding none. And when she went about her labors, hewing wood, drawing water, bearing the corn to the grindstones, leading the mules to the mill-stream, she ceased to despair. For she had heard the old glad story of the children of Zeus who dwelt so long within a herdsman's hut, nameless and dishonored, yet lived to go back crowned to Thebes and see the beasts of the desert and the stones of the streets rise up and obey the magic of their song.
Arslàn in his day had given many evil gifts, but this one gift that he gave was pure and full of solace: this gift of the beauty of the past. Imperfect, obscure, broken in fragments, obscured by her own ignorance, it was indeed when it reached her; yet it came with a glory that time could not dim, and a consolation that ignorance could not impair.
"What has come to that evil one? She walks the land as though she were a queen," the people of Yprès said to one another, watching the creature they abhorred as she went through the town to the river-stair or to the market-stall.
She seemed to them transfigured.
A perpetual radiance shone in the dark depths of her eyes; a proud elasticity replaced the old sullen defiance of her carriage: her face had a sweet musing mystery and dreaminess on it; and when she smiled her smile was soft, and sudden, like the smile of one who bears fair tidings in her heart unspoken.
Even those people, dull and plodding and taciturn, absorbed in their small trades or in their continual field labor, were struck by the change in her, and looked after her, and listened in a stupid wonder to the sonorous songs in an unknown tongue that rose so often on her lips as she strode among the summer grasses or led the laden mules through the fords.
They saw, even with their eyes purblind from hate, that she had thrown off their yoke, and had escaped from their narrow world, and was happy with some rich, mute, nameless happiness that they could neither evade nor understand.
The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful, clouded, fierce face.
As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free forest animal, was in a way welcome.
All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another planet than his own.
He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the tyranny of a human love.
She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows, and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake what slumbered there.
But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.
The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.
He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself; despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing—a thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,—these were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own weakness.
She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.
Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at her.
"She has found a lover,—oh-ho!—that brown wicked thing! A lover meet for her;—a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"—so the women screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.
At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.
In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy itself in its own darkness:—he had never stretched a finger to hold it back.
The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first day, breathed a word to Arslàn of the treatment that she received at Yprès. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.
And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.
So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslàn's tower she spent in acquiring another art,—she learned to read.
There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was better educated than most, and could even write a little.
To her Folle-Farine went.
"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."
The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still——" The wish for the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She consented.
Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and despair of all the market-place.
Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder, and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.
Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslàn.
It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings; the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their folded white lilies,—these were all things he cared to study.
The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to move abroad.
Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of all honest folk, were after some unholy work—coming from the orgy of some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.
For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.
Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages she could for learning the art of letters.
The acquisition was hard and hateful—a dull plodding task that she detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen in communion with the wicked thing of Yprès.