Folle Farine Part 57

Arslan watched the sweep of the steel.

"The reeds only fall now for the market," he said, with a smile that was cruel. "And the G.o.ds are all dead--Folle-Farine."

She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild strawberries and the heavy gra.s.ses wet with the dew.

The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies grew dark.

He looked, and let her go;--alone.

In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which all sweetest and n.o.blest music might have been breathed. But Hermes, when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslan, his reed was but a reed as the rest were--a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve--a thing of the stagnant water and drifting sand--a thing that lived by the breath of the wind--a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any wise remember--a reed of the river, as the rest were.

BOOK V.

CHAPTER I.

"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I should be free; and with me _these_."

The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he thought himself alone.

This was a perpetual torture to him, this captivity and penury, this aimlessness and fruitlessness, in which his years were drifting, spent in the dull bodily labor that any brainless human brute could execute as well as he, consuming his days in physical fatigues that a roof he despised might cover him, and a bread which was bitter as gall to him might be his to eat; knowing all the while that the real strength which he possessed, the real power that could give him an empire amidst his fellows, was dying away in him as slowly but as surely as though his brain were feasting fishes in the river-mud below.

So little!--just a few handfuls of the wealth that cheats and wantons, fools and panders, gathered and scattered so easily in that world with which he had now no more to do than if he were lying in his grave;--and having this, he would be able to compel the gaze of the world, and arouse the homage of its flinching fear, even if it should still continue to deny him other victories.

It was not the physical privations of poverty which could daunt him. His boyhood had been spent in a healthful and simple training, amidst a strong and hardy mountain-people.

It was nothing to him to make his bed on straw; to bear hunger unblenchingly; to endure cold and heat, and all the freaks and changes of wild weather.

In the long nights of a northern winter he had fasted for weeks on a salted fish and a handful of meal; on the polar seas he had pa.s.sed a winter ice-blocked, with famine kept at bay only by the flesh of the seal, and men dying around him raving in the madness of thirst.

None of the physical ills of poverty could appall him; but its imprisonment, its helplessness, the sense of utter weakness, the impotence to rise and go to other lands and other lives, the perpetual narrowness and darkness in which it compelled him to abide, all these were horrible to him; he loathed them as a man loathes the irons on his wrists, and the stone vault of his prison-cell.

"If I had only money!" he muttered, looking on his Barabbas, "ever so little--ever so little!"

For he knew that if he had as much gold as he had thrown away in earlier times to the Syrian beggar who had sat to him on his house-top at Damascus, he could go to a city and make the work live in color, and try once more to force from men that wonder and that fear which are the highest tributes that the mult.i.tude can give to the genius that arises amidst it.

There was no creature in the chamber with him, except the spiders that wove in the darkness among the timbers.

It was only just then dawn. The birds were singing in the thickets of the water's edge; a blue kingfisher skimmed the air above the rushes, and a dragon-fly hunted insects over the surface of the reeds by the sh.o.r.e; the swallows, that built in the stones of the tower, were wheeling to and fro, glad and eager for the sun.

Otherwise it was intensely silent.

In the breadth of shadow still cast across the stream by the walls of the tower, the market-boat of Ypres glided by, and the soft splash of the pa.s.sing oars was a sound too familiar to arouse him.

But, unseen, Folle-Farine, resting one moment in her transit to look up at that grim gray pile in which her paradise was shut, watching and listening with the fine-strung senses of a great love, heard through the open cas.e.m.e.nt the muttered words which, out of the bitterness of his heart, escaped his lips unconsciously.

She heard and understood.

Although a paradise to her, to him it was only a prison.

"It is with him as with the great black eagle that they keep in the bridge-tower, in a hole in the dark, with wings cut close and a stone tied to each foot," she thought, as she went on her way noiselessly down with the ebb-tide on the river. And she sorrowed exceedingly for his sake.

She knew nothing of all that he remembered in the years of his past--of all that he had lost, whilst yet young, as men should only lose their joys in the years of their old age; she knew nothing of the cities and the habits of the world--nothing of the world's pleasures and the world's triumphs.

To her it had always seemed strange that he wanted any other life than this which he possessed. To her, the freedom, the strength, the simplicity of it, seemed n.o.ble, and all that the heart of a man could desire from fate.

Going forth at sunrise to his daily labor on the broad golden sheet of the waters, down to the sight and the sound and the smile of the sea, and returning at sunset to wander at will through the woods and the pastures in the soft evening shadows, or to watch and portray with the turn of his wrist the curl of each flower, the wonder of every cloud, the smile in any woman's eyes, the gleam of any moonbeam through the leaves; or to lie still on the gra.s.s or the sand by the sh.o.r.e, and see the armies of the mists sweep by over his head, and hearken to the throb of the nightingale's voice through the darkness, and mark the coolness of the dews on the hollow of his hand, and let the night go by in dreams of worlds beyond the stars;--such a life as this seemed to her beyond any other beautiful.

A life in the air, on the tide, in the light, in the wind, in the sound of salt waves, in the smell of wild thyme, with no roof to come between him and the sky, with no need to cramp body and mind in the cage of a street--a life spent in the dreaming of dreams, and full of vision and thought as the summer was full of its blossom and fruits,--it seemed to her the life that must needs be best for a man, since the life that was freest, simplest, and highest.

She knew nothing of the l.u.s.t of ambition, of the desire of fame, of the ceaseless unrest of the mind which craves the world's honor, and is doomed to the world's neglect; of the continual fire which burns in the hands which stretch themselves in conscious strength to seize a scepter and remain empty, only struck in the palm by the buffets of fools.

Of these she knew nothing.

She had no conception of them--of the weakness and the force that twine one in another in such a temper as his. She was at once above them and beneath them. She could not comprehend that he who could so bitterly disdain the flesh-pots and the wine-skins of the common crowd, yet could stoop to care for the crowd's Hosannas.

But yet this definite longing which she overheard in the words that escaped him she could not mistake; it was a longing plain to her, one that moved all the dullest and most brutal souls around her. All her years through she had seen the greed of gold, or the want of it, the twin rulers of the only little dominion that she knew.

Money, in her estimate of it, meant only some little sum of copper pieces, such as could buy a hank of flax, a load of sweet chestnuts, a stack of wood, a swarm of bees, a sack of autumn fruits. What in cities would have been penury, was deemed illimitable riches in the homesteads and cabins which had been her only world.

"A little gold!--a little gold!" she pondered ceaselessly, as she went on down the current. She knew that he only craved it, not to purchase any pleasure for his appet.i.tes or for his vanities, but as the lever whereby he would be enabled to lift off him that iron weight of adverse circ.u.mstance which held him down in darkness as the stones held the caged eagle.

"A little gold!" she said to herself again and again as the boat drifted on to the town, with the scent of the mulberries, and the herbs, and the baskets of roses, which were its cargo for the market, fragrant on the air.

"A little gold!"

It seemed so slight a thing, and the more cruel, because so slight, to stand thus between him and that noonday splendor of fame which he sought to win in his obscurity and indigence, as the blinded eagle in his den still turned his aching eyes by instinct to the sun. Her heart was weary for him as she went.

"What use for the G.o.ds to have given him back life," she thought, "if they must give him thus with it the incurable fever of an endless desire?"

It was a gift as poisoned, a granted prayer as vain, as the immortality which they had given to t.i.thonus.

"A little gold," he had said: it seemed a thing almost within her grasp.

Had she been again willing to steal from Flamma, she could have taken it as soon as the worth of the load she carried should have been paid to her; but by a theft she would not serve Arslan now. No gifts would she give him but what should be pure and worthy of his touch. She pondered and pondered, cleaving the waters with dull regular measure, and gliding under the old stone arches of the bridge into the town.

When she brought the boat back up the stream at noonday, her face had cleared; her mouth smiled; she rowed on swiftly, with a light sweet and glad in her eyes.

A thought had come to her.

In the market-place that day she had heard two women talk together, under the shade of their great red umbrellas, over their heaps of garden produce.