Folle Farine Part 78

A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and bade her get from the ground.

"You are fitter to go back again," he muttered; "you are mad still, I think."

Like a hunted animal she stumbled to her feet and fled from him; winged by the one ghastly terror that they would claim her and chain her back again.

They had said that she was free: but what were words? They had taken her once; they might take her twice.

She ran, and ran, and ran.

The intense fear that possessed her lent her irresistible force. She coursed the earth with the swiftness of a hare. She took no heed whence she went; she only knew that she fled from that one unutterable horror of the place. She thought that they were right; that she was mad.

It was a level, green, silent country which was round her, with little loveliness and little color; but as she went she laughed incessantly in the delirious gladness of her liberty.

She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cl.u.s.ter of loose apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could no longer bear the pa.s.sionate pain of all the long-lost sweetness, but, flinging herself downward, sobbed with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.

The h.e.l.l in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.

"Ah, G.o.d!" she thought, "I know now--one cannot be utterly wretched whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."

And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with their eyes downward, and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so little to the sound of the breeze in the gra.s.ses, looking so little to the pa.s.sage of the clouds against the sun.

When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had a little pa.s.sed away, and abated in violence, she stood in the midst of the green fields and the fresh woods, a strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute desolation.

Her clothes were in rags; her red girdle had been changed by weather to a dusky purple; her thick cl.u.s.tering hair had been cut to her throat; her radiant hues were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully from beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an antelope whom men vainly starve in the attempt to tame.

She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She had not a coin nor a crust upon her. She could not tell where she then stood, nor where the only home that she had ever known might lie.

She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was beautiful, and was a woman.

She stood and looked; she did not weep; she did not pray; her heart seemed frozen in her. She had the gift she had craved,--and how could she use it?

The light was obscured by clouds, great, sweet rain-clouds which came trooping from the west. Woods were all round, and close against her were low brown cattle, cropping clovered gra.s.s. Away on the horizon was a vague, vast, golden cloud, like a million threads of gossamer glowing in the sun.

She did not know what it was; yet it drew her eyes to it. She thought of the palaces.

A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed to the cloud.

"What is that light?" she asked him.

The cowherd stared and laughed.

"That light? It is only the sun s.h.i.+ning on the domes and the spires of Paris."

"Paris!"

She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed her hands upon her breast, and in her way thanked G.o.d.

She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it.

She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. It looked quite close.

She had exhausted the scanty strength which she had in her first flight; she could go but slowly; and the roads were heavy across the plowed lands, and through the edges of the woods. She walked on and on till it grew dusk, then she asked of a woman weeding in a field how far it might be yet to Paris.

The woman told her four leagues and more.

She grew deadly cold with fear. She was weak, and she had no hope that she could reach it before dawn; and she had nothing with which to buy shelter for the night. She could see it still; a cloud, now as of fireflies, upon the purple and black of the night; and in a pa.s.sionate agony of longing she once more bent her limbs and ran--thinking of him.

To her the city of the world, the city of the kings, the city of the eagles, was only of value for the sake of this one life it held.

It was useless. All the strength she possessed was already spent. The feebleness of fever still sang in her ears and trembled in her blood.

She was sick and faint, and very thirsty.

She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked to rest the night there.

The woman glanced at her and slammed to the door. At another and yet another she tried; but at neither had she any welcome; they muttered of the hospitals and drove her onward. Finally, tired out, she dropped down on the curled hollow of an old oak stump that stood by the wayside, and fell asleep, seeing to the last through her sinking lids that cloud of light where the great city lay.

The night was cold; the earth damp; she stretched her limbs out wearily and sighed, and dreamed that Thanatos touched her with his asphodels and whispered, "Come."

CHAPTER IX.

When she awoke she was no longer in the open air by the roadside, and the gray of the falling night about her, and the wet leaves for her bed.

She was in a wide painted chamber, sweet with many roses, hung with deep hues of violet, filled with gold and color and sculpture and bronze, duskily beautiful and dimly lighted by a great wood fire that glowed upon andirons of bra.s.s.

On the wall nearest her hung all alone a picture,--a picture of a girl asleep in a scarlet blaze of poppies, above her head a purple b.u.t.terfly, and on her breast the Red Mouse of the Brocken.

Opposite to it, beside the hearth, watching her with his small brilliant eyes, and quite motionless, sat the old man Sartorian, who had kept his faith with her, though the G.o.ds had not kept theirs.

And the picture and the reality grew confused before her, and she knew not which was herself and which her painted likeness, nor which was the little red mouse that gibbered among the red flowers, and which the little old man who sat watching her with the fire-gleams bright in his eyes; and it seemed to her that she and the picture were one, and he and the mouse were one likewise; and she moaned and leaned her head on her hands and tried to think.

The heat of the chamber, and the strong nourishment which they had poured down her throat when she was insensible of anything they did to her, had revived the life in her. Memory and sense returned slowly to her; what first awakened was her one pa.s.sionate desire, so intense that it became an instinct stifling every other, to go on her way to the city that had flashed in its golden glory on her sight one moment, only the next to disappear into the eternal night.

"Paris!" she muttered, mechanically, as she lifted her face with a hopeless, bewildered prayer.

"Tell me the way to Paris," she muttered, instinctively, and she tried to rise and walk, not well knowing what she did.

The old man laughed a little, silently.

"Ah-h-h! Women are the only peaches that roll of their own accord from the wall to the wasp's nest!"

At the sound of his voice her eyes opened wide upon him; she knew his face again.

"Where am I?" she asked him, with a sharp terror in her voice.

"In my house," he said, simply. "I drove by you when you lay on the roadside. I recognized you. When people dream of immortality they generally die in a ditch. You would have died of a single night out there. I sent my people for you. You did not wake. You have slept here five hours."