Folle Farine Part 34

He cast a foul word at her, new upon his lips. She was silent all the same; her arms crossed on her breast, her head bent.

"Where is the boat?--that is worth more than your body. And soul you have none."

She raised her head and looked upward.

"I have lost the boat."

She thought that, very likely, he would kill her for it. Once when she had lost an osier basket, not a hundredth part the cost of this vessel, he had beaten her till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for many a week. But she looked up quietly there among the dripping bushes and the cheerless gra.s.sy ways.

That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by long proof; but this was in his sight only on a piece with the strength born in her from the devil; the devil had in all ages told so many truths to the confusion of the saints G.o.d.

"Drifted where?"

"I do not know--on the face of the flood,--with the tide."

"You had left it loose."

"I got out to push it off the sand. It had grounded. I forgot it. It went adrift."

"What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"

She was silent.

"If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a hundred stripes!"

"You can."

"I can! You shall know truly that I can. Go, get the boat--find it above or below water--or to the town prison you go as a thief."

The word smote her with a sudden pang.

For the first time her courage failed her. She turned and went in silence at his bidding.

In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and the soaked thickets, she searched for the lost vessel; knowing well that it would be scarcely less than a miracle which could restore it to her; and that the G.o.d upon the cross worked no miracles for her;--a child of sin.

For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched with water, ready to drop with exhaustion, as she was used to see the overdriven cattle sink upon the road. She pa.s.sed many peasants; women on their mules, men in their barges, children searching for such flotsam and jetsam as might have been flung upon the land from the little flooded gardens and the few riverside cabins that had been invaded in the night.

She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none of these. What she could not do for herself, it never occurred to her that others could do for her. It was an ignorance that was strength. At length, to her amaze, she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young tree, which being blown down had fallen into the stream, and had caught the boat hard and fast as in a net.

At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite labor, from the entanglement of the boughs; and at scarce less peril, rowed on her homeward way upon the swollen force of the turbid river; full against the tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that beat the bar, away to the northward, in the full sunrise.

It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the orchards of Ypres, brown in their leaflessness, and with gray lichens blowing from their boughs, like h.o.a.ry beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy breaths of charity.

She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst his trees, pruning and delving in the red and chilly day.

She went up the winding stairs, planks green and slippery with wet river weeds, which led straight through the apple orchards to the mill.

"I have found the boat," she said, standing before him; her voice was faint and very tired, her whole body drooped with fatigue, her head for once was bowed.

He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was a leap of gladness at his heart; the miser's gladness over recovered treasure; but he showed such weakness neither in his eye nor words.

"It is well for you that you have," he said with bitter meaning. "I will spare you half the stripes:--strip."

Without a word of remonstrance, standing before him in the gray shadow of the lichens, and the red mists of the morning, she pushed the rough garments from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her weakness, drew herself erect to receive the familiar chastis.e.m.e.nt.

"I am guilty--this time," she said to herself as the lash fell:--she was thinking of her theft.

CHAPTER IV.

A score of years before, in a valley of the far north, a group of eager and silent listeners stood gathered about one man, who spoke aloud with fervent and rapturous oratory.

It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the silence of the winter world had given way to a million sounds of waking life from budding leaves and nesting birds, and melting torrents and warm winds fanning the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red alpine rose to blossom.

The little valley was peopled by a hardy race of herdsmen and of fishers; men who kept their goat-flocks on the steep sides of the mountains, or went down to the deep waters in search of a scanty subsistence. But they were a people simple, n.o.ble, grave, even in a manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured on the old grand songs of a mighty past, and holding a pure faith in the traditions of a great sea-sovereignty. They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and facing the ocean, where it stretched at the northward end of the vale; a man peasant-born himself, but gifted with a native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic and enthusiast; one who held it as his errand to go to and fro the land, raising his voice against the powers of the world, and of wealth, and who spoke against these with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned and impressionable mult.i.tudes that heard him, seemed the voice of a genius heaven-sent.

When a boy he had been a shepherd, and dreaming in the loneliness of the mountains, and by the side of the deep hill-lakes far away from any sound or steps of human life, a madness, innocent, and in its way beautiful, had come upon him.

He believed himself born to carry the message of grace to the nations; and to raise his voice up against those pa.s.sions whose fury had never a.s.sailed him, and against those riches whose sweetness he had never tasted. So he had wandered from city to city, from village to village; mocked in some places, revered in others; protesting always against the dominion of wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry which thrilled the hearts of his listeners, and had almost in it, at times, the menace and the mystery of a prophet's upbraiding.

He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child; he was a cripple and very feeble; he drank at the wayside rills with the dogs; he lay down on the open fields with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had its sway over the people, and held the scoffers and the jesters quiet under the spell of his tender and flutelike tones.

Raised above the little throng upon the bare red rock, with the vast green fields and dim pine-woods stretching round him as far as his eye could reach, he preached now to the groups of fishers and herdsmen and foresters and hunters; protesting to this simple people against the force of wealth, and the l.u.s.t of possession, as though he preached to princes and to conquerors. He told them of what he had seen in the great cities through which he had wandered; of the corruption and the vileness and the wantonness; of the greed in which the days and the years of men's lives were spent; of the ama.s.sing of riches for which alone the nations cared, so that all loveliness, all simplicity, all high endeavor, all innocent pastime, were abjured and derided among them. And his voice was sweet and full as the swell of music as he spoke to them, telling them one of the many fables and legends, of which he had gathered a full harvest, in the many lands that had felt his footsteps.

This was the parable he told them that day, whilst the rude toilers of the forests and the ocean stood quiet as little children, hearkening with upturned faces and bated breath, as the sun went down behind the purple pines:

"There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, among the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.

"He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the people as they hewed stone or brought water, said among themselves, 'Verily, this man is as a G.o.d; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits off all lands are culled for him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.

"His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For he had been long bitterly hara.s.sed by foes who descended upon him as wolves from the hills in their hunger, and plagued with heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, in which his heart was set. So he being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury, with all his might prayed to the G.o.ds that all he touched might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in other ages. And the G.o.ds gave him the thing he craved: and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in the short s.p.a.ce of a single summer-day.

"But it was bought with a price.

"When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love-words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cup-bearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And at eventide when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met his own.

"That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this agony, since all around him was desolation, even though all around him was wealth.

"Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will barter its life away.

"Look you,--this thing is certain: I say that the world will perish, even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its own fulfilled desire.

"The future of the world is written. For G.o.d has granted their prayer to men. He has made them rich and their riches shall kill them.

"When all green places shall have been destroyed in the builder's l.u.s.t of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers rank with poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed, because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field, nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedge-row bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cricket, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave."