"Avez-vous vu en BarcelonneUne belle dame, au sein bruni,Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,La Marchesa d'Amaguï."
"Avez-vous vu en BarcelonneUne belle dame, au sein bruni,Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,La Marchesa d'Amaguï."
The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it with his empty hands.
"Wine!—wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.
Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by discord—their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of lewd riot and of amorous verse.
Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white face of the moon.
After awhile he mocked it—the cold, chaste thing that was the meek trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.
Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never set:—all these memories floated before her and only served to make her fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.
There he lay delirious—a madman chained at her feet, so close in the little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air, from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.
And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.
She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were the first cries that had ever broken from her lips for human aid; and they were vain.
The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a dotard's dreams. The village was not aroused. What cared any of its sleepers how these outcasts fared?
She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony had spent itself in the passion of appeal.
The night—would it ever end?
Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage of her old life seemed like peace and freedom.
Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunkard struck her—all unconscious of the blow—across her eyes, and fell, contorted and senseless, with his head upon her knees.
He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt his lustful triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, and babbled with a strange sound, low and fast and inarticulate.
"In the little green wood—in the little green wood," he muttered. "Hark! do you hear the mill-water run? She looked so white and so cold; and they all called her a saint. What could a man do but killthat? Does she cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie—be you devil or god. You sit on a great white throne and judge us all. So they say. You can send us to hell?... Well, do. You shall never wring a word from her tomyhurt. She thinks I killed the child? Nay—that I swear. Phratos knew, I think. But he is dead;—so they say. Ask him.... My brown queen, who saw me kill the red bull,—are you there too? Ay. How the white jewels shine in your breast! Stoop a little, and kiss me. So! Your mouth burns; and the yellow jasmine flower—there is a snake in it. Look! You love me?—oh-ho!—what does your priest say, and your lord? Love!—so many of you swore that. But she,—she, standing next to her god there,—I hurt her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!"
When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, they found the sightless face of the dead man lying full in the light of the sun: beside him the girl crouched with a senseless stare in the horror of her eyes, and on her lips a ghastly laugh.
For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her Father's kingdom.
For many months she knew nothing of the flight of time. All she was conscious of were burning intolerable pain, continual thirst, and the presence of as an iron hand upon her head, weighing down the imprisoned brain. All she saw in the horrible darkness, which no ray of light ever broke, was the face of Thanatos, with the white rose pressed against his mouth, to whom endlessly she stretched her arms in vain entreaty, but who said only, with the passionless pity of his gaze, "I come in my own time, and neither tarry nor hasten for any supplication of a mortal creature."
She lived as a reed torn up from the root may live by the winds that waft it, by the birds that carry it, by the sands that draw its fibers down into themselves, to root afresh whether it will or no.
"The reed was worthy to die!—the reed was worthy to die!" was all that she said, again and again, lying staring with her hot distended eyes into the void as of perpetual night, which was all that she saw around her. The words were to those who heard her, however, the mere meaningless babble of madness.
When they had found her in the cell of the guard-house, she was far beyond any reach of harm from them, or any sensibility of the worst which they might do to her. She was in a delirious stupor, which left her no more sense of place, or sound, or time than if her brain had been drugged to the agonies and ecstasies of the opium-eater.
They found her homeless, friendless, nameless; a thing accursed, destitute, unknown; as useless and as rootless as the dead Spanish vagrant lying on the stones beside her. They cast him to the public ditch; they sent her to the public sick wards, a league away; an ancient palace, whose innumerable chambers and whose vast corridors had been given to a sisterhood of mercy, and employed for nigh a century as a public hospital.
In this prison she lay without any sense of the passing of hours and days and months.
The accusation against her fell to the ground harmless; no one pursued it: the gold was gone—somewhere, nowhere. No one knew, unless it were the bee-wife, and she held her peace.
She was borne, senseless, to the old hospice in the great, dull, saintly, historic town, and there perished from all memories as all time perished to her.
Once or twice the sister of charity who had the charge of her sought to exorcise the demon tormenting this stricken brain and burning body, by thrusting into the hands that clinched the air a leaden image or a cross of sacred wood. But those heathen hands, even in delirium, threw those emblems away always, and the captive would mutter in a vague incoherence that froze the blood of her hearers:
"The old gods are not dead; they only wait—they only wait! I am theirs—theirs! They forget, perhaps. But I remember. I keep my faith; they must keep theirs, for shame's sake. Heaven or hell? what does it matter? Can it matter to me, so that he has his desire? And that they must give, or break faith, as men do. Persephone ate the pomegranate,—you know—and she went back to hell. So will I—if they will it. What can it matter how the reed dies?—by fire, by steel, by storm?—what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, God! the reed was found worthy to die! And I—I am too vile, too poor, too shameful even forthat!"
And then her voice would rise in a passion of hysteric weeping, or sink away into the feeble wailing of the brain, mortally stricken and yet dimly sensible of its own madness and weakness; and all through the hours she, in her unconsciousness, would lament for this—for this alone—that the gods had not deemed her worthy of the stroke of death by which, through her, a divine melody might have arisen, and saved the world.
For the fable—which had grown to hold the place of so implicit a faith to her—was in her delirium always present with her; and she had retained no sense of herself except as the bruised and trampled reed which man and the gods alike had rejected as unworthy of sacrifice.
All the late autumn and the early winter came and went; and the cloud was dark upon her mind, and the pain of the blow dealt to her by Taric's hand gnawed at her brain.
When the winter turned, the darkness in which her reason had been engulfed began to clear, little by little.
As the first small trill of the wren stirred the silence in the old elm-boughs; as the first feeble gleam of the new-year sunshine struggled through the matted branches of the yews; as the first frail blossom of the pale hepatica timidly peeped forth in the damp moss-grown walls without, so consciousness slowly returned to her. She was so young; the youth in her refused to be quenched, and recovered its hold upon life as did the song of the birds, the light in the skies, the corn in the seed-sown earth.
She awakened to strength, to health, to knowledge; though she awoke thus blinded and confused and capable of little save the sense of some loathsome bondage, of some irreparable loss, of some great duty which she had left undone, of some great errand to which she had been summoned, and found wanting.
She saw four close stone walls around her; she saw her wrists and her ankles bound; she saw a hole high up above her head, braced with iron bars, which served to let in a few pallid streaks of daylight which alone ever found their way thither; she saw a black cross in one corner, and before it two women in black, who prayed.
She tried to rise, and could not, being fettered. She tore at the rope on her wrists with her teeth, like a young tigress at her chains.
They essayed to soothe her, but in vain; they then made trial first of threats, then of coercion; neither affected her; she bit at the knotted cords with her white, strong teeth, and, being unable to free herself, fell backward in a savage despair, glaring in mute impotent rage upon her keepers.
"I must go to Paris," she muttered again and again. "I must go to Paris."
So much escaped her;—but her secret she was still strong to keep buried in silence in her heart, as she had still kept it even in her madness.
Her old strength, her old patience, her old ferocity and stubbornness and habits of mute resistance, had revived in her with the return of life and reason. Slowly she remembered all things—remembered that she had been accused and hunted down as a thief and brought thither into this prison, as she deemed it, where the closeness of the walls pent her in and shut out the clouds and the stars, the water and the moonrise, the flicker of the green leaves against the gold of sunset, and all the liberty and loveliness of earth and air for which she was devoured by a continual thirst of longing, like the thirst of the caged lark for the fair heights of heaven.
So when they spoke of their god, she answered always as the lark answers when his jailers speak to him of song:—"Set me free."
But they thought this madness no less, and kept her bound there in the little dark stone den, where no sound ever reached, unless it were the wailing of a bell, and no glimpse of the sky or the trees could ever come to charm to peaceful rest her aching eyes.
At length they grew afraid of what they did. She refused all food; she turned her face to the wall; she stretched herself on her bed of straw motionless and rigid. The confinement, the absence of air, were a living death to the creature whose lungs were stifled unless they drank in the fresh cool draught of winds blowing unchecked over the width of the fields and forests, and whose eyes ached and grew blind unless they could gaze into the depths of free-flowing water, or feed themselves in far-reaching sight upon the radiant skies.
The errant passions in her, the inborn instincts towards perpetual liberty, and the life of the desert and of the mountains which came with the blood of the Zingari, made her prison-house a torture to her such as is unknown to the house-born and hearth-fettered races.
If this wild moorbird died of self-imposed famine rather than live only to beat its cut wings against the four walls of their pent prison-house, it might turn ill for themselves; so the religious community meditated. They became afraid of their own work.
One day they said to her:
"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."
She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed Master."
"If a Christian swear it,—it must be a lie," she said, with the smile that froze their timid blood.
But she accepted the food and the drink which they brought her, and broke her fast, and slept through many hours; strengthened, as by strong wine, by that one hope of freedom beneath the wide pure skies.
She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They told her it was the early spring.
"The spring," she echoed dully,—all the months were a blank to her, which had rolled by since that red autumn evening when in the cell of the guard-house the voice of Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the passion songs of Spain.
"Yes. It is spring," they said again; and one sister, younger and gentler than the rest, reached from its place above the crucifix the bough of the golden catkins of the willow, which served them at their holy season as an emblem of the palms of Palestine.
She looked at the drooping grace of the branches, with their buds of amber, long and in silence; then with a passion of weeping she turned her face from them as from the presence of some intolerable memory.
All down the shore of the river, amongst the silver of the reeds, the willows had been in blossom when she had first looked upon the face of Arslàn.
"Stay with us," the women murmured, drawn to her by the humanity of those the first tears that she had ever shed in her imprisonment. "Stay with us; and it shall go hard if we cannot find a means to bring you to eternal peace."
She shook her head wearily.
"It is not peace that I seek," she murmured.
Peace?
He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, she knew. What she had sought to gain for him—what she would seek still when once she should get free—was the eternal conflict of a great fame in the world of men; since this was the only fate which in his sight had any grace or any glory in it.
They kept their faith with her. They opened the doors of her prison-house and bade her depart in peace, pagan and criminal though they deemed her.
She reeled a little dizzily as the first blaze of the full daylight fell on her. She walked out with unsteady steps into the open air where they took her, and felt it cool and fresh upon her cheek, and saw the blue sky above her.
The gates which they unbarred were those at the back of the hospital, where the country stretched around. They did not care that she should be seen by the people of the streets.
She was left alone on a road outside the great building that had been her prison-house; the road was full of light, it was straight and shadowless; there was a tall tree near her full of leaf; there was a little bird fluttering in the sand at her feet; the ground was wet, and sparkled with rain-drops.
All the little things came to her like the notes of a song heard far away—far away—in another world. They were all so familiar, yet so strange.
There was a little yellow flower growing in a tuft of grasses straight in front of her; a little wayside weed; a root and blossom of the field-born celandine.
She fell on her knees in the dust by it, and laughed and wept, and, quivering, kissed it and blessed it that it grew there. It was the first thing of summer and of sunshine that she had seen for so long.
A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and bade her get from the ground.
"You are fitter to go back again," he muttered; "you are mad still, I think."
Like a hunted animal she stumbled to her feet and fled from him; winged by the one ghastly terror that they would claim her and chain her back again.
They had said that she was free: but what were words? They had taken her once; they might take her twice.
She ran, and ran, and ran.
The intense fear that possessed her lent her irresistible force. She coursed the earth with the swiftness of a hare. She took no heed whence she went; she only knew that she fled from that one unutterable horror of the place. She thought that they were right; that she was mad.
It was a level, green, silent country which was round her, with little loveliness and little color; but as she went she laughed incessantly in the delirious gladness of her liberty.
She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could no longer bear the passionate pain of all the long-lost sweetness, but, flinging herself downward, sobbed with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.
The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.
"Ah, God!" she thought, "I know now—one cannot be utterly wretched whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."
And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with their eyes downward, and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to the passage of the clouds against the sun.
When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had a little passed away, and abated in violence, she stood in the midst of the green fields and the fresh woods, a strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute desolation.
Her clothes were in rags; her red girdle had been changed by weather to a dusky purple; her thick clustering hair had been cut to her throat; her radiant hues were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully from beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an antelope whom men vainly starve in the attempt to tame.
She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She had not a coin nor a crust upon her. She could not tell where she then stood, nor where the only home that she had ever known might lie.
She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was beautiful, and was a woman.
She stood and looked; she did not weep; she did not pray; her heart seemed frozen in her. She had the gift she had craved,—and how could she use it?
The light was obscured by clouds, great, sweet rain-clouds which came trooping from the west. Woods were all round, and close against her were low brown cattle, cropping clovered grass. Away on the horizon was a vague, vast, golden cloud, like a million threads of gossamer glowing in the sun.
She did not know what it was; yet it drew her eyes to it. She thought of the palaces.
A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed to the cloud.
"What is that light?" she asked him.
The cowherd stared and laughed.
"That light? It is only the sun shining on the domes and the spires of Paris."
"Paris!"
She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed her hands upon her breast, and in her way thanked God.
She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it.
She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. It looked quite close.
She had exhausted the scanty strength which she had in her first flight; she could go but slowly; and the roads were heavy across the plowed lands, and through the edges of the woods. She walked on and on till it grew dusk, then she asked of a woman weeding in a field how far it might be yet to Paris.
The woman told her four leagues and more.
She grew deadly cold with fear. She was weak, and she had no hope that she could reach it before dawn; and she had nothing with which to buy shelter for the night. She could see it still; a cloud, now as of fireflies, upon the purple and black of the night; and in a passionate agony of longing she once more bent her limbs and ran—thinking of him.
To her the city of the world, the city of the kings, the city of the eagles, was only of value for the sake of this one life it held.
It was useless. All the strength she possessed was already spent. The feebleness of fever still sang in her ears and trembled in her blood. She was sick and faint, and very thirsty.
She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked to rest the night there.
The woman glanced at her and slammed to the door. At another and yet another she tried; but at neither had she any welcome; they muttered of the hospitals and drove her onward. Finally, tired out, she dropped down on the curled hollow of an old oak stump that stood by the wayside, and fell asleep, seeing to the last through her sinking lids that cloud of light where the great city lay.
The night was cold; the earth damp; she stretched her limbs out wearily and sighed, and dreamed that Thanatos touched her with his asphodels and whispered, "Come."
When she awoke she was no longer in the open air by the roadside, and the gray of the falling night about her, and the wet leaves for her bed. She was in a wide painted chamber, sweet with many roses, hung with deep hues of violet, filled with gold and color and sculpture and bronze, duskily beautiful and dimly lighted by a great wood fire that glowed upon andirons of brass.
On the wall nearest her hung all alone a picture,—a picture of a girl asleep in a scarlet blaze of poppies, above her head a purple butterfly, and on her breast the Red Mouse of the Brocken.
Opposite to it, beside the hearth, watching her with his small brilliant eyes, and quite motionless, sat the old man Sartorian, who had kept his faith with her, though the gods had not kept theirs.
And the picture and the reality grew confused before her, and she knew not which was herself and which her painted likeness, nor which was the little red mouse that gibbered among the red flowers, and which the little old man who sat watching her with the fire-gleams bright in his eyes; and it seemed to her that she and the picture were one, and he and the mouse were one likewise; and she moaned and leaned her head on her hands and tried to think.
The heat of the chamber, and the strong nourishment which they had poured down her throat when she was insensible of anything they did to her, had revived the life in her. Memory and sense returned slowly to her; what first awakened was her one passionate desire, so intense that it became an instinct stifling every other, to go on her way to the city that had flashed in its golden glory on her sight one moment, only the next to disappear into the eternal night.
"Paris!" she muttered, mechanically, as she lifted her face with a hopeless, bewildered prayer.
"Tell me the way to Paris," she muttered, instinctively, and she tried to rise and walk, not well knowing what she did.
The old man laughed a little, silently.
"Ah-h-h! Women are the only peaches that roll of their own accord from the wall to the wasp's nest!"
At the sound of his voice her eyes opened wide upon him; she knew his face again.
"Where am I?" she asked him, with a sharp terror in her voice.
"In my house," he said, simply. "I drove by you when you lay on the roadside. I recognized you. When people dream of immortality they generally die in a ditch. You would have died of a single night out there. I sent my people for you. You did not wake. You have slept here five hours."
"Is this Rioz?" She could not comprehend; a horror seized her, lest she should have strayed from Paris back into her mother's province.
"No. It is another home of mine; smaller, but choicer maybe. Who has cut your hair close?"
She shuddered and turned paler with the memory of that ghastly prison-house.
"Well; I am not sure but that you are handsomer,—almost. A sculptor would like you more now,—what a head you would make for an Anteros, or an Icarus, or a Hyacinthus! Yes—you are best so. You have been ill?"
She could not answer; she only stared at him, blankly, with sad, mindless, dilated eyes.
"A little gold!" she muttered, "a little gold!"
He looked at her awhile, then rose and went and sent his handwomen, who took her to an inner chamber, and bathed and attended her with assiduous care. She was stupefied, and knew not what they did.
They served her tenderly. They bathed her tired limbs and laid her, as gently as though she were some wounded royal captive, upon a couch of down.
She had no force to resist. Her eyes were heavy, and her senses were obscured. The potence of the draught which they had forced through her lips, when she had been insensible, acted on her as an anodyne. She sank back unconsciously, and she slept again, all through the night and half the day that followed.
Through all the hours she was conscious at intervals of the fragrance of flowers, of the gleams of silver and gold, of the sounds of distant music, of the white, calm gaze of marble fauns and dryads, who gazed on her from amidst the coolness of hanging foliage. She who had never rested on any softer couch than her truss of hay or heap of bracken, dreamed that she slept on roses. The fragrance of innumerable flowers breathed all around her. A distant music came through the silence on her drowsy ear. For the first time in her life of toil and pain she knew how exquisite a pleasure mere repose can be.
At noon she awoke, crying aloud that the Red Mouse claimed her soul from Thanatos.
When her vision cleared, and her dream passed away, the music, the flowers, the color, the coolness, were all real around her. She was lying on a couch as soft as the rose-beds of Sybaris. About her were the luxuries and the graces amidst which the rich dwell. Above her head, from a golden height, a painted Eros smiled.
The light, on to which her startled eyes opened, came to her veiled through soft, rosy hues; the blossom of flowers met her everywhere; gilded lattices, and precious stones, and countless things for which she knew neither the name nor use, and wondrous plants, with birds like living blossoms on the wing above them, and the marble heads of women, rising cold and pure above the dreamy shadows, all the color, and the charm, and the silence, and the grace of the life that is rounded by wealth were around her.
She lay silent and breathless awhile, with wide-open eyes, motionless from the languor of her weakness and the confusion of her thoughts, wondering dully, whether she belonged to the hosts of the living or the dead.
She was in a small sleeping-chamber, in a bed like the cup of a lotos; there was perfect silence round her, except for the faint far-off echo of some music; a drowsy subtle fragrance filled the air, the solemn measure of a clock's pendulum deepened the sense of stillness; for the first time in her life she learned how voluptuous a thing the enjoyment of simple rest can be. All her senses were steeped in it, lulled by it, magnetized by it; and, so far as every thought was conscious to her, she thought that this was death—death amidst the fields of asphodel, and in the eternal peace of the realm of Thanatos.
Suddenly her eyes fell on a familiar thing, a little picture close at hand, the picture of herself amidst the poppies.
She leapt from her bed and fell before it, and clasped it in her arms, and wept over it and kissed it, because it had been the work of his hand, and prayed to the unknown gods to make her suffer all things in his stead, and to give him the desire of his soul. And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.
She rose from that prayer with her mind clear, and her nerves strung from the lengthened repose; she remembered all that had chanced to her.
"Where are my clothes?" she muttered to the serving-woman who watched beside her. "It is broad day;—I must go on;—to Paris."
They craved her to wear the costly and broidered stuffs strewn around her; masterpieces of many an Eastern and Southern loom; but she put them all aside in derision and impatience, drawing around her with a proud loving action the folds of her own poor garments. Weather-stained, torn by bush and brier, soaked with night-dew, and discolored by the dye of many a crushed flower and bruised berry of the fields and woods, she yet would not have exchanged these poor shreds of woven flax and goats' wool against imperial robes, for, poor though they were, they were the symbols of her independence and her liberty.
The women tended her gently, and pressed on her many rare and fair things, but she would not have them; she took a cup of milk, and passed out into the larger chamber.
She was troubled and bewildered, but she had no fear; for she was too innocent, too wearied, and too desperate with that deathless courage, which, having borne the worst that fate can do, can know no dread.
She stood with her arms folded on her breast, drawing together the tattered folds of the tunic, gazing at the riches and the luxury, and the blended colors of the room. So softly that she never heard his footfall, the old man entered behind her, and came to the hearth, and looked on her.
"You are better?" he asked. "Are you better, Folle-Farine?"
She looked up, and met the eyes of Sartorian. They smiled again on her with the smile of the Red Mouse.
The one passion which consumed her was stronger than any fear or any other memory: she only thought——this man must know?
She sprang forward and grasped his arm with both hands, with the seizure of a tigress; her passionate eyes searched his face; her voice came hard and fast.
"What have you done?—is he living or dead?—you must know?"
His eyes still smiled:
"I gave him his golden key;—how he should use it, that was not in our bond? But, truly, I will make another bond with you any day, Folle-Farine."
She shuddered, and her hands dropped from their hold.
"You know nothing?" she murmured.
"Of your Norse god? nay, nothing. An eagle soars too high for a man's sight to follow, you know—oftentimes."
And he laughed his little soft laugh.
The eagles often soared so high—so high—that the icy vapors of the empyrean froze them dead, and they dropped to earth a mere bruised, helpless, useless mass:—he knew.
She stood stunned and confused: her horror of Sartorian was struggling into life through the haze in which all things of the past were still shrouded to her dulled remembrance—all things, save her love.
"Rest awhile," he said, gently. "Rest; and we may—who knows?—learn something of your Northern god. First, tell me of yourself. I have sought for tidings of you vainly."
Her eyes glanced round her on every side.
"Let me go," she muttered.
"Nay—a moment yet. You are not well."
"I am well."
"Indeed? Then wait a moment."
She rested where he motioned; he looked at her in smiling wonder.
She leaned on one of the cushioned couches, calm, motionless, negligent, giving no sign that she saw the chamber round her to be any other than the wooden barn or thatched cattle-sheds of the old mill-house; her feet were crossed, her limbs were folded in that exquisite repose which is inborn in races of the East; the warmth of the room and the long hours of sleep had brought the natural bloom to her face, the natural luster to her eyes, which earlier fatigue and long illness had banished.
He surveyed her with that smile which she had resented on the day when she had besought pity of him for Arslàn's sake.
"Do you not eat?" was all he said.
"Not here."
He laughed, his low humorous laugh that displeased her so bitterly, though it was soft of tone.
"And all those silks, and stuffs, and laces—do they please you no better?"
"They are not mine."
"Pooh! do you not know yet? A female thing, as beautiful as you are, makes hers everything she looks upon?"
"That is a fine phrase."
"And an empty one, you think. On my soul! no. Everything you see here is yours, if it please you."
She looked at him with dreaming perplexed eyes.
"What do you want of me?" she said, suddenly.
"Nay—why ask? All men are glad to give to women with such a face as yours."
She laughed a little; with the warmth, the rest, the wonder, the vague sense of some unknown danger, her old skill and courage rose. She knew that she had promised to be grateful always to this man: otherwise,—oh, God!—how she could have hated him, she thought!
"Why?" she answered, "why? Oh, only this: when I bought a measure of pears for Flamma in the market-place, the seller of them would sometimes pick me out a big yellow bon-chrétien, soft as butter, sweet as sugar, and offer it to me for myself. Well, when he did that, I always knew that the weight was short, or the fruit rotten. This is a wonderful pear you would give me; but is your measure false?"
He looked at her with a curious wonder and admiration; he was angered, humbled, incensed, and allured, and yet he was glad; she looked so handsome thus with the curl on her quiet lips, and her spirited head fit for a bronze cast of Atalanta.
He was an old man; he could bear to pause and rightly appreciate the charm of scorn, the spur of irony, the good of hatred. He knew the full value of its sharp spears to the wonder-blooming aloe.
He left the subject for a happier moment, and, seating himself, opened his hands to warm them by the wood fire, still watching her with that smile, which for its very indulgence, its merry banter, she abhorred.
"You lost your Norse god as I prophesied?" he asked, carelessly.
He saw her whole face change as with a blow, and her body bend within itself as a young tree bends under a storm.
"He went when you gave him the gold," she said below her breath.
"Of course he went. You would have him set free," he said, with the little low laugh still in his throat. "Did I not say you must dream of nothing else if once you had him freed? You would be full of faith; and unbar your eagle's prison-house, and then, because he took wing through the open door, you wonder still. That is not very wise, Folle-Farine."
"I do not wonder," she said, with fierce effort, stifling her misery. "He had a right to do as he would: have I said any otherwise?"
"No. You are very faithful still, I see. Yet, I cannot think that you believed my prophecy, or you—a woman—had never been so strong. You think I can tell you of his fate? Nay, on my soul I know nothing. Men do not speak his name. He may be dead;—you shrink? So! can it matter so much? He is dead to you. He is a great man, but he is a fool. Half his genius would give him the fame he wants with much greater swiftness than the whole ever will. The world likes talent, which serves it. It hates genius, which rules it. Men would adore his technical treatment, his pictorial magnificence, his anatomical accuracy; but they will always be in awe of his intensity of meaning, of his marvelous fertility, of his extraordinary mingling of the chillest of idealisms and the most unsparing of sensualities,—but I talk idly. Let us talk of you; see, I chose your likeness, and he let me have it—did you dream that he would part with it so lightly?"
"Why not? He had a million things more beautiful."
He looked at her keenly. He could measure the superb force of this unblenching and mute courage.
"In any other creature such a humility would be hypocrisy. But it is not so in you. Why will you carry yourself as in an enemy's house? Will you not even break your fast with me? Nay, that is sullen, that is barbaric. Is there nothing that can please you? See here,—all women love these; the gypsy as well as the empress. Hold them a moment."
She took them; old oriental jewels lying loose in an agate cup on a table near; there were among them three great sapphires, which in their way were priceless, from their rare size and their perfect color.
Her mouth laughed with its old scorn. She, who had lost life, soul, earth, heaven, to be consoled with the glass beads of a bauble! This man seemed to her more foolish than any creature that had ever spoken on her ear.
She looked, then laid them—indifferently—down.
"Three sparrow's eggs are as big, and almost as blue, among the moss in any month of May!"
He moved them away, chagrined.
"How do you intend to live? he asked, dryly.
"It will come as it comes," she answered, with the fatalism and composure that ran in her Eastern blood.
"What have you done up to this moment since you left my house at Rioz?"
She told him, briefly; she wanted to hide that she had suffered aught, or had been in any measure coldly dealt with, and she spoke with the old force of a happier time, seeking rather to show how well it was with her that she should thus be free, and have no law save her own will, and know that none lived who could say to her, "Come hither" or "go there."
Almost she duped him, she was so brave. Not quite. His eyes had read the souls and senses of women for half a century; and none had ever deceived him. As he listened to her he knew well that under her desolation and her solitude her heart was broken—though not her courage.
But he accepted her words as she spoke them. "Perhaps you are wise to take your fate so lightly," he said to her. "But do you know that it is a horrible thing to be alone and penniless and adrift, and without a home or a friend, when one is a woman and young?"
"It is worse when one is a woman and old; but who pities it then?" she said, with the curt and caustic meaning that had first allured him in her.
"And a woman is so soon old!" he added, with as subtle a significance.
She shuddered a little; no female creature that is beautiful and vigorous and young can coldly brook to look straight at the doom of age; death is far less appalling, because death is uncertain, mystical, and may still have beauty.
"What do you intend to do with yourself?" he pursued.
"Intend! It is for the rich 'to intend,' the poor must take what chances."
She spoke calmly, leaning down on one of the cushioned benches by the hearth, resting her chin on her hand; her brown slender feet were crossed one over another, her eyelids were heavy from weakness and the warmth of the room; the soft dim light played on her tenderly; he looked at her with a musing smile.
"No beautiful woman need ever be poor," he said, slowly spreading out the delicate palms of his hands to the fire; "and you are beautiful—exceedingly."
"I know!" She gave a quick gesture of her head, tired, insolent, indifferent; and a terrible darkness stole over her face; what matter how beautiful she might be, she had no beauty in her own sight, for the eyes of Arslàn had dwelt on her cold, calm, unmoved, whilst he had said, "I would love you—if I could."
"You know your value," Sartorian said, dryly. "Well, then, why talk of poverty and of your future together? they need never be companions in this world."
She rose and stood before him in the rosy glow of the fire that bathed her limbs until they glowed like jade and porphyry.
"No beautiful woman need be poor—no—no beautiful woman need be honest, I dare say."
He smiled, holding his delicate palms to the warmth of his hearth.
"Your lover drew a grand vision of Barabbas. Well—we choose Barabbas still, just as Jerusalem chose; only now, our Barabbas is most often a woman. Why do you rise? It is a wet day, out there, and, for the spring-time, cold."
"Is it?"
"And you have been ill?"
"So they say."
"You will die of cold and exposure."
"So best."
"Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a dog stir."
"You would if the dog chose to go."
"To a master who forsook it—for a kick and a curse?"
Her face burned; she hung her head instinctively. She sank down again on the seat which she had quitted. The old horror of shame which she had felt by the waterside under the orchards bent her strength under this man's unmerciful pressure. She knew that he had her secret, and the haughty passion and courage of her nature writhed under his taunt of it.
"To refuse to stay is uncouth," he said to her.
"I am uncouth, no doubt."
"And it is ungrateful."
"I would not be that."
"Ungrateful! I did what you asked of me. I unloosed your Othyr of Art to spend his strength as he will, in essaying to raise a storm-blast which shall have force enough to echo through the endless tunnels of the time to come."
"You gave him a handful of gold pieces forthat!"
"Ah! if you thought that I should offer him the half of my possessions, you were disappointed, no doubt. But you forgot that 'that' would not sell in the world, as yet, for a handful of wheat."
She touched the three sapphires.
"Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being ignorant, esteem them of no more value than three sparrow's eggs in the hedge?"
"My poor jewels! Well, stay here to-night; you need rest, shelter, and warmth; and to-morrow you shall go as poor as you came, if you wish. But the world is very hard. The world is always winter—to the poor," he added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.
Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was close at hand—the world in which she would be houseless, friendless, penniless, alone.
"A hard world, to those who will not worship its gods," he repeated, musingly. "And you astray in it, you poor barbarian, with your noble madness, and your blindness of faith and of passion. Do you know what it is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?"
"Do I know?" her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang loud on the stillness. "Do you?The empty dish, the chill stove, the frozen feet, the long nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour berries and hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the rats fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black months, whose saints' days are kept by new pains, and whose holy days are feasted by fresh diseases. DoIknow? Doyou?"
He did not answer her; he was absorbed in his study of her face; he was thinking how she would look in Paris in some theatre's spectacle of Egypt, with anklets of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind her a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky.
"What a fool he must have been!" he thought, as his eyes went from her to the study of her sleeping in the poppies. "What a fool! he left his lantern of Aladdin behind him."
"You remember unlovely things," he said, aloud. "No, I do not know them; and I should not have supposed that you, who did, could so much have cared to know them more, or could have clung to them as the only good, as you now seem to do. You cannot love such hardships?"
"I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them."
"Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?"
"I do not know—to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and forever to see the sun."
"Not a low ideal. You must await the Peruvian Paradise. Meanwhile there is a dayspring that represents the sun not ill; we call it Wealth."
"Ah!" she could not deride this god, for she knew it was the greatest of them all; when the rod of riches had been lost, had not the Far-Striking King himself been brought low and bound down to a slave's drudgery?
The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not change from its musing study, its slow, vigilant smile; holding her under the subtle influence of his gaze, Sartorian began to speak,—speak as he could at choice, with accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery. With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he placed before her that world of which she knew no more than any one of the reeds that blew by the sands of the river.
He painted to her that life of all others which was in most vital contrast and unlikeness to her own; the life of luxury, of indolence, of carelessness, of sovereignty, of endless pleasure, and supreme delight; he painted to her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent, beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from which to choose her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, her victories, her cruelties, and her seductions. He painted the long cloudless invigorating day of such a favorite of fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its laughter rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold; the same day for the same woman, whether it were called of Rome or of Corinth, of Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or of Paris, and whether she herself were hailed hetaira or imperatrix. He drew such things as the skill of his words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled him, in language which aroused her even from the absorption of her wretchedness, and stirred her dull disordered thoughts to a movement of restless discontent, and of strange wonder—Arslàn had never spoken to her thus.
He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he asked her,—
"Such lives are; do you not envy them?"
She thought,—"Envy them? she? what could she envy save the eyes that looked on Arslàn's face?" "What were the use?" she said aloud; "all my life I have seen all things are for others; nothing is for me."
"Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall see all things for you, instead."
She flashed her eyes upon him.
"How can that be?"
"Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle-Farine?"
"Alone; yes."
"You have not a coin to stand a day between you and hunger?"
"Not one."
"You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much as a night?"
"Not one."
"You have just left a public place of pestilence?"
"Yes."
"And you know that every one's hand is against you because you are nameless and bastard, and come of a proscribed people, who are aliens alike in every land?"
"I am Folle-Farine; yes."
For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic acceptance of the fate that made her name—merely because hers—a symbol of all things despised, and desolate, and forsaken, touched his heart and moved him to a sorrowful pity. But the pity died, and tie cruelty remained alive behind it.
He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sardonic, meaning eyes.
"Well—be Folle-Farine still. Why not? But let Folle-Farine mean no longer a beggar, an outcast, a leper, a thing attainted, proscribed, and forever suspected; but let it mean on the ear of every man that hears it the name of the most famous, the most imperious, the most triumphant, the most beautiful woman of her time; a woman of whom the world says, 'look on her face and die—you have lived enough.'"
Her breath came and went as she listened; the blood in her face flushed and paled; she trembled violently, and her whole frame seemed to dilate and strengthen and vibrate with the electric force of that subtlest temptation.
"I!" she murmured brokenly.
"Yes, you. All that I say you shall be: homeless, tribeless, nameless, nationless, though you stand there now, Folle-Farine."
The wondrous promise swept her fancy for the moment on the strong current of its imagery, as a river sweeps a leaf. This empire hers?—hers?—when all mankind had driven and derided her, and shunned her sight and touch, and cursed and flouted her, and barely thought her worthy to be called "thou dog!"
He looked at her and smiled, and bent towards the warmth of the fire.
"All that I say you shall be; and—the year is all winter for the poor, Folle-Farine."
The light on her face faded; a sudden apprehension tightened at her heart; on her face gathered the old fierce deadly antagonism which constant insult and attack had taught her to assume on the first instant of menace as her only buckler.
She knew not what evil threatened; but vaguely she felt that treason was close about her.
"If you do not mock me," she said slowly, "if you do not—how will you make me what you promise?"
"I will show the world to you, you to the world; your beauty will do the rest."
The darkness and the perplexed trouble deepened on her face; she rose and stood and looked at him, her teeth shut together with a quick sharp ring, her straight proud brows drew together in stormy silence; all the tigress in her was awoke and rising ready to spring; yet amid that dusky passion, that withering scorn of doubt, there was an innocent pathetic wonder, a vague desolation and disappointment, that were childlike and infinitely sad.
"This is a wondrous pear you offer me!" she said, bitterly. "And so cheap?—it must be rotten somewhere."
"It is golden. Who need ask more?"
And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat.
Then, and then only, she understood him.
With a sudden unconscious instinctive action her hand sought her knife, but the girdle was empty; she sprang erect, her face on fire with a superb fury, her eyes blazing like the eyes of a wild beast's by night, a magnificence of scorn and rage upon her quivering features.
Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the blows of steel.
"I ask more,—that I should pluck it with clean hands, and eat of it with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beggar,—homeless, penniless, tribeless, nationless! So you think, no doubt. But we who are born outlawed are born free,—and do not sell our freedom. Let me go."
He watched her with a musing smile, a dreamy calm content; all this tempest of her scorn, all this bitterness of her disdain, all this whirlwind of her passion and her suffering, seemed but to beguile him more and make him surer of her beauty, of her splendor, of her strength.
"She would be a great creature to show to the world," he thought, as he drooped his head and watched her through his half-closed eyelids, as the Red Mouse watched the sleeper in the poppies. "Let you go?" he said, with that slow, ironic smile,—"let you go? Why should I let you go, Folle-Farine?"
She stooped as a tigress stoops to rise the stronger for her death spring, and her voice was low, on a level with his ear.
"Why? Why? To save your own life—if you are wise."
He laughed in his throat again.
"Ah, ah! It is never wise to threaten, Folle-Farine. I do not threaten. You are foolish; you are unreasonable: and that is the privilege of a woman. I am not angered at it. On the contrary, it adds to your charm. You are a beautiful, reckless, stubborn, half-mad, half-savage creature. Passion and liberty become you,—become you like your ignorance and your ferocity. I would not for worlds that you should change them."
"Let me go!" she cried, across his words.
"Oh, fool! the winter will be hard,—and you are bare of foot,—and you have not a crust!"
"Let me go."
"Ah! Go?—to beg your way to Paris, and to creep through the cellars and the hospitals till you can see your lover's face, and to crouch a moment at his feet to hear him mutter a curse on you in payment for your pilgrimage; and then to slit your throat or his—in your despair, and lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch."
"Let me go, I say!"
"Or else, more like, come back to me in a week's time and say, 'I was mad but now I am wise. Give me the golden pear. What matter a little speck? What is golden may be rotten; but to all lips it is sweet.'"
"Let me go!"
She stood at bay before him, pale in her scorn of rags, her right hand clinched against her breast, her eyes breathing fire, her whole attitude instinct with the tempest of contempt and loathing, which she held down thus, passive and almost wordless, because she once had promised never to be thankless to this man.
He gazed at her and smiled, and thought how beautiful that chained whirlwind of her passions looked; but he did not touch her nor even go nearer to her. There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes that daunted him. Moreover, he was patient, humorous, gentle, cruel, wise,—all in one; and he desired to tame and to beguile her, and to see her slowly drawn into the subtle sweetness of the powers of gold; and to enjoy the yielding of each moral weakness one by one, as the southern boy slowly pulls limb from limb, wing from wing, of the cicala.
"I will let you go, surely," he said, with his low, grim laugh. "I keep no woman prisoner against her will. But think one moment longer, Folle-Farine. You will take no gift at my hands?"
"None."
"You want to go,—penniless as you are?"
"I will go so,—no other way."
"You will fall ill on the road afresh."
"That does not concern you."
"You will starve."
"That is my question."
"You will have to herd with the street dogs."
"Their bite is better than your welcome."
"You will be suspected,—most likely imprisoned. You are an outcast."
"That may be."
"You will be driven to public charity."
"Not till I need a public grave."
"You will have never a glance of pity, never a look of softness, from your northern god; he has no love for you, and he is in his grave most likely. Icarus falls—always."
For the first time she quailed as though struck by a sharp blow; but her voice remained inflexible and serene.
"I can live without love or pity, as I can without home or gold. Once for all,—let me go."
"I will let you go," he said, slowly, as he moved a little away. "I will let you go in seven days' time. For seven days you shall do as you please; eat, drink, be clothed, be housed, be feasted, be served, be beguiled,—as the rich are. You shall taste all these things that gold gives, and which you, being ignorant, dare rashly deride and refuse. If, when seven days end, you still choose, you shall go, and as poor as you came. But you will not choose, for you are a woman, Folle-Farine!"
Ere she knew his intent he had moved the panel and drawn it behind him, and left her alone,—shut in a trap like the birds that Claudis Flamma had netted in his orchards.
That night, when the night without was quite dark, she knelt down before the study of the poppies, and kissed it softly, and prayed to the unknown God, of whom none had taught her in anywise, yet whose light she still had found, and followed in a dim, wondering, imperfect fashion, as a little child lost in the twilight of some pathless wood, pursues in trembling the gleam of some great, still planet looming far above her through the leaves.
When she arose from her supplication, her choice was already made.
And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.
AT sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water's edge.
The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the basement walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the garden palace, where the bird of Hêrê dwelt.
Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peacock swept in the light, there was an open casement, a narrow balcony of stone; a group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the night—the night wet and moonless,—waters a fathom deep,—a bed of sand treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.
On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of the Brocken.
But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long in the breast of the women whom men love.
The Sun came from the east, and passed through the pale stricken faces that watched from the casement, and came straight to where the Red Mouse sat amidst the poppies.
"Have you let a female soul escape you?" said the Sun.
The Red Mouse answered:
"Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch, and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to me."
Said the Sun:
"That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has told me oftentimes that Eros is your pander—always."
"Anteros only," said the Red Mouse.
The Sun, wondering, said again:
"And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into every female soul you enter at birth, and dwell there unto death. Is it, then, not so?"
The Red Mouse answered:
"The boast is not mine; it is man's."