Folle Farine Part 88

She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and l.u.s.trous moonlight about her. She saw--she saw now!

And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty, and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least believe--believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and merciless gift.

"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it--know it, at least, enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,--to stand homeless under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired, Folle-Farine!"

She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.

Tired!--ah, G.o.d!--tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he spake.

"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!--what vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!--what retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance--so symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to wither at your birth,--a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of pa.s.sion. I use no anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way, you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest vengeance on him. A n.o.ble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men; and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;--nothing as you are, Folle-Farine!"

She heard in silence to the end.

On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam close against her sight; below was the infinite s.p.a.ce of the darkness, in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted in the s.p.a.ces of the stones.

As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the void of the darkness.

"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you, and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."

And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted her.

CHAPTER XIV.

The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like wolves; the temptations of the city crouched in wait for her incessantly, like tigers. She was always hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once of listening, of yielding, of taking any pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never thought of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner pa.s.sions were absorbed and slain.

Once or twice, through some lighted cas.e.m.e.nt in some lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed on fairy lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl on her lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.

"To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have both hands full of gold, that is what women love," she thought; and laughed a little in her cold wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their purple throats, and broke among them her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on the parapet and watched the round white moon rise over the shining roofs of Paris.

She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, she was very wretched; but she had a supreme love in her, and she was strong.

A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and unclose to him sooner or later.

"You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine," the Red Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old man Sartorian; and he kept his word very patiently.

He was patient, he was wise; he believed in the power of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a woman. He knew how to wait--unseen, so that this rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly incense, her.

Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go among the world of the sleeping poor, at her threshold she would step on some gift worthy of a queen's acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there against the stone of the stairs.

When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there would be on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst them some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the pines and of the grapes in gold.

When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars, sick with the tumult and the stench and the squalor, parched with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search for one face amidst the millions,--going home!--oh, mockery of the word!--to a bed of straw, to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to a night of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a moment now and then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, saying,--

"Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?"

But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.

The mill dust; the reed by the river; the nameless, friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance breeze--so the Red Mouse told her; should have asked no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a crown of pleasure.

Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.

For Love was with her.

And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love's breast, and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet when Love, once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a hand of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares meddle with Love no more.

In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather that had the purple glow of the autumnal storms and the chills of coming winter on it, she arose, as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent, and lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds to rouse the sleepers.

She had barely tasted food for many hours. All the means of subsistence that she had was the few coins earned from those as poor almost as herself. Often these went in debt to her, and begged for a little time to get the piece or two of base metal that they owed her; and she forgave them such debts always, not having the heart to take the last miserable pittance from some trembling withered hand which had worked through fourscore years of toil, and found no payment but its wrinkles in its palm; not having the force to fill her own platter with crusts which could only be purchased by the hunger cries of some starveling infant, or by the barter of some little valueless cross of ivory or rosary of berries long cherished in some aching breast after all else was lost or spent.

She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she had not had even a few grains to scatter to the hungry pigeons as they had fluttered to her on the housetop in the stormy twilight as the evening fell.

She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of the bells sound the hours, and seeming to say to her as they beat on the silence,--

"Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the river, a Nothing?"

When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that fastened her door, and went out on the crazy stairway, she struck her foot against a thing of metal. It glittered in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up; it was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse lurked in, among the pearls, to spring out from their whiteness into the purer snow of Gretchen's bread.

With it was only one written line:

"When you are tired, Folle-Farine?"

She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.

An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face, lit with wolf's eyes, through the gloom.

"Are you not tired?" she muttered in the formula taught her. "Are you not tired, Folle-Farine?"

"If I be, what of that?" she answered, and she thrust the case away to the feet of the woman, still shut, and went on with her little dim taper down round the twist of the stairs. She knew what she did, what she put away. She had come to know, too, what share the s.e.x of her mother takes in the bringing to the lips of their kind the golden pear that to most needs no pressing.

"If I had only your face, and your chances," had said to her that day a serving-girl, young, with sallow cheeks, and a hollow voice, and eyes of fever, who lived in a den lower down on the stairway.

"Are you mad that you hunger here when you might hang yourself with diamonds like our Lady of Atocha?" cried a dancing-woman with sullen eyes and a yellow skin from the hither side of the mountains, who begged in the streets all day.

So, many tongues hissed to her in different fashions. It seemed to many of them impious in one like her to dare be stronger than the gold was that a.s.sailed her, to dare to live up there among the clouds, and hunger, and thirst, and keep her silence, and strike dumb all the mouths that tried to woo her down, and shake aside all the hands that strove softly to slide their purchase-moneys into hers.

For they chimed in chorus as the bells did:

"Strength in the dust--in a reed--in a Nothing?"

It was a bitter windy morning; the rain fell heavily; there were no stars out, and the air was sharp and raw. She was too used to all changes of weather to take heed of it, but her thin clothes were soaked through, and her hair was drenched as she crossed the courts and traversed the pa.s.sages to reach her various employers.

The first she roused was a poor sickly woman sleeping feverishly on an old rope mat; the second an old man wrestling with nightmare, as the rain poured on him through a hole in the roof, making him dream that he was drowning.

The third was a woman, so old that her quarter accredited her with a century of age; she woke mumbling that it was hard at her years to have to go and pick rags for a crumb of bread.