Folle Farine Part 27

There was no answer.

She smote the wood more loudly, and called to him again.

A heavy step echoed on the mud floor within; a match was struck, a dull light glimmered; a voice she did not know muttered drowsily, "Who is there?"

"It is I, Marcellin," she answered. "It is not night. I am come to be an hour with you. Is anything amiss?"

The door opened slowly, an old woman, whose face was strange to her, peered out into the dusk. She had been asleep on the settle by the fire, and stared stupidly at the flame of her own lamp.

"Is it the old man, Marcellin, you want?" she asked.

"Marcellin, yes--where is he?"

"He died four days ago. Get you gone; I will have no tramps about my place."

"Died!"

Folle-Farine stood erect and without a quiver in her face and in her limbs; but her teeth shut together like a steel clasp, and all the rich and golden hues of her skin changed to a sickly ashen pallor.

"Yes, why not?" grumbled the old woman. "To be sure, men said that G.o.d would never let him die, because he killed St. Louis; but I myself never thought that. I knew the devil would not wait more than a hundred years for him--you can never cheat the devil, and he always seems stronger than the saints--somehow. You are that thing of Ypres, are you not? Get you gone!"

"Who are you? Why are you here?" she gasped.

Her right hand was clinched on the door-post, and her right foot was set on the threshold, so that the door could not be closed.

"I am an honest woman and a pious; and it befouls me to dwell where he dwelt," the old peasant hissed in loud indignation. "I stood out a whole day; but when one is poor, and the place is offered quit of rent, what can one do?----and it is roomy and airy for the fowls, and the priest has flung holy water about it and purified it, and I have a Horseshoe nailed up and a St. John in the corner. But be off with you, and take your foot from my door!"

Folle-Farine stood motionless.

"When did he die, and how?" she asked in her teeth.

"He was found dead on the road, on his heap of stones, the fourth night from this," answered the old woman, loving to hear her own tongue, yet dreading the one to whom she spoke. "Perhaps he had been hungered, I do not know; or more likely the devil would not wait any longer--anyways he was dead, the hammer in his hand. Max Lieben, the man that travels with the wooden clocks, found him. He lay there all night. n.o.body would touch him. They say they saw the mark of the devil's claws on him. At last they got a dung-cart, and that took him away before the sun rose. He died just under the great Calvary--it was like his blasphemy. They have put him in the common ditch. I think it shame to let the man that slew a saint be in the same grave with all the poor honest folk who feared G.o.d, and were Christians, though they might be beggars and outcasts. Get you gone, you be as vile as he. If you want him, go ask your father the foul fiend for him--they are surely together now."

And she drove the door to, and closed it, and barred it firmly within.

"Not but what the devil can get through the c.h.i.n.ks," she muttered, as she turned the wick of her lamp up higher.

Folle-Farine went back over the snow; blind, sick, feeling her way through the twilight as though it were the darkness of night.

"He died alone--he died alone," she muttered, a thousand times, as she crept shivering through the gloom; and she knew that now her own fate was yet more desolate. She knew that now she lived alone without one friend on earth.

The death on the open highway; the numbness, and stillness, and deafness to all the maledictions of men.

The shameful bier made at night on the dung-cart, amidst loathing glances and muttered curses; the nameless grave in the common ditch with the beggar, the thief, the harlot, and the murderer,--these which were so awful to all others seemed to her as sweet as to sink to sleep on soft unshorn gra.s.s, whilst rose-leaves were shaken in the wind, and fell as gently as kisses upon the slumberer.

For even those at least were rest. And she in her youth and in her strength, and in the blossom of her beauty, gorgeous as a pa.s.sion-flower in the sun, envied bitterly the old man who had died at his work on the public road, hated by his kind, weighted with the burden of nigh a hundred years.

For his death was not more utterly lonely and desolate than was her life; and to all taunts and to all curses the ears of the dead are deaf.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

Night had come; a dark night of earliest spring. The wild day had sobbed itself to sleep after a restless life with fitful breaths of storm and many sighs of shuddering breezes.

The sun had sunk, leaving long tracks of blood-red light across one-half the heavens.

There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and the cl.u.s.tering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.

Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward, black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard; blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam; driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the winter hurricanes, and scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden-ways.

The smell of wet gra.s.s, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by the plow, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its face.

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and, striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp, reached the opposing wall within.

It was a wall of gray stone, dead and l.u.s.terless like the wall of a prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; an old tower, of which the country-folk told strange tales where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.

A man watched the spider as it went.

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the glow of the sunken sun.

It was fat, well nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, h.o.a.rding, breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve and multiplied.

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.

This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise also: wise with the only wisdom which is honored of other men.

He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood, watching the sun die, with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.

For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher in his trestle was empty; and he had not wherewithal to refill it.

He might have found some to fill it for him, no doubt. He lived amidst the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and bitter to the rich.

But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on themselves without his yielding to their torments.

He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the G.o.dliness of men by what they gained, would have held him accursed--the madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the G.o.ds.

For it is an insanity unfruitful, except to the future. And for the future who cares,--save the madmen themselves?