Folle Farine Part 42

And looking at them, she seemed to know them as her only friends,--as the only rulers who ever could loose the bands of her fate and let her forth to freedom--Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.

They were above her where she sank upon the stone floor; the shadows were dark upon the ground; but the sunrays striking through the distant window against the opposite wall fell across the golden head of the boy Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled feet.

She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task, the populace that had hooted her abroad, the stripes that awaited her at home. The answering gaze of the G.o.ds magnetized her; the poetic virus which had stirred dumbly in her from her birth awoke in her bewildered brain.

Without knowing what she wanted, she longed for freedom, for light, for pa.s.sion, for peace, for love.

Shadowy fancies pa.s.sed over her in a tumultuous pageantry; the higher instincts of her nature rose and struggled to burst the bonds in which slavery and ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew nothing, knew no more than the gra.s.s knew that blew in the wind, than the pa.s.sion-flower knew that slept unborn in the uncurled leaf; and yet withal she felt, saw, trembled, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all blindly, all in confusion and in pain.

The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes, that had never quailed before the fury of any living thing; her head fell on her chest; she wept bitterly,--not because the people had injured her,--not because her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore,--but because a distance so immeasurable, so unalterable, severed her from all of which these G.o.ds told her without speech.

The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst the stones on which she sat and her own form were dark in shadow; and as though the bright boy Hypnos pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had compa.s.sion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her kind, the dumb violence of her weeping brought its own exhaustion with it.

The drowsy heat of noon, pain, weariness, the faintness of fasting, the fatigue of conflict, the dreamy influences of the place, had their weight on her. Crouching there half on her knees, looking up ever in the faces of the three Immortals, the gift of Hypnos descended upon her and stilled her; its languor stole through her veins; its gentle pressure closed her eyelids; gradually her rigid limbs and her bent body relaxed and unnerved; she sank forward, her head lying on her outstretched arms, and the stillness of a profound sleep encompa.s.sed her.

Oneiros added his gift also; and a throng of dim, delirious dreams floated through her brain, and peopled her slumber with fairer things than the earth holds, and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were wet.

Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her with his dark sad eyes, and held his finger on his close-pressed lips, as though he said--"Not yet."

CHAPTER III.

Her sleep remained unbroken; there was no sound to disturb it. The caw of a rook in the top of the poplar-tree, the rus.h.i.+ng babble of the water, the cry of a field-mouse caught among the rushes by an otter, the far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern road that ran broad and white beyond the meadows, the gnawing of the rats in the network of timbers which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the noises that reached this solitary place, and these were both too faint and too familiar to awaken her. Heat and pain made her slumber heavy, and the forms on which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full of dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows lengthened, the day advanced: nothing came to rouse her. At length the vesper bell rang over the pastures and the peals of the Ave Maria from the cathedral in the town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned around.

As the chimes died, Arslan crossed the threshold of the granary and entered the desolate place where he had made his home. For once his labor had been early completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare and precious moments of the remaining light.

He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying beneath his cartoons of the sons of Nyx. He paused and looked down.

Her att.i.tude had slightly changed, and had in it all the abandonment of youth and of sleep; her face was turned upward, with quick silent breathings parting the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the linen of her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen back from her right arm and shoulder; the whole supple grace and force that were mingled in her form were visible under the light folds of her simple garments. The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor where she was stretched.

As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked on her.

But in him there arose little curiosity and still less pity; he recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of old Egypt, he had seen rowing her boat-load of corn down the river, and whom he had noticed for her strange unlikeness to all around her.

He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her there, and sleep overtaken her in the drowsiness of the first heat of the budding year.

He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any shame or pain which, at her waking, she might feel. He merely saw in her a barbaric yet beautiful creature; and his only desire was to use the strange charms in her for his art.

A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turning it where best the light fell, he began to sketch her att.i.tude, rapidly, in black and white. It was quickly done by a hand so long accustomed to make such transcripts; and he soon went further, to that richer portraiture which color alone can accomplish. The gray stone pavement; the brown and slender limbs; the breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins; the upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of a red carnation blooming in the twilight of some old wooden gallery; the eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth that smiled and sighed in dreaming; while on the wall above, the radiant figure of the young G.o.d remained in full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark;--these gave a picture which required no correction from knowledge, no addition from art.

He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood began to beam with something of the hues of flesh and blood, and the whole head was thrown out in color, although the body and the limbs still remained in their mere outline.

Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a little, dully, as though the perpetual unsparing gaze, bent on her with a scrutiny so cold and yet so searching, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep. But she never awakened, and he had time to study and to trace out every curve and line of the half-developed loveliness before him with as little pity, with as cruel exact.i.tude, as that with which the vivisector tears asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or the botanist plucks to pieces the new-born flower whose structure he desires to examine.

The most beautiful women, who had bared their charms that he might see them live again upon his canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand tremble a moment in such translation.

To the surgeon all s.e.x is dead, all charm is gone, from the female corpse that his knife ravages in search of the secrets of science; and to Arslan the women whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as s.e.xless, nearly as powerless to create pa.s.sion or emotion. They were the tools for his art: no more.

When, in the isolation of the long northern winters, he had sat beside the pine-wood that blazed on his hearth while the wolves howled down the deserted village street, and the snow drifted up and blocked from sight the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse of the outer world, he had been more enamored of the visions which visited him in that solitude than he had ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty he had recorded in his works.

He had little pa.s.sion in him, or pa.s.sion was dormant; and he had sought women, even in the hours of love, with coldness and with something of contempt for that license which, in the days of his comparative affluence, he had not denied himself. He thought always--

"De ces baisers puissants comme un dictame, De ces transports plus vifs que des rayons, Que reste-t-il? C'est affreux, o mon ame!

Rien qu'un dessin fort pale aux trois crayons."

And for those glowing colors of pa.s.sion which burned so hotly for an instant, only so soon to fade out into the pallor of indifference or satiety, he had a contempt which almost took the place and the semblance of chast.i.ty.

He worked on and on, studying the sleeper at his feet with the keenness of a science that was as merciless in its way as the science which tortures and slaughters in order to penetrate the mysteries of sentient existence.

She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange foreign child, who looked as though her native home must have been where the Nile lily blooms, and the black brows of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.

She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young python, coiled there, lightly breathing, and mute and motionless and unconscious. He painted her as he would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics. And she was no more to him than these would have been.

The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the bright head of the boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on the bank without got a red flush from the west; there came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of children going home from the meadows where they had gathered the first cowslips of the season in great sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air through the open window as they went by beneath the walls.

The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through the silence; they pierced her ear and startled her from her slumber; she sprang up suddenly, with a bound like a hart that scents the hounds, and stood fronting him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her nerves strained to listen and striving to combat.

For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening she thought that she was still in the market-place of the town, and that the shouts were from the clamor of her late tormentors.

He turned and looked at her.

"What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of the country.

She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew her disordered dress together, and stood mute, with her hands crossed on her bosom, and the blood coming and going under her transparent skin.

"What do you fear?" he asked again.

"_I_ fear?"

She echoed the cowardly word with a half-tremulous defiance; the heroism of her nature, which an hour earlier had been lashed to its fullest strength, cast back the question as an insult; but her voice was low and husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.

For she feared him; and for the moment she had forgotten how she had come there and all that had pa.s.sed, except that some instinct of the long-hunted animal was astir in her to hide herself and fly.

But he stood between her and the pa.s.sage outward, and pride and shame held her motionless. Moreover, she still listened intently: the confused voices of the children still seemed to her like those of the mult.i.tude by whom she had been chased; and she was ready to leap tiger-like upon them, rather than let them degrade her in his sight.

He looked at her with some touch of interest: she was to him only some stray beggar-girl, who had trespa.s.sed into his solitude; yet her untamed regard, her wide-open eyes, the staglike grace of her att.i.tude, the sullen strength which spoke in her reply,--all attracted him to closer notice of these.

"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly. "You were asleep here when I came, more than an hour ago."

The color burned in her face: she said nothing.

The singing of the children was waxing fainter, as the boat floated from beneath the wall on its homeward way into the town. She ceased to fancy these cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to revive in her.

"Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how he should persuade her to return to the att.i.tude sketched out upon his easel.

She returned his look with the bold truthfulness natural to her, joined with the apprehensiveness of chastis.e.m.e.nt which becomes second nature to every creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten for every real or imagined fault.