Folle Farine Part 63

"Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day's life of a rose, and who got eternal life for it,--as you think to do."

She started a little, and a tremulous pain pa.s.sed over the dauntless brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.

"I?" she murmured. "Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a little place--anywhere--wherever my life can live with his on the canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each other, 'See, it is true--he thought her worthy of _that_, though she was less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,' it will be enough for me--more than enough."

The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.

She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.

She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly, as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.

He waited awhile; then he spoke:

"But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?"

She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of memory, so pitiful of his doubt.

She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had bought his life back for him, with her own, from the G.o.ds. For the pact was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.

But of it her lips never spoke.

"What is that to you?" she said, briefly. "If you turn the key, you will see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty, and I will give you grat.i.tude. Farewell."

Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side, and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the gardens without.

He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native forest.

The old man sat silent.

CHAPTER II.

When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded lands.

She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought left--the gold that she had gained.

The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness pa.s.sed.

The strength of the pa.s.sion that possessed her was too pure to leave her long a prey to any thought of her own fate.

She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.

"What will it matter how or when the G.o.ds take my life, so only they keep their faith and give me his?" she thought.

And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.

She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those nine gold pieces.

"A little gold," he had said; and here she had it--honest, clean, worthy of his touch and usage.

Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the shade of angels above their heads.

When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye bread that she had carried in her pouch, and a few water-cresses that she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink there.

Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk of the falling night.

She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings, and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which flew by her over the fields.

"A little gold," he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love, all honor, all peace, and all fealty?

"Phratos would have wished his gift to go so," she thought to herself, with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.

For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the gra.s.s, and the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.

"A little gold!--a little gold!" she murmured, and she laughed aloud in her great joy, and blessed the G.o.ds that they had given her to hear the voice of his desire.

"A little gold," he had said, only; and here she had so much!

No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma's eyes she had seen glisten over a t.i.the of such a sum as over the riches of an emperor's treasury.

She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air, past the dark Christ who would not look,--who had never looked, or she had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved Thanatos.

Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and lightly as a swallow on the wing pa.s.sed through the dreary portals into Arslan's chamber.

His lamp was lighted.

He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces, with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the yellow suns.h.i.+ne of her first-born's curls.

His face as he stood was very pale, pa.s.sionless, weary, with a sadness sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes those dreams which went so far--so far--into worlds whose glories his hand could portray for no human sight.

He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.

"You must rot," he thought. "You will feed the rat and the mouse; the squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the fly will take you for a sp.a.w.ning-bed. You will serve no other end--since you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not, and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of his ideals,--save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms to it vainly, and die?"

There came a soft s.h.i.+ver of the air, as though it were severed by some eager bird.

She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a radiance in her eyes, more l.u.s.trous than any smile; her body tremulous and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.

"Here is the gold!" she cried.

Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.

"Gold?"

He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her sudden presence there.

"Here is the gold!" she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. "'A little gold,' you said, you remember?--'only a little.' And this is much. Take it--take it! Do you not hear?"