In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she thought, would prove her grave; but the waters, with human-like caprice, had cast her back upon the land with scarce an effort of her own. Given back thus to life, whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled to her feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy night through the grassy stretches of the unknown gardens and lands in which she found herself.
She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with lead, but she was made swift by terror and hatred, as though Hermes for once had had pity for anything human, and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals.
She ran on and on, not knowing whither; only knowing that she ran from the man who had tempted her by the strength of the rod of wealth.
The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the dense mist no lights far or near, of the city or planets, of palace or house were seen. She did not know where she went; she only ran on away and away, anywhere, from the Red Mouse and its master.
When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she paused, and trembling crept into a cattle-shed to rest and take breath a little. She shrank from every habitation, she quivered at every human voice; she was afraid—horribly afraid—in those clinging vapors, those damp deathly smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those indistinct and unfamiliar creatures of a country strange to her.
That old man with the elf's eyes, who had tempted her, was he a god too, she wondered, since he had the rod that metes power and wealth? He might stretch his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her.
The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for her, and humbly welcomed her. She hid herself among their beds of hay, and in the warmth of their breath and their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any half-drowned dog; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, and hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. She slept from sheer exhaustion of mind and body. The cattle could have trodden her to death, or tossed her through the open spaces of their byres, but they seemed to know, they seemed to pity; and they stirred so that they did not brush a limb of her, nor shorten a moment of her slumbers.
When she awoke the sun was high.
A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails, kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place passively, not well knowing what she did.
The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.
The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf—f—f! get out, you drowned rat."
She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember—and be thankful—that in the night that was past she had been strong.
The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint; she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had looked again on the face of Arslàn.
She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.
She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by one, as the death tears of the llama fall.
This was the young year round her; that she knew.
The winter had gone by; its many months had passed over her head whilst she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from which a toad would turn. Oh, God! would death never take her likewise? Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of the dead?
That god whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's only friend":—even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned her.
Vague memories of things which she had heard in fable and tradition, of bodies accursed and condemned to wander forever unresting and wailing; of spirits, which for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world itself endured; creatures that the very elements had denied, and that were too vile for fire to burn, or water to drown, or steel to slay, or old age to whither, or death to touch and take in any wise. All these memories returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered if she were such a one as these.
She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great sin; she had done none willingly, and yet all people called her vile, and they must know.
Even the old man, mocking her, had said:
"Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, soon or late. And your fate is shame; it was your birth-gift, it will be your burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? No. But you can make it potent as gold, and sweet as honey if you choose, Folle-Farine."
And she had not chosen; yet of any nobility in the resistance she did not dream. She had shut her heart to it by the unconscious instinct of strength, as she had shut her lips under torture, and shut her hands against life.
She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friendless, and every human creature was against her. Her tempter had spoken only the bare and bleak truth. A dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more desolate than herself.
The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless sky, but in the little wood it was cool and shady, and had the moisture of a heavy morning dew. Millions of young leaves had uncurled themselves in the warmth. Little butterflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, danced in the light. Brown rills of water murmured under the grasses, the thrushes sang to one another through the boughs, and the lizard darted hither and thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter.
A little distance from her there was a group of joyous singers who looked at her from time to time, their laughter hushing a little, and their simple carousal under the green boughs broken by a nameless chillness and involuntary speculation. She did not note them, her face being bowed down upon her hands, and no sound of the thrushes' song or of the human singers' voices rousing her from the stupefaction of despair which drugged her senses.
They watched her long; her attitude did not change.
One of them at length rose up and went, hesitating, a step or two forwards; a girl with winking feet, clad gayly in bright colors, though the texture of her clothes was poor.
She went and touched the crouched, sad figure softly.
"Are you in trouble?"
The figure lifted its bowed head, its dark, hopeless eyes.
Folle-Farine looked up with a stare and a shiver.
"It is no matter, I am only—tired."
"Are you all alone?"
"Yes."
"Come and sit with us a moment. You are in the damp and the gloom; we are so pleasant and sunny there. Come."
"You are good, but let me be."
The blue-eyed girl called to the others. They lazily rose and came.
"Heaven! she is handsome!" the men muttered to one another.
She looked straight at them all, and let them be.
"You are all alone?" they asked her again.
"Always," she answered them.
"You are going—where?"
"To Paris"
"What to do there?"
"I do not know."
"You look wet—suffering—what is the matter?"
"I was nearly drowned last night—an accident—it is nothing."
"Where have you slept?"
"In a shed: with some cattle."
"Could you get no shelter in a house?"
"I did not seek any."
"What do you do? What is your work?"
"Anything—nothing."
"What is your name?"
"Folle-Farine."
"That means the chaff;—less than the chaff,—the dust."
"It means me."
They were silent, only bending on her their bright curious eyes.
They saw that she was unspeakably wretched; that some great woe or shock had recently fallen on her, and given her glance that startled horror and blanched her rich skin to an ashen pallor, and frozen, as it were, the very current of the young blood in her veins.
They were silent a little space. Then whispered together.
"Come with us," they urged. "We, too, go to Paris. We are poor. We follow art. We will befriend you."
She was deaf to them long, being timid and wild of every human thing. But they were urgent; they were eloquent; these young girls with their bright eyes; these men who spoke of art; these wanderers who went to the great city.
In the end they pressed on her their companionship. They, too, were going to Paris; they spoke of perils she would run, of vouchers she would need: she wondered at their charity, but in the end walked on with them—fearing the Red Mouse.
They were mirthful, gentle people, so she thought: they said they followed art; they told her she could never enter Paris nameless and alone: so she went. The chief of the little troop watched wonderingly her step, her posture, her barbaric and lustrous beauty, brilliant still even through the pallor of grief and the weariness of fatigue; of these he had never seen the like before, and he knew their almost priceless value in the world, and of the working classes and street mobs of Paris.
"Listen," he said suddenly to her. "We shall play to-night at the next town. Will you take a part?"
Walking along through the glades of the wood, lost in thought, she started at his voice.
"I do not know what you mean?"
"I mean—will you show yourself with us? We will give you no words. It will be quite easy. What money we make we divide among us. All you shall do shall be to stand and be looked at—you are beautiful, and you know it, no doubt?"
She made a weary sign of assent. Beautiful? What could it matter if she were so, or if she were not, what the mere thought of it? The beauty that she owned, though so late a precious possession, a crown of glory to her, had lost all its fairness and all its wonder since it had been strengthless to bind to hers the only heart in which she cared to rouse a throb of passion, since it had been unworthy to draw upon it with any lingering gaze of love the eyes of Arslàn.
He looked at her more closely; this was a strange creature, he thought, who, being a woman and in her first youth, could thus acknowledge her own loveliness with so much candor, yet so much indifference.
That afternoon they halted at a little town that stood in a dell across the fields, a small place lying close about a great church tower.
It was almost dusk when they entered it; but it was all alive with lights and shows, and trumpets and banners; it was the day of a great fair, and the merry-go-rounds were whirling, and the trades in gilded cakes and puppets of sugar were thriving fast, and the narrow streets were full of a happy and noisy peasant crowd.
As soon as the little troop entered the first street a glad cry rose.
They were well known and well liked there; the people clustered by dozens round them, the women greeting them with kisses, the children hugging the dogs, the men clamoring with invitations to eat and to drink and be merry.
They bade her watch them at their art in a rough wooden house outside the wine tavern.
She stood in the shadow and looked as they bade her, while the mimic life of their little stage began and lived its hour.
To the mind which had received its first instincts of art from the cold, lofty, passionless creations of Arslàn, from the classic purity and from the divine conception of the old Hellenic ideal, the art of the stage could seem but poor and idle mimicry; gaudy and fragrantless as any painted rose of paper blooming on a tinseled stem.
The crystal truthfulness, the barbaric liberty, the pure idealism of her mind and temper revolted in contempt from the visible presentment and the vari-colored harlequinade of the actor's art. To her, a note of song, a gleam of light, a shadowy shape, a veiled word, were enough to unfold to her passionate fancy a world of dreams, a paradise of faith and of desire; and for this very cause she shrank away, in amazement and disgust, from this realistic mockery of mere humanity, which left nothing for the imagination to create, which spoke no other tongue than the common language of human hopes and fears. It could not touch her, it could not move her; it filled her—so far as she could bring herself to think of it at all—with a cold and wondering contempt.
For to the reed which has once trembled under the melody born of the breath divine, the voices of mortal mouths, as they scream in rage, or exult in clamor, or contend in battle, must ever seem the idlest and the emptiest of all the sounds under heaven.
"That is your art?" she said wearily to the actors when they came to her.
"Well, is it not art; and a noble one?"
A scornful shadow swept across her face.
"It is no art. It is human always. It is never divine. There is neither heaven nor hell in it. It is all earth."
They were sharply stung.
"What has given you such thoughts as that?" they said, in their impatience and mortification.
"I have seen great things," she said simply, and turned away and went out into the darkness, and wept,—alone.
She who had knelt at the feet of Thanatos, and who had heard the songs of Pan amidst the rushes by the river, and had listened to the charmed steps of Persephone amidst the flowers of the summer;—could she honor lesser gods than these?
"They may forget—they may forsake, and he likewise, but I never," she thought.
If only she might live a little longer space to serve and suffer for them and for him still; of fate she asked nothing higher.
That night there was much money in the bag. The players pressed a share upon her; but she refused.
"Have I begged from you?" she said. "I have earned nothing."
It was with exceeding difficulty that they ended in persuading her even to share their simple supper.
She took only bread and water, and sat and watched them curiously.
The players were in high spirits; their chief ordered a stoup of bright wine, and made merry over it with gayer songs and louder laughter, and more frequent jests than even were his wont.
The men and women of the town came in and out with merry interchange of words. The youths of the little bourg chattered light amorous nonsense; the young girls smiled and chattered in answer; whilst the actors bantered them and made them a hundred love prophecies.
Now and then a dog trotted in to salute the players' poodles; now and then the quaint face of a pig looked between the legs of its master.
The door stood open; the balmy air blew in; beyond, the stars shone in a cloudless sky.
She sat without in the darkness, where no light fell among the thick shroud of one of the blossoming boughs of pear-trees, and now and then she looked and watched their laughter and companionship, and their gay and airy buffoonery, together there within the winehouse doors.
"All fools enjoy!" she thought; with that bitter wonder, that aching disdain, that involuntary injustice, with which the strong sad patience of a great nature surveys the mindless merriment of lighter hearts and brains more easily lulled into forgetfulness and content.
They came to her and pressed on her a draught of the wine, a share of the food, a handful of the honeyed cates of their simple banquet; even a portion of their silver and copper pieces with which the little leathern sack of their receipts was full,—for once,—to the mouth.
She refused all: the money she threw passionately away.
"Am I a beggar?" she said, in her wrath.
She remained without in the gloom among the cool blossoming branches that swayed above-head in the still night, while the carousal broke up and the peasants went on their way to their homes, singing along the dark streets, and the lights were put out in the winehouse, and the trill of the grasshopper chirped in the fields around.
"You will die of damp, roofless in the open air this moonless night," men, as they passed away, said to her in wonder.
"The leaves are roof enough for me," she answered them: and stayed there with her head resting on the roll of her sheepskin; wide awake through the calm dark hours; for a bed within she knew that she could not pay, and she would not let any charity purchase one for her.
At daybreak when the others rose she would only take from them the crust that was absolutely needful to keep life in her. Food seemed to choke her as it passed her lips,—since how could she tell but what his lips were parched dry with hunger or were blue and cold in death?
That morning, as they started, one of the two youths who bore their traveling gear and the rude appliances of their little stage upon his shoulders from village to village when they journeyed thus—being oftentimes too poor to permit themselves any other mode of transit and of porterage—fell lame and grew faint and was forced to lay down his burden by the roadside.
She raised the weight upon her back and head as she had been wont to do the weights of timber and of corn for the mill-house, and bore it onward.
In vain they remonstrated with her; she would not yield, but carried the wooden framework and the folded canvases all through the heat and weariness of the noonday.
"You would have me eat of your supper last night. I will have you accept of my payment to-day," she said, stubbornly.
For this seemed to her a labor innocent and just, and even full of honor, whatever men might say: had not Helios himself been bound as a slave in Thessaly?
They journeyed far that day, along straight sunlit highways, and under the shadows of green trees. The fields were green with the young corn and the young vines; the delicate plumes of the first blossoming lilacs nodded in their footsteps; the skies were blue; the earth was fragrant.
At noonday the players halted and threw themselves down beneath a poplar-tree, in a wild rose thicket, to eat their noonday meal of bread and a green cress salad.
The shelter they had chosen was full of fragrance from rain-drops still wet upon the grasses, and the budding rose vines. The hedge was full of honeysuckle and tufts of cowslips; the sun was warmer; the mild-eyed cattle came and looked at them; little redstarts picked up their crumbs; from a white vine-hung cottage an old woman brought them salt and wished them a fair travel.
But her heart was sick and her feet weary, and she asked always,—"Where is Paris?"
At last they showed it her, that gleaming golden cloud upon the purple haze of the horizon.
She crossed her hands upon her beating breast, and thanked the gods that they had thus given her to behold the city of his desires.
The chief of the mimes watched her keenly.
"You look at Paris," he said after a time. "There you may be great if you will."
"Great? I?"
She echoed the word with weary incredulity. She knew he could but mock at her.
"Ay," he made answer seriously. "Even you! Why not? There is no dynasty that endures in that golden city save only one—the sovereignty of a woman's beauty."
She started and shuddered a little; she thought that she saw the Red Mouse stir amidst the grasses.
"I want no greatness," she said, slowly. "What should I do with it?"
For in her heart she thought,—
"What would it serve me to be known to all the world and remembered by all the ages of men if he forget—forget quite?"
That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and fruitful zone of the city—one of the fragrant and joyous pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened violets in each other's breasts.
The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.
"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.
She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslàn had declared that fame—or death—should come to him.
The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.
A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive, with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.
The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that her eyes never lost that look.
"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest of them asked her.
She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which it was?—whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she would light on at the last?
She was a mystery to them.
She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.
She was silent always, and she never smiled.
"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.
By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient, enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslàn's was not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.
So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very strange and wondrous to her.
The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise, change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun, walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs, various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.
For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."
"You are not happy?" one man said to her.
"Happy!"
She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.
"Show your beauty once—just once amidst us on the stage, and on the morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.
But she refused always.
Her beauty—it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or death, for him.
The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more unending, than a great city.
She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every accent of persuasion or of passion.
When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold mute weariness of contempt.
One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she showed him the edge of her hidden knife.
One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude, and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many colors.
"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a name of power, if only you will come."
"Come whither?" she asked him.
"Come with me—only to my supper-table—for one hour; my horses wait."
She threw the chain of stones at her feet.
"I have no hunger," she said, carelessly. "Go, ask those that have to your feast."
And she gave no other phrase in answer to all the many honeyed and persuasive words with which in vain he urged her, that night and many another night, until he wearied.
One day, in the green outskirts of the city, passing by under a gilded gallery, and a wide window, full of flowers, and hung with delicate draperies, there looked out the fair head of a woman, with diamonds in the ears, and a shroud of lace about it, while against the smiling scornful mouth a jeweled hand held a rose; and a woman's voice called to her, mockingly:
"Has the devil not heard you yet, that you still walk barefoot in the dust on the stones, and let the sun beat on your head? O fool! there is gold in the air, and gold in the dust, and gold in the very gutter here, for a woman!"
And the face was the face, and the voice the voice, of the gardener's wife of the old town by the sea.
She raised, to the gilded balcony above, her great sorrowful, musing eyes, full of startled courage: soon she comprehended; and then her gaze gave back scorn for scorn.
"Does that brazen scroll shade you better than did the trellised vine?" she said, with her voice ascending clear in its disdain. "And are those stones in your breast any brighter than the blue was in the eyes of your child?"
The woman above cast the rose at her and laughed, and withdrew from the casement.
She set her heel on the rose, and trod its leaves down in the dust. It was a yellow rose, scentless and loveless—an emblem of pleasure and wealth. She left it where it lay, and went onward.
The sweet sins, and all their rich profits, that she might take as easily as she could have taken the rose from the dust, had no power to allure her.
The gilded balcony, the velvet couch, the jewels in the ears, the purple draperies, the ease and the affluence and the joys of the sights and the senses, these to her were as powerless to move her envy, these to her seemed as idle as the blow-balls that a child's breath floated down the current of a summer breeze.
When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the gods by night steal through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of brass, and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.
"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades—to buy souls and to sell them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the other?"
There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the gods had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.
By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from passion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.
They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.
It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous, hopeless class that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent—so silent that no one notices when death replaces life.
Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost there.
In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs. And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought a head of clover, or a spray of grass, in their beaks; and at sight of it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.
She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer than themselves.
They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours' toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the sparrows in the dark.
She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen, roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of their crust, a little copper piece,—anything that they could afford or she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the réveilleuse of the quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:—"Her eyes have no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.
It was a strange trade—to rise whilst yet for the world it was night, and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew. So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter those mercies of the night.
It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house, from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp alone burning.
They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.
Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their starved children on their breasts, those young maidens worn blind over the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or the potato-fields outside the walls,—she could neither fear them nor hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, passionate, wondering grief.
She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin, suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair that had closed around her.
And some of these in turn loved her.
Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued, flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that had closed about her heart.
It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the thirst of overdriven cattle.
All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She sought for him always;—sought the busy crowds of the living; sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories that it treasured; it became clearer to her—this thing of his desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and endlessly yearned.
The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let me only die as the reed died,—what matter,—so that only the world speak his name!"
One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it, seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,—how long?"
Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,—
"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"
Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is but one god now,—that god is gold."
"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance. "You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden pear. It was not wise."
He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment paralyzed.
"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."
She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by the snake.
"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"
"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me. But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very weak, of course;—you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,—and you will plunge after it,—and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."
"You came—to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.
"Nay—I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I——My golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags——"
She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under enforced composure.
"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with clean hands."
He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly.
"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may, shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You—a thing beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice. Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue will envy you the red robe bitterly then."
Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rushing mill-water.
"You came—to say this?"
"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon tired, I say; but I——Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin; you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while, and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a woman who sells her soul—at a loss. You see?—ah, surely, you see, Folle-Farine?"
She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous moonlight about her. She saw—she saw now!
And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty, and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least believe—believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and merciless gift.
"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it—know it, at least, enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,—to stand homeless under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired, Folle-Farine!"
She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
Tired!—ah, God!—tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he spake.
"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!—what vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!—what retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance—so symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to wither at your birth,—a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way, you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men; and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;—nothing as you are, Folle-Farine!"
She heard in silence to the end.
On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness, in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted in the spaces of the stones.
As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the void of the darkness.
"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you, and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."
And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted her.
The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like wolves; the temptations of the city crouched in wait for her incessantly, like tigers. She was always hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once of listening, of yielding, of taking any pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never thought of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner passions were absorbed and slain.
Once or twice, through some lighted casement in some lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed on fairy lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl on her lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.
"To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in their breasts, to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have both hands full of gold, that is what women love," she thought; and laughed a little in her cold wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their purple throats, and broke among them her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on the parapet and watched the round white moon rise over the shining roofs of Paris.
She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, she was very wretched; but she had a supreme love in her, and she was strong.
A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and unclose to him sooner or later.
"You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine," the Red Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old man Sartorian; and he kept his word very patiently.
He was patient, he was wise; he believed in the power of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a woman. He knew how to wait—unseen, so that this rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly incense, her.
Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go among the world of the sleeping poor, at her threshold she would step on some gift worthy of a queen's acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there against the stone of the stairs.
When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there would be on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst them some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the pines and of the grapes in gold.
When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars, sick with the tumult and the stench and the squalor, parched with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search for one face amidst the millions,—going home!—oh, mockery of the word!—to a bed of straw, to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to a night of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a moment now and then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, saying,—
"Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"
But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.
The mill dust; the reed by the river; the nameless, friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance breeze—so the Red Mouse told her; should have asked no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a crown of pleasure.
Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.
For Love was with her.
And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love's breast, and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet when Love, once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a hand of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares meddle with Love no more.
In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather that had the purple glow of the autumnal storms and the chills of coming winter on it, she arose, as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent, and lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds to rouse the sleepers.
She had barely tasted food for many hours. All the means of subsistence that she had was the few coins earned from those as poor almost as herself. Often these went in debt to her, and begged for a little time to get the piece or two of base metal that they owed her; and she forgave them such debts always, not having the heart to take the last miserable pittance from some trembling withered hand which had worked through fourscore years of toil, and found no payment but its wrinkles in its palm; not having the force to fill her own platter with crusts which could only be purchased by the hunger cries of some starveling infant, or by the barter of some little valueless cross of ivory or rosary of berries long cherished in some aching breast after all else was lost or spent.
She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she had not had even a few grains to scatter to the hungry pigeons as they had fluttered to her on the housetop in the stormy twilight as the evening fell.
She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of the bells sound the hours, and seeming to say to her as they beat on the silence,—
"Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the river, a Nothing?"
When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that fastened her door, and went out on the crazy stairway, she struck her foot against a thing of metal. It glittered in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up; it was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse lurked in, among the pearls, to spring out from their whiteness into the purer snow of Gretchen's bread.
With it was only one written line:
"When you are tired, Folle-Farine?"
She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.
An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face, lit with wolf's eyes, through the gloom.
"Are you not tired?" she muttered in the formula taught her. "Are you not tired, Folle-Farine?"
"If I be, what of that?" she answered, and she thrust the case away to the feet of the woman, still shut, and went on with her little dim taper down round the twist of the stairs. She knew what she did, what she put away. She had come to know, too, what share the sex of her mother takes in the bringing to the lips of their kind the golden pear that to most needs no pressing.
"If I had only your face, and your chances," had said to her that day a serving-girl, young, with sallow cheeks, and a hollow voice, and eyes of fever, who lived in a den lower down on the stairway.
"Are you mad that you hunger here when you might hang yourself with diamonds like our Lady of Atocha?" cried a dancing-woman with sullen eyes and a yellow skin from the hither side of the mountains, who begged in the streets all day.
So, many tongues hissed to her in different fashions. It seemed to many of them impious in one like her to dare be stronger than the gold was that assailed her, to dare to live up there among the clouds, and hunger, and thirst, and keep her silence, and strike dumb all the mouths that tried to woo her down, and shake aside all the hands that strove softly to slide their purchase-moneys into hers.
For they chimed in chorus as the bells did:
"Strength in the dust—in a reed—in a Nothing?"
It was a bitter windy morning; the rain fell heavily; there were no stars out, and the air was sharp and raw. She was too used to all changes of weather to take heed of it, but her thin clothes were soaked through, and her hair was drenched as she crossed the courts and traversed the passages to reach her various employers.
The first she roused was a poor sickly woman sleeping feverishly on an old rope mat; the second an old man wrestling with nightmare, as the rain poured on him through a hole in the roof, making him dream that he was drowning.
The third was a woman, so old that her quarter accredited her with a century of age; she woke mumbling that it was hard at her years to have to go and pick rags for a crumb of bread.
The fourth was a little child not seven; he was an orphan, and the people who kept him sent him out to get herbs in the outlying villages to sell in the streets, and beat him if he let other children be beforehand with him. He woke sobbing; he had dreamed of his dead mother, and cried out that it was so cold, so cold.
There were scores like them at whose doors she knocked, or whose chambers she entered. The brief kind night was over, and they had to arise and work,—or die.
"Why do they not die?" she wondered; and she thought of the dear gods that she had loved, the gods of oblivion.
Truly there were no gifts like their gifts; and yet men knew their worth so little;—but thrust Hypnos back in scorn, dashing their winecups in his eyes; and mocked Oneiros, calling him the guest of love-sick fools and of mad poets; and against Thanatos strove always in hatred and terror as against their dreaded foe.
It was a strange, melancholy, dreary labor this into which she had entered.
It was all dark. The little light she bore scarcely shed its rays beyond her feet. It was all still. The winds sounded infinitely sad among those vaulted passages and the deep shafts of the stairways. Now and then a woman's voice in prayer or a man's in blasphemy echoed dully through the old half-ruined buildings. Otherwise an intense silence reigned there, where all save herself were sleeping.
She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which she alone was living.
And sometimes she had not the heart to waken them; when there was a smile on some wan worn face that never knew one in its waking hours; or when some childless mother in her lonely bed sleeping, in fancy drew young arms about her throat.
This morning when all her tasks were done, and all the toilers summoned to another day of pain, she retraced her steps slowly, bearing the light aloft, and with its feeble rays shed on the colorless splendor of her face, and on her luminous dilated troubled eyes that were forever seeking what they never found.
A long vaulted passage stretched between her and the foot of the steps that led to the tower; many doors opened on it, the winds wailed through it, and the ragged clothes of the tenants blew to and fro upon the swaying cords. She traversed it, and slowly mounted her own staircase, which was spiral and narrow, with little loopholes ever and again that looked out upon the walls, and higher on the roofs, and higher yet upon the open sky. By one of these she paused and looked out wearily.
It was dark still; great low rain-clouds floated by; a little caged bird stirred with a sad note; mighty rains swept by from the westward, sweet with the smell of the distant fields.
Her heart ached for the country.
It was so still there in the dusk she knew, even in this wild autumn night, which there would be so purple with leaf shadow, so brown with embracing branches, so gray with silvery faint mists of lily, white with virgin snows. Ah, God! to reach it once again, she thought, if only to die in it.
And yet she stayed on in this, which was to her the deepest hell, stayed on because he—in life or death—was here.
She started as a hand touched her softly, where she stood looking through the narrow space. The eyes of Sartorian smiled on her through the twilight.
"Do you shrink still?" he said, gently. "Put back your knife; look at me quietly; you will not have the casket?—very well. Your strength is folly; yet it is noble. It becomes you. I do you good for ill. I have had search made for your lover, who loves not you. I have found him."
"Living?" She quivered from head to foot; the gray walls reeled round her; she feared, she hoped, she doubted, she believed. Was it hell? Was it heaven? She could not tell. She cared not which, so that only she could look once more upon the face of Arslàn.
"Living," he answered her, and still he smiled. "Living. Come with me, and see how he has used the liberty you gave. Come."
She staggered to her feet and rose, and held her knife close in the bosom of her dress, and with passionate eyes of hope and dread searched the face of the old man through the shadows.
"It is the truth?" she muttered. "If you mock me,—if you lie——"
"Your knife will sheathe itself in my body, I know. Nay, I have never lied to you. One cannot wear a velvet glove to tame a lioness. Come with me; fear nothing, Folle-Farine. Come with me, and see with your own eyesight how the world of men has dealt with this your god."
"I will come."
Sartorian gazed at her in silence.
"You are a barbarian; and so you are heroic always. I would not lie to you, and here I have no need. Come; it is very near to you. A breadth of stone can sever two lives, though the strength of all the world cannot unite them. Come."
She gripped the knife closer, and, with feet that stumbled as the feet of a dumb beast that goes out to its slaughter, followed him, through the dark and narrow ways. She had no fear for herself; she had no dread of treachery or peril; for herself she could be strong, always: and the point of the steel was set hard against her breast; but for him?—had the gods forgotten? had he forgot?
She was sick, and cold, and white with terror as she went. She dreaded the unknown thing her eyes might look upon. She dreaded the truth that she had sought to learn all through the burning months of summer, all through the horrors of the crowded city. Was it well with him, or ill? Had the gods remembered at last? Had the stubborn necks of men been bent to his feet? Was he free?—free to rise to the heights of lofty desire, and never look downward, in pity, once?
They passed in silence through many passage-ways of the great stone hive of human life in which she dwelt. Once only Sartorian paused and looked back and spoke.
"If you find him in a woman's arms, lost in a sloth of passion, what then? Will you say still, Let him have greatness?"
In the gloom he saw her stagger as though struck upon the head. But she rallied and gazed at him in answer with eyes that would neither change nor shrink.
"What is that to you?" she said, in her shut teeth. "Show me the truth: and as for him,—he has a right to do as he will. Have I said ever otherwise?"
He led the way onward in silence.
This passion, so heroic even in its barbarism, so faithful even in its wretchedness, so pure even in its abandonment, almost appalled him,—and yet on it he had no pity.
By his lips the world spoke: the world which, to a creature nameless, homeless, godless, friendless, offered only one choice—shame or death; and for such privilege of choice bade her be thankful to men and to their deity.
He led her through many vaulted ways, and up the shaft of a stone stairway in a distant side of the vast pile, which, from holding many habitants of kings, and monks, and scholars, had become the populous home of the most wretched travailers of a great city.
"Wait here," he said, and drew her backward into a hollow in the wall. It was nearly dark.
As she stood there in the darkness looking down through the narrow space, there came a shadow to her through the gloom,—a human shadow, noiseless and voiceless. It ascended the shaft of the stairs with a silent, swift tread, and passed by her, and went onward; as it passed, the rays of her lamp were shed on it, and her eyes at last saw the face of Arslàn.
It was pale as death; his head was sunk on his breast; his lips muttered without the sound of words, his fair hair streamed in the wind; he moved without haste, without pause, with the pulseless haste, the bloodless quiet of a phantom.
She had heard men talk of those who, being dead, yet dwelt on earth and moved amidst the living. She had no thought of him in that moment save as among the dead. But he, dead or living, could have no horror for her; he, dead or living, ruled her as the moon the sea, and drew her after him, and formed the one law of her life.
She neither trembled nor prayed, nor wept nor laughed, nor cried aloud in her inconceivable joy. Her heart stood still, as though some hand had caught and gripped it. She was silent in the breathless silence of an unspeakable awe; and with a step as noiseless as his own, she glided in his path through the deep shaft of the stairs, upward and upward through the hushed house, through the innumerable chambers, through the dusky shadows, through the chill of the bitter dawn, through the close hive of the sleeping creatures, up and up, into the very roof itself, where it seemed to meet the low and lurid clouds, and to be lifted from the habitations and the homes of men.
A doorway was open; he passed through it; beyond it was a bare square place through which there came the feeblest rays of dawn, making the yellow oil flame that burned in it look dull and hot and garish. He passed into the chamber and stood still a moment, with his head dropped on his chest and his lips muttering sounds without meaning.
The light fell on his face; she saw that he was living. Crouched on his threshold, she watched him, her heart leaping with a hope so keen, a rapture so intense, that its very strength and purity suffocated her like some mountain air too pure and strong for human lungs to breathe.
He walked in his sleep; that sleep so strange and so terrible, which drugs the senses and yet stimulates the brain; in which the sleeper moves, acts, remembers, returns to daily habits, and resorts to daily haunts, and yet to all the world around him is deaf and blind and indifferent as the dead.
The restless brain, unstrung by too much travail and too little food, had moved the limbs unconsciously to their old haunts and habits; and in his sleep, though sightless and senseless, he seemed still to know and still to suffer. For he moved again, after a moment's rest, and passed straight to the wooden trestles on which a great canvas was outstretched. He sank down on a rough bench in front of it, and passed his hand before the picture with the fond, caressing gesture with which a painter shows to another some wave of light, some grace of color, and then sat there, stupidly, steadfastly, with his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and his eyes fastened on the creation before him.
It was a rugged, desolate, wind-blown chamber, set in the topmost height of the old pile, beaten on by all snows, drenched by all rains, rocked by all storms, bare, comfortless, poor to the direst stretch of poverty, close against the clouds, and with the brazen bells and teeming roofs of the city close beneath.
She had dwelt by him for many weeks, and no sense of his presence had come to her, no instinct had awakened in him towards the love which clung to him with a faithfulness only as great as its humility. She, praying always to see this man once more, and die—had been severed from him by the breadth of a stone as by an ocean's width; and he—doomed to fail always, spending his life in one endeavor, and by that one perpetually vanquished—he had had no space left to look up at a nameless creature with lithe golden limbs, about whose head the white-winged pigeons fluttered at twilight on the housetop.