Folle Farine Part 87

When once a human ear has heard the whispers of the G.o.ds by night steal through the reeds by the river, never again to it can there sound anything but discord and empty sound in the tinkling cymbals of bra.s.s, and the fools' bells of silver, in which the crowds in their deafness imagine the songs of the heroes and the music of the spheres.

"There are only two trades in a city," said the actors to her, with a smile as bitter as her own, "only two trades--to buy souls and to sell them. What business have you here, who do neither the one nor the other?"

There was music still in this trampled reed of the river, into which the G.o.ds had once bidden the stray winds and the wandering waters breathe their melody; but there, in the press, the buyers and sellers only saw in it a frail thing of the sand and the stream, only made to be woven for barter, or bind together the sheaves of the roses of pleasure.

By-and-by they grew so impatient of this soul which knew its right errand so little that it would neither accept temptation itself nor deal it to others, they grew so impatient to receive that golden guerdon from pa.s.sion and evil which they had foreseen as their sure wage for her when they had drawn her with them to the meshes of the city, that they betrayed her, stung and driven into treachery by the intolerable reproach of her continual strength, her continual silence.

They took a heavy price, and betrayed her to the man who had set his soul upon her beauty, to make it live naked and vile and perfect for all time in marble. She saved herself by such madness of rage, such fury of resistance, as the native tigress knows in the glare of the torches or the bonds of the cords. She smote the sculptor with her knife; a tumult rose round; voices shouted that he was stabbed; the men who had betrayed her raised loudest the outcry. In the darkness of a narrow street, and of a night of tempest, she fled from them, and buried herself in the dense obscurity which is one of the few privileges of the outcasts.

It was very poor, this quarter where she found refuge; men and women at the lowest ebb of life gathered there together. There was not much crime; it was too poor even for that. It was all of that piteous, hopeless cla.s.s that is honest, and suffers and keeps silent--so silent that no one notices when death replaces life.

Here she got leave to dwell a little while in the topmost corner of a high tower, which rose so high, so high, that the roof of it seemed almost like the very country itself. It was so still there, and so fresh, and the clouds seemed so near, and the pigeons flew so close about it all day long, and at night so trustfully sought their roost there.

In a nook of it she made her home. It was very old, very desolate, very barren; yet she could bear it better than she could any lower range of dwelling. She could see the sunrise and the sunset; she could see the rain-mists and the planets; she could look down on all the white curl of the smoke; and she could hear the bells ring with a strange, peculiar sweetness, striking straight to her ear across the wilderness of roofs.

And then she had the pigeons. They were not much, but they were something of the old, fresh country life; and now and then they brought a head of clover, or a spray of gra.s.s, in their beaks; and at sight of it the tears would rush into her eyes, and though it was pain, it was yet a dearer one than any pleasure that she had.

She maintained herself still without alms, buying her right to live there, and the little food that sufficed for her, by one of those offices in which the very poor contrive to employ those still poorer than themselves.

They slept so heavily, those people who had the weight of twenty hours'

toil, the pangs of hunger, and the chills of cold upon them, whenever they laid them down, and who would so willingly have slept forever with any night they laid their heads upon their sacks of rags. But, so long as they woke at all, they needed to wake with the first note of the sparrows in the dark.

She, so long used to rise ere ever the first streak of day were seen, roused scores of them; and in payment they gave her the right to warm herself at their stove, a handful of their chestnuts, a fragment of their crust, a little copper piece,--anything that they could afford or she would consent to take. A woman, who had been the reveilleuse of the quarter many years, had died; and they were glad of her:--"Her eyes have no sleep in them," they said; and they found that she never failed.

It was a strange trade--to rise whilst yet for the world it was night, and go to and fro the dreary courts, up and down the gloom of the staircases, and in and out the silent chambers, and call all those sons and daughters of wretchedness from the only peace that their lives knew.

So often she felt so loath to wake them; so often she stood beside the bundle of straw on which some dreaming creature, sighing and smiling in her sleep, murmured of her home, and had not the heart rudely to shatter those mercies of the night.

It was a strange, sad office, to go alone among all those sleepers in the stillness that came before the dawn, and move from house to house, from door to door, from bed to bed, with the one little star of her lamp alone burning.

They were all so poor, so poor, it seemed more cruel than murder only to call them from their rest to work, and keep alive in them that faculty of suffering which was all they gained from their humanity.

Her pity for them grew so great that her heart perforce softened to them also. Those strong men gaunt with famine, those white women with their starved children on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, those young maidens worn blind over the needle or the potter's clay, those little children who staggered up in the dark to go to the furnace, or the wheel, or the powder-mill, or the potato-fields outside the walls,--she could neither fear them nor hate them, nor do aught save sorrow for them with a dumb, pa.s.sionate, wondering grief.

She saw these people despised for no shame, wretched for no sin, suffering eternally, though guilty of no other fault than that of being in too large numbers on an earth too small for the enormous burden of its endless woe. She found that she had companions in her misery, and that she was not alone under that bitter scorn which had been poured on her. In a manner she grew to care for these human creatures, all strangers, yet whose solitude she entered, and whose rest she roused. It was a human interest, a human sympathy. It drew her from the despair that had closed around her.

And some of these in turn loved her.

Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the l.u.s.trous, deep-hued, flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.

"When she wakes us, the children never cry," said a woman whom she always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that had closed about her heart.

It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the thirst of overdriven cattle.

All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.

She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She sought for him always;--sought the busy crowds of the living; sought the burial-grounds of the dead.

As she pa.s.sed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she pa.s.sed by the vast temples of art; as she pa.s.sed by the open doors of the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories that it treasured; it became clearer to her--this thing of his desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and endlessly yearned.

The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, "Let me only die as the reed died,--what matter,--so that only the world speak his name!"

CHAPTER XIII.

One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm alt.i.tude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.

The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it, seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on the mighty maze of the city, and thought, "How long,--how long?"

Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear,--

"You are not tired, Folle-Farine?"

Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips the world said to her, "Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your G.o.ds are dead; and there is but one G.o.d now,--that G.o.d is gold."

"You must be tired, surely," the old man said, with soft insistance.

"You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden pear. It was not wise."

He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment paralyzed.

"You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead G.o.ds for naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine."

She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by the snake.

"Who told you?" she muttered. "Who told you that I dwell here?"

"The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me.

But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very weak, of course;--you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear,--and you will plunge after it,--and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine."

"You came--to say this?" she said, through her locked teeth.

"Nay--I came to see your beauty: your ice-G.o.d tired soon; but I----My golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted pa.s.sion than his beggar's quarter, and these wretched rags----"

She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under enforced composure.

"There is no shame here," she said, between her teeth. "A beggar's quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with clean hands."

He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly.

"No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may, shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You--a thing beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice.

Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue will envy you the red robe bitterly then."

Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rushing mill-water.

"You came--to say this?"

"Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern G.o.d soon tired, I say; but I----Look yonder a moment," he pursued; and he motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night air. "See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin; you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while, and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: 'She has sunk into sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than was her innocence.' And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a woman who sells her soul--at a loss. You see?--ah, surely, you see, Folle-Farine?"