Folle Farine Part 77

"The reed was worthy to die!--the reed was worthy to die!" was all that she said, again and again, lying staring with her hot distended eyes into the void as of perpetual night, which was all that she saw around her. The words were to those who heard her, however, the mere meaningless babble of madness.

When they had found her in the cell of the guard-house, she was far beyond any reach of harm from them, or any sensibility of the worst which they might do to her. She was in a delirious stupor, which left her no more sense of place, or sound, or time than if her brain had been drugged to the agonies and ecstasies of the opium-eater.

They found her homeless, friendless, nameless; a thing accursed, dest.i.tute, unknown; as useless and as rootless as the dead Spanish vagrant lying on the stones beside her. They cast him to the public ditch; they sent her to the public sick wards, a league away; an ancient palace, whose innumerable chambers and whose vast corridors had been given to a sisterhood of mercy, and employed for nigh a century as a public hospital.

In this prison she lay without any sense of the pa.s.sing of hours and days and months.

The accusation against her fell to the ground harmless; no one pursued it: the gold was gone--somewhere, nowhere. No one knew, unless it were the bee-wife, and she held her peace.

She was borne, senseless, to the old hospice in the great, dull, saintly, historic town, and there perished from all memories as all time perished to her.

Once or twice the sister of charity who had the charge of her sought to exorcise the demon tormenting this stricken brain and burning body, by thrusting into the hands that clinched the air a leaden image or a cross of sacred wood. But those heathen hands, even in delirium, threw those emblems away always, and the captive would mutter in a vague incoherence that froze the blood of her hearers:

"The old G.o.ds are not dead; they only wait--they only wait! I am theirs--theirs! They forget, perhaps. But I remember. I keep my faith; they must keep theirs, for shame's sake. Heaven or h.e.l.l? what does it matter? Can it matter to me, so that he has his desire? And that they must give, or break faith, as men do. Persephone ate the pomegranate,--you know--and she went back to h.e.l.l. So will I--if they will it. What can it matter how the reed dies?--by fire, by steel, by storm?--what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, G.o.d! the reed was found worthy to die! And I--I am too vile, too poor, too shameful even for _that_!"

And then her voice would rise in a pa.s.sion of hysteric weeping, or sink away into the feeble wailing of the brain, mortally stricken and yet dimly sensible of its own madness and weakness; and all through the hours she, in her unconsciousness, would lament for this--for this alone--that the G.o.ds had not deemed her worthy of the stroke of death by which, through her, a divine melody might have arisen, and saved the world.

For the fable--which had grown to hold the place of so implicit a faith to her--was in her delirium always present with her; and she had retained no sense of herself except as the bruised and trampled reed which man and the G.o.ds alike had rejected as unworthy of sacrifice.

All the late autumn and the early winter came and went; and the cloud was dark upon her mind, and the pain of the blow dealt to her by Taric's hand gnawed at her brain.

When the winter turned, the darkness in which her reason had been engulfed began to clear, little by little.

As the first small trill of the wren stirred the silence in the old elm-boughs; as the first feeble gleam of the new-year sunshine struggled through the matted branches of the yews; as the first frail blossom of the pale hepatica timidly peeped forth in the damp moss-grown walls without, so consciousness slowly returned to her. She was so young; the youth in her refused to be quenched, and recovered its hold upon life as did the song of the birds, the light in the skies, the corn in the seed-sown earth.

She awakened to strength, to health, to knowledge; though she awoke thus blinded and confused and capable of little save the sense of some loathsome bondage, of some irreparable loss, of some great duty which she had left undone, of some great errand to which she had been summoned, and found wanting.

She saw four close stone walls around her; she saw her wrists and her ankles bound; she saw a hole high up above her head, braced with iron bars, which served to let in a few pallid streaks of daylight which alone ever found their way thither; she saw a black cross in one corner, and before it two women in black, who prayed.

She tried to rise, and could not, being fettered. She tore at the rope on her wrists with her teeth, like a young tigress at her chains.

They essayed to soothe her, but in vain; they then made trial first of threats, then of coercion; neither affected her; she bit at the knotted cords with her white, strong teeth, and, being unable to free herself, fell backward in a savage despair, glaring in mute impotent rage upon her keepers.

"I must go to Paris," she muttered again and again. "I must go to Paris."

So much escaped her;--but her secret she was still strong to keep buried in silence in her heart, as she had still kept it even in her madness.

Her old strength, her old patience, her old ferocity and stubbornness and habits of mute resistance, had revived in her with the return of life and reason. Slowly she remembered all things--remembered that she had been accused and hunted down as a thief and brought thither into this prison, as she deemed it, where the closeness of the walls pent her in and shut out the clouds and the stars, the water and the moonrise, the flicker of the green leaves against the gold of sunset, and all the liberty and loveliness of earth and air for which she was devoured by a continual thirst of longing, like the thirst of the caged lark for the fair heights of heaven.

So when they spoke of their G.o.d, she answered always as the lark answers when his jailers speak to him of song:--"Set me free."

But they thought this madness no less, and kept her bound there in the little dark stone den, where no sound ever reached, unless it were the wailing of a bell, and no glimpse of the sky or the trees could ever come to charm to peaceful rest her aching eyes.

At length they grew afraid of what they did. She refused all food; she turned her face to the wall; she stretched herself on her bed of straw motionless and rigid. The confinement, the absence of air, were a living death to the creature whose lungs were stifled unless they drank in the fresh cool draught of winds blowing unchecked over the width of the fields and forests, and whose eyes ached and grew blind unless they could gaze into the depths of free-flowing water, or feed themselves in far-reaching sight upon the radiant skies.

The errant pa.s.sions in her, the inborn instincts towards perpetual liberty, and the life of the desert and of the mountains which came with the blood of the Zingari, made her prison-house a torture to her such as is unknown to the house-born and hearth-fettered races.

If this wild moorbird died of self-imposed famine rather than live only to beat its cut wings against the four walls of their pent prison-house, it might turn ill for themselves; so the religious community meditated.

They became afraid of their own work.

One day they said to her:

"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."

She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.

"Is that true?" she asked.

"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed Master."

"If a Christian swear it,--it must be a lie," she said, with the smile that froze their timid blood.

But she accepted the food and the drink which they brought her, and broke her fast, and slept through many hours; strengthened, as by strong wine, by that one hope of freedom beneath the wide pure skies.

She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They told her it was the early spring.

"The spring," she echoed dully,--all the months were a blank to her, which had rolled by since that red autumn evening when in the cell of the guard-house the voice of Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the pa.s.sion songs of Spain.

"Yes. It is spring," they said again; and one sister, younger and gentler than the rest, reached from its place above the crucifix the bough of the golden catkins of the willow, which served them at their holy season as an emblem of the palms of Palestine.

She looked at the drooping grace of the branches, with their buds of amber, long and in silence; then with a pa.s.sion of weeping she turned her face from them as from the presence of some intolerable memory.

All down the sh.o.r.e of the river, amongst the silver of the reeds, the willows had been in blossom when she had first looked upon the face of Arslan.

"Stay with us," the women murmured, drawn to her by the humanity of those the first tears that she had ever shed in her imprisonment. "Stay with us; and it shall go hard if we cannot find a means to bring you to eternal peace."

She shook her head wearily.

"It is not peace that I seek," she murmured.

Peace?

He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, she knew. What she had sought to gain for him--what she would seek still when once she should get free--was the eternal conflict of a great fame in the world of men; since this was the only fate which in his sight had any grace or any glory in it.

They kept their faith with her. They opened the doors of her prison-house and bade her depart in peace, pagan and criminal though they deemed her.

She reeled a little dizzily as the first blaze of the full daylight fell on her. She walked out with unsteady steps into the open air where they took her, and felt it cool and fresh upon her cheek, and saw the blue sky above her.

The gates which they unbarred were those at the back of the hospital, where the country stretched around. They did not care that she should be seen by the people of the streets.

She was left alone on a road outside the great building that had been her prison-house; the road was full of light, it was straight and shadowless; there was a tall tree near her full of leaf; there was a little bird fluttering in the sand at her feet; the ground was wet, and sparkled with rain-drops.

All the little things came to her like the notes of a song heard far away--far away--in another world. They were all so familiar, yet so strange.

There was a little yellow flower growing in a tuft of gra.s.ses straight in front of her; a little wayside weed; a root and blossom of the field-born celandine.

She fell on her knees in the dust by it, and laughed and wept, and, quivering, kissed it and blessed it that it grew there. It was the first thing of summer and of sunshine that she had seen for so long.