Folle Farine Part 53

He flung his charcoal away, and looked at the sun as it rose.

"Even I!" he answered her. "We, who call ourselves poets or painters, can see the truth and can tell it,--we are prophets so far,--but when we come down from our h.o.r.eb we hanker for the flesh-pots and the dancing-women, and the bags of gold, like all the rest. We are no better than those we preach to; perhaps we are worse. Our eyes are set to the light; but our feet are fixed in the mire."

She did not hear him; and had she heard, would not have comprehended.

Her eyes were still fastened on the Christ, and the blood in her cheeks faded and glowed at every breath she drew, and in her eye there was the wistful, wondering, trustful reverence which shone in those of the child, who, breaking from his mother's arms, and, regardless of the soldier's stripes, clung to the feet of the scourged captive, and there kneeled and prayed.

Without looking at her, Arslan went out to his daily labor on the waters.

The sun had fully risen; the day was red and clear; the earth was hushed in perfect stillness; the only sounds there were came from the wings and voices of innumerable birds.

"And yet I desire nothing for myself," he thought. "I would lie down and die to-morrow, gladly, did I know that they would live."

Yet he knew that to desire a fame after death, was as idle as to desire with a child's desire, the stars.

For the earth is crowded full with clay G.o.ds and false prophets, and fresh legions forever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and if a man pa.s.s unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed on him and shut him forever from sight.

When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to garner its recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a n.o.ble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden.

But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.

Why should it not be?

It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.

And the prayer which to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old old cry that it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of the wind, and forever--forever unanswered!

CHAPTER VII.

One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set.

"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"

"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"

"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it is."

"The man has never yet lived who could tell--in fit language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old G.o.ds of h.e.l.las who still lives and reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."

So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves.

It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought the coals and fish; when she had a little s.p.a.ce of leisure to herself she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the sh.o.r.e; almost always in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a broad estuary.

She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to herself.

When she had thought of it at all, she had only thought of it as probably some wide ca.n.a.l black with mud and dust and edged by dull pathways slippery and toilsome, along which tired horses towed heavy burdens all day long, that men and women might be thereby enriched of the beauty and the mystery. Of the infinite sweetness and solace of the sea, she knew no more than she knew of any loveliness or of any pity in human nature.

A few leagues off, where the stream widened into a bay and was hemmed in by sand-banks in lieu of its flat green pastures, there was a little fishing-town, built under the great curve of beetling cliffs, and busy with all the stir and noise of mart and wharf. There the sea was crowded with many masts and ruddy with red-brown canvas; and the air was full of the salt scent of rotting sea-weed, of stiff sails spread out to dry, of great shoals of fish poured out upon the beach, and of dusky noisome cabins, foul smelling and made hideous by fishwives' oaths, and the death-screams of scalded sh.e.l.lfish.

He did not take her thither.

He took her half way down the stream whilst it was still sleepily beautiful with pale gray willows and green meadow-land, and acres of silvery reeds, and here and there some quaint old steeple or some apple-hidden roofs on either side its banks. But midway he left the water and stretched out across the country, she beside him, moving with that rapid, lithe, and staglike ease of limbs that have never known restraint.

Some few people pa.s.sed them on their way: a child, taking the cliff-road to his home under the rocks, with a big blue pitcher in his bands; an old man, who had a fishing-brig at sea and toiled up there to look for her, with a gray dog at his heels, and the smell of salt water in his clothes; a goatherd, clad in rough skins, wool outward, and killing birds with stones as he went; a woman, with a blue skirt and scarlet hose, and a bundle of boughs and brambles on her head, with here and there a stray winter berry glowing red through the tender green leaf.a.ge; all these looked askance at them, and the goatherd muttered a curse, and the woman a prayer, and gave them wide way through the stunted furze, for they were both of them accursed in the people's sight.

"You find it hard to live apart from your kind?" he asked her suddenly as they gained the fields where no human habitation at all was left, and over which in the radiance of the still sunlit skies there hung the pale crescent of a week-old moon.

"To live apart?"--she did not understand.

"Yes--like this. To have no child smile, no woman gossip, no man exchange good-morrow with you. Is it any sorrow to you?"

Her eyes flashed through the darkness fiercely.

"What does it matter? It is best so. One is free. One owes nothing--not so much as a fair word. That is well."

"I think it is well--if one is strong enough for it. It wants strength."

"I am strong."

She spoke quietly, with the firm and simple consciousness of force, which has as little of vanity in it as it has of weakness.

"To live apart," she said, after a pause, in which he had not answered.

"I know what you mean--now. It is well--it was well with those men you tell me of, when the world was young, who left all other men and went to live with the watercourse and the wild dove, and the rose and the palm, and the great yellow desert; was it not well?"

"So well with them that men worshiped them for it. But there is no such worship now. The cities are the kingdom of heaven, not the deserts; and he who hankers for the wilderness is stoned in the streets as a fool.

And how should it be well with you, who have neither wild rose nor wild dove for compensation, but are only beaten and hooted, and hated and despised?"

Her eyes glittered through the darkness, and her voice was hard and fierce as she answered him:

"See here.--There is a pretty golden thing in the west road of the town who fears me horribly, Yvonne, the pottery painter's daughter. She says to her father at evening, 'I must go read the offices to old Mother Margot;' and he says, 'Go, my daughter; piety and reverence of age are twin blossoms on one stem of a tree that grows at the right hand of G.o.d in Paradise.'

"And she goes; not to Margot, but to a little booth, where there is dancing, and singing, and brawling, that her father has forbade her to go near by a league.

"There is an old man at the corner of the market-place, Ryno, the fruitseller, who says that I am accursed, and spits out at me as I pa.s.s.

He says to the people as they go by his stall, 'See these peaches, they are smooth and rosy as a child's cheek; sweet and firm; not their like betwixt this and Paris. I will let you have them cheap, so cheap; I need sorely to send money to my sick son in Africa.' And the people pay, greedily; and when the peaches are home they see a little black speck in each of them, and all save their bloom is rottenness.

"There is a woman who makes lace at the window of the house against the fourth gate; Marion Silvis; she is white and sleek, and blue-eyed; the priests honor her, and she never misses a ma.s.s. She has an old blind mother whom she leaves in her room. She goes out softly at nightfall, and she slips to a wineshop full of soldiers, and her lovers kiss her on the mouth. And the old mother sits moaning and hungry at home; and a night ago she was badly burned, being alone. Now--is it well or no to be hated of those people? If I had loved them, and they me, I might have become a liar, and have thieved, and have let men kiss me, likewise."

She spoke with thoughtful and fierce earnestness, not witting of the caustic in her own words, meaning simply what she said, and cla.s.sing the kisses of men as some sort of weakness and vileness, like those of a theft and a lie; as she had come to do out of a curious, proud, true instinct that was in her, and not surely from the teaching of any creature.

She in her way loved the man who walked beside her; but it was a love of which she was wholly unconscious; a pity, a sorrow, a reverence, a pa.s.sion, a deification, all combined, that had little or nothing in common with the loves of human kind, and which still left her speech as free, and her glance as fearless, with him as with any other.

He knew that; and he did not care to change it; it was singular, and gave her half her charm of savageness and innocence commingled. He answered her merely, with a smile: