Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from that belonged to the herb-seller—a rude old tattered pamphlet recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you were not so ignorant!"—and since that day she had set herself to clear away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood with her hatchet.
It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles to me."
He praised her; and she was glad and proud.
It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;—a love that unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her, and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.
He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.
A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman woods,—what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission, was welcome to him.
And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.
She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at the blue-rock on the wing.
This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit—habit, and the callousness begotten by his own continual pain.
The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.
He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.
His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition—a passion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.
"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of hours—waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly. It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to do with you, go and hang yourself—or if you fear to do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before you, Hosannah."
So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew over them.
Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught her.
"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?—if the world's choice were wrong once, why not twice?"
Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth than the ice floes of his native seas.
"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas—the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."
She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.
"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they bow when they pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But with Barabbas—what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise him?"
Arslàn laughed a little.
"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay whitening on the plains—those times were primitive, the world was young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all who run may read. In our day Barabbas—the Barabbas of money greeds and delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the assassination that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals moral death and not material death—our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud in the place of mailed Force,—lives always in purple and fine linen, and ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his corpse."
He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right, where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to his hand.
She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.
"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly. "I have thought of something."
And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him; a vision had arisen before him.
The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded away as though they had existed only in a dream.
All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld them.
The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a city at high festival.
And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.
A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose; a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose gleaming marble walls the silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they had one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a god's pity and a man's reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.
And triumphant in the throng, whose choice he was, seated aloft upon men's shoulders, with a purple robe thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, grinning, bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of lust, of obscenity, of brutality, of avarice, of desire. This man the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, content in the guide whom they had chosen, victorious in the fiend for whom they spurned a deity; crying, with wide-open throats and brazen lungs,—"Barabbas!"
There was not a form in all this closed-packed throng which had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in itself a symbol of some lust or of some vice, for which women and men abjure the godhead in them.
One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his amphora broken beneath him, the stream of the purple wine lapped eagerly by ragged children.
A money-changer had left the receipt of custom, eager to watch and shout, and a thief clutched both hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.
A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to catch at all the rolling pieces, regardless in his greed how the crowd trampled and trod on him.
A mother chid and struck her little brown curly child, because he stretched his arms and turned his face towards the thorn-crowned captive.
A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife thrust in his girdle, dragged beside him, by the throat, a little tender lamb doomed for the sacrifice.
A dancing-woman with jewels in her ears, and half naked to the waist, sounding the brazen cymbals above her head, drew a score of youths after her in Barabbas' train.
On one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and fine linen, looking down on the street below from the thick foliage of her citron boughs and her red Syrian roses, was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning beside her, tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young centurion of the Roman guard, languid and laughing, with his fair chest bare to the heat, and his armor flung in a pile beside him.
And thus, in like manner, every figure bore its parable; whilst above all was the hard, hot, cruel, cloudless sky of blue, without one faintest mist to break its horrible serenity, and, high in the azure ether and against the sun, an eagle and a vulture fought, locked close, and tearing at each other's breasts.
Six nights the conception occupied him—his days were not his own, he spent them in a rough mechanical labor which his strength executed while his mind was far away from it; but the nights were all his, and at the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as far as his hand could perfect it; begotten by a chance and ignorant word as have been many of the greatest works the world has seen;—oaks sprung from the acorn that a careless child has let fall.
When he had finished it, his arm dropped to his side, he stood motionless; the red glow of the dawn lighting the dreamy depths of his sleepless eyes.
He knew that his work was good.
The artist, for one moment of ecstasy, realizes the content of a god when, resting from his labors, he knows that those labors have borne their full fruit.
It is only for a moment; the greater the artist the more swiftly will discontent and misgiving overtake him, the more quickly will the feebleness of his execution disgust him in comparison with the splendor of his ideal; the more surely will he—though the world ring with applause of him—be enraged and derisive and impatient at himself.
But while the moment lasts it is a rapture; keen, pure, intense, surpassing every other. In it, fleeting though it be, he is blessed with a blessing that never falls on any other creature. The work of his brain and of his hand contents him,—it is the purest joy on earth.
Arslàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imagination for which he had given up sleep, and absorbed in which he had almost forgotten hunger and thirst and the passage of time.
He had known no rest until he had embodied the shapes that pursued him. He had scarcely spoken, barely slumbered an hour; tired out, consumed with restless fever, weak from want of sleep and neglect of food he had worked on, and on, and on, until the vision as he had beheld it lived there, recorded for the world that denied him.
As he looked on it he felt his own strength, and was glad; he had faith in himself though he had faith in no other thing; he ceased to care what other fate befell him, so that only this supreme power of creation remained with him.
His lamp died out; the bell of a distant clock chimed the fourth hour of the passing night.
The day broke in the east, beyond the gray levels of the fields and plains; the dusky crimson of the dawn rose over the cool dark skies; the light of the morning stars came in and touched the visage of his fettered Christ; all the rest was in shadow.
He himself remained motionless before it. He knew that in it lay the best achievement, the highest utterance, the truest parable, that the genius in him had ever conceived and put forth;—and he knew too that he was as powerless to raise it to the public sight of men as though he were stretched dead beneath it. He knew that there would be none to heed whether it rotted there in the dust, or perished by moth or by flame, unless indeed some illness should befall him, and it should be taken with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of bread, or oil, or fuel.
There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his mind and his hand—and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for their meaning.
To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.
A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.
"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on it."
All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on canvas.
If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the wing of the owl and the flittermouse.
The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.
Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.
She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have remembered.
She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him and looked;—looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.
The dawn was brighter now, red and hazy with curious faint gleams of radiance from the sun, that as yet was not risen. All the light there was fell on the crowd of Jerusalem.
One ray white and pure fell upon the bowed head of the bound God.
She stood and gazed at it.
She had watched it all grow gradually into being from out the chaos of dull spaces and confused lines. This art, which could call life from the dry wastes of wood and paper, and shed perpetual light where all was darkness, was even to her an alchemy incomprehensible, immeasurable; a thing not to be criticised or questioned, but adored in all its unscrutable and majestic majesty. To her it could not have been more marvelous if his hand had changed the river-sand to gold, or his touch wakened the dead cornflowers to bloom afresh as living asphodels. But now for once she forgot the sorcery of the art in the terror and the pathos of the story that it told; now for once she forgot, in the creation, its creator.
All she saw was the face of the Christ,—the pale bent face, in whose eyes there was a patience so perfect, a pity so infinite, a reproach that had no wrath, a scorn that had no cruelty.
She had hated the Christ on the cross, because he was the God of the people she hated, and in whose name they reviled her. But this Christ moved her strangely—there, in the light, alone; betrayed and forsaken while the crowd rushed on, lauding Barabbas.
Ignorant though she was, the profound meanings of the parable penetrated her with their ironies and with their woe—the parable of the genius rejected and the thief exalted.
She trembled and was silent; and in her eyes sudden tears swam.
"They have talked of their God—often—so often," she muttered. "But I never knew till now what they meant."
Arslàn turned and looked at her. He had not known that she was there.
"Is it so?" he said, slowly. "Well—the world refuses me fame; but I do not know that the world could give me a higher tribute than your admiration."
"The world?" she echoed, with her eyes still fastened on the head of the Christ and the multitudes that flocked after Barabbas. "The world? You care for the world—you?—who have paintedthat?"
Arslàn did not answer her: he felt the rebuke.
He had drawn the picture in all its deadly irony, in all its pitiless truth, only himself to desire and strive for the wine streams and the painted harlotry, and the showers of gold, and the false gods of a worldly success.
Was he a renegade to his own religion; a skeptic of his own teaching?
It was not for the first time that the dreamy utterances of this untrained and imperfect intelligence had struck home to the imperious and mature intellect of the man of genius.
He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.
"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it,—we are prophets so far,—but when we come down from our Horeb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."
She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.
Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there kneeled and prayed.
Without looking at her, Arslàn went out to his daily labor on the waters.
The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and voices of innumerable birds.
"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."
Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire with a child's desire, the stars.
For the earth is crowded full with clay gods and false prophets, and fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and if a man pass unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed on him and shut him forever from sight.
When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden.
But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be moved, and swift—terribly swift—to forget.
Why should it not be?
It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.
And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of the wind, and forever—forever unanswered!
One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set.
"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"
"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"
"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it is."
"The man has never yet lived who could tell—in fit language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."
So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves.
It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a broad estuary.
She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to herself.
When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as probably some wide canal black with mud and dust and edged by dull pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in human nature.
A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the death-screams of scalded shellfish.
He did not take her thither.
He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known restraint.
Some few people passed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leafage; all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze, for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.
"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale crescent of a week-old moon.
"To live apart?"—she did not understand.
"Yes—like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"
Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.
"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing—not so much as a fair word. That is well."
"I think it is well—if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."
"I am strong."
She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force, which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.
"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered. "I know what you mean—now. It is well—it was well with those men you tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm, and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"
"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool. And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and despised?"
Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and fierce as she answered him:
"See here.—There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of God in Paradise.'
"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to go near by a league.
"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pass. He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay, greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.
"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the priests honor her, and she never misses a mass. She has an old blind mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall, and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now—is it well or no to be hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."
She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and classing the kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any creature.
She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a passion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.
He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He answered her merely, with a smile:
"You are only a barbarian; how should you understand that the seductions of civilization lie in its multiplications of the forms of vice? Men would not bear its yoke an hour if it did not in return facilitate their sins. You are an outcast from it;—so you have kept your hands honest and your lips pure. You may be right to be thankful—I would not pretend to decide."
"At least—I would not be as they are," she answered him with a curl of the mouth, and a gleam in her eyes: the pride of the old nomadic tribes, whose blood was in her, asserting itself against the claimed superiority of the tamed and hearth-bound races—blood that ran free and fearless to the measure of boundless winds and rushing waters; that made the forest and the plain, the dawn and the darkness, the flight of the wild roe and the hiding-place of the wood pigeon, dearer than any roof-tree, sweeter than any nuptial bed.
She had left the old life so long—so long that even her memories of it were dim as dreams, and its language had died off her lips in all save the broken catches of her songs; but the impulses of it were in her, vivid and ineradicable, and the scorn with which the cowed and timid races of hearth and of homestead regarded her, she, the daughter of Taric, gave back to them in tenfold measure.
"I would not be as they are!" she repeated, her eyes glancing through the sunshine of the cloudless day. "To sit and spin; to watch their soup-pot boil; to spend their days under a close roof; to shut the stars out, and cover themselves in their beds, as swine do with their straw in the sty; to huddle all together in thousands, fearing to do what they will, lest the tongue of their neighbor wag evil of it; to cheat a little and steal a little, and lie always when the false word serves them, and to mutter to themselves, 'God will wash us free of our sins,' and then to go and sin again stealthily, thinking men will not see and sure that their God will give them a quittance;—that is their life. I would not be as they are."
And her spirits rose, and her earliest life in the Liebana seemed to flash on her for one moment clear and bright through the veil of the weary years, and she walked erect and swiftly through the gorse, singing by his side the bold burden of one of the old sweet songs.
And for the first time the thought passed over Arslàn:
"This tameless wild doe would crouch like a spaniel, and be yoked as a beast of burden,—if I chose."
Whether or no he chose he was not sure.
She was beautiful in her way; barbaric, dauntless, innocent, savage; he cared to hurt, to please, to arouse, to study, to portray her; but to seek love from her he did not care.
And yet she was most lovely in her own wild fashion like a young desert mare, or a seagull on the wing; and he wondered to himself that he cared for her no more, as he moved beside her through the thickets of the gorse and against the strong wind blowing from the sea.
There was so little passion left in him.
He had tossed aside the hair of dead women and portrayed the limbs and the features of living ones till that ruthless pursuit had brought its own penalty with it; and the beauty of women scarcely moved him more than did the plumage of a bird or the contour of a marble. His senses were drugged, and his heart was dead; it was well that it should be so, he had taught himself to desire it; and yet——
As they left the cliff-road for the pathless downs that led toward the summit of the rocks, they passed by a wayside hut, red with climbing creepers, and all alone on the sandy soil, like the little nest of a yellowhammer.
Through its unclosed shutter the light of the sun streamed into it; the interior was visible. It was very poor—a floor of mud, a couch of rushes; a hearth on which a few dry sticks were burning; walls lichen-covered and dropping moisture. Before the sticks, kneeling and trying to make them burn up more brightly to warm the one black pot that hung above them, was a poor peasant girl, and above her leaned a man who was her lover, a fisher of the coast, as poor, as hardy, and as simple as herself.
In the man's eye the impatience of love was shining, and as she lifted her head, after breathing with all her strength on the smoking sticks, he bent and drew her in his arms and kissed her rosy mouth and the white lids that drooped over her bright blue smiling northern eyes. She let the fuel lie still to blaze or smoulder as it would, and leaned her head against him, and laughed softly at his eagerness. Arslàn glanced at them as he passed.
"Poor brutes!" he muttered. "Yet how happy they are! It must be well to be so easily content, and to find a ready-made fool's paradise in a woman's lips."
Folle-Farine hearing him, paused, and looked also. She trembled suddenly, and walked on in silence.
A new light broke on her, and dazzled her, and made her afraid: this forest-born creature, who had never known what fear was.
The ground ascended as it stretched seaward, but on it there were only wide dull fields of colza or of grass lying, sickly and burning, under the fire of the late afternoon sun. The slope was too gradual to break their monotony.
Above them was the cloudless weary blue; below them was the faint parched green; other color there was none; one little dusky panting bird flew by pursued by a kite; that was the only change.
She asked him no questions; she walked mutely and patiently by his side; she hated the dull heat, the colorless waste, the hard scorch of the air, the dreary changelessness of the scene. But she did not say so. He had chosen to come to them.
A league onward the fields were merged into a heath, uncultivated and covered with short prickly furze; on the brown earth between the stunted bushes a few goats were cropping the burnt-up grasses. Here the slope grew sharper, and the earth seemed to rise up between the sky and them, steep and barren as a house-roof.
Once he asked her,—
"Are you tired?"
She shook her head.
Her feet ached, and her heart throbbed; her limbs were heavy like lead in the heat and the toil. But she did not tell him so. She would have dropped dead from exhaustion rather than have confessed to him any weakness.
He took the denial as it was given, and pressed onward up the ascent.
The sun was slanting towards the west; the skies seemed like brass; the air was sharp, yet scorching; the dull brown earth still rose up before them like a wall; they climbed it slowly and painfully, their hands and their teeth filled with its dust, that drifted in a cloud before them. He bade her close her eyes, and she obeyed him. He stretched his arm out and drew her after him up the ascent that was slippery from drought and prickly from the stunted growth of furze.
On the summit he stood still and released her.
"Now look."
She opened her eyes with the startled half-questioning stare of one led out from utter darkness into a full and sudden light.
Then, with a cry, she sank down on the rock, trembling, weeping, laughing, stretching out her arms to the new glory that met her sight, dumb with its grandeur, delirious with its delight.
For what she saw was the sea.
Before her dazzled sight all its beauty stretched, the blueness of the waters meeting the blueness of the skies; radiant with all the marvels of its countless hues; softly stirred by a low wind that sighed across it; bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on it from the westward; rolling from north to south in slow sonorous measure, filling the silent air with ceaseless melody. The luster of the sunset beamed upon it; the cool fresh smell of its water shot like new life through all the scorch and stupor of the day; its white foam curled and broke on the brown curving rocks and wooded inlets of the shores; innumerable birds, that gleamed like silver, floated or flew above its surface; all was still, still as death, save only for the endless movement of those white swift wings and the susurrus of the waves, in which all meaner and harsher sounds of earth seemed lost and hushed to slumber and to silence.
The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in the sweet young years of the earth when men were not; as, maybe, it will be its turn to reign again in the years to come, when men and all their works shall have passed away and be no more seen nor any more remembered.
Arslàn watched her in silence.
He was glad that it should awe and move her thus. The sea was the only thing for which he cared; or which had any power over him. In the northern winter of his youth he had known the ocean in one wild night's work undo all that men had done to check and rule it, and burst through all the barriers that they had raised against it, and throw down the stones of the altar and quench the fires of the hearth, and sweep through the fold and the byre, and flood the cradle of the child and the grave of the grandsire. He had seen the storms wash away at one blow the corn harvests of years, and gather in the sheep from the hills, and take the life of the shepherd with the life of the flock. He had seen it claim lovers locked in each other's arms, and toss the fair curls of the first-born as it tossed the ribbon-weeds of its deeps. And he had felt small pity; it had rather given him a sense of rejoicing and triumph to see the water laugh to scorn those who were so wise in their own conceit, and bind beneath its chains those who held themselves masters over all beasts of the field and birds of the air.
Other men dreaded the sea and cursed it; but he in his way loved it almost with passion, and could he have chosen the manner of his death would have desired that it should be by the sea and through the sea; a death cold and serene and dreamily voluptuous; a death on which no woman should look and in which no man should have share.
He watched her now for some time without speaking. When the first paroxysm of her emotion had exhausted itself, she stood motionless, her figure like a statue of bronze against the sun, her head sunk upon her breast, her arms outstretched as though beseeching the wondrous brightness which she saw to take her to itself and make her one with it. Her whole attitude expressed an unutterable worship. She was like one who for the first time hears of God.
"What is it you feel?" he asked her suddenly. He knew without asking; but he had made it his custom to dissect all her joys and sufferings, with little heed whether he thus added to either.
At the sound of his voice she started, and a shiver shook her as she answered him slowly, without withdrawing her gaze from the waters,—
"It has been there always—always—so near me?"
"Before the land, the sea was."
"And I never knew!"
Her head drooped on her breast; tears rolled silently down her checks; her arms fell to her sides; she shivered again and sighed. She knew all she had lost—this is the greatest grief that life holds.
"You never knew," he made answer. "There was only a sand-hill between you and all this glory; but the sand-hill was enough. Many people never climb theirs all their lives long."
The words and their meaning escaped her.
She had for once no remembrance of him; nor any other sense save of this surpassing wonder which had thus burst on her—this miracle that had been near her for so long, yet of which she had never in all her visions dreamed.
She was quite silent; sunk there on her knees, motionless, and gazing straight, with eyes unblenching, at the light.
There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.
He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:
"Since it pains you come away."
A great sob shuddered through her.
"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?—it is life, heaven, liberty!"
For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and passions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.
Arslàn looked at her, and let her be.
Passionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the passions of this untrained and intense nature had interest for him—the cold interest of analysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with little pity and little tenderness.
The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still that look of one who worships with intense honor and passionate faith an unknown God.
The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens; the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the rocks; the shores of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came faint and weirdlike.
Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and draw her to it with some unseen power.
She started again as Arslàn spoke.
"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"
She gave a heavy stifled sigh.
"It looks so free. And I——"
On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a slave—since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its weight was upon her.
He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.
"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty, but obedience—just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it, but nature has never accorded it."
The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a rose.
"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only known—I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on it—as that bird floats—it would be so quiet there and it would not fling me back, I think. It would have pity."
Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire was in it.
"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"
"You live," she said, simply.
He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.
"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."
With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and fled at the human footsteps.
She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she obeyed.
With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.
It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.
But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.
He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her the center of innumerable stories.
He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg. He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's sake spoke not.
He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell, the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.
Of all the studies he made from her—he all the while cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of sacrifice,—those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath, around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken—the one touch of pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.
In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,—ready for the mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,—ready for the feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in dust.
And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so unsparing and unfaltering a hand.
Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power, because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder, which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his bidding.
She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.
She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would. That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslàn seemed sweet as the south wind.
To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life sublime to her.
"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Yprès went down the water-street beneath.
"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are—the little mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they say—sooner or later—to every creature that lives again for him in his art?"
Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.
"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.
"And you have no fear?"
"I have no fear."
The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow tresses.
"Well—the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you—his daughter—to lend yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that for you—his own-begotten—I will cleave close to the saints and the angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."
The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around which they beat with their wings the empty air.
The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched. If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing, she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.
Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.
The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen down,—she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a human joy.
Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely, with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her—nay, unfelt—went on her daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes, and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and entered into a heritage of grace.
She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity; proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God for it—that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries of the starlit skies.
Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him, and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave; she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.
To be of use to him,—to be held of any worth to him,—to have his eyes find any loveliness to study in her,—to be to him only as a flower that he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out on the land to wither as it would,—this, even this, seemed to her the noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.
That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme, passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated all that they consumed.
"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.
One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.
The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn; she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain.
He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for his art:—a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable passion.
Art is so vast; and human life is so little.
It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance and submission to his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of the Mexican nation.
The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have perished frozen in perpetual night.
So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?
The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much of its priests.
"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.
She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.
"I was thinking,—I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of,—the one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut down to make into a flute."
"Ah?—you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the market."
"That is not the fault of the reeds?"
"Not that I know; it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do you think the reed felt then?—pain to be so sharply severed from its fellows?"
"No—or the god would not have chosen it"
"What, then?"
A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath into the little life of a day.
"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter the toads and the newts,—there is not a note of music in them all—except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they remember that long—long—ago, the breath of a great god was in them."
Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.
He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.
"Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard you, he would think you mad."
"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"
"Nothing at all;—that I know. But you seem to envy that reed—so long ago—that was chosen?"
"Who would not?"
"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;—dancing there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."
"Nay;—how do you know?"
Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.
"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather it was born in the sands, among the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,—no one asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad—no one caring where it dropped. Rather,—it grew there by the river, and such millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn. And then—I think I see!—the great god walked by the edge of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth forever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of the tall sand-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;—killed it as a reed,—but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?—or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"
Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as planets through the rain.
She spoke of the reed and the god:—she thought of herself and of him.
He was silent.
The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze of the evening, and cast a malignant eye upon them, and bent his back and drew the curve of his hook through the rushes.
Arslàn watched the sweep of the steel.
"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was cruel. "And the gods are all dead—Folle-Farine."
She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.
The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies grew dark.
He looked, and let her go;—alone.
In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes, when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslàn, his reed was but a reed as the rest were—a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve—a thing of the stagnant water and drifting sand—a thing that lived by the breath of the wind—a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any wise remember—a reed of the river, as the rest were.