Folle Farine Part 36

He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the vapors s.h.i.+fted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and cas.e.m.e.nt answered cas.e.m.e.nt, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved daubs; and the c.o.c.ks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.

Then he turned away.

The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in his necessity and succored.

He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.

He was thankless; for he had grown tired of this fruitless labor, this abortive combat; he had grown tired of seeking credence and being derided for his pains, while other men prost.i.tuted their powers to base use and public gain, receiving as their wages honor and applause; he had grown tired of toiling to give beauty and divinity to a world which knew them not when it beheld them.

He had grown tired, though he was yet young, and had strength, and had pa.s.sion, and had manhood. Tired--utterly, because he was dest.i.tute of all things save his genius, and in that none were found to believe.

"I have tried all things, and there is nothing of any worth." It does not need to have worn the imperial purples and to be lying dying in old age to know thus much in all truth and all bitterness.

"Why did they give me back my life?" he said in his heart, as he turned aside from the risen sun.

He had striven to do justly with this strange, fleeting, unasked gift of existence, which comes, already warped, into our hands, and is broken by death ere we can set it straight.

He had not spent it in riot or madness, in lewd love or in gambling greed; he had been governed by great desires, though these had been fruitless, and had spent his strength to a great end, though this had been never reached.

As he turned from looking out upon the swollen stream that rushed beneath his windows, his eyes fell upon the opposite wall, where the white shapes of his cartoons were caught by the awakening sun.

The spider had drawn his dusty trail across them; the rat had squatted at their feet; the darkness of night had enshrouded and defaced them; yet with the morning they arose, stainless, n.o.ble, undefiled.

Among them there was one colossal form, on which the sun poured with its full radiance.

This was the form of a captive grinding at a millstone; the majestic symmetrical supple form of a man who was also a G.o.d.

In his naked limbs there was a supreme power; in his glance there was a divine command; his head was lifted as though no yoke could ever lie on that proud neck; his foot seemed to spurn the earth as though no mortal tie had ever bound him to the sod that human steps bestrode: yet at the corn-mill he labored, grinding wheat like the patient blinded oxen that toiled beside him.

For it was the great Apollo in Pherae.

The hand which awoke the music of the spheres had been blood-stained with murder; the beauty which had the light and l.u.s.ter of the sun had been darkened with pa.s.sion and with crime; the will which no other on earth or in heaven could withstand had been bent under the chastis.e.m.e.nt of Zeus.

He whose glance had made the black and barren slopes of Delos to laugh with fruitfulness and gladness,--he whose prophetic sight beheld all things past, present, and to come, the fate of all unborn races, the doom of all unspent ages,--he, the Far-Striking King, labored here beneath the curse of crime, greatest of all the G.o.ds, and yet a slave.

In all the hills and vales of Greece his Io paean sounded still.

Upon his holy mountains there still arose the smoke of fires of sacrifice.

With dance and song the Delian maidens still hailed the divinity of Leto's son.

The waves of the pure Ionian air still rang forever with the name of Delphinios.

At Pytho and at Clarus, in Lycia and in Phokis, his oracles still breathed forth upon their fiat terror or hope into the lives of men; and still in all the virgin forests of the world the wild beasts honored him wheresoever they wandered, and the lion and the boar came at his bidding from the deserts to bend their free necks and their wills of fire meekly to bear his yoke in Thessaly.

Yet he labored here at the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen eyes, even as though he cried:

"O brother, who would be greater than I! For what hast thou bartered to me the golden rod of thy wealth, and thy dominion over the flocks and the herds? For seven chords strung on a sh.e.l.l--for a melody not even thine own! For a lyre outshone by my syrinx hast thou sold all thine empire to me! Will human ears give heed to thy song, now thy scepter has pa.s.sed to my hands? Immortal music only is left thee, and the vision foreseeing the future. O G.o.d! O hero! O fool! what shall these profit thee now?"

Thus to the artist by whom they had been begotten the dim white shapes of the deities spoke. Thus he saw them, thus he heard, whilst the pale and watery sunlight lit up the form of the toiler in Pherae.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with the genius of a man, which, being born of a G.o.d, yet is bound as a slave to the grindstone. Since, even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring Bow, so is genius mocked of the world when it has bartered the herds, and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him; and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslan buried his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the chained G.o.d in Pherae bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to carry his yoke; yet, like the G.o.d, he likewise stood fettered to the mill to grind for bread.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

A valley long and narrow, shut out from the rest of the living world by the ramparts of stone that rose on either side to touch the clouds; dense forests of pines, purple as night, where the erl-king rode and the bear-king reigned; at one end mountains, mist, and gloom, at the other end the ocean; brief days with the sun shed on a world of snow, in which the sounds of the winds and the moans of the wolves alone were heard in the solitude; long nights of marvelous magnificence with the stars of the arctic zone glowing with an unbearable l.u.s.ter above a sea of phosph.o.r.escent fire; those were Arslan's earliest memories--those had made him what he was.

In that pine-clothed Norwegian valley, opening to the sea, there were a few homesteads gathered together round a little wooden church, with torrents falling above them, and a profound loneliness around; severed by more than a day's journey from any other of the habitations of men.

There a simple idyllic life rolled slowly on through the late and lovely springtimes, when the waters loosened and the seed sprouted, and the white blossoms broke above the black ground: through the short and glorious summers, when the children's eyes saw the elves kiss the roses, and the fairies float on the sunbeam, and the maidens braided their fair hair with blue cornflowers to dance on the eve of St. John: through the long and silent winters, when an almost continual night brooded over all things, and the thunder of the ocean alone answered the war of the wind-torn forests, and the blood-red blaze of the northern light gleamed over a white still mountain world, and, within doors, by the warm wood fire the youths sang Scandinavian ballads, and the old people told strange sagas, and the mothers, rocking their new-born sons to sleep, prayed G.o.d to have mercy on all human lives drowning at sea and frozen in the snow.

In this alpine valley, a green nest, hidden amidst stupendous walls of stone, bottomless precipices, and summits that touched the clouds, there was a cottage even smaller and humbler than most, and closest of all to the church. It was the house of the pastor.

The old man had been born there, and had lived there all the years of his life,--save a few that he had pa.s.sed in a town as a student,--and he had wedded a neighbor who, like himself, had known no other home than this one village. He was gentle, patient, simple, and full of tenderness; he worked, like his people, all the week through in the open weather among his fruit-trees, his little breadth of pasturage, his herb-garden, and his few sheep.

On the Sabbath-day he preached to the people the creed that he himself believed in with all the fond, unquestioning, implicit faith of the young children who lifted to him their wondering eyes.

He was good; he was old: in his simple needs and his undoubting hopes he was happy; all the living things of his little world loved him, and he loved them. So fate lit on him to torture him, as it is its pleasure to torture the innocent.

It sent him a daughter who was fair to sight, and had a voice like music; a form lithe and white, hair of gold, and with eyes like her own blue skies on a summer night.

She had never seen any other spot save her own valley; but she had the old Norse blood in her veins, and she was restless; the sea tempted her with an intense power; she desired pa.s.sionately without knowing what she desired.

The simple pastoral work, the peaceful household labors, the girls'

garland of alpine flowers, the youths' singing in the brief rose twilight, the saga told the thousandth time around the lamp in the deep midwinter silence; these things would not suffice for her. The old Scandinavian Bersaeck madness was in her veins. The mountains were to her as the walls of a tomb. And one day the sea tempted her too utterly; beyond her strength; as a lover, after a thousand vain entreaties, one day tempts a woman, and one day finds her weak. The sea vanquished her, and she went--whither?

They hardly knew: to these old people the world that lay behind their mountain fortress was a blank. It might be a paradise; it might be a prison. They could not tell.

They suffered their great agony meekly; they never cursed her; they did not even curse their G.o.d because they had given life to a woman-child.

After awhile they heard of her.

She wrote them tender and glowing words; she was well, she was proud, she was glad, she had found those who told her that she had a voice which was a gift of gold, and that she might sing in triumph to the nations. Such tidings came to her parents from time to time; brief words, first teeming with hope, then delirious with triumph, yet ever ending with a short, sad sigh of conscience, a prayer for pardon--pardon for what? The letters never said: perhaps only for the sin of desertion.

The slow salt tears of age fell on these glowing pages in which the heart of a young, vainglorious, mad, tender creature had stamped itself; but the old people never spoke of them to others. "She is happy, it does not matter for us." This was all they said, yet this gentle patience was a martyrdom too sharp to last; within that year the mother died, and the old man was left alone.