Folle Farine Part 43

"I came to see _those_," she answered him, with a backward movement of her hand, which had a sort of reverence in it, up to the forms of the G.o.ds above her.

The answer moved him; he had not thought to find a feeling so high as this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt child; and, to the man for whom, throughout a youth of ambition and of disappointment, the world had never found the voice of favor, even so much appreciation as lay in this outcast's homage had its certain sweetness. For a man may be negligent of all sympathy for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will he be able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sympathy for his works.

"Those!" he echoed, in surprise. "What can they be to _you_?"

She colored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in his last word; her head drooped; she knew that they were much to her--friends, masters, teachers divine and full of pity. But she had no language in which to tell him this; and if she could have told him, she would have been ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those benefits to him, of which he was ignorant, had now come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts, and it locked her lips to silence.

Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she bore him made her blind and giddy and afraid; she moved restlessly, glaring round with the half-timid, half-fierce glances of a wild animal that desires to escape and cannot.

Watching her more closely, he noticed for the first time the stains of blood upon her shoulder, and the bruise on her chest, where the rent in her linen left it bare.

"You have been hurt?" he asked her, "or wounded?"

She shook her head.

"It is nothing."

"Nothing? You have fallen or been ill treated, surely?"

"The people struck me."

"Struck you? With what?"

"Stones."

"And why?"

"I am Folle-Farine."

She answered him with the quiet calm of one who offers an all-sufficient reply.

But the reply to him told nothing: he had been too shunned by the populace, who dreaded the evil genius which they attributed to him, to have been told by them of their fancies and their follies; and he had never essayed to engage either their companionship or their confidence.

To be left to work, or to die, in solitude undisturbed was the uttermost that he had ever asked of any strange people amidst whom he had dwelt.

"Because you are Folle-Farine?" he repeated. "Is that a reason to hate you?"

She gave a gesture of a.s.sent.

"And you hate them in return?"

She paused a moment, glancing still hither and thither all round, as a trapped bird glances, seeking his way outward.

"I think so," she muttered; "and yet I have had their little children in my reach many a time by the water when the woods were all quiet, and I have never killed one yet."

He looked at her more earnestly than he had done before. The repressed pa.s.sion that glanced under her straight dusky brows, the unspoken scorn which curled on her mouth, the nervous meaning with which her hands clinched on the folds of linen on her breast, attracted him; there was a force in them all which aroused his attention. There were in her that conscious power for ferocity, and that contemptuous abstinence from its exercise, which lie so often in the fathomless regard of the lion; he moved nearer to her, and addressed her more gently.

"Who are you?" he asked, "and why have these people such savage violence against you?"

"I am Folle-Farine," she answered him again, unable to add anything else.

"Have you no other name?"

"No."

"But you must have a home? You live--where?"

"At the mill with Flamma."

"Does he also ill use you?"

"He beats me."

"When you do wrong?"

She was silent.

"Wrong?" "Right?"

They were but words to her--empty and meaningless. She knew that he beat her more often because she told truth or refused to cheat. For aught that she was sure of, she might be wrong, and he right.

Arslan looked at her musingly. All the thought he had was to induce her to return to the att.i.tude necessary to the completion of his picture.

He put a few more questions to her; but the replies told him little. At all times silent, before him a thousand emotions held her dumb. She was afraid, besides, that at every word he might suspect the debt he owed to her, and she dreaded its avowal with as pa.s.sionate a fear as though, in lieu of the highest sacrifice and service, her action had been some crime against him. She felt ashamed of it, as of some unholy thing: it seemed to her impious to have dared to give him back a life that he had wearied of, and might have wished to lose.

"He must never know, he must never know," she said to herself.

She had never known what fear meant until she had looked on this man's face. Now she dreaded, with an intensity of apprehension, which made her start like a criminal at every sound, lest he should ever know of this gift of life which, unbidden, she had restored to him: this gift, which being thus given, her instinct told her he would only take as a burden of an intolerable debt of an unmeasurable shame.

"Perfect love casts out fear," runs the tradition: rather, surely, does the perfect love of a woman break the courage which no other thing could ever daunt, and set foot on the neck that no other yoke would ever touch.

By slow degrees he got from her such fragments of her obscure story as she knew. That this child, so friendless, ill treated, and abandoned, had been the savior of his own existence, he never dreamed. A creature beaten and half starved herself could not, for an instant, seem to him one likely to have possessed even such humble gifts as food and fuel.

Besides, his thoughts were less with her than with the interrupted study on his easel, and his one desire was to induce her to endure the same watch upon her, awakening, which had had power to disturb her even in her unconsciousness. She was nothing to him, save a thing that he wished to turn to the purpose of his art--like a flower that he plucked on his way through the fields, for the sake of its color, to fill in some vacant nook in a mountain foreground.

"You have come often here?" he asked her, whilst she stood before him, flushing and growing pale, irresolute and embarra.s.sed, with her hands nervously gathering the folds of her dress across her chest, and her sad, l.u.s.trous, troubled eyes glancing from side to side in a bewildered fear.

"Often," she muttered. "You will not beat me for it? I did no harm."

"Beat you? Among what brutes have you lived? Tell me, why did you care to come?"

Her face drooped, and grew a deeper scarlet, where the warm blood was burning.

"They are beautiful, and they speak to me," she murmured, with a pathetic, apologetic timidity in her voice.

He laughed a little; bitterly.

"Are they? They have few auditors. But you are beautiful, too, in your way. Has no one ever told you so?"

"I?"