Folle Farine Part 62

She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits a.s.sailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.

She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby gla.s.s, rimmed with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.

"Your denial is very churlish," he said, after many a honeyed entreaty, which had met with no other answer from her. "How shall you bind me to keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?"

She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.

"A word that needs compelling," she answered him curtly, "is broken by the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root, to put faith in a man that needs a bond."

He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Where have you got all your wisdom?" he asked.

"It is not wisdom; it is truth."

"And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well."

She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.

"I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen."

"And that is----"

"I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain, so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round,--and I knew its birth was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false thing that would poison all that should eat of it."

"Well?"

"Well--when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the toadstool that springs from their breath?"

"Who taught you so much suspicion?"

Her face darkened in anger.

"Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am afraid of nothing."

"So it would seem."

He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He tried to tempt her otherwise.

She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta.

She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color and for grace. There was about her a dauntless and imperious freedom.

She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with such pa.s.sion for another.

He had various treasures shown to her,--treasures of jewels, of gold and silver, of fine workmans.h.i.+p, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as the wing of a b.u.t.terfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her eyes had rested on such things all her days.

"They are beautiful, no doubt," she said simply. "But I marvel that you--being a man--care for such things as these."

"Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me,--as one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at least out of these to keep in remembrance of me."

Her eyes burned in anger.

"If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?"

"You are very perverse," he said, relinquis.h.i.+ng his efforts with regret.

He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of temptation: gold was a forcing-heat--slow, but sure.

She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and yet a vague apprehension.

"Are you the Red Mouse?" she said suddenly.

He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he laughed--his little low cynical laugh.

"What makes you think that?"

"I do not know. You look like it--that is all. He has made one sketch of me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same triumph in your eye."

He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.

"He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead--if I am indeed, the Red Mouse."

She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of aversion.

"I must go," she said abruptly. "The mules wait. Remember him, and I will remember you."

He smiled.

"Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when it unlocks your eagle's cage and unbinds his wings?"

"What?"

She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no memory of her own fate had r.e.t.a.r.ded or hastened her footsteps.

"Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?"

"I?"

"Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?"

A proud light laughed like suns.h.i.+ne over all her face.

"Ah, yes!" she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb triumph in her eyes. "He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live as the rose lives, on his canvas--a thing of a day that he can make immortal!"

The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had found what he wanted--as he thought.

"And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the world's sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra."

"Farnarina? What is that?"