Folle Farine Part 74

Folle-Farine's lips grew whiter, and she shrunk a little; but she answered steadily,--

"No."

"No! And at your age; and handsome as a ripe, red apple,--with your skin of satin, and your tangle of hair! Fie, for shame! Are the men blind?

Where do you rest to-night?"

"I am going on--south."

"And mean to walk all night? Pooh! Come home with me, and sup and sleep.

I live hard by, just inside the walls."

Folle-Farine opened her great eyes wide. It was the first creature who had ever offered her hospitality. It was an old woman, too; there could be nothing but kindness in the offer, she thought; and kindness was so strange to her, that it troubled her more than did cruelty.

"You are good," she said, gratefully,--"very good; but I cannot come."

"Cannot come? Why, then?"

"Because I must go on to Paris; I cannot lose an hour. Nevertheless, it is good of you."

The old woman laughed roughly.

"Oh-ho! the red apple must go to Paris. No other market grand enough! Is that it?"

"I do not know what you mean."

"But stay with me to-night. The roads are dangerous. There are vagrants and ill-livers about. There are great fogs, too, in this district; and you will meet drunken soldiers and beggars who will rob you. Come home with me. I have a pretty little place, though poor; and you shall have such fare as I give my own daughters. And maybe you will see two or three of the young n.o.bles. They look in for a laugh and a song--all innocent: my girls are favorites. Come, it is not a stone's throw through the south gate."

"You are good; but I cannot come. As for the road, I am not afraid. I have a good knife, and I am strong."

She spoke in all unconsciousness, in her heart thankful to this, the first human creature that had ever offered her shelter or good nature.

The woman darted one sharp look at her, venomous as an adder's bite; then bade her a short good-night, and went on her way to the gates of the town.

Folle-Farine rose up and walked on, taking her own southward road.

She was ignorant of any peril that she had escaped. She did not know that the only animals which prey upon the young of their own s.e.x and kind are women.

She was very tired; long want of sleep, anguish, and bodily fatigue made her dull, and too exhausted to keep long upon her feet. She looked about her for some place of rest; and she knew that if she did not husband her strength, it might fail her ere she reached him, and stretch her on a sick-bed in some hospital of the poor.

She pa.s.sed two or three cottages standing by the roadside, with light gleaming through their shutters; but she did not knock at any one of them. She was afraid of spending her three copper coins; and she was too proud to seek food or lodging as an alms.

By-and-by she came to a little shed, standing where no house was. She looked into it, and saw it full of the last season's hay, dry and sweet-smelling, tenanted only by a cat rolled round in slumber.

She crept into it, and laid herself down and slept, the bright starry skies shining on her through the open s.p.a.ce that served for entrance, the clatter of a little brook under the poplar-trees the only sound upon the quiet air.

Footsteps went past twice or thrice, and once a wagon rolled lumbering by; but no one came thither to disturb her, and she sank into a fitful heavy sleep.

At daybreak she was again afoot, always on the broad road to the southwest.

With one of her coins she bought a loaf and a draught of milk, at a hamlet through which she went. She was surprised to find that people spoke to her without a curse or taunt, and dealt with her as with any other human being.

Insensibly with the change of treatment, and with the fresh, sweet air, and with the brisk movement that bore her on her way, her heart grew lighter, and her old dauntless spirit rose again.

She would find him, she thought, as soon as ever she entered Paris; and she would watch over him, and only go near him if he needed her. And then, and then----

But her thoughts went no further. She shut the future out from her; it appalled her. Only one thing was clear before her--that she would get him the greatness that he thirsted for, if any payment of her body or her soul, her life or her death, could purchase it.

A great purpose nerves the life it lives in, so that no personal terrors can a.s.sail, nor any minor woes afflict it. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, hardship, danger,--these were all in her path, and she had each in turn; but not one of them unnerved her.

To reach Paris, she felt that she would have walked through flames, or fasted forty days.

For two days and nights she went on--days cloudless, nights fine and mild; then came a day of storm--sharp hail and loud thunder. She went on through it all the same; the agony in her heart made the glare of lightning and the roar of winds no more to her than the sigh of an April breeze over a primrose bank.

She had various fortunes on her way.

A party of tramps crossing a meadow set on her, and tried to insult her; she showed them her knife, and, with the blade bare against her throat, made them fall back, and scattered them.

A dirty and tattered group of gypsies, swatting in a dry ditch under a tarpaulin, hailed her, and wanted her to join with them and share their broken food. She eluded them with disgust; they were not like the gitanos of the Liebana, and she took them to be beggars and thieves, as, indeed, they were.

At a little wayside cabin, a girl, with a bright rosy face, spoke softly and cheerily to her, and bade her rest awhile on the bench in the porch under the vines; and brought out some white pigeons to show her; and asked her, with interest, whence she came. And she, in her fierceness and her shyness, was touched, and wondered greatly that any female thing could be thus good.

She met an old man with an organ on his back, and a monkey on his shoulder. He was old and infirm. She carried his organ for him awhile, as they went along the same road; and he was gentle and kind in return, and made the route she had to take clear to her, and told her, with a shake of his head, that Paris would be either h.e.l.l or heaven to such as she. And she, hearing, smiled a little, for the first time since she had left Ypres, and thought--heaven or h.e.l.l, what would it matter which, so long as she found Arslan?

Of Dante she had never heard; but the spirit of the "_questi chi mai da me non piu diviso_" dwells untaught in every great love.

Once, at night, a vagrant tried to rob her, having watched her count the gold and notes which she carried in her girdle. He dragged her to a lonely place, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at the red sash, grasping the money with it; but she was too quick for him, and beat him off in such a fashion that he slunk away limping, and told his fellows to beware of her; for she had the spring of a cat, and the stroke of a swan's wing.

On the whole, the world seemed better to her than it had done: the men were seldom insolent, taking warning from the look in her flashing eyes and the straight carriage of her flexile frame; and the women more than once were kind.

Many peasants pa.s.sed her on their market-mules, and many carriers' carts and farm-wagons went by along the sunny roads.

Sometimes their drivers called to her to get up, and gave her a lift of a league or two on their piles of gra.s.s, of straw, or among their crates of cackling poultry, as they made their slow way between the lines of the trees, with their horses nodding heavily under the weight of their uncouth harness.

All this while she never touched the gold that he had given her. Very little food sufficed to her: she had been hardily reared; and for the little she had she worked always, on her way.

A load carried, a lost sheep fetched in, some wood hewn and stacked, a crying calf fed, a cabbage-patch dug or watered, these got her the simple fare which she fed on; and for lodging she was to none indebted, preferring to lie down by the side of the cows in their stalls, or under a stack against some little blossoming garden.

The people had no prejudice against her: she found few foes, when she had left the district that knew the story of Reine Flamma; they were, on the contrary, amused with her strange picture-like look, and awed with the sad brevity of her speech to them. Sometimes it chanced to her to get no tasks of any sort to do, and at these times she went without food: touch his gold she would not. On the road she did what good she could; she walked a needless league to carry home a child who had broken his leg in a lonely lane; she sought, in a foggy night, for the straying goat of a wretched old woman; she saved an infant from the flames in a little cabin burning in the midst of the green fields: she did what came in her path to do. For her heart was half broken; and this was her way of prayer.

So, by tedious endeavor, she won her pa.s.sage wearily towards Paris.

She had been nine days on the road, losing her way at times, and having often wearily to retrace her steps.

On the tenth day she came to a little town lying in a green hollow amidst woods.

It had an ancient church; the old sweet bells were ringing their last mid-day ma.s.s, _Salutaris hostia_; a crumbling fortress of the Angevine kings gave it majesty and shadow; it was full of flowers and of trees, and had quaint, quiet, gray streets, hilly and shady, that made her think of the streets round about the cathedral of her mother's birthplace, away northwestward in the white sea-mists.

When she entered it, noon had just sounded from all its many clocks and chimes. The weather was hot, and she was very tired. She had not eaten any food, save some berries and green leaves, for more than forty hours.

She had been refused anything to do in all places; and she had no money--except that gold of his.