Folle Farine Part 92

She laughed where she was stretched upon the ground, a laugh that stayed the smile upon his mouth.

He stooped, and the sweetness of his voice was low and soft as the south wind.

"I will save him, if you say that you are tired, Folle-Farine."

Where she was stretched face downward at his feet she shuddered, as though the folds of a snake curled round her, and stifled, and slew her with a touch.

"I cannot!" she muttered faintly in her throat.

"Then let him die!" he said; and turned away.

Once again he smiled.

The hours pa.s.sed; she did not move; stretched there, she wrestled with her agony as the fate-pursued wrestled with their doom on the steps of the temple, while the dread Eumenides drew round them and waited--waiting in cold patience for the slow sure end.

She arose and went to his side as a dying beast in the public roadway under a blow staggers to its feet to breathe its last.

"Let him die!" she muttered, with lips dry as the lips of the dead. "Let him die!"

Once more the choice was left to her. So men said: and the G.o.ds were dead.

An old man, with a vulture's eyes and bony fingers, and rags that were plague-stricken with the poisons of filth and of disease, had followed and looked at her in the doorway, and kicked her where she lay.

"He owes me twenty days for the room," he muttered, while his breath scorched her throat with the fumes of drink. "A debt is a debt.

To-morrow I will take the canvas; it will do to burn. You s.h.i.+ver?--fool!

If you chose, you could fill this garret with gold this very night. But you love this man, and so you let him perish while you prate of 'shame.'

Oh-ho! that is a woman!"

He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he struck his staff upon each stair,--

"The picture will feed the stove; the law will give me that."

She heard and s.h.i.+vered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great canvas of the Barabbas.

Before another day had come and gone, he would lie in the common ditch of the poor, and the work of his hand would be withered, as a scroll withers in a flame.

If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some deliverance, some mercy--who could say?--might yet be found, she thought. The G.o.ds were dead; but men,--were they all more wanton than the snake, more cruel than the scorpion?

For the first time in seven days she left his side.

She rose and staggered from the garret, down the stairway, into the lower stories of the wilderness of wood and stone.

She traced her way blindly to the places she had known. They closed their doors in haste, and fled from her in terror.

They had heard that she had gone to tend some madman, plague-stricken with some nameless fever; and those wretched lives to life clung closely, with a frantic lore.

One woman she stayed, and held with timid, eager bands. Of this woman she had taken nothing all the summer long in wage for waking her tired eyes at daybreak.

"Have pity!" she muttered. "You are poor, indeed, I know; but help me.

He dies there!"

The woman shook her off, and shrank.

"Get you gone!" she cried. "My little child will sicken if you breathe on her!"

The others said the same, some less harshly, some more harshly. Twice or thrice they added:

"You beg of us, and send the jewels back? Go and be wise. Make your harvest of gold whilst you can. Reap while you may in the yellow fields with the sharp, sure sickle of youth!"

Not one among them braved the peril of a touch of pity; not one among them asked the story of her woe; and when the little children ran to her, their mothers plucked them back, and cried,--

"Art mad? She is plague-stricken."

She went from them in silence, and left them, and pa.s.sed out into the open air.

In all this labyrinth of roofs, in all these human herds, she yet thought, "Surely there must be some who pity?"

For even yet she was so young; and even yet she knew the world so little.

She went out into the streets.

Her brain was on fire, and her heart seemed frozen; her lips moved without sound, and unconsciously shaped the words which night and day pursued her, "A little gold,--a little gold!"

So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach as Aldebaran, when it glistened through the storm-wrack of the rain.

Why could he have not been content--she had been--with the rush of the winds over the plains, the strife of the flood and the hurricane, the smell of the fruit-hung ways at night, the cool, green shadows of the summer woods, the courses of the clouds, the rapture of the keen air blowing from the sea, the flight of a bird over the tossing poppies, the day-song of the lark? All these were life enough for her; were freedom, loveliness, companions.h.i.+p, and solace. Ah, G.o.d! she thought, if only these had made the world of his desires likewise. And even in her ghastlier grief her heart sickened for them in vain anguish as she went,--these the pure joys of earth and air which were her only heritage.

She went out into the streets.

It was a night of wind and rain.

The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. Beggars, and thieves, and harlots jostled her in the narrow ways.

"It must be h.e.l.l,--the h.e.l.l of the Christians," she muttered, as she stood alone on the flints of the roads, in the rancid smell, in the hideous riot, in the ghastly mirth, in the choking stench, in the thick steam of the darkness, whose few dull gleams of yellow light served to show the false red on a harlot's cheek, or the bleeding wound on a crippled horse, or the reeling dance of a drunkard.

It was the h.e.l.l of the Christians: in it there was no hope for her.

She moved on with slow unconscious movement of her limbs; her hair blew back, her eyes had a pitiless wonder in their vacant stare; her bloodless face had the horror in it that Greek sculptors gave to the face of those whom a relentless destiny pursued and hunted down; ever and again she looked back as she went, as though some nameless, shapeless, unutterable horror were behind her in her steps.

The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted her; when they had any s.p.a.ce to think of her at all.

"A little food, a little wine, for pity's sake," she murmured; for her own needs she had never asked a crust in charity, but for his,--she would have kissed the mud from the feet of any creature who would have had thus much of mercy.

In answer they only mocked her, some struck her in the palm of her outstretched hand. Some called her by foul names; some seized her with a drunken laugh, and cursed her as she writhed from their lewd hold; some, and these often women, whispered to her of the bagnio and the brothel; some muttered against her as a thief; one, a youth, who gave her the gentlest answer that she had, murmured in her ear, "A beggar? with that face? come tarry with me to-night."

She went on through the sulphurous yellow glare, and the poisonous steam of these human styes, shuddering from the hands that grasped, the voices that wooed her, the looks that ravished her, the laughs that mocked her.

It was the h.e.l.l of the Christians: it was a city at midnight; and its very stones seem to arise and give tongue in her derision and cry, "Oh, fool, you dreamt of a sacrifice which should be honor; of a death, which should be release; of a means whereby through you the world should hear the old songs of the G.o.ds? Oh, fool! We are Christians here: and we only gather the reeds of the river to bruise them and break them, and thrust them, songless and dead, in the name of our Lord."