Folle Farine Part 55

There was no sound near them, nor was there anything in sight except where above against the deepest azure of the sky two curlews were circling around each other, and in the distance a single ship was gliding, with sails silvered by the sun. All signs of human life lay far behind; severed from them by those steep scorched slopes swept only by the plovers and the bees. And all the while she looked the slow tears gathered in her eyes and fell, and the loud hard beating of her heart was audible in the hushed stillness of the upper air.

He waited awhile; then he spoke to her:

"Since it pains you come away."

A great sob shuddered through her.

"Give me that pain," she muttered, "sooner than any joy. Pain? Pain?--it is life, heaven, liberty!"

For suddenly those words which she had heard spoken around her, and which had been scarcely more to her than they were to the deaf and the dumb, became real to her with a thousand meanings. Men use them unconsciously, figuring by them all the marvels of their existence, all the agonies of their emotions, all the mysteries of their pangs and pa.s.sions, for which they have no other names; even so she used them now in the tumult of awe, in the torture of joy, that possessed her.

Arslan looked at her, and let her be.

Pa.s.sionless himself, except in the pursuit of his art, the pa.s.sions of this untrained and intense nature had interest for him--the cold interest of a.n.a.lysis and dissection, not of sympathy. As he portrayed her physical beauty scarcely moved by its flush of color and grace of mould, so he pursued the development of her mind searchingly, but with little pity and little tenderness.

The seagulls were lost in the heights of the air; the ship sailed on into the light till the last gleam of its canvas vanished; the sun sank westward lower and lower till it glowed in a globe of flame upon the edge of the water: she never moved; standing there on the summit of the cliff, with her head dropped upon her breast, her form thrown out dark and motionless against the gold of the western sky; on her face still that look of one who worships with intense honor and pa.s.sionate faith an unknown G.o.d.

The sun sank entirely, leaving only a trail of flame across the heavens; the waters grew gray and purple in the shadows; one boat, black against the crimson reflections of the west, swept on swiftly with the in-rushing tide; the wind rose and blew long curls of seaweed on the rocks; the sh.o.r.es of the bay were dimmed in a heavy mist, through which the lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed, and the distant voices of fishermen calling to each other as they drew in their deep-sea nets came faint and weirdlike.

Still she never moved; the sea at her feet seemed to magnetize her, and draw her to it with some unseen power.

She started again as Arslan spoke.

"This is but a land-locked bay," he said, with some contempt; he who had seen the white aurora rise over the untraversed ocean of an Arctic world. "And it lies quiet enough there, like a duck-pool, in the twilight. Tell me, why does it move you so?"

She gave a heavy stifled sigh.

"It looks so free. And I----"

On her there had vaguely come of late the feeling that she had only exchanged one tyranny for another; that, leaving the dominion of ignorance, she had only entered into a slavery still sterner and more binding. In every vein of her body there leaped and flashed and lived the old free blood of an ever lawless, of an often criminal, race, and yet, though with its instincts of rebellion so strong in her, moving her to break all bonds and tear off all yokes, she was the slave of a slave--since she was the slave of love. This she did not know; but its weight was upon her.

He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of poverty and of the world's forgetfulness, and he had not even so much poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.

"It is not free," was all he answered her. "It obeys the laws that govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty, but obedience--just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of the gra.s.s. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it, but nature has never accorded it."

The words pa.s.sed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a rose.

"It is so free!" she murmured, regardless of his words. "If I had only known--I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on it--as that bird floats--it would be so quiet there and it would not fling me back, I think. It would have pity."

Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire was in it.

"Is it too late?" he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his words to her. "Can you have grown in love with life?"

"You live," she said, simply.

He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.

"Let us go down!" he said, abruptly, at length; "it grows late."

With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the shadows, while the goats lying down for their night's rest started and fled at the human footsteps.

CHAPTER VIII.

She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she obeyed.

With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.

It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.

But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river's edge at his bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.

He painted or sketched her in nearly every att.i.tude, and rendered her the center of innumerable stories.

He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg.

He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm G.o.d Othyr. He portrayed her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the fruit of pa.s.sion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love's sake spoke not.

He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seash.e.l.l, the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.

Of all the studies he made from her--he all the while cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of sacrifice,--those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as with a knife into the humanity he dissected.

In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath, around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in her dreams; over her a b.u.t.terfly flew, spreading golden wings to the sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her with an elf's eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken--the one touch of pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.

In the second, there was still the same att.i.tude, the same solitude, the same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone there lay a surgeon's knife and a sculptor's scalpel; between her lips the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined,--ready for the mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife,--ready for the feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in dust.

And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so unsparing and unfaltering a hand.

Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power, because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder, which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his bidding.

She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.

She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would.

That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslan seemed sweet as the south wind.

To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life sublime to her.

"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Ypres went down the water-street beneath.

"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no better gifts than that. He is as n.i.g.g.ard as the saints are--the little mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they say--sooner or later--to every creature that lives again for him in his art?"

Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.

"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.

"And you have no fear?"