Folle Farine Part 58

"So thou hast bought the brindled calf after all! Thou art in luck."

"Ay, in luck indeed, for the boy to rout up the old pear-tree and find those queer coins beneath it. The tree had stood there all my father's and grandfather's time, and longer too, for aught I know, and no one ever dreamed there was any treasure at the root; but he took a fancy to dig up the tree; he said it looked like a ghost, with its old gray arms, and he wanted to plant a young cherry."

"There must have been a ma.s.s of coin?"

"No,--only a few little shabby, bent pieces. But the lad took them up to the Prince Sartorian; and he is always crazed about the like; and he sent us for them quite a roll of gold, and said that the coins found were, beyond a doubt, of the Julian time--whatever he might mean by that."

"Sartorian will buy any rubbish of that sort. For my part, I think if one buried a bra.s.s b.u.t.ton only long enough, he would give one a bank-note for it."

"They say there are marble creatures of his that cost more than would dower a thousand brides, or pension a thousand soldiers. I do not know about that. My boy did not get far in the palace; but he said that the hall he waited in was graven with gold and precious stones. One picture he saw in it was placed on a golden altar, as if it were a G.o.d. To wors.h.i.+p old coins, and rags of canvas, and idols of stone like that,--how vile it is! while we are glad to get a nettle-salad off the edge of the road."

"But the coins gave thee the brindled calf."

"That was no goodness to us. Sartorian has a craze for such follies."

Folle-Farine had listened, and, standing by them, for once spoke:

"Who is Sartorian? Will you tell me?"

The women were from a far-distant village, and had not the infinite horror of her felt by those who lived in the near neighborhood of the mill of Ypres.

"He is a great n.o.ble," they answered her, eyeing her with suspicion.

"And where is his dwelling?"

"Near Rioz. What do the like of you want with the like of the Prince?"

She gave them thanks for their answers, and turned away in silence with a glow at her heart.

"What is that wicked one thinking of now, that she asks for such as the Prince Sartorian?" said the women, crossing themselves, repentant that they had so far forgotten themselves as to hold any syllable of converse with the devil's daughter.

An old man plucking birds near at hand chuckled low in his throat:

"Maybe she knows that Sartorian will give yet more gold for new faces than for old coins; and--how handsome she is, the black-browed witch!"

She had pa.s.sed away through the crowds of the market, and did not hear.

"I go to Rioz myself in two days' time with the mules," she thought; and her heart rose, her glance lightened, she moved through the people with a step so elastic, and a face so radiant from the flush of a new hope, that they fell away from her with an emotion which for once was not wholly hatred.

That night, when the mill-house was quiet, and the moonbeams fell through all its small dim windows and checkered all its wooden floors, she rose from the loft where she slept, and stole noiselessly down the steep stairway to the chamber where the servant Pitchou slept.

It was a little dark chamber, with jutting beams and a cas.e.m.e.nt that was never unclosed.

On a nail hung the blue woolen skirt and the linen cap of the woman's working-dress. In a corner was a little image of a saint and a string of leaden beads.

On a flock pallet the old wrinkled creature slept, tired out with the labor of a long day's work among the cabbage-beds and rows of lettuces, muttering as she slept of the little daily peculations that were the sweet sins of her life and of her master's.

She cared for her soul--cared very much, and tried to save it; but cheating was dear to her, and cruelty was natural: she tricked the fatherless child in his measure of milk for the tenth of a sou, and wrung the throat of the bullfinch as it sang, lest he should peck the tenth of a cherry.

Folle-Farine went close to the straw bed and laid her hand on the sleeper.

"Wake! I want a word with you."

Pitchou started, struggled, glared with wide-open eyes, and gasped in horrible fear.

Folle-Farine put the other hand on her mouth.

"Listen! The night I was brought here you stole the sequins off my head.

Give them back to me now, or I will kill you where you lie."

The grip of her left hand on the woman's throat, and the gleam of her knife in the right, were enough, as she had counted they would be.

Old Pitchou struggled, lied, stammered, writhed, strove to scream, and swore her innocence of this theft which had waited eleven years to rise against her to Mary and her angels; but in the end she surrendered, and tottered on her shuddering limbs, and crept beneath her bed, and with terror and misery brought forth from her secret hole in the rafters of the floor the little chain of shaking sequins.

It had been of no use to her: she had always thought it of inestimable value, and could never bring herself to part from it, visiting it night and day, and being perpetually tormented with the dread lest her master should discover and claim it.

Folle-Farine seized it from her silently, and laughed--a quiet cold laugh--at the threats and imprecations of the woman who had robbed her in her infancy.

"How can you complain of me, without telling also of your own old sin?"

she said, with contempt, as she quitted the chamber. "Shriek away as you choose: the chain is mine, not yours. I was weak when you stole it; I am strong enough now. You had best not meddle, or you will have the worst of the reckoning."

And she shut the door on the old woman's screams and left her, knowing well that Pitchou would not dare to summon her master.

It was just daybreak. All the world was still dark.

She slipped the sequins in her bosom, and went back to her own bed of hay in the loft.

There was no sound in the darkness but the faint piping of young birds that felt the coming of day long ere the grosser senses of humanity could have seen a glimmer of light on the black edge of the eastern clouds.

She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.

As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a strong emotion came over her.

The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment revived for her.

The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music, the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the hill-pa.s.ses, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters,--all arose to her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile had buried them.

The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins, she thought of Phratos.

She had never known his fate.

The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.

Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.

All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father's race had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made no plunder.

The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the smile and the voice of Phratos.