Folle Farine Part 45

Night was near and the darkness soon inclosed it; the beat of the oars sounding faintly through the silence of the evening.

There was little need to exact the promise from her.

Like Persephone she had eaten of the fatal pomegranate-seed, which, whether she would or no, would make her leave the innocence of youth, and the light of the sun and the blossoms of the glad green springtime world, and draw her footsteps backward and downward to that h.e.l.l which none,--once having entered it,--can ever more forsake.

She drifted away from him into the shadows of evening as they died from the sh.o.r.e and the stream into the gloom of the night.

He thought no more of pursuing her than he thought of chasing the melted shadows.

Returning to his chamber he looked for some minutes at the panel where it leaned against the wall, catching the first pallid moon-gleam of the night.

"If she should not come, it will be of little moment," he thought. "I have nearly enough for remembrance there."

And he went away from the painting, and took up charcoal and turned to those anatomical studies whose severity he never spared himself, and for whose perfection he pursued the science of form even in the bodies of the dead.

From the moment that his hand touched the stylus he forgot her; for she was no more to him than a chance bird that he might have taken from its home among the ripe red autumn foliage and caged for awhile to study its grace and color, its longing eye and drooping wing; and then tossed up into the air again when he had done with it to find its way to freedom, or to fall into the fowler's snare;--what matter which?

The boat went on into the darkness under the willow banks, past the great Calvary, whose lantern was just lit and glimmered through the gloom.

She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.

She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or a smith's forge.

By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical, silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the mult.i.tudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the mult.i.tudes of the city whither it goes.

It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to and fro in his wood-yard.

At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches, and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted, and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.

In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered, puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle; there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter; under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring; on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.

The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the G.o.ds, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslan.

She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of l.u.s.ter that the night air lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.

The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray bent brows.

"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth.

"Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"

The old dogged ferocity gathered over her countenance, chasing away the softened perplexed radiance that had been newly wakened there.

"I say nothing," she answered.

"Nothing! nothing!" he echoed after her. "Then we will find a way to make thee speak. Nothing!--when three of the clock should have seen thee back hither at latest, and five hours since then have gone by without account. You have spent it in brawling and pleasure--in shame and iniquity--in vice and in violence, thou creature of sin!"

"Since you know, why ask?"

She spoke with steady contemptuous calm. She disdained to seek refuge from his fury by pleading the injuries that the townsfolk had wrought her; and of the house by the river she would not have spoken though they had killed her. The storm of his words raged on uninterrupted.

"Five hours, five mortal hours, stolen from me, your lawful work left undone that you may riot in some secret abomination that you dare not to name. Say, where you have been, what you have done, you sp.a.w.n of h.e.l.l, or I will wring your throat as I wring a sparrow's!"

"I have done as I chose."

She looked him full in the eyes as she spoke, with the look in her own that a bull's have when he lowers his head to the charge and attack.

"As you choose! Oh-ho! You would speak as queens speak--_you!_--a thing less than the worm and the emmet. As you choose--you!--who have not a rag on your back, not a crust of rye bread, not a leaf of salad to eat, not a lock of hay for your bed, that is not mine--mine--mine. As you choose. _You!_--you thing begotten in infamy; you slave; you beggar; you sloth! You are nothing--nothing--less than the blind worm that crawls in the sand. You have the devil that bred you in you, no doubt; but it shall go hard if I cannot conquer him when I bruise your body and break your will."

As he spoke he seized, to strike, her; in his hand he already gripped an oak stick that he had brought in with him from his timber-yard, and he raised it to rain blows on her, expecting no other course than that dumb, pa.s.sive, scornful submission with which she had hitherto accepted whatsoever he had chosen to do against her.

But the creature, silent and stirless, who before had stood to receive his lashes as though her body were of bronze or wood, that felt not, was changed. A leonine and superb animal sprang up in full rebellion. She started out of his grasp, her lithe form springing from his seizure as a willow-bough that has been bent to earth springs back, released, into the air.

She caught the staff in both her hands, wrenched it by a sudden gesture from him, and flung it away to the farther end of the chamber; then she turned on him as a hart turns brought to bay.

Her supple body was erect like a young pine; her eyes flashed with a l.u.s.ter he had never seen in them; the breath came hard and fast through her dilated nostrils.

"Touch me again!" she cried aloud, while her voice rang full and imperious through the stillness. "Touch me again; and by the heaven and h.e.l.l you prate of, I will kill you!"

So sudden was the revolt, so sure the menace, that the old man dropped his hands and stood and gazed at her aghast and staring; not recognizing the mute, patient, doglike thing that he had beaten at his will, in this stern, fearless, splendid, terrible creature, who faced him in all the royalty of wrath, in all the pa.s.sion of insurrection.

He could not tell what had altered her, what had wrought this transformation, what had changed her as by sorcery; he could not tell that what had aroused a human soul in her had been the first human voice that she had listened to in love; he could not tell that her body had grown sacred to her because a stranger had called her beautiful, and that her life for the first time had acquired a worth and dignity in her sight because one man had deemed it fair.

He could not tell; he could only see that for the first time his slave had learned somewhere, and in somewise, what freedom meant; and had escaped him. This alone he saw; and, seeing it, was startled and afraid.

She waited, watching him some moments, with cold eyes of disdain, in which a smouldering fire slept, ready to burst into an all-devouring flame.

There was not a sound in the place; the woman spinning stopped her wheel, wondering in a half-stupid, savage fashion; the lean cat ceased its cries; there was only the continual swish of the water in the sluices under the wall without, and the dull ticking of an old Black Forest clock, that kept a fitful measure of the days and nights in its cracked case of painted wood, high up, where the thyme, and the sage, and the onions hung among the twisted rafters.

Folle-Farine stood still, her left hand resting on her hip, her lips curved scornfully and close, her face full of pa.s.sion, which she kept still as the dead birds hanging on the wall; whilst all the time the tawny smoky hues of the oil-lamp were wavering with an odd fantastic play over her head and limbs.

Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently, without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their n.o.ble fort.i.tude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as was the daily bread she broke.

But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the G.o.ds upon her, now she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslan.

There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.

Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily in him; some vague remembrance pa.s.sed over him, that, whatsoever else she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will, with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.

He pa.s.sed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard at her in the dusky lamp-light.

He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superst.i.tious, ignorant life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and trample it under foot, and spit on it.

He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his path, while he struck out the light with his staff.

"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late.

To-morrow I will deal with thee."

She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslan had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to preserve it by death from that indignity.