Folle Farine Part 67

Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and lose all things for a dream of G.o.d; and then at the last, upon his death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.

"It is so cruel! It is so cruel!" she muttered, where she sat with dry eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.

And she had reason.

For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith;--the Faith, whatever its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh, drowns him.

CHAPTER IV.

The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth, lest she should meet the eyes of Arslan.

The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Ypres was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in the mellow fields, and called across, "Hast heard? Flamma is dead--at last."

No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.

The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.

No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some simple meal of crusts and eggs.

"For who can tell?" the shrewd old Norway crone thought to herself,--"who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins."

For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.

"Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?" the old peasant muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.

"The wealth,--whose wealth?" Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She had had no thought of the h.o.a.rded savings of that long life of theft, and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his heir.

"Ay, his wealth," answered the woman, standing against the water with her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and gra.s.s, gazing, with a curious eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. "Ay, his wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare ma.s.s of gold hid away somewhere or another--the notary knows, I suppose--it is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And, maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so near. Where think you it will go?"

A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine's mouth.

"It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of their hearts and their bodies."

"Then you have no hope for yourself:--you?"

"I?"

She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of Pitchou.

"Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way," said the woman, moving away through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. "As if a thing of h.e.l.l like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any other hope than the hope of the gold! Well,--as for me,--I never pretend to lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch's mouldy crusts and lentil-washings."

She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.

Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to her with the woman's words of greed.

Before another day had sped, it was possible,--so even said one who hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at the miser's board,--possible that she would enter into the heritage of all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered together.

One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslan, and there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would have cried out of the fullness of her heart, "Take, enjoy, be free, do as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer than kings!"

But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with her first breath, "All that is mine is thine."

She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen, unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said, "You have no right to burden me with debt"?

Yet as she sat there lonely among the gra.s.ses, with the great mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the day of Flamma's death had been a saint's day, the fancy which had been set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.

If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought, to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind and hand.

And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love, she submitted without question to its cruelty.

At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little.

The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time willingly. "Who can say?" the Norman thought to herself,--"who can say?

She may yet get it all, who knows?"

At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her eyes.

"If only I could know who gets the gold?" she muttered. Her sole thought was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal.

She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.

With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood.

She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and none sought her.

All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.

Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the living a fair savor.

No one came to her. What had they to do with her,--a creature unbaptized, and an outcast?

She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory of the fields.

She did not think of herself--since Arslan had looked at her, in his merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.

It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and fortune.

She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds uncompanioned.

She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds; she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached--she thought always:

"If only I might die for him,--as the reed for the G.o.d."

The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.

The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown, and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.

From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to her ear in the shadow of the solitude.