Folle Farine Part 81

"Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a dog stir."

"You would if the dog chose to go."

"To a master who forsook it--for a kick and a curse?"

Her face burned; she hung her head instinctively. She sank down again on the seat which she had quitted. The old horror of shame which she had felt by the waterside under the orchards bent her strength under this man's unmerciful pressure. She knew that he had her secret, and the haughty pa.s.sion and courage of her nature writhed under his taunt of it.

"To refuse to stay is uncouth," he said to her.

"I am uncouth, no doubt."

"And it is ungrateful."

"I would not be that."

"Ungrateful! I did what you asked of me. I unloosed your Othyr of Art to spend his strength as he will, in essaying to raise a storm-blast which shall have force enough to echo through the endless tunnels of the time to come."

"You gave him a handful of gold pieces for _that_!"

"Ah! if you thought that I should offer him the half of my possessions, you were disappointed, no doubt. But you forgot that 'that' would not sell in the world, as yet, for a handful of wheat."

She touched the three sapphires.

"Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being ignorant, esteem them of no more value than three sparrow's eggs in the hedge?"

"My poor jewels! Well, stay here to-night; you need rest, shelter, and warmth; and to-morrow you shall go as poor as you came, if you wish. But the world is very hard. The world is always winter--to the poor," he added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.

Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was close at hand--the world in which she would be houseless, friendless, penniless, alone.

"A hard world, to those who will not worship its G.o.ds," he repeated, musingly. "And you astray in it, you poor barbarian, with your n.o.ble madness, and your blindness of faith and of pa.s.sion. Do you know what it is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?"

"Do I know?" her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang loud on the stillness. "_Do you?_ The empty dish, the chill stove, the frozen feet, the long nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour berries and hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the rats fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black months, whose saints' days are kept by new pains, and whose holy days are feasted by fresh diseases. Do _I_ know? Do _you_?"

He did not answer her; he was absorbed in his study of her face; he was thinking how she would look in Paris in some theatre's spectacle of Egypt, with anklets of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind her a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky.

"What a fool he must have been!" he thought, as his eyes went from her to the study of her sleeping in the poppies. "What a fool! he left his lantern of Aladdin behind him."

"You remember unlovely things," he said, aloud. "No, I do not know them; and I should not have supposed that you, who did, could so much have cared to know them more, or could have clung to them as the only good, as you now seem to do. You cannot love such hardships?"

"I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them."

"Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?"

"I do not know--to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and forever to see the sun."

"Not a low ideal. You must await the Peruvian Paradise. Meanwhile there is a dayspring that represents the sun not ill; we call it Wealth."

"Ah!" she could not deride this G.o.d, for she knew it was the greatest of them all; when the rod of riches had been lost, had not the Far-Striking King himself been brought low and bound down to a slave's drudgery?

The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not change from its musing study, its slow, vigilant smile; holding her under the subtle influence of his gaze, Sartorian began to speak,--speak as he could at choice, with accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery.

With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he placed before her that world of which she knew no more than any one of the reeds that blew by the sands of the river.

He painted to her that life of all others which was in most vital contrast and unlikeness to her own; the life of luxury, of indolence, of carelessness, of sovereignty, of endless pleasure, and supreme delight; he painted to her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent, beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from which to choose her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, her victories, her cruelties, and her seductions. He painted the long cloudless invigorating day of such a favorite of fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its laughter rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold; the same day for the same woman, whether it were called of Rome or of Corinth, of Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or of Paris, and whether she herself were hailed hetaira or imperatrix. He drew such things as the skill of his words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled him, in language which aroused her even from the absorption of her wretchedness, and stirred her dull disordered thoughts to a movement of restless discontent, and of strange wonder--Arslan had never spoken to her thus.

He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he asked her,--

"Such lives are; do you not envy them?"

She thought,--"Envy them? she? what could she envy save the eyes that looked on Arslan's face?" "What were the use?" she said aloud; "all my life I have seen all things are for others; nothing is for me."

"Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall see all things for you, instead."

She flashed her eyes upon him.

"How can that be?"

"Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle-Farine?"

"Alone; yes."

"You have not a coin to stand a day between you and hunger?"

"Not one."

"You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much as a night?"

"Not one."

"You have just left a public place of pestilence?"

"Yes."

"And you know that every one's hand is against you because you are nameless and b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and come of a proscribed people, who are aliens alike in every land?"

"I am Folle-Farine; yes."

For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic acceptance of the fate that made her name--merely because hers--a symbol of all things despised, and desolate, and forsaken, touched his heart and moved him to a sorrowful pity. But the pity died, and tie cruelty remained alive behind it.

He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sardonic, meaning eyes.

"Well--be Folle-Farine still. Why not? But let Folle-Farine mean no longer a beggar, an outcast, a leper, a thing attainted, proscribed, and forever suspected; but let it mean on the ear of every man that hears it the name of the most famous, the most imperious, the most triumphant, the most beautiful woman of her time; a woman of whom the world says, 'look on her face and die--you have lived enough.'"

Her breath came and went as she listened; the blood in her face flushed and paled; she trembled violently, and her whole frame seemed to dilate and strengthen and vibrate with the electric force of that subtlest temptation.

"I!" she murmured brokenly.

"Yes, you. All that I say you shall be: homeless, tribeless, nameless, nationless, though you stand there now, Folle-Farine."

The wondrous promise swept her fancy for the moment on the strong current of its imagery, as a river sweeps a leaf. This empire hers?--hers?--when all mankind had driven and derided her, and shunned her sight and touch, and cursed and flouted her, and barely thought her worthy to be called "thou dog!"