Folle Farine Part 37

The long winter came, locking the valley within its fortress of ice, severing it from all the rest of the breathing human world; and the letters ceased. He would not let them say that she had forgotten; he chose to think that it was the wall of snow which was built up between them rather than any division raised by her ingrat.i.tude and oblivion.

The sweet, sudden spring came, all the white and golden flowers breaking up from the hard crust of the soil, and all the loosened waters rushing with a shout of liberty to join the sea. The summer followed, with the red mountain roses blossoming by the brooks, and the green mountain gra.s.ses blowing in the wind, with the music of the herd-bells ringing down the pa.s.ses, and the sound of the fife and of the reed-pipe calling the maidens to the dance.

In the midst of the summer, one night, when all the stars were shining above the quiet valley, and all the children slept under the roofs with the swallows, and not a soul was stirring, save where here and there a lover watched a light glare in some lattice underneath the eaves, a half-dead woman dragged herself feebly under the lime-tree shadows of the pastor's house, and struck with a faint cry upon the door and fell at her father's feet, broken and senseless. Before the full day dawned she had given birth to a male child and was dead.

Forgiveness had killed her; she might have borne reproach, injury, malediction, but against that infinite love which would bear with her even in her wretchedness, and would receive her even in her abas.e.m.e.nt, she had no strength.

She died as her son's eyes opened to the morning light. He inherited no name, and they called him after his grandsire, Arslan.

When his dead daughter lay stretched before him in the sunlight, with her white large limbs folded to rest, and her n.o.ble fair face calm as a mask of marble, the old pastor knew little--nothing--of what her life through these two brief years had been. Her lips had scarcely breathed a word before she had fallen senseless on his threshold. That she had had triumph he knew; that she had fallen into dire necessities he saw.

Whether she had surrendered art for the sake of love, or whether she had lost the public favor by some public caprice, whether she had been eminent or obscure in her career, whether it had abandoned her, or she had abandoned it, he could not tell, and he knew too little of the world to be able to learn.

That she had traveled back on her weary way homeward to her native mountains that her son might not perish amidst strangers; thus much he knew, but no more. Nor was more ever known by any living soul.

In life there are so many histories which are like broken boughs that strew the ground, snapped short at either end, so that none know the crown of them nor the root.

The child, whom she had left, grew in goodliness, and strength, and stature, until the people said that he was like the child-king, whom their hero Frithiof raised up upon his buckler above the mult.i.tude: and who was not afraid, but boldly gripped the brazen shield, and smiled fearlessly at the noonday sun.

The child had his mother's Scandinavian beauty; the beauty of a marble statue, white as the snow, of great height and largely moulded; and his free life amidst the ice-fields and the pine-woods, and on the wide, wild northern seas developed these bodily to their uttermost perfection.

The people admired and wondered at him; love him they did not. The lad was cold, dauntless, silent; he repelled their sympathies and disdained their pastimes. He chose rather to be by himself, than with them. He was never cruel; but he was never tender; and when he did speak he spoke with a sort of eloquent scorn and caustic imagery that seemed to them extraordinary in one so young.

But his grandfather loved him with a sincere love, though it was tinged with so sharp a bitterness; and reared him tenderly and wisely; and braced him with a scholar's lore and by a mountaineer's exposure; so that both brain and body had their due. He was a simple childlike broken old man; but in this youth of promise that unfolded itself beside his age seemed to strike fresh root, and he had wisdom and skill enough to guide it justly.

The desire of his soul was that his grandson should succeed him in the spiritual charge of that tranquil and beloved valley, and thus escape the dire perils of that world in which his mother's life had been caught and consumed like a moth's in flame. But Arslan's eyes looked ever across the ocean with that look in them which had been in his mother's; and when the old Norseman spoke of this holy and peaceful future, he was silent.

Moreover, he--who had never beheld but the rude paintings on panels of pine that decorated the little red church under the firs and lindens,--he had the gift of art in him.

He had few and rough means only with which to make his crude and unguided essays; but the delirium of it was on him, and the peasants of his village gazed awe-stricken and adoring before the things which he drew on every piece of pine-wood, on every smooth breadth of sea-worn granite, on every bare surface of lime-washed wall that he could find at liberty for his usage.

When they asked him what, in his manhood, he would do, he said little.

"I will never leave the old man," he made answer; and he kept his word.

Up to his twentieth year he never quitted the valley. He studied deeply, after his own manner; but nearly all his hours were pa.s.sed in the open air alone, in the pure cold air of the highest mountain summits, amidst the thunder of the furious torrents, in the black recesses of lonely forests, where none, save the wolf and the bear, wandered with him; or away on the vast expanse of the sea, where the storm drove the great arctic waves like scourged sheep, and the huge breakers seized the sh.o.r.e as a panther its prey.

On such a world as this, and on the marvelous nights of the north, his mind fed itself and his youth gained its powers. The faint, feeble life of the old man held him to this lonely valley that seemed filled with the coldness, the mystery, the unutterable terror and the majesty of the arctic pole, to which it looked; but unknown to him, circ.u.mstance thus held him likewise where alone the genius in him could take its full shape and full stature.

Unknown to him, in these years it took the depth, the strength, the patience, the melancholy, the virility of the North; took these never to be lost again.

In the twentieth winter of his life an avalanche engulfed the pastor's house, and the little church by which it stood, covering both beneath a mountain of earth and snow and rock and riven trees. Some of the timbers withstood the shock, and the roof remained standing, uncrushed, above their heads. The avalanche fell some little time after midnight: there were only present in the dwelling himself, the old man, and a serving woman.

The woman was killed on her bed by the fall of a beam upon her; he and the pastor still lived: lived in perpetual darkness without food or fuel, or any ray of light.

The wooden clock stood erect, uninjured; they could hear the hours go by in slow succession. The old man was peaceful and even cheerful; praising G.o.d often and praying that help might come to his beloved one. But his strength could not hold out against the icy cold, the long hunger, the dreadful blank around as of perpetual night. He died ere the first day had wholly gone by, at even-song; saying still that he was content, and still praising G.o.d who had rewarded his innocence with shame and recompensed his service with agony.

For two more days and nights Arslan remained in his living tomb, enshrouded in eternal gloom, alone with the dead, stretching out his hands ever and again to meet that icy touch rather than be without companionship.

On the morning of the third day the people of the village, who had labored ceaselessly, reached him, and he was saved.

As soon as the spring broke he left the valley and pa.s.sed over the mountains, seeking a new world.

His old familiar home had become hateful to him; he had no tie to it save two low graves, still snow-covered underneath a knot of tall stone-pines; the old Norse pa.s.sion of wandering was in his veins as it had been in his mother's before him; he fiercely and mutely descried freedom, pa.s.sion, knowledge, art, fame, as she had desired them, and he went: turning his face from that lowly green nest lying like a lark's between the hills.

He did not go as youth mostly goes, blind with a divine dream of triumph: he went, consciously, to a bitter combat as the sea-kings of old, whose blood ran in his veins, and whose strength was in his limbs, had gone to war, setting their prow hard against the sharp salt waves and in the teeth of an adverse wind.

He was not without money. The pastor, indeed, had died almost penniless; he had been always poor, and had given the little he possessed to those still poorer. But the richest landowner in the village, the largest possessor of flocks and herds, dying childless, had bequeathed his farm and cattle to Arslan; having loved the lad's dead mother silently and vainly. The value of these realized by sale gave to Arslan, when he became his own master, what, in that valley at least, was wealth; and he went without care for the future on this score into the world of men; his mind full of dreams and the beautiful myths of dead ages; his temper compounded of poetry and of coldness, of enthusiasm and of skepticism; his one pa.s.sion a supreme ambition, pure as snow in its instinct, but half savage in its intensity.

From that spring, when he had pa.s.sed away from his birthplace as the winter snows were melting on the mountain-sides, and the mountain flowers were putting forth their earliest buds under the pine-boughs, until the time that he now stood solitary, starving, and hopeless before the mocking eyes of his Hermes, twelve years had run their course, and all through them he had never once again beheld his native land.

Like the Scandinavian Regner, he chose rather to perish in the folds, and by the fangs, of the snakes that devoured him than return to his country with the confession of defeat. And despite the powers that were in him, his life had been a failure, an utter failure--as yet.

In his early youth he had voyaged often with men who went to the extreme north in search of skins and such poor trade as they could drive with Esquimaux or Koraks; he had borne their dangers and their poverty, their miseries and their famine, for sake of seeing what they saw;--the pathless oceans of the ice realm, the trailing pines alone in a white, snow-world, the red moon fantastic and horrible in a sky of steel, the horned clouds of reindeer rushing through the endless night, the arch of the aurora spanning the heavens with their fire. He had pa.s.sed many seasons of his boyhood in the silence, the solitude, the eternal desolation of the mute mystery of the arctic world, which for no man has either sympathy or story; and in a way he had loved it, and was often weary for it; in a way its spirit remained with him always; and its inexorable coldness, its pitiless indifference to men's wants and weakness, its loneliness and its purity, and its scorn, were in all the works of his hand; blended in a strange union with the cruelty and the voluptuousness, and the gorgeousness of color, that gave to everything he touched the gleed and the temper of the case.

Thus, what he did pleased none; being for one half the world too chill, and being for the other half too sensual.

The world had never believed in him; and he found himself in the height and the maturity of his powers condemned to an absolute obscurity. Not one man in a million knew his name.

During these years he had devoted himself to the study of art with an undeviating subservience to all its tyrannies. He had studied humanity in all its phases; he had studied form with all the rigid care that it requires; he had studied color in almost every land that lies beneath the sun; he had studied the pa.s.sions in all their deformities, as well as in all their beauties; he had spared neither himself nor others in pursuit of knowledge. He had tried most vices, he had seen all miseries, he had spared himself no spectacle, however loathsome; he had turned back from no license, however undesired, that could give him insight into or empire over human raptures and affliction. Neither did he spare himself any labor however costly, however exhausting, to enrich his brain with that varied learning, that multifarious scene which he held needful to every artist who dared to desire greatness. The hireling beauty of the wanton, the splendor of the sun and sea, the charnel lore of anatomy, the secrets of dead tongues and buried nations, the horrors of the lazar wards and pest-houses, the glories of golden deserts and purple vineyards, the flush of love on a young girl's cheek, the rottenness of corruption on a dead man's limbs, the h.e.l.lish tint of a brothel, the divine calm of an Eastern night; all things alike he studied, without abhorrence as without delight, indifferent to all save for one end,--knowledge and art.

So entirely and undividedly did this possess him that it seemed to have left him without other pa.s.sions; even as the surgeon dissects the fair lifeless body of some woman's corpse, regardless of loveliness or s.e.x, only intent on the secret of disease, the mystery of formation, which he seeks therein, so did he study the physical beauty of women and their mortal corruption, without other memories than those of art. He would see the veil fall from off the limbs of a creature lovely as a G.o.ddess, and would think only to himself,--"How shall I render this so that on my canvas it shall live once more?"

One night, in the hot, close streets of Damascus, a man was stabbed,--a young Maronite,--who lay dying in the roadway, without sign or sound, whilst his a.s.sa.s.sins fled; the silver Syrian moon shining full on his white and scarlet robe, his calm, upturned face, his lean hand knotted on the dagger he had been spared no time to use; a famished street dog smelling at his blood. Arslan, pa.s.sing through the city, saw and paused beside him; stood still and motionless, looking down on the outstretched figure; then drew his tablets out and sketched the serene, rigid face, the flowing, blood-soaked robes, the hungry animal mouthing at the wound. Another painter, his familiar friend, following on his steps, joined him a little later, and started from his side in horror.

"My G.o.d! what do you do there?" he cried. "Do you not see?--the man is dying."

Arslan looked up--"I had not thought of that," he answered.

It was thus always with him.

He was not cruel for the sake of cruelty. To animals he was humane, to women gentle, to men serene; but his art was before all things with him, and with humanity he had little sympathy: and if he had pa.s.sions, they had wakened no more than as the drowsy tiger wakes in the hot hush of noon, half indifferent, half l.u.s.tful, to strike fiercely what comes before her, and then, having slain, couches herself and sleeps again.

But for this absolute surrender of his life, his art had as yet recompensed him nothing.

Men did not believe in him; what he wrought saddened and terrified them; they turned aside to those who fed them on simpler and on sweeter food.

His works were great, but they were such as the public mind deems impious. They unveiled human corruption too nakedly, and they shadowed forth visions too exalted, and satires too unsparing, for them to be acceptable to the mult.i.tude. They were compounded of an idealism clear and cold as crystal, and of a reality cruel and voluptuous as love. They were penetrated with an acrid satire and an intense despair: the world, which only cares for a honeyed falsehood and a gilded gloss in every art, would have none of them.

So for these twelve long years his labor had been waste, his efforts been fruitless. Those years had been costly to him in purse;--travel, study, gold flung to fallen women, sums spent on faithless friends, utter indifference to whosoever robbed him so long as he was left in peace to pursue lofty aims and high endeavors; all these did their common work on wealth which was scanty in the press of the world, though it had appeared inexhaustible on the sh.o.r.es of the north sea. His labors also were costly, and they brought him no return.

The indifference to fortune of a man of genius is, to a man of the world, the stupor of idiocy: from such a stupor he was shaken one day to find himself face to face with beggary.

His works were seen by few, and these few were antagonistic to them.

All ways to fame were closed to him, either by the envy of other painters, or by the apathies and the antipathies of the nations themselves. In all lands he was repulsed; he roused the jealousy of his compeers and the terror of the mult.i.tudes. They hurled against him the old worn-out cry that the office of art was to give pleasure, not pain; and when his money was gone, so that he could no longer, at his own cost, expose his works to the public gaze, they and he were alike obliterated from the public marts; they had always denied him fame, and they now thrust him quickly into oblivion, and abandoned him to it without remorse, and even with contentment.

He could, indeed, with the facile power of eye and touch that he possessed, have easily purchased a temporary ease, an evanescent repute, if he had given the world from his pencil those themes for which it cared, and descended to the common spheres of common art. But he refused utterly to do this. The best and greatest thing in him was his honesty to the genius wherewith he was gifted; he refused to prost.i.tute it; he refused to do other than to tell the truth as he saw it.

"This man blasphemes; this man is immoral," his enemies had always hooted against him.

It is what the world always says of those who utter unwelcome truths in its unwilling ears.