Folle Farine Part 69

He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another's voice, thrilled through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.

He might be hers--all her own--each pulse of his heart echoing hers, each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers!--she hid her face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.

She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one idolatry and one pa.s.sion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she would have given her body and her soul. Her soul--if the G.o.ds and man allowed her one--her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one single day of Arslan's love. Her soul, forever, to any h.e.l.l they would--but his?

Not for this had she sold her life to the G.o.ds--not for this; not for the rapture of pa.s.sion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.

What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in his stead to die.

"Choose," said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze smiled on her through the twilight. "Shall he consume his heart here in solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by the river?"

The reeds by the river.

The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the bonds of pa.s.sion which were binding so closely about her. As the river-reed to the G.o.d, so she had thought that her brief span of life might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her faith,--to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius peris.h.i.+ng in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man heart-sick and heart-broken?

She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would have shaken an asp's coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was once more strong.

"What have you to do with me?" she muttered, feebly, while the fierce glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. "Keep your word; set him free. His freedom let him use--as he will."

Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.

Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully and slowly back by the gra.s.s-grown footpath through the little wood, along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and alone.

"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime unreason--that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold, as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh, at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was twisting.

He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.

Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.

It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from the porch.

In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the house.

She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance of his wealth. She only thought of those great and n.o.ble fruits of a man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?--forget quite--when he is free?"

The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the doorway.

Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.

She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and stupor.

"She has been told," thought the old serving-woman. "She has been told, and her heart breaks for the gold."

The thought was sweet to her--precious with the preciousness of vengeance.

"Come within," she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. "I will give thee a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a Christian; and to-night I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no longer. With the break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here."

Folle-Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that she spoke.

"You called me?" she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude coming to her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.

"Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now; and I will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they eat of my bread. Tonight thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do for sake of thy mother, though she was a foul light o' love, when all men deemed her a saint; but to-morrow thou shalt tramp. Such h.e.l.l-sp.a.w.n as thou art mayst not lie on a bed of Holy Church."

Folle-Farine gazed at her, confused and still not comprehending; scarcely awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength spent and bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had a.s.sailed her.

"You mean," she muttered, "you mean----What would you tell me? I do not know."

The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the carved gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house-leek on the roof seemed to her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, "You prate of the soul. I alone am the soul of the world."

All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth shook under her feet; the heavens circled around her:----and Pitchou, looking on her, thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser's treasure!

She! in whose whole burning veins there ran only one pa.s.sion, in whose crushed brain there was only one thought--"Will he forget--forget quite--when he is free?"

The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager, hissing, tumultuous words:

"Hast not heard? No? Well, see, then. Some said you should be sent for, but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the love-begotten. Flamma died worth forty thousand francs, set aside all his land and household things. G.o.d rest his soul! He was a man. He forgot my faithful service, true, but the good almoner will remember all that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a man! And hardly a nettle boiled in oil would he eat some days together. Where does this money go--eh, eh? Canst guess?"

"Go?"

Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud:

"Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope, too? Oh, fool! what thing did ever he hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the lands, and the things--every coin, every inch, every crumb--is willed away to the Church, to the holy chapter in the town yonder, to hold for the will of G.o.d and the glory of his kingdom. And ma.s.ses will be said for his soul, daily, in the cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as good as said that the mill shall be let to Francvron, the baker, who is old and has no women to his house; and that I shall dwell here and manage all things, and rule Francvron, and end my days in the chimney corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in the hay to-night, but to-morrow you must tramp, for the devil's daughter and Holy Church will scarce go to roost together."

Folle-Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in the apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its familiarity, and its silence, and its old woodland-ways.

"Go!"--she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a vague sense she felt the sharpness of desolation that repulses the creature whom no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.

"Yes. Go; and that quickly," said the peasant with a sardonic grin. "I serve the Church now. It is not for me to harbor such as thee; nor is it fit to take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed as are thine. Thou mayst lie here to-night--I would not be overharsh--but tarry no longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost hear?"

Folle-Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.

The old woman watched her shadow pa.s.s across the threshold, and away down the garden-paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and vanish beyond the fall of drooping fig-boughs and the walls of ivy and of laurel; then with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in her corner and made her evening meal, well pleased; comfort was secured her for the few years which she had to live, and she was revenged for the loss of the sequins.

"How well it is for me that I went to ma.s.s every Saint's-day!" she thought, foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church and of old deaf Francvron, the baker.

Folle-Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her sleeping-chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheepskin, and went down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill-garden across the bridge into the woods.

She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse, like one who does some things unconsciously, walking abroad in the trance of sleep. That she was absolutely dest.i.tute scarcely bore any sense to her. She had never realized that this begrudged roof and scanty fare, which Flamma had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were, yet been all the difference between home and homelessness--between existence and starvation.

She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.

She paused a moment on the river-sand, and turned and looked back at the mill and the house. From where she stood, she could see its brown gables and its peaked roof rising from ma.s.ses of orchard-blossom, white and wide as sea-foam; further round it, closed the dark belt of the sweet chestnut woods.

She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded them.

She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only pain, and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself was dear to her, its homely and simple look: its quiet garden-ways, its dells of leafy shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and feathered creatures that gave it life and loveliness,--these had been her consolations often,--these, in a way, she loved.