Folle Farine Part 72

She did not reason--all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring instinct of pa.s.sion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as eternally as though his grave had closed on him.

She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.

She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.

Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard at her feet.

Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the summer into the core of a wasps'-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was resolute to follow him,--to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.

To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as it is to the dog to track his master's wanderings.

She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a thing that was vile.

But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion's rage and humble as the camel's endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands, but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.

She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.

He had said that he would leave at dawn.

In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the river where he dwelt.

She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too, she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his eyes would kill her.

It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and feeble limbs through the long gra.s.ses of the sh.o.r.e and reached the ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the s.p.a.ces in the stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that the place was desolate.

The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the pigments and tools and articles of an artist's store, were gone; but the figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the stone.

She entered and looked at them.

She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there--alone.

The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute and content;--and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread winged King,--the Greek youths, with doves in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and golden apples in their hands,--the women dancing upon Cithaeron in the moonlight,--the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion,--all the familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old sweet life of the heroic times, were there--left to the rat and the spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.

The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the skies, and they would be there--alone.

To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as the prophet's gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.

She held them in a pa.s.sionate tenderness--these, the first creatures who had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness of her life.

She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them in an agony of prayer--prayed for them that the hour might come, and come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in wors.h.i.+p to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart, towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and consolation.

Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving them she had reached the pure and impersonal pa.s.sion of the artist. To have them live, she would have given her own life.

Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first time, she fell into a pa.s.sion of tears, and, stretched there on the floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.

When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and Thanatos--the gentle G.o.ds who give forgetfulness to men.

They were her dear G.o.ds, her best beloved and most compa.s.sionate; yet their look struck coldly to her heart.

Sleep, Dreams, and Death,--were these the only gifts with which the G.o.ds, being merciful, could answer prayer?

CHAPTER VI.

At the little quay in the town many boats were lading and unlading, and many setting their sails to go southward with their loads of eggs, or of birds, of flowers, of fruit, or of herbage; all smelling of summer rain, and the odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest of the lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them.

Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and learned what she needed without any asking, in turn, question of her.

Arslan had sailed at sunrise.

There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded with Russian violets from a flower-farm. The old man was angered and in trouble: the lad who steered for him had failed him, and the young men and boys on the ca.n.a.ls were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage for the wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and leaned towards him.

"Do you go the way to Paris?"

The old man nodded.

"I will steer for you, then," she said to him; and leaped down among his fragrant freight. He was a stranger to her, and let her be. She did for him as well as another, since she said that she knew those waters well.

He was in haste, and, without more words, he loosened his sail, and cut his moor-rope, and set his little vessel adrift down the water-ways of the town, the violets filling the air with their odors and blue as the eyes of a child that wakes smiling.

All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and dim pa.s.sages, all the ropes on which the lanterns and the linen hung, all the wide carved stairways water-washed, all the dim windows that the women filled with pots of ivy and the song of birds,--she was drifting from them with every pulse of the tide, never again to return; but she looked at them without seeing them, indifferent, and having no memory of them; her brain, and her heart, and her soul were with the boat that she followed.

It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat-bottomed boats were coming in at sunrise, in each some cargo of green food or of farm produce; a strong girl rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the white glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds' eggs, children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, old women nursing a wicker cage of cackling hens or hissing geese, mules and a.s.ses, shaking their bells and worsted ta.s.sels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin saddles,--these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, or on the broad highroad that ran for a s.p.a.ce by the water's edge.

All of these knew her well; all of these some time or another had jeered her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled from her. But no one stopped her.

No one cared enough for her to care even to wonder whither she went.

She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew so well, along the line of the wood and the orchards of Ypres. But what at another time would have had pain for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad familiarity, now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great pa.s.sion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all slighter memories.

All day long they sailed.

At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust as part of her wage; she tried to eat them, knowing she would want all her strength.

They left the course of the stream that she knew, and sailed farther than she had ever sailed; pa.s.sed towns whose bells were ringing, and n.o.ble bridges gleaming in the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome, and bright orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. She knew none of them. There were only the water flowing under the keel, and the blue sky above, with the rooks circling in it, which had the look of friends to her.

The twilight fell; still the wind served, and still they held on; the mists came, white and thick, and stars rose, and the voices from the sh.o.r.es sounded strangely, with here and there a note of music or the deep roll of a drum.

So she drifted out of the old life into an unknown world. But she never once looked back. Why should she?--He had gone before.

When it was quite night, they drew near to a busy town, whose lights glittered by hundreds and thousands on the bank. There were many barges and small boats at anchor in its wharves, banging out lanterns at their mast-heads. The old man bade her steer his boat among them, and with a cord he made it fast.

"This is Paris?" she asked breathlessly

The old man laughed:

"Paris is days' sail away."