Folle Farine Part 47

Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.

Arslan stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle of wood.

He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face, closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his hold like lead.

She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty nor terror.

It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and threw a black cloth over the trestle.

"Do not look there," he said to her. "I had forgotten you.

Otherwise----"

"I have looked there. It is only a dead woman."

"Only! What makes you say that?"

"I do not know. There are many--are there not?"

He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or curiosity was true and not a.s.sumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread, and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory of death were wholly absent from her.

"There are many indeed," he made answer, slowly. "Just there is the toughest problem--it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds of human ephemerae, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is the _numbers_ that kill one's dreams of immortality!"

She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.

"It is Fortis, the ragpicker's daughter," she said, indifferently, and dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its calm limbs.

"Yes," he answered her. "It is his daughter. She died twenty hours ago,--of low fever, they say--famine, no doubt."

"Why do you have her here?" She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born; she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.

"The dead sit to me often," he said, with a certain smile that had sadness and yet coldness in it.

"Why?"

"That they may tell me the secrets of life."

"Do they tell them?"

"A few;--most they keep. See,--I paint death; I must watch it to paint it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the riverside last night. He said to me, 'You like studying the dead, they say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving;--and it cannot hurt her.' So I gave him the coin--though I am as poor as he--and I took the dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl shall go to her grave when I have done with her."

She bent her head in a.s.sent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious pain.

She did not care for the body lying there--it had been but the other day that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past it; but there pa.s.sed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she, likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.

The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to lay her down in the cool water and let it take her to long sleep and to complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner, she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his thought.

Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.

She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple altars. To die at his will and be of use to him;--this seemed to her the most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker's daughter lying there in such calm content.

"Why do you look so much at her?" he said at length. "I shall do her no harm; if I did, what would she know?"

"I was not thinking of her," she answered slowly, with a certain perplexed pain upon her face. "I was thinking I might be of more use to you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often thought of it lately."

He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they gained from their study but little.

For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical development, but mindless as any clod of earth.

He did not know how to answer her.

"Why should you think of death?" he said at last. "Is your life so bitter to you?"

She stared at him.

"Is a beaten dog's bitter? or is a goaded ox's sweet?"

"But you are so young,--and you are handsome, and a woman?"

She laughed a little.

"A woman! Marcellin said that."

"Well! What is there strange in saying it?"

She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.

"That was a woman--a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I am a devil, they say."

His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and whose irony escaped her.

"What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call you so?"

Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.

"You do not believe that I am a devil?"

"How should I tell? If you covet the t.i.tle claim it,--you have a right,--you are a woman!"

"Always a woman!" she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.

"Always a woman," he echoed as he pointed to the G.o.d Hermes. "And there is your creator."

"_He!_"

She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged G.o.d.

"Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words out of the empty wind. Hephaestus made her heart, fusing for it bra.s.s and iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages.

But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night, and tell me your story while I work."