Folle Farine Part 33

He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious, words of a pa.s.sionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.

After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire, and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he sank to a deep sleep.

The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have a.s.sailed creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.

To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved him from death, and he was hers: and this was all that she remembered. She dealt with him as she would have done with some forest beast or bird that she should have found frozen in the woods of winter.

His head had fallen on her, and she crouched unwearied in the posture that gave him easiest rest.

With a touch so soft that it could not awaken him, she stroked the l.u.s.terless gold of his hair, and from time to time felt for the inaudible beating of his heart.

Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept through her brain, like the echoes of some music, faint yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses and half soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn.

For the first time since the melodies of Phratos had died forever from off her ear she was happy.

She did not ask wherefore,--neither of herself or of the G.o.ds did she question whence came this wonder-flower of her nameless joy.

She only sat quiet, and let the hours drift by, and watched him as he slept, and was content.

So the hours pa.s.sed.

Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.

Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.

He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too great sweetness of a summer shower.

It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been conscious;--under it a sudden flush pa.s.sed over her, a sudden thrill stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly human.

A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.

It was not the G.o.ds she feared, it was herself.

She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows it blowing on the wind. She had pa.s.sed through the crowds of fair and market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious, thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and dared not, because her teeth were strong.

She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast s.h.i.+ne back to her, on the gla.s.sy current adown which she sails.

Now,--as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.

She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water, and the moisture from the gra.s.ses, and the sand and s.h.i.+ngle of the sh.o.r.e; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin and the curves of her s.h.i.+ning shoulders.

A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake again and see her as she was;--wet, miserable, half-clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes, outcast and ashamed.

She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did not know that even as she was, she had an exquisitely savage grace, as storm-birds have in theirs against the thunder-cloud and the lightning blaze, of their water-world in tempest.

She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his clearer and more conscious gaze; a sudden shy dread and longing to hide herself under the earth, or take refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet those eyes to which she had given back the light of life cast on her in abhorrence and in scorn;--and that he could have any other look, for her, she had no thought.

She had been an outcast among an alien people too long to dream that any human love could ever fall on her. She had been too long cursed by every tongue, to dream that any human voice could ever arise in honor or in welcome to a thing so despised and criminal as she.

For the gift which she had given this man, too, would curse her;--that she had known when she had offered it.

She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away with velvet footfall, through the twilight of the dawn; her head hung down, and her face was flushed as with some great guilt.

With the rising of the day, all her new joy was banished.

With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank back into secrecy and shame.

The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless bushes seemed sharp on her ear, calling on her to rise and go forth to her work, as the creature of toil, of exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men had made her.

At the cas.e.m.e.nt, she turned and cast one long but lingering glance upon him where he slept; then once more she launched herself into the dusky and watery mists of the cold dawn.

She had made no more sound in her pa.s.sing than a bird makes in her flight.

The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.

He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with water, and brown arched feet all s.h.i.+ning with silvery sands; with mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed, fair and free.

But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened they had pa.s.sed.

Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet sh.o.r.e-paths, the sighing rushes.

The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road was impa.s.sable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Ypres.

The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.

From the distant banks, the voices of women came m.u.f.fled through the fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.

Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a sweet damp odor from soaked gra.s.ses and upturned sods, from the breath of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.

A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill notes of woe.

Folle-Farine saw nothing.

She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically, by sheer force of long habit. Her mind was in a trance; she was insensible of pain or cold, of hunger or fever, of time or place.

Yet she went straight home, as the horse being blinded will do, to the place where its patience and fealty have never been recompensed with any other thing than blows.

As she had groped her way through the gloom of the night, and found it, though the light of the roadside Christ had been turned from her, so in the same blind manner she had groped her way to her own conceptions of honesty and duty. She hated the bitter and cruel old man, with a pa.s.sion fierce and enduring that nothing could have changed; yet all the same she served him faithfully. This was an untamed animal indeed, that he had yoked to his plowshare; but she did her work loyally and doggedly; and whenever she had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged her back to it or not.

It was partially from the force of habit which is strong upon all creatures; it was partially from a vague instinct in her to work out her right to the begrudged shelter which she received, and not to be beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.

The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached it.

Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door of the loft, where he was weighing corn for the grinding.

"You have been away all night long!" he cried to her.

She was silent; standing below in the wet garden.