Folle Farine Part 51

Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at her.

"She has found a lover,--oh-ho!--that brown wicked thing! A lover meet for her;--a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"--so the women screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.

At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.

In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy itself in its own darkness:--he had never stretched a finger to hold it back.

The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first day, breathed a word to Arslan of the treatment that she received at Ypres. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, "It is well enough with me now." He cared not enough for her to doubt her.

And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.

So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslan's tower she spent in acquiring another art,--she learned to read.

There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was better educated than most, and could even write a little.

To her Folle-Farine went.

"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters."

The old woman hesitated. "It were as much as my life is worth to have you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still----" The wish for the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She consented.

Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no one else knew them; and the old dame's herb-stall was the envy and despair of all the market-place.

Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the Evil Spirit of Ypres gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder, and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.

Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslan.

It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings; the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing against the first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their folded white lilies,--these were all things he cared to study.

The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and revolting coa.r.s.eness of their works, only built to blot it with so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslan loved best to move abroad.

Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of all honest folk, were after some unholy work--coming from the orgy of some witches' sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give them the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power of life and death.

For these things are still believed by many a peasant's hearth, and whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.

Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages she could for learning the art of letters.

The acquisition was hard and hateful--a dull plodding task that she detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the lore of books. She could only learn too at odd s.n.a.t.c.hes of time, with the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen in communion with the wicked thing of Ypres.

Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from that belonged to the herb-seller--a rude old tattered pamphlet recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she had cared to read, for reading's sake: books, she heard, only told the thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, "If only you were not so ignorant!"--and since that day she had set herself to clear away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood with her hatchet.

It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand before him and say, "The characters that men print are no longer riddles to me."

He praised her; and she was glad and proud.

It was love that had entered into her, but a great and n.o.ble love, full of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice;--a love that unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her, and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.

He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.

A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman woods,--what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission, was welcome to him.

And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.

She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at the blue-rock on the wing.

This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit--habit, and the callousness begotten by his own continual pain.

The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to change the sluggard appet.i.tes and the hungry cruelties of their kind into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.

He held that a man's chief pa.s.sion is his destiny, and will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circ.u.mstance or as hazard may.

His chief, his sole, pa.s.sion was a great ambition--a pa.s.sion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.

"What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day before his paintings. "What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of hours--waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly.

It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to do with you, go and hang yourself--or if you fear to do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a mult.i.tude. It is no use what your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before you, Hosannah."

So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew over them.

Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught her.

"Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she read of their G.o.d, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true?--if the world's choice were wrong once, why not twice?"

Arslan smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth than the ice floes of his native seas.

"Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world's sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas--the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. 'Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?' Every generation is asked the same question, and every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."

She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.

"But the end?" she asked. "The dead G.o.d is the G.o.d of all these people round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they bow when they pa.s.s his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise him?"

Arslan laughed a little.

"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money greeds and delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the a.s.sa.s.sination that destroys souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud in the place of mailed Force,--lives always in purple and fine linen, and ends in the odor of sanct.i.ty with the prayers of priests over his corpse."

He spoke with a certain fierce pa.s.sion that rose in him whenever he thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right, where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to his hand.

She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.

"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly. "I have thought of something."

And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him; a vision had arisen before him.

The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded away as though they had existed only in a dream.

All the empty s.p.a.ce about him became peopled with many human shapes that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld them.

The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a city at high festival.