Folle Farine Part 89

The fourth was a little child not seven; he was an orphan, and the people who kept him sent him out to get herbs in the outlying villages to sell in the streets, and beat him if he let other children be beforehand with him. He woke sobbing; he had dreamed of his dead mother, and cried out that it was so cold, so cold.

There were scores like them at whose doors she knocked, or whose chambers she entered. The brief kind night was over, and they had to arise and work,--or die.

"Why do they not die?" she wondered; and she thought of the dear G.o.ds that she had loved, the G.o.ds of oblivion.

Truly there were no gifts like their gifts; and yet men knew their worth so little;--but thrust Hypnos back in scorn, das.h.i.+ng their winecups in his eyes; and mocked Oneiros, calling him the guest of love-sick fools and of mad poets; and against Thanatos strove always in hatred and terror as against their dreaded foe.

It was a strange, melancholy, dreary labor this into which she had entered.

It was all dark. The little light she bore scarcely shed its rays beyond her feet. It was all still. The winds sounded infinitely sad among those vaulted pa.s.sages and the deep shafts of the stairways. Now and then a woman's voice in prayer or a man's in blasphemy echoed dully through the old half-ruined buildings. Otherwise an intense silence reigned there, where all save herself were sleeping.

She used to think it was a city of the dead, in which she alone was living.

And sometimes she had not the heart to waken them; when there was a smile on some wan worn face that never knew one in its waking hours; or when some childless mother in her lonely bed sleeping, in fancy drew young arms about her throat.

This morning when all her tasks were done, and all the toilers summoned to another day of pain, she retraced her steps slowly, bearing the light aloft, and with its feeble rays shed on the colorless splendor of her face, and on her luminous dilated troubled eyes that were forever seeking what they never found.

A long vaulted pa.s.sage stretched between her and the foot of the steps that led to the tower; many doors opened on it, the winds wailed through it, and the ragged clothes of the tenants blew to and fro upon the swaying cords. She traversed it, and slowly mounted her own staircase, which was spiral and narrow, with little loopholes ever and again that looked out upon the walls, and higher on the roofs, and higher yet upon the open sky. By one of these she paused and looked out wearily.

It was dark still; great low rain-clouds floated by; a little caged bird stirred with a sad note; mighty rains swept by from the westward, sweet with the smell of the distant fields.

Her heart ached for the country.

It was so still there in the dusk she knew, even in this wild autumn night, which there would be so purple with leaf shadow, so brown with embracing branches, so gray with silvery faint mists of lily, white with virgin snows. Ah, G.o.d! to reach it once again, she thought, if only to die in it.

And yet she stayed on in this, which was to her the deepest h.e.l.l, stayed on because he--in life or death--was here.

She started as a hand touched her softly, where she stood looking through the narrow s.p.a.ce. The eyes of Sartorian smiled on her through the twilight.

"Do you shrink still?" he said, gently. "Put back your knife; look at me quietly; you will not have the casket?--very well. Your strength is folly; yet it is n.o.ble. It becomes you. I do you good for ill. I have had search made for your lover, who loves not you. I have found him."

"Living?" She quivered from head to foot; the gray walls reeled round her; she feared, she hoped, she doubted, she believed. Was it h.e.l.l? Was it heaven? She could not tell. She cared not which, so that only she could look once more upon the face of Arslan.

"Living," he answered her, and still he smiled. "Living. Come with me, and see how he has used the liberty you gave. Come."

She staggered to her feet and rose, and held her knife close in the bosom of her dress, and with pa.s.sionate eyes of hope and dread searched the face of the old man through the shadows.

"It is the truth?" she muttered. "If you mock me,--if you lie----"

"Your knife will sheathe itself in my body, I know. Nay, I have never lied to you. One cannot wear a velvet glove to tame a lioness. Come with me; fear nothing, Folle-Farine. Come with me, and see with your own eyesight how the world of men has dealt with this your G.o.d."

"I will come."

Sartorian gazed at her in silence.

"You are a barbarian; and so you are heroic always. I would not lie to you, and here I have no need. Come; it is very near to you. A breadth of stone can sever two lives, though the strength of all the world cannot unite them. Come."

She gripped the knife closer, and, with feet that stumbled as the feet of a dumb beast that goes out to its slaughter, followed him, through the dark and narrow ways. She had no fear for herself; she had no dread of treachery or peril; for herself she could be strong, always: and the point of the steel was set hard against her breast; but for him?--had the G.o.ds forgotten? had he forgot?

She was sick, and cold, and white with terror as she went. She dreaded the unknown thing her eyes might look upon. She dreaded the truth that she had sought to learn all through the burning months of summer, all through the horrors of the crowded city. Was it well with him, or ill?

Had the G.o.ds remembered at last? Had the stubborn necks of men been bent to his feet? Was he free?--free to rise to the heights of lofty desire, and never look downward, in pity, once?

They pa.s.sed in silence through many pa.s.sage-ways of the great stone hive of human life in which she dwelt. Once only Sartorian paused and looked back and spoke.

"If you find him in a woman's arms, lost in a sloth of pa.s.sion, what then? Will you say still, Let him have greatness?"

In the gloom he saw her stagger as though struck upon the head. But she rallied and gazed at him in answer with eyes that would neither change nor shrink.

"What is that to you?" she said, in her shut teeth. "Show me the truth: and as for him,--he has a right to do as he will. Have I said ever otherwise?"

He led the way onward in silence.

This pa.s.sion, so heroic even in its barbarism, so faithful even in its wretchedness, so pure even in its abandonment, almost appalled him,--and yet on it he had no pity.

By his lips the world spoke: the world which, to a creature nameless, homeless, G.o.dless, friendless, offered only one choice--shame or death; and for such privilege of choice bade her be thankful to men and to their deity.

He led her through many vaulted ways, and up the shaft of a stone stairway in a distant side of the vast pile, which, from holding many habitants of kings, and monks, and scholars, had become the populous home of the most wretched travailers of a great city.

"Wait here," he said, and drew her backward into a hollow in the wall.

It was nearly dark.

As she stood there in the darkness looking down through the narrow s.p.a.ce, there came a shadow to her through the gloom,--a human shadow, noiseless and voiceless. It ascended the shaft of the stairs with a silent, swift tread, and pa.s.sed by her, and went onward; as it pa.s.sed, the rays of her lamp were shed on it, and her eyes at last saw the face of Arslan.

It was pale as death; his head was sunk on his breast; his lips muttered without the sound of words, his fair hair streamed in the wind; he moved without haste, without pause, with the pulseless haste, the bloodless quiet of a phantom.

She had heard men talk of those who, being dead, yet dwelt on earth and moved amidst the living. She had no thought of him in that moment save as among the dead. But he, dead or living, could have no horror for her; he, dead or living, ruled her as the moon the sea, and drew her after him, and formed the one law of her life.

She neither trembled nor prayed, nor wept nor laughed, nor cried aloud in her inconceivable joy. Her heart stood still, as though some hand had caught and gripped it. She was silent in the breathless silence of an unspeakable awe; and with a step as noiseless as his own, she glided in his path through the deep shaft of the stairs, upward and upward through the hushed house, through the innumerable chambers, through the dusky shadows, through the chill of the bitter dawn, through the close hive of the sleeping creatures, up and up, into the very roof itself, where it seemed to meet the low and lurid clouds, and to be lifted from the habitations and the homes of men.

A doorway was open; he pa.s.sed through it; beyond it was a bare square place through which there came the feeblest rays of dawn, making the yellow oil flame that burned in it look dull and hot and garish. He pa.s.sed into the chamber and stood still a moment, with his head dropped on his chest and his lips muttering sounds without meaning.

The light fell on his face; she saw that he was living. Crouched on his threshold, she watched him, her heart leaping with a hope so keen, a rapture so intense, that its very strength and purity suffocated her like some mountain air too pure and strong for human lungs to breathe.

He walked in his sleep; that sleep so strange and so terrible, which drugs the senses and yet stimulates the brain; in which the sleeper moves, acts, remembers, returns to daily habits, and resorts to daily haunts, and yet to all the world around him is deaf and blind and indifferent as the dead.

The restless brain, unstrung by too much travail and too little food, had moved the limbs unconsciously to their old haunts and habits; and in his sleep, though sightless and senseless, he seemed still to know and still to suffer. For he moved again, after a moment's rest, and pa.s.sed straight to the wooden trestles on which a great canvas was outstretched. He sank down on a rough bench in front of it, and pa.s.sed his hand before the picture with the fond, caressing gesture with which a painter shows to another some wave of light, some grace of color, and then sat there, stupidly, steadfastly, with his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and his eyes fastened on the creation before him.

It was a rugged, desolate, wind-blown chamber, set in the topmost height of the old pile, beaten on by all snows, drenched by all rains, rocked by all storms, bare, comfortless, poor to the direst stretch of poverty, close against the clouds, and with the brazen bells and teeming roofs of the city close beneath.

She had dwelt by him for many weeks, and no sense of his presence had come to her, no instinct had awakened in him towards the love which clung to him with a faithfulness only as great as its humility. She, praying always to see this man once more, and die--had been severed from him by the breadth of a stone as by an ocean's width; and he--doomed to fail always, spending his life in one endeavor, and by that one perpetually vanquished--he had had no s.p.a.ce left to look up at a nameless creature with lithe golden limbs, about whose head the white-winged pigeons fluttered at twilight on the housetop.

His eyes had swept over her more than once; but they had had no sight for her; they were a poet's eyes that saw forever in fancy faces more amorous and divine, limbs lovelier and more lily-like, mouths sweeter and more persuasive in their kiss, than any they ever saw on earth.

One pa.s.sion consumed him, and left him not pause, nor breath, nor pity, nor sorrow for any other thing. He rested from his work and knew that it was good; but this could not content him, for this his fellow-men denied.

There was scarcely any light, but there was enough for her to read his story by--the story of continual failure.

Yet where she hid upon the threshold, her heart beat with wildest music of recovered joy; she had found him, and she had found him alone.