Folle-Farine

"I have no fear."

The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow tresses.

"Well—the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you—his daughter—to lend yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that for you—his own-begotten—I will cleave close to the saints and the angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."

The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around which they beat with their wings the empty air.

The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched. If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing, she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.

Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.

The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen down,—she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a human joy.

Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely, with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her—nay, unfelt—went on her daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes, and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and entered into a heritage of grace.

She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity; proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God for it—that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries of the starlit skies.

Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him, and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave; she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.

To be of use to him,—to be held of any worth to him,—to have his eyes find any loveliness to study in her,—to be to him only as a flower that he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out on the land to wither as it would,—this, even this, seemed to her the noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.

That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme, passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated all that they consumed.

"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.

CHAPTER IX

One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn; she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain.

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for his art:—a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable passion.

Art is so vast; and human life is so little.

It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance and submission to his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of the Mexican nation.

The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have perished frozen in perpetual night.

So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?

The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much of its priests.

"What are you thinking of to-night?" he asked her where she came through the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.

She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.

"I was thinking,—I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of,—the one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut down to make into a flute."

"Ah?—you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the market."

"That is not the fault of the reeds?"

"Not that I know; it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do you think the reed felt then?—pain to be so sharply severed from its fellows?"

"No—or the god would not have chosen it"

"What, then?"

A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath into the little life of a day.

"I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter the toads and the newts,—there is not a note of music in them all—except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they remember that long—long—ago, the breath of a great god was in them."

Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.

He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.

"Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard you, he would think you mad."

"They have thought me many things worse. What matter?"

"Nothing at all;—that I know. But you seem to envy that reed—so long ago—that was chosen?"

"Who would not?"

"Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant;—dancing there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and the blue bell-flowers for its brethren."

"Nay;—how do you know?"

Her voice was low, and thrilled with a curious eager pain.

"How do you know?" she murmured. "Rather it was born in the sands, among the stones, of the chance winds, of the stray germs,—no one asking, no one heeding, brought by a sunbeam, spat out by a toad—no one caring where it dropped. Rather,—it grew there by the river, and such millions of reeds grew with it, that neither waters nor winds could care for a thing so common and worthless, but the very snakes twisting in and out despised it, and thrust the arrows of their tongues through it in scorn. And then—I think I see!—the great god walked by the edge of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man, on a joy that should be a joy on the earth forever; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by the thyme that fed the bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of the tall sand-rush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed, and the swallows loved, and he came to the one little reed pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up, and cut it to the root, and killed it;—killed it as a reed,—but breathed into it a song audible and beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed?—or life? Would a thousand summers of life by the waterside have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it?"

Her face lightened with a radiance to which the passion of her words was pale and poor; the vibrations of her voice grew sonorous and changing as the sounds of music itself; her eyes beamed through unshed tears as planets through the rain.

She spoke of the reed and the god:—she thought of herself and of him.

He was silent.

The reaper came nearer to them through the rosy haze of the evening, and cast a malignant eye upon them, and bent his back and drew the curve of his hook through the rushes.

Arslàn watched the sweep of the steel.

"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was cruel. "And the gods are all dead—Folle-Farine."

She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.

The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies grew dark.

He looked, and let her go;—alone.

In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes, when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslàn, his reed was but a reed as the rest were—a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve—a thing of the stagnant water and drifting sand—a thing that lived by the breath of the wind—a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any wise remember—a reed of the river, as the rest were.

BOOK V

CHAPTER I

"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I should be free; and with me these."

The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he thought himself alone.

This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.

So little!—just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons, fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;—and having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still continue to deny him other victories.

It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a strong and hardy mountain-people.

It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes of wild weather.

In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had passed a winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.

None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.

"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so little—ever so little!"

For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the highest tributes that the multitude can give to the genius that arises amidst it.

There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that wove in the darkness among the timbers.

It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes, and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the shore; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.

Otherwise it was intensely silent.

In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of the tower, the market-boat of Yprès glided by, and the soft splash of the passing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.

But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through the open casement the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.

She heard and understood.

Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.

"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his sake.

She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past—of all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and the habits of the world—nothing of the world's pleasures and the world's triumphs.

To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the simplicity of it, seemed noble, and all that the heart of a man could desire from fate.

Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea, and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud, the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the leaves; or to lie still on the grass or the sand by the shore, and see the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams of worlds beyond the stars;—such a life as this seemed to her beyond any other beautiful.

A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a street—a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,—it seemed to her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was freest, simplest, and highest.

She knew nothing of the lust of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.

Of these she knew nothing.

She had no conception of them—of the weakness and the force that twine one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.

But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.

Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads and cabins which had been her only world.

"A little gold!—a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase any pleasure for his appetites or for his vanities, but as the lever whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse circumstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the caged eagle.

"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the air.

"A little gold!"

It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary for him as she went.

"What use for the gods to have given him back life," she thought, "if they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless desire?"

It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality which they had given to Tithonus.

"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.

Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslàn now. No gifts would she give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.

When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and glad in her eyes.

A thought had come to her.

In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together, under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden produce.

"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."

"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms, and he wanted to plant a young cherry."

"There must have been a mass of coin?"

"No,—only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time—whatever he might mean by that."

"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if one buried a brass button only long enough, he would give one a bank-note for it."

"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a god. To worship old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like that,—how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the edge of the road."

"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."

"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."

Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:

"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"

The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the mill of Yprès.

"He is a great noble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.

"And where is his dwelling?"

"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"

She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with a glow at her heart.