Folle Farine Part 90

No woman leaned upon his breast; no soft tossed hair bathed his arms, no mouth murmured against his own. He was alone. Her only rival was that one great pa.s.sion with which she had never in her humility dreamed to mete herself.

Dead he might be to all the world of men, dead in his own sight by a worse fate than that or any could give; but for her he was living,--to her what mattered failure or scorn, famine or woe, defeat or despair?

She saw his face once more.

She crouched upon his threshold now, and trembled with the madness of her joy, and courted its torture. She dared not creep and touch his hand, she dared not steal and kneel a moment at his feet.

He had rejected her. He had had no need of her. He had left her with the first hour that freedom came to him. He had seen her beauty, and learned its lines and hues, and used them for his art, and let it go again, a soulless thing that gave him no delight; a thing so slight he had thought it scarcely worth his while even to break it for an hour's sport. This was what he had deemed her; that she knew.

She accepted the fate at his hands with the submission that was an integral part of the love she bore him. She had never thought of equality between herself and him; he might have beaten her, or kicked her, as a brute his dog, and she would not have resisted nor resented.

To find him, to watch him from a distance, to serve him in any humble ways she might; to give him his soul's desire, if any barter of her own soul could purchase it,--this was all she asked. She had told him that he could have no sins to her, and it had been no empty phrase.

She crouched on his threshold, scarcely daring to breathe lest he should hear her.

In the dull light of dawn and of the sickly lamp she saw the great canvas on the trestles that his eyes, without seeing it, yet stared at;--it was the great picture of the Barabbas, living its completed life in color: beautiful, fearful, and divine, full of its majesty of G.o.dhead and its mockery of man.

She knew then how the seasons since they had parted had been spent with him; she knew then, without any telling her in words, how he had given up all his nights and days, all his scant store of gold, all leisure and comfort and peace, all hours of summer suns.h.i.+ne and of midnight cold, all laughter of glad places, and all pleasures of pa.s.sion or of ease, to render perfect this one work by which he had elected to make good his fame or perish.

And she knew that he must have failed; failed always; that spending his life in one endeavor, circ.u.mstance had been stronger than he, and had baffled him perpetually. She knew that it was still in vain that he gave his peace and strength and pa.s.sions, all the golden years of manhood, and all the dreams and delights of the senses; and that although these were a treasure which, once spent, came back nevermore to the hands which scatter them, he had failed to purchase with them, though they were his all, this sole thing which he besought from the waywardness of fate.

"I will find a name or a grave," he had said, when they had parted: she, with the instinct of that supreme love which clung to him with a faithfulness only equaled by its humility, needed no second look upon his face to see that no G.o.ds had answered him save the G.o.ds of oblivion;--the G.o.ds whose pity he rejected and whose divinity he denied.

For to the proud eyes of a man, looking eagle-wise at the far-off sun of a great ambition, the coming of Thanatos could seem neither as consolation nor as vengeance, but only as the crowning irony in the mockery and the futility of life.

The dawn grew into morning.

A day broke full of winds and of showers, with the dark ma.s.ses of clouds tossed roughly hither and thither, and the bells of the steeples blown harshly out of time and tune, and the wet metal roofs glistening through a steam of rain.

The sleepers wakened of themselves or dreamed on as they might.

She had no memory of them.

She crouched in the gloom on his threshold, watching him.

He sank awhile into profound stupor, sitting there before his canvas, with his head dropped and his eyelids closed. Then suddenly a shudder ran through him; he awoke with a start, and shook off the lethargy which drugged him. He rose slowly to his feet, and looked at the open shutters, and saw that it was morning.

"Another day--another day!" he muttered, wearily; and he turned from the Barabbas.

Towards the form on his threshold he had never looked.

She sat without and waited.

Waited--for what? She did not know. She did not dare even to steal to him and touch his hand with such a timid caress as a beaten dog ventures to give the hand of the master who has driven it from him.

For even a beaten dog is a creature less humble and timid than a woman that loves and whose love is rejected.

He took up a palette ready set, and went to a blank s.p.a.ce of canvas and began to cover it with shapes and shadows on the unconscious creative instinct of the surcharged brain. Faces and foliage, beasts and scrolls, the heads of G.o.ds, the folds of snakes, forms of women rising from flames and clouds, the flowers of Paradise blossoming amidst the corruption and tortures of Antenora. All were cast in confusion, wave on wave, shape on shape, horror with loveliness, air with flame, heaven with h.e.l.l, in all the mad tumult of an artist's dreams.

With a curse he flung his brushes from him, and cast himself face downward on his bed of straw.

The riot of fever was in his blood. Famine, sleepless nights, unnatural defiance of all pa.s.sions and all joys, the pestilence rife in the crowded quarter of the poor,--all these had done their work upon him. He had breathed in the foul air of plague-stricken places, unconscious of its peril; he had starved his body, reckless of the flight of time; he had consumed his manhood in one ceaseless, ruthless, and absorbing sacrifice; and Nature, whom he had thus outraged, and thought to outrage with impunity as mere b.e.s.t.i.a.l feebleness, took her vengeance on him and cast him here, and mocked him, crying,--

"A deathless name?--Oh, madman! A little breath on the mouths of men in all the ages to come?--Oh, fool! Hereafter you cry?--Oh, fool!--heaven and earth may pa.s.s away like a scroll that is burnt into ashes, and the future you live for may never come--neither for you nor the world. What you may gain--who shall say? But all you have missed, I know. And no man shall scorn me--and pa.s.s unscathed."

There came an old lame woman by laboriously bearing a load of firewood.

She paused beside the threshold.

"You look yonder," she said, resting her eyes on the stranger crouching on the threshold. "Are you anything to that man?"

Silence only answered her.

"He has no friends," muttered the cripple. "No human being has ever come to him; and he has been here many months. He will be mad--very soon. I have seen it before. Those men do not die. Their bodies are too strong.

But their brains go,--look you. And their brains go, and yet they live--to fourscore and ten many a time--shut up and manacled like wild beasts."

Folle-Farine s.h.i.+vered where she crouched in the shadow of the doorway; she still said nothing.

The crone mumbled on indifferent of answer, and yet pitiful, gazing into the chamber.

"I have watched him often; he is fair to look at--one is never too old to care for that. All winter, spring, and summer he has lived so hard;--so cold too and so silent--painting that strange thing yonder. He looks like a king--he lives like a beggar. The picture was his G.o.d:--see you. And no doubt he has set his soul on fame--men will. All the world is mad. One day in the springtime it was sent somewhere--that great thing yonder on the trestles,--to be seen by the world, no doubt. And whoever its fate lay with would not see any greatness in it, or else no eyes would look. It came back as it went. No doubt they knew best;--in the world. That was in the spring of the year. He has been like this ever since. Walking most nights;--starving most days;--I think. But he is always silent."

The speaker raised her wood and went slowly, muttering as she limped down each steep stair,--

"There must hang a crown of stars I suppose--somewhere--since so many of them forever try to reach one. But all they ever get here below is a crown of straws in a madhouse."

"The woman says aright," the voice of Sartorian murmured low against her ear.

She had forgotten that he was near from the first moment that her eyes had once more fed themselves upon the face of Arslan.

"The woman says aright," he echoed, softly. "This man will perish; his body may not die, but his brain will--surely. And yet for his life you would give yours?"

She looked up with a gleam of incredulous hope; she was yet so ignorant; she thought there might yet be ways by which one life could buy another's from the mercy of earth, from the pity of heaven.

"Ah!" she murmured with a swift soft trembling eagerness. "If the G.o.ds would but remember!--and take me--instead. But they forget--they forget always."

He smiled.

"Ay, truly, the G.o.ds forget. But if you would give yourself to death for him, why not do a lesser thing?--give your beauty, Folle-Farine?"

A scarlet flush burned her from head to foot. For once she mistook his meaning. She thought, how could a beauty that he--who perished there--had scorned, have rarity or grace in those cold eyes, of force or light enough to lure him from his grave?

The low melody of the voice in her ear flowed on.

"See you--what he lacks is only the sinew that gold gives. What he has done is great. The world rightly seeing must fear it; and fear is the highest homage the world ever gives. But he is penniless; and he has many foes; and jealousy can with so much ease thrust aside the greatness which it fears into obscurity, when that greatness is marred by the failures and the feebleness of poverty. Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong; gold is the war scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes and gives free pa.s.sage to the sun-coursers, with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battle-fields of earth."

"You were to give that gold," she muttered, in her throat.

"Nay, not so. I was to set him free: to find his fame or his grave; as he might. He will soon find one, no doubt. Nay; you would make no bond with me, Folle-Farine. You scorned my golden pear. Otherwise--how great they are! That cruel scorn, that burning color, that icelike coldness!