Folle Farine Part 59

"I would never part with them for myself," she thought; "I would die of hunger first--were it only myself."

And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little treasure--the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her, even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.

The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.

At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslan, she spoke to him, timidly,--

"I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I might do there--for you?"

"Do? What should you do?" he answered her, with inattention and almost impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of inaction.

She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her lips.

She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.

"If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps," she said to herself.

So she kept silence.

On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the two mules, to Rioz.

It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in either hand.

The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of a pastoral country in late summer.

She met few people; a market-woman or two on their a.s.ses, a walking peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd--these were all.

The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only sound in the silence.

It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell, surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble and the gorse grew wild.

But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore; she herself grew tired and fevered.

She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway, where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her bra.s.s pails on the ground.

She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered them.

The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky, half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she would bring her food and drink.

But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches, refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.

The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the market-women had said, "What does the like of you want with the Prince?"

"I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will," she answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.

The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.

"What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?" she muttered, watching the form of the girl as it pa.s.sed up the steep suns.h.i.+ny street.

"Some evil, no doubt," answered her a.s.sistant, a stalwart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. "You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the s.h.i.+ps, they say, and the wicked herb, _bon plaisir_, and the philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a _cajote_."

Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:

"No one would ask the road _there_ for any good; that is sure. No doubt she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all the Arts!"

Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.

In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things--girls' faces, coils of foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple pa.s.sion-flower blooming on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown waters;--things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of genius.

She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded slopes,--those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince Sartorian.

One hen-huckster, leading his a.s.s to market with a load of live poultry, looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his wife:

"There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his velvet-lined cupboards."

And the wife laughed in answer,--

"Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys."

The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could mean; but she would not turn back to ask.

Her feet were weary, like her mules'; the sun scorched her; she felt feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp ascent that rose in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river ran.

At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and s.h.i.+elds. She pushed one open--there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the domain which they guarded.

At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were green, the gra.s.s long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to her.

Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver b.r.e.a.s.t.s of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood here and there amidst the leavy darkness.

She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.

She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.

A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great, fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it, wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.

A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it, thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted, silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer's kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while, always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.

At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush and the lotos, and the white pampas-gra.s.s, and the flamelike flowering reed, of the East and of the West.

All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace.

A door stood open near. She entered it.

She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear in her whole temper.

Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the wonders that are gathered together by the world's luxury were for the first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the rich lived.

She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.

On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on the moss of the orchard at Ypres. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups, the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were folded.