Folle Farine Part 30

She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird had come.

She saw the wide dark square of the opened cas.e.m.e.nt; the gleam of a lamp within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.

The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone; dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in the capitals of its columns.

No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.

She had pa.s.sed this grain tower with every day and night that she had gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.

Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed--believed that the dead lived and gathered there.

White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible loveliness of death.

In their midst burned a lamp; as the light burns night and day in the tombs of the kings of the East.

Her color paled, her breath came and went, her body trembled like a leaf; yet she was not afraid.

A divine ecstasy of surprise and faith smote the dull misery of her life. She saw at last another world than the world of toil in which she had labored without sight and without hope, as the blinded ox labored in the brick-field, treading his endless circles in the endless dark, and only told that it was day by blows.

She had no fear of them--these, whom she deemed the dwellers of the lands beyond the sun, could not be more cruel to her than had been the sons of men. She yearned to them, longed for them; wondered with rapture and with awe if these were the messengers of her father's kingdom; if these would have mercy on her, and take her with them to their immortal homes--whether of heaven or of h.e.l.l, what mattered it?

It was enough to her that it would not be of earth.

She raised herself upon the ledge above the rushes, poised herself lightly as a bird, and with deft soundless feet dropped safely on the floor within, and stood in the midst of that enchanted world--stood motionless, gazing upwards with rapt eyes, and daring barely to draw breath with any audible sigh, lest she should rouse them, and be driven from their presence. The flame of the lamp, and the moonlight, reflected back from the foam of the risen waters, shed a strange, pallid, shadowy light on all the forms around her.

"They are the dead, surely," she thought, as she stood among them; and she stayed there, with her arms folded on her breast to still its beating, lest any sound should anger them and betray her; a thing lower than the dust--a mortal amidst this great immortal host.

The mists and the shadows between her eyes and them parted them as with a sea of dim and subtle vapor, through which they looked white and impalpable as a summer cloud, when it seems to lean and touch the edge of the world in a gray, quiet dawn.

They were but the creations of an artist's cla.s.sic dreams, but to her they seemed to thrill, to move, to sigh, to gaze on her; to her, they seemed to live with that life of the air, of the winds, of the stars, of silence and solitude, and all the nameless liberties of death, of which she dreamed when, shunned, and cursed, and hungered, she looked up to the skies at night from a sleepless bed.

They were indeed the dead: the dead of that fair time when all the earth was young, and men communed with their deities, and loved them, and were not afraid. When their G.o.ds were with them in their daily lives, when in every breeze that curled the sea, in every cloud that darkened in the west, in every water-course that leaped and sparkled in the sacred cedar groves, in every bee-sucked blossom of wild thyme that grew purple by the marble temple steps, the breath and the glance of the G.o.ds were felt, the footfall and the voice of the G.o.ds were heard.

They were indeed the dead: the dead who--dying earliest, whilst yet the earth was young enough to sorrow for its heroic lives to embalm them, to remember them, and to count them worthy of lament--perished in their bodies, but lived forever immortal in the traditions of the world.

From every s.p.a.ce of the somber chamber some one of these gazed on her through the mist.

Here the silver dove of Argos winged her way through the iron-jaws of the dark sea-gates.

Here the white Io wandered in exile and unresting, forever scourged on by the sting in her flesh, as a man by the genius in him.

Here the glad G.o.d whom all the woodlands love played in the moonlight, on his reeds, to the young stags that couched at his feet in golden beds of daffodils and asphodel.

Here in a darkened land the great Demeter moved, bereaved and childless, bidding the vine be barren, and the fig-trees fruitless, and the seed of the sown furrows strengthless to multiply and fill the sickles with ripe increase.

Here the women of Thebes danced upon Cithaeron in the mad moonless nights, under the cedars, with loose hair on the wind, and bosoms that heaved and brake through their girdles of fawnskin.

Here at his labor, in Pherae, the sun-G.o.d toiled as a slave; the highest wrought as the lowest; while wise Hermes stood by and made mirth of the kings.h.i.+p that had bartered the rod of dominion for the mere music which empty air could make in a hollow reed.

Here, too, the brother G.o.ds stood, Hypnos, and Oneiros, and Thanatos; their bowed heads crowned with the poppy and moonwort, the flowering fern, and the amaranth, and, pressed to their lips, a white rose, in the old sweet symbol of silence; fas.h.i.+oned in the same likeness, with the same winged feet, which yet fall so softly that no human ears hear their coming; the G.o.ds that most of all have pity on men,--the G.o.ds of the Night and of the Grave.

These she saw, not plainly, but through the wavering shadows and the halo of the vapors which floated, dense and silvery as smoke, in from the misty river. Their lips were dumb, and for her they had no name nor story, and yet they spoke to her with familiar voices. She knew them; she knew that they were G.o.ds, and yet to the world were dead; and in the eyes of the forest-G.o.d, who piped upon his reeds, she saw the eyes of Phratos look on her with their tender laughter and their unforgotten love.

Just so had he looked so long ago--so long!--in the deep woods at moonrise, when he had played to the bounding fawns, to the leaping waters, to the listening trees, to the sleeping flowers.

They had called him an outcast,--and lo!--she found him a G.o.d.

She sank on her knees, and buried her face in her hands and wept,--wept with grief for the living lost forever,--wept with joy that the dead forever lived.

Tears had rarely sprung to her proud, rebellious eyes; she deemed them human things,--things of weakness and of shame; she had thrust them back and bit her lips till the blood came, in a thousand hours of pain, rather than men should see them and exult. The pa.s.sion had its way for once, and spent itself, and pa.s.sed. She rose trembling and pale, with her eyes wet and dimmed in l.u.s.ter, like stars that s.h.i.+ne through rain, and looked around her fearfully.

She thought that the G.o.ds might rise in wrath against her, even as mortals did, for daring to be weary of her life.

As she rose, she saw for the first time before the cold hearth the body of a man.

It was stretched straightly out on the stone floor; the chest was bare; upon the breast the right hand was clinched close and hard; the limbs were in profound repose; the head was lit by the white glimmer from the moon; the face was calm and colorless, and full of sadness.

In the dim strange light it looked white as marble, colossal as a statue, in that pa.s.sionless rest,--that dread repose.

Instinctively she drew nearer to him, breathless and allured; she bent forward and looked closer on his face.

He was a G.o.d, like all the rest, she thought; but dead,--not as they were dead, with eyes that rejoiced in the light of cloudless suns, and with lips that smiled with a serene benignity and an eternal love,--but dead, as mortals die, without hope, without release, with the breath frozen on their tired lips, and bound on their hearts eternally the burden of their sin and woe.

She leaned down close by his side, and looked on him,--sorrowful, because he alone of all the G.o.ds was stricken there, and he alone had the shadow of mortality upon him.

Looking thus she saw that his hands were clinched upon his chest, as though their latest effort had been to tear the bones asunder, and wrench out a heart that ached beneath them. She saw that this was not a divine, but a human form,--dead indeed as the rest were, but dead by a man's death of a.s.sa.s.sination, or disease, or suicide, or what men love to call the "act of Heaven," whereby they mean the self-sown fruit of their own faults and follies.

Had the G.o.ds slain him--being a mortal--for his entrance there?

Marcellin in legends had told her of such things.

He was human; with a human beauty; which, yet white and cold and golden, full of serenity and sadness, was like the sun-G.o.d's yonder, and very strange to her whose eyes had only rested on the sunburnt, pinched, and rugged faces of the populace around her.

That beauty allured her; she forgot that he had against her the crime of that humanity which she hated. He was to her like some n.o.ble forest beast, some splendid bird of prey, struck down by a bolt from some murderous bow, strengthless and senseless, yet majestic even in its fall.

"The G.o.ds slew him because he dared to be too like themselves," she thought, "else he could not be so beautiful,--he,--only a man, and dead?"

The dreamy intoxication of fancy had deadened her to all sense of time or fact. The exaltation of nerve and brain made all fantastic fantasies seem possible to her as truth.

Herself, she was strong; and desolate no more, since the eyes of the immortals had smiled on her, and bade her welcome there; and she felt an infinite pity on him, inasmuch as with all his likeness to them he yet, having incurred their wrath, lay helpless there as any broken reed.

She bent above him her dark rich face, with a soft compa.s.sion on it; she stroked the pale heavy gold of his hair, with fingers brown and lithe, but infinitely gentle; she fanned the cold pain of his forehead, with the breath of her roselike mouth; she touched him and stroked him and gazed on him, as she would have caressed and looked on the velvet hide of the stag, the dappled plumage of the hawk, the white leaf of the lily.

A subtle vague pleasure stole on her, a sharp sweet sorrow moved her,--for he was beautiful, and he was dead.

"If they would give him back his life?" she thought: and she looked for the glad forest-G.o.d playing on his reed amidst the amber asphodels, he who had the smile and the glance of Phratos. But she could see Pan's face no more.

The wind rose, the moon was hidden, all was dark save the flicker of the flame of the lamp; the storm had broken, and the rain fell: she saw nothing now but the bowed head of Thanatos, holding the rose of silence to his lips.