Folle-Farine

Here at his labor, in Pheræ, the sun-god toiled as a slave; the highest wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kingship that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which empty air could make in a hollow reed.

Here, too, the brother gods stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos; their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old sweet symbol of silence; fashioned in the same likeness, with the same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their coming; the gods that most of all have pity on men,—the gods of the Night and of the Grave.

These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them; she knew that they were gods, and yet to the world were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-god, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten love.

Just so had he looked so long ago—so long!—in the deep woods at moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.

They had called him an outcast,—and lo!—she found him a god.

She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,—wept with grief for the living lost forever,—wept with joy that the dead forever lived.

Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them human things,—things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather than men should see them and exult. The passion had its way for once, and spent itself, and passed. She rose trembling and pale, with her eyes wet and dimmed in luster, like stars that shine through rain, and looked around her fearfully.

She thought that the gods might rise in wrath against her, even as mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.

As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body of a man.

It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare; upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.

In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a statue, in that passionless rest,—that dread repose.

Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent forward and looked closer on his face.

He was a god, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,—not as they were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,—but dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the burden of their sin and woe.

She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,—sorrowful, because he alone of all the gods was stricken there, and he alone had the shadow of mortality upon him.

Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a divine, but a human form,—dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a man's death of assassination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of their own faults and follies.

Had the gods slain him—being a mortal—for his entrance there?

Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.

He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden, full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-god's yonder, and very strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and rugged faces of the populace around her.

That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some noble forest beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its fall.

"The gods slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,—he,—only a man, and dead?"

The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies seem possible to her as truth.

Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet, having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.

She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compassion on it; she stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe, but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the lily.

A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved her,—for he was beautiful, and he was dead.

"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for the glad forest-god playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's face no more.

The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence to his lips.

On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:

"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that dead man—perish."

She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the delirium and divinity of her sex had entered into her.

She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the gods, if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned; whilst he who lay dead—though so still and so white, and so mute and so powerless,—he looked a king among men, though the gods for his daring had killed him.

"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,—I am nothing—nothing. Let me die as the Dust dies—what matter?"

The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.

He alone heard. He—the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the gods—for this man's sake—she chose.

CHAPTER III

When the trance of her delirious imaginations passed, they left her tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pass already from the form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.

He was dead still;—or so she thought;—she watched him with dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.

She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had brought back to him.

It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the gods', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of love; but hers—hers—shared only with the greatness she had bought for him.

Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart; she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.

His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or luster in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.

"To die—of hunger—like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the stones.

She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her feet.

She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain, as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from altar fires of sacrifice.

The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.

"To die—of hunger!"

She muttered the phrase after him—shaken from her stupor by its gaunt and common truth.

It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had gathered there as to a festival to see him die.

As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has long fasted, almost unto death.

She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds of many another, as old, as wretched, and as nobly stubborn against alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had often passed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a thorny bramble of the fields to quiet the gnawing of their entrails.

She stood still beside him, and thought.

All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head; this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the feebly beating heart;—these she saw as she would have seen the white outlines of a statue in the dark.

He moved a little with a hollow sigh.

"Bread—bread—bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"

At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the dreams and passions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her poetic ignorance.

The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she had prayed for him to the gods, and to the gods given herself for him—that was well—if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it? The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone, she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the gods' despite.

In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread. It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad passed it in scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch; she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.

That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pass those clinched teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand gathered up from the river-shore. Neither could there be any wood, which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that hour drenched with water.

She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air, the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of that fell disease.

There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human hand—to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child—was always clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged mercy or aid at any human hearth.

She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men, women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to which appeal could in such straits be made.

If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.

What could she do? she pondered.

Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she stood irresolute.

To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.

In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.

All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to see the children and the maidens—those who held her accursed, and were themselves held so innocent and just—steal the ripe cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched.

It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they," when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone, though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to the thing which she abhorred.

She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens around her were haunted;—so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of their vengeful and indolent masters.

She had been so proud!—and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.

It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she had offered for his to the gods.

She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.

"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in the delirium of his brain.

The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung her to action as the spur stings a horse.

She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water; she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.

It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot deep.

She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue, of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of lead,—the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the watch of the cruel gods.

She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.

As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard, stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom, with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as familiar by night as day.

The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.

She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the body of the house.

Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.

She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done, that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor, she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue. She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred in her, blood and bone.

Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were wanted in the house were stored.

The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly, but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents; the more abundantly as he had more than once found it a lucrative matter in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.

Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint gray glimmer from the clearing skies.

A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a twittering outcry.

She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food as was to be found there—loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a flask of the richest wine—wine of the south, of the hue of the violet, sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.

That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square, and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.

She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.

She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.

She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were blowing with a sound like the sea.

She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet, holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.

Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her. It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk's; she discerned the outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.

The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays upon the path she followed.

At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy; the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little creek.

She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.

"How like their god is to them!" she thought; the wooden crucifix was the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her; it was in Christ's name that Marcellin's corpse had been cast on the dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ's name that the women had avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in Christ's name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten figs for sweet.