King of Camargue Part 14

A murmur of reproof ran from mouth to mouth among the gossips.

"Ah! here's old Rosine, she'll set us right."

Motionless upon her horse Livette listened vaguely. She was absent-minded, yet interested.

When old Rosine, who was very deaf, had finally been made to understand what was wanted of her, and that she was expected to give her views concerning Sara the bondwoman, she began:

"Ah! my children, G.o.d knows his own, and Sara was a great saint, for sure----"

Here Rosine crossed herself, and was at once imitated by all the old women.

"But," added Rosine, "Sara was a heathen woman from Egypt, and not a Jewess of Judea; and the heathens, you see, come a long way after the Jews in the world's esteem. Don't you see that the Jews are scattered all over the world, but they stay everywhere, and become masters by force of avarice. That is their way of being blessed by their Lord.

But the heathens of Egypt, on the contrary, are wanderers and poor, although they are thieves, and more scattered and more accursed than the Jews. Well, you see, my children, Saint Sara is their saint, the saint of the Egyptian heathens! She wasn't a very good Catholic saint, to pay the boatman for her pa.s.sage by a sight of her naked body--with the indifference of an old sinner, I fancy! So it is right that she should come after the two Marys, for there are different ranks in heaven. And that is why Saint Sara's bones are not between the boards of the great shrine in the church, but under the gla.s.s of the little shrine in the crypt--or the cellar, you might say. The cellar is a good enough place--under the feet of Christians--for miserable gipsies! And it is right that it should be so."

"What Rosine says is true!" cried one of the women. "These frequent visits of the gipsies are the ruin of the country. When our pilgrims come, rich and poor, do you suppose they like to find all these scamps, who are so clever at stealing folks' handkerchiefs and purses, settled here before them? Don't you suppose that drives people away from us? How many there are who would like to come, but don't care to compromise themselves by being found in such company!"

"Bah! such nonsense!" said a humpbacked woman; "those who have faith don't stop half-way for such a small matter! And those who have some troublesome disease and hope to cure it here aren't afraid of the thieves nor their vermin. Take away my hump, mighty saints, and I will undertake to get rid of my lice and my fleas one by one, without any a.s.sistance!"

This speech was greeted by a roar of laughter, which stopped abruptly, as if by enchantment. The little gate to the spring was opened at last, and, at the sound of the water rushing from the pipe, all the women ran to take their places in the line--not without some trifling disputes for precedence.

At last, some of Livette's girl friends arrived. Spying them at some little distance, she went to meet them.

"What brings Livette here so early, on horseback?" said the women, when she had moved away.

"Why, she's looking for her rascal of a Renaud, of course!" said the hunchback. "That fellow isn't used to being tied like a goat to a stake, and the little one will have a hard time to keep him true to her, for all her fine _dot_!--The other day, Rampal--you know, the drover, a good fellow--saw him at a distance on the beach talking with a gipsy who wasn't dressed for winter!"

"Not dressed for winter? what do you mean?"

"She wore no furs, nor cloak, nor anything else, poor me! She was taking a bath as G.o.d made her. The plain isn't a safe place for that sort of thing. You think you can't be seen because you think you can see a long distance yourself, but a tuft of heather is enough for the lizard to hide his two eyes behind while he looks."

Again the women began to chuckle and laugh, but for a moment only.

Meanwhile, Livette's friends were saying to her:

"No, we haven't seen your sweetheart, my dear; but they are already putting the benches in place against the church for the branding, and he can't fail to be here soon."

At that moment, a strain of weird music arose not far away. It was produced by a flute, and the notes, softly modulated at first, were abruptly changed to heart-rending shrieks. A strange, dull, monotonous accompaniment seemed to encourage the sick heart, that called for help with piercing cries.

"Hark! there are the gipsies and their devil's music, Livette. Just go and look--it is such an amusing sight. We will join you in a little while."

"What about my horse?" said Livette.

"If you haven't come to stay, there's a heavy iron bracelet just set into the wall of the church to hold the bars of the enclosure for the branding. Tie your horse to that, and don't be afraid that he will disappear. Every one will know he's yours by those pretty letters in copper nails you have had put on your saddle-bow."

Livette fastened her horse to the ring in the church-wall, and walked in the direction of the gipsy music. It seemed to her that she might probably learn something there.

Now, Zinzara the Egyptian had seen Livette ride into the village, and her music had no other purpose than to attract her, and Renaud, her fiance, with her, if he were there. Why? to see;--to bring together for an instant, with no fixed purpose, upon the same point of the vast world through which she wandered, two of the personages with whom she "beguiled her time;" to look on at the comedy of life, and to watch the sequel, with the inclination to give an evil turn to it, chance aiding. She loved the anomalies that result from the chaotic jumbling together of circ.u.mstances.

Zinzara was turning a kaleidoscope whose field was vast like the horizon of her never-ending travels, and whose bits of gla.s.s, multicolored, were living souls.--She turned the wheel to see what calamity destiny, with her a.s.sistance, would bring to pa.s.s. The amus.e.m.e.nt of a woman, of a sorceress.

XIII

THE SNAKE-CHARMER

Life is an enigma. The everlasting silence of s.p.a.ce is but the endless murmuring of invisible circles which, twining in and out, part and meet again, lose and never find one another, or are inextricably interwoven forever. Life is an enigma. We can see something of its beginning, nothing of its close; its meaning escapes us, but all the links make the chain, and some one knows the rest.

That there are two ends to the ladder is certain. Day is not night, and one does not exist without the other. There are joy and sorrow, health and sickness, happiness and unhappiness, life and death--in a word, good and evil, for the beast of flesh and bone. This is a good man, that a bad. Religion and morals have nothing to do with it, and afford no explanation; but little children know that it is so, and fools know it likewise. They who undertake to reason the thing out learnedly, befog it. They who pull the thread break it. There is some one and there is something. Nothing is null, I tell you, my good friends, and yonder drivelling old idiot, sitting on the stone at the foot of the Calvary before the church, and holding out his hand to Livette, knows two things better than we--good and evil. The idiot, when he pa.s.sed the gipsies' wagons in the morning, talked amicably, yes, he talked for some minutes with two or three gaunt dogs chained up under the wagons; but when he saw Zinzara, the queen, fix her eyes upon him, the idiot was afraid and limped away as fast as he could. He was afraid because _there was_, in Zinzara's look, _something not good_.

And now Livette, as she pa.s.ses by, glances at him, and the idiot--poor human worm--smiles and holds out to her a gla.s.s pearl,--a treasure in his eyes,--which he found that morning in the filth of the gutter near by. The pearl glistens. It is bright blue. The idiot sees beauty in it, and offers it to the pretty girl pa.s.sing by. Livette smiles at him, and he, the drivelling idiot, the cripple who drags himself along the ground, laughs back at Livette. He laughs and feels his man's heart vaguely opening within him--why?--because of _something good_ in Livette's eyes.

G.o.d is above us, and the devil beneath us. G.o.d? what do you mean by G.o.d? Kindly humanity, which is above us and toward which we are ascending; the ideal, evolved from ourselves which, by dint of declaring itself and compelling love, will be realized in our children. The devil? what is that? the obscure beast, the ravenous, blind worm, which we were, and from which we are moving farther and farther away.

There is something nearer the mystery than the mind, and that something is the instinct. Certainly we are nearer to our origin than to our end, and instinct almost explains the origin because it is still near at hand, but the mind cannot explain the end because it is still so far away! Whence come we? The crawling beast may suspect.--Whither go we? How can the beast tell, when he cannot fly?

The bond that binds us fast to earth is not cut. Man bears forever the scar of his birth. He has, therefore, always before him evidence of how he is connected with infinity _behind_ him; but how he is connected, by death, with the life everlasting, _before_ him, he does not see.

Instinct, like a glow-worm, lights up the depths from which man comes forth, but intelligence casts no light into the boundless expanse on high, wherein it loses itself, just at the point where G.o.d begins.--Ah! how mysterious is G.o.d!

Yes, between the intelligence and man's origin, instinct stretches like a bridge. Between the intelligence and man's end, there is a yawning chasm. The reason cannot cross it. There is no way but to leap. Man finds it easy to imagine what lies below; his own weight draws him down to a point where he can understand it.

To understand what is above, it is essential to have a power of lightening one's self, a wing which man has not. Here instinct acts upon the mind in a direction opposed to mental effort.

To some minds this faculty of rising sometimes comes, but man's conceptions depend upon his experiences, and the time has pa.s.sed when reliance was placed upon the "wise men," upon those whose conceptions far outran their experiences. Perhaps it is better so. Perhaps every man ought to form his ideas for himself and no one will know anything _for good and all_ until he has earned the right.

Sometimes, for a moment, especially in dreams, but occasionally in his waking hours, man _knows_. He has profound intuition; but nothing is more fleeting than this sudden glimpse of eternity.

The best of us are blind men haunted by the memory of a flash of light.

Which of us has not known, by personal experience, how a man can fly away from himself? The sense of mystery, scarcely detected, has escaped us, but who has not been conscious of it for a second?

Truth, like love, reveals itself for a second only, but we must believe in it--forever.

These thoughts are properly presented here, for everything is in everything. One man studies the hyssop, another the oak; Cuvier the mastodon, and Lubbock the ant, but they all arrive at the same point, a point which includes everything.

Do you know why the gipsies, Bohemians, gitanos, zincali, zingari, zigeuners, zinganes, tziganes, romani, romichal,--all different appellations of the same wandering race,--arouse such intense interest on the part of civilized peoples?

There are two reasons.

The first is, that the gipsy, being very primitive and wild, appears among civilized beings as the image of themselves in the past. It is as if they were our own ghosts.

When we see them among us, we amuse ourselves, in the shelter of our established homes, by thinking regretfully that we no longer have before us the broad plains so dear to the beasts we are; that we are no longer in constant contact with the earth, the plants, the animals, which are the _mothers_ that bore us, and whom we love for that reason. They have remained what we were when we left them, and that touches us.

The second reason is that they really discovered long ago something of the meaning of life.