Folle Farine Part 40

Arslan had never been more ceaselessly pursued by innumerable fantasies, and never had given to these a more terrible force, a more perfect utterance, than now, when the despair which possessed him was absolute,--when it seemed to him that he had striven in his last strife with fate, and been thrown never to rise again,--when he kept his body alive by such soulless, ceaseless labor as that of the oxen in the fields,--when he saw every hour drift by, barren, sullen, painful,--when only some dull yet stanch instinct of virility held him back from taking his own life in the bleak horror of these fruitless days,--when it seemed to him that his oath before Hermes to make men call him famous was idle as the sigh of a desert wind through the hollow ears of a skull bleaching white on the sand.

Yet he had never done greater things,--never in the long years through which he had pursued and studied art.

With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and color the imaginations of his brain.

And it was on these that the pa.s.sionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing, scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness her brief youth had ever known.

Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord, there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the imaginative senses latent in her,--enough of the old mediaeval fancy, of the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.

Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in which she dwelt.

Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,--where the common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a thousand fas.h.i.+ons,--where the graceful and the grotesque and the terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite, confusion,--where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some trace of a dead art, some fas.h.i.+oning by a dead hand,--where all these were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.

Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.

Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three G.o.ds of forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude, lying waste, bearing no harvest.

Of these visits Arslan himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.

She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals, which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.

And this secret--in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face and frame--changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless, pa.s.sionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into desires.

For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she became human.

All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days of his leisure.

Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and stole down the river, and screened herself among the gra.s.ses, and watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of the oil-lamp burning behind him.

She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes created by him; and he seemed to her like a G.o.d, with the power to beget worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a little dust.

The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command like this, yet perish for a crust!--that fusion of omnipotence and powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.

She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.

She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or on the pale s.p.a.ces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile, the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the G.o.ds come forth from the temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command, and beneath his touch.

She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him; and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful service, and would not let him do as other men did--tell the world lies, and take its payment out in gold.

Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.

But now, watching him, hearing him, a pa.s.sionate sorrow for a human sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of his sun-G.o.d; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and ma.s.sive limbs, like the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.

She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense pa.s.sion of a young and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of the long gra.s.s to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she knew not why, into the deepest shadow.

Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself atonement for her fault--the fault through which those tender little bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the year.

She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had taken.

Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute; she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.

So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses--a spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the past winter.

It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Ypres, and for all the other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire, that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.

The old quiet town was busy, with a rich suns.h.i.+ne shed upon it, in which the first yellow b.u.t.terflies of the year had begun to dance.

It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.

Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile a.s.ses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests, knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all together in compet.i.tion but in amity.

Here and there a priest pa.s.sed, with his black robe and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom amidst tufts of thyme.

The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.

The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls' bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they had garnered through all the winter.

Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly budded leaf.a.ge. Plovers' eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the homelier ma.s.ses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.

It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill paddles.

In one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and a little ruddy wild strawberry.

Her brown eyes were now br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with tears where she stood surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.

"I saw her look at it," she muttered. "Look at it as she pa.s.sed with her wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have gone this very night to Paris."

"Thou art not alone, Edmee," groaned an old woman, tottering from her egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up in her hand. "Look! As she went by my poor brown hen--the best sitter I have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noel--just cackled and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog rushed in and killed the blessed bird--killed her in her basket! A great yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again into the earth, like lightning."

"Not worse than she did to my precious Remy," said a tanner's wife, who drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen, querulous child.

"She hath the evil eye," said sternly an old man who had served in the days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat was.h.i.+ng fresh lettuces in a large bra.s.s bowl, by his grandson's herb-stall.

"You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three Kings?" asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a living, struggling, moaning goose. "Coming singing through the fog like nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin's curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce have known him. You remember?"

"Surely we remember," they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken almond-tree. "Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?"

"And little Bernardou," added one who had not hitherto spoken. "Little Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied."

"A _jettatrice_ ever brings misfortune," muttered the old soldier of Napoleon, was.h.i.+ng his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.

"Or does worse," muttered the mother of the crippled child. "She is not for nothing the devil's daughter, mark you."

"Nay, indeed," said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed sweet-smelling thyme. "Nay, was it not only this very winter that my son's little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he slept, and broke his arm above the elbow:--she is a witch; there is no question but she is a witch."

"If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her," murmured the youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.

"My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time, and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is blind now," said a hard-visaged woman, was.h.i.+ng turnips in a basin of water.