Folle Farine Part 48

She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.

The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a likeness to his own.

It awakened a certain compa.s.sion for her in his heart, which was rarely moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to self-contempt than to self-compa.s.sion, for these were evils of the body and of the senses.

As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famis.h.i.+ng people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests, and the furious seas below gnas.h.i.+ng and raging on the wreck-strewn strand. It was with these last that he had had kins.h.i.+p and communion: these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?

And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the gra.s.ses of the fields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, and stirs in the strange _loves_ of wind-borne plants, and hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent; tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly a.s.sails the unknown G.o.d in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and s.h.i.+vering to its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its n.o.ble life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable h.e.l.l in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.

But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased.

It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast broadcast.

Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her--that she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid att.i.tudes, in her curt, unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides, although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companions.h.i.+p of boors, with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme poverty in which the latter months of his life had been pa.s.sed, had excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who had brought the dead girl to him for a few bra.s.s coins, had been the only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made such change in it worse than its continuance.

In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless, hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance, he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.

He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.

The prison door once flung open, the suns.h.i.+ne once streaming across the darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out again among his fellows, then--the spider is left to miss the human love that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still locked they are much.

Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world's neglect, and they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.

And in these, in their bondage, there were little patience, or sympathy, or softness, and to them, even nature itself at times looked horrible, though never so horrible, because never so despicable, as humanity.

Yet, still even in these an instinct of companions.h.i.+p abided; and this creature, with a woman's beauty, and an animal's fierceness and innocence, was in a manner welcome.

"Why were women ever made, then?" she said, after awhile, following, though imperfectly, the drift of his last words, where she lay stretched obedient to his will, under the shadow of the wall.

He smiled the smile of one who recalls some story he has heard from the raving lips of some friend fever-stricken.

"Once, long ago, in the far East, there dwelt a saint in the desert. He was content in his solitude: he was holy and at peace: the honey of the wild bee and the fruit of the wild tamarisk-tree sufficed to feed him; the lions were his ministers, and the hyenas were his slaves; the eagle flew down for his blessing, and the winds and the storms were his messengers; he had killed the beast in him, and the soul alone had dominion; and day and night, upon the lonely air, he breathed the praise of G.o.d.

"Years went with him thus, and he grew old, and he said to himself, 'I have lived content; so shall I die purified, and ready for the kingdom of heaven.' For it was in the day when that wooden G.o.d, who hangs on the black cross yonder, was not a lifeless effigy, as now, but had a name of power and of might, adjuring which, his people smiled under torture, and died in the flame, dreaming of a land where the sun never set, and the song never ceased, and the faithful forever were at rest.

"So the years, I say, went by with him, and he was glad and at peace.

"One night, when the thunder rolled and the rain torrents fell, to the door of his cave there came a wayfarer, fainting, sickly, lame, trembling with terror of the desert, and beseeching him to save her from the panthers.

"He was loth, and dreaded to accede to her prayer, for he said, 'Wheresoever a woman enters, there the content of a man is dead.' But she was in dire distress, and entreated him with tears and supplications not to turn her adrift for the lightning and the lions to devour: and he felt the old human pity steal on him, and he opened the door to her, and bade her enter and be at sanctuary there in G.o.d's name.

"But when she had entered, age, and sickness, and want fell from off her, her eyes grew as two stars, her lips were sweet as the rose of the desert, her limbs had the grace of the cheetah, her body had the radiance and the fragrance of frankincense on an altar of gold. And she laughed in his beard, and cried, saying, 'Thou thinkest thou hast lived, and yet thou hast not loved! Oh, sage! oh, saint! oh, fool, fool, fool!'

Then into his veins there rushed youth, and into his brain there came madness; the life he had led seemed but death, and eternity loathsome since pa.s.sionless; and he stretched his arms to her and sought to embrace her, crying, 'Stay with me, though I buy thee with h.e.l.l.' And she stayed.

"But when the morning broke she left him laughing, gliding like a phantom from his arms, and out into the red sunlight, and across the desert sand, laughing, laughing, always, and mocking him whilst she beckoned. He pursued her, chasing her through the dawn, through the noon, through the night. He never found her; she had vanished as the rose of the rainbow fades out of the sky.

"He searched for her in every city, and in every land. Some say he searches still, doomed to live on through every age and powerless to die."

He had a certain power over words as over color. Like all true painters, the fiber of his mind was sensuous and poetic, though the quality of pa.s.sionate imagination was in him welded with a coldness and a stillness of temper born in him with his northern blood. He had dwelt much in the Asiatic countries, and much of the philosophies and much of the phraseology of the East remained with him. Something even there seemed in him of the mingled asceticism and sensualism, the severe self-denial, with the voluptuous fancy of the saints who once had peopled the deserts in which he had in turn delighted to dwell, free and lonely, scorning women and deserting men. He spoke seldom, being by nature silent; but when he did speak, his language was unconsciously varied into picture-like formations.

She listened breathless, with the color in her cheeks and the fire brooding in her eyes, her unformed mind catching the swift shadowy allegories of his tale by force of the poetic instincts in her.

No one had ever talked to her thus; and yet it seemed clear to her and beautiful, like the story that the great sunflowers told as they swayed to and fro in the light, like the song that the bright brook-water sung as it purred and sparkled under the boughs.

"That is true?" she said, suddenly, at length.

"It is a saint's story in substance; it is true in spirit for all time."

Her breath came with a sharp, swift, panting sound. She was blinded with the new light that broke in on her.

"If I be a woman, shall I, then, be such a woman as that?"

Arslan rested his eyes on her with a grave, half-sad, half-sardonic smile.

"Why not? You are the devil's daughter, you say. Of such are men's kingdom of heaven!"

She pondered long upon his answer; she could not comprehend it; she had understood the parable of his narrative, yet the pa.s.sion of it had pa.s.sed by her, and the evil shut in it had escaped her.

"Do, then, men love what destroys them?" she asked, slowly.

"Always!" he made answer, still with that same smile as of one who remembers hearkening to the delirious ravings round him in a madhouse through which he has walked--himself sane--in a bygone time.

"I do not want love," she said, suddenly, while her brain, half strong, half feeble, struggled to fit her thoughts to words. "I want--I want to have power, as the priest has on the people when he says, 'Pray!' and they pray."

"Power!" he echoed, as the devotee echoes the name of his G.o.d. "Who does not? But do you think the woman that tempted the saint had none? If ever you reach that kingdom such power will become yours."

A proud glad exultation swept over her face for a moment. It quickly faded. She did not believe in a future. How many times had she not, since the hand of Claudis Flamma first struck her, prayed with all the pa.s.sion of a child's dumb agony that the dominion of her Father's power might come to her? And the great Evil had never hearkened. He, whom all men around her feared, had made her no sign that he heard, but left her to blows, to solitude, to continual hunger, to perpetual toil.

"I have prayed to the devil again and again and he will not hear," she muttered. "Marcellin says that he has ears for all. But for me he has none."

"He has too much to do to hear all. All the nations of the earth beseech him. Yonder man on the cross they adjure with their mouths indeed; but it is your G.o.d only whom in their hearts they wors.h.i.+p. See how the Christ hangs his head: he is so weary of lip service."

"But since they give the Christ so many temples, why do they raise none to the devil?"

"Chut! No man builds altars to his secret G.o.d. Look you: I will tell you another story: once, in an Eastern land, there was a temple dedicated to all the various deities of all the peoples that wors.h.i.+ped under the sun.

There were many statues and rare ones; statues of silver and gold, of ivory, and agate, and chalcedony, and there were altars raised before all, on which every nation offered up sacrifice and burned incense before its divinity.

"Now, no nation would look at the G.o.d of another; and each people cl.u.s.tered about the feet of its own fetich, and glorified it, crying out, 'There is no G.o.d but this G.o.d.'

"The noise was fearful, and the feuds were many, and the poor king, whose thought it had been to erect such a temple, was confounded, and very sorrowful, and murmured, saying, 'I dreamed to beget universal peace and tolerance and harmony; and lo! there come of my thought nothing but discord and war.'

"Then to him there came a stranger, veiled, and claiming no country, and he said, 'You were mad to dream religion could ever be peace, yet, be not disquieted; give me but a little place and I will erect an altar whereat all men shall wors.h.i.+p, leaving their own G.o.ds.'

"The king gave him permission; and he raised up a simple stone, and on it he wrote, 'To the Secret Sin!' and, being a sorcerer, he wrote with a curious power, that showed the inscription to the sight of each man, but blinded him whilst he gazed on it to all sight of his fellows.

"And each man forsook his G.o.d, and came and kneeled before this nameless altar, each bowing down before it, and each believing himself in solitude. The poor forsaken G.o.ds stood naked and alone; there was not one man left to wors.h.i.+p one of them."

She listened; her eloquent eyes fixed on him, her lips parted, her fancy fantastic and full of dreams, strengthened by loneliness, and unbridled through ignorance, steeping itself in every irony and every fantasy, and every shred of knowledge that Chance; her only teacher, cast to her.

She sat thinking, full of a vague sad pity for that denied and forsaken G.o.d on the cross, by the river, such as she had never felt before, since she had always regarded him as the symbol of cruelty, of famine, and of hatred; not knowing that these are only the colors which all deities alike reflect from the hearts of the peoples that wors.h.i.+p them.