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Folle-Farine

by Ouida · English · Gutenberg #39745 · 1,057,126 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Folle-Farine

Author: Ouida


        
Release date: May 20, 2012 [eBook #39745]
                Most recently updated: November 24, 2012

Language: English

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book was produced from scanned images of public domain
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                          FOLLE-FARINE.

                            By OUIDA,

    AUTHOR OF "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS," "IDALIA," "TRICOTRIN," "PUCK,"
    "GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," "UNDER TWO FLAGS," ETC.

        "Un gazetier fumeux qui se croit au flambeau
          Dit au pauvre qu'il a noyé dans les ténèbres:
        Où donc l'aperçois-tu ce Créateur du Beau?
          Ce Rédresseur que tu célèbres!"

                                   BAUDELAIRE.


    PHILADELPHIA
    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.
    1871.

    Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by

    J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.,

    In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.




            À
        LA MÉMOIRE
         D'INGRES,
      PEINTRE-POËTE.




FOLLE-FARINE.




BOOK I.




CHAPTER I.


Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from
the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which
flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the
impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment,
and then is scattered--on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight,
down in the mud. What matters? who cares?

Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in
the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere,
borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to
lie in a fetid ditch.

Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones,
grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself
Love avers that its God does grind the world.

"It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born;
it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not
any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it
is very like you," said the old miller, watching the millstones.

Folle-Farine heard--she had heard a hundred times,--and held her peace.

Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.

As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The
dust,--sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the
shred husks and the shattered stalks.

Folle-Farine,--she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from
between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were
thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so
mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.

The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it
listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it
died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the
curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could
mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with
it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the
dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.

In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much
better dealt with than she was.

"Folle-Farine! Folle--Folle--Folle--Farine!" the other children hooted
after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her
bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and
answered to it as others to their birthnames.

It meant that she was a thing utterly useless, absolutely worthless; the
very refuse of the winnowings of the flail of fate. But she accepted
that too, so far as she understood it; she only sometimes wondered in a
dull fierce fashion why, if she and the dust were sisters, the dust had
its wings while she had none.

All day long the dust flew in and out and about as it liked, through the
open doors, and among the tossing boughs, and through the fresh cool
mists, and down the golden shafts of the sunbeams; and all day long she
stayed in one place and toiled, and was first beaten and then cursed, or
first cursed and then beaten,--which was all the change that her life
knew. For herself, she saw no likeness betwixt her and the dust; for
that escaped from the scourge and flew forth, but she abode under the
flail, always.

Nevertheless, Folle-Farine was all the name she knew.

The great black wheel churned and circled in the brook water, and
lichens and ferns and mosses made lovely all the dark, shadowy, silent
place; the red mill roof gleamed in the sun, under a million summer
leaves; the pigeons came and went all day in and out of their holes in
the wall; the sweet scents of ripening fruits in many orchards filled
the air; the great grindstones turned and turned and turned, and the
dust floated forth to dance with the gnat and to play with the sunbeam.

Folle-Farine sat aloft, on the huge, black, wet timbers above the wheel,
and watched with her thoughtful eyes, and wondered again, after her own
fashion, why her namesake had thus liberty to fly forth whilst she had
none.

Suddenly a shrill, screaming voice broke the stillness savagely.

"Little devil!" cried the miller, "go fetch me those sacks, and carry
them within, and pile them; neatly, do you hear? Like the piles of stone
in the road."

Folle-Farine swung down from the timbers in obedience to the command,
and went to the heap of sacks that lay outside the mill; small sacks,
most of them; all of last year's flour.

There was an immense gladiolus growing near, in the mill-garden, where
they were; a tall flower all scarlet and gold, and straight as a palm,
with bees sucking into its bells, and butterflies poising on its stem.
She stood a moment looking at its beauty; she was scarce any higher than
its topmost bud, and was in her way beautiful, something after its
fashion. She was a child of six or eight years, with limbs moulded like
sculpture, and brown as the brook water; great lustrous eyes, half
savage and half soft; a mouth like a red pomegranate bud, and straight
dark brows--the brows of the friezes of Egypt.

Her only clothing was a short white linen kirtle, knotted around her
waist, and falling to her knees; and her skin was burned, by exposure in
the sun, to a golden-brown color, though in texture it was soft as
velvet, and showed all the veins like glass. Standing there in the deep
grass, with the great scarlet flower against her, and purple butterflies
over her head, an artist would have painted her and called her by a
score of names, and described for her some mystical or noble fate: as
Anteros, perhaps, or as the doomed son of Procne, or as some child born
to the Forsaken in the savage forests of Naxos, or conceived by
Persephone, in the eternal night of hell, while still the earth lay
black and barren and fruitless, under the ban and curse of a bereaved
maternity.

But here she had only one name, Folle-Farine; and here she had only to
labor drearily and stupidly like the cattle of the field; without their
strength, and with barely so much even as their scanty fare and
begrudged bed.

The sunbeams that fell on her might find out that she had a beauty which
ripened and grew rich under their warmth, like that of a red flower bud
or a golden autumn fruit. But nothing else ever did. In none of the eyes
that looked on her had she any sort of loveliness. She was Folle-Farine;
a little wicked beast that only merited at best a whip and a cruel word,
a broken crust and a malediction; a thing born of the devil, and out of
which the devil needed to be scourged incessantly.

The sacks were all small; they were the property of the peasant
proprietors of the district,--a district of western Normandy. But though
small they were heavy in proportion to her age and power. She lifted
one, although with effort, yet with the familiarity of an accustomed
action; poised it on her back, clasped it tight with her round slender
arms, and carried it slowly through the open door of the mill. That one
put down upon the bricks, she came for a second,--a third,--a fourth,--a
fifth,--a sixth, working doggedly, patiently and willingly, as a little
donkey works.

The sacks were in all sixteen; before the seventh she paused.

It was a hot day in mid-August: she was panting and burning with the
exertion; the bloom in her cheeks had deepened to scarlet; she stood a
moment, resting, bathing her face in the sweet coolness of a white tall
tuft of lilies.

The miller looked round where he worked, among his beans and cabbages,
and saw.

"Little mule! Little beast!" he cried. "Would you be lazy--you!--who
have no more right to live at all than an eft, or a stoat, or a toad?"

And as he spoke he came toward her. He had caught up a piece of rope
with which he had been about to tie his tall beans to a stake, and he
struck the child with it. The sharp cord bit the flesh cruelly, curling
round her bare chest and shoulders, and leaving a livid mark.

She quivered a little, but she said nothing; she lifted her head and
looked at him, and dropped her hands to her sides. Her great eyes glowed
fiercely; her red curling lips shut tight; her straight brows drew
together.

"Little devil! Will you work now?" said the miller. "Do you think you
are to stand in the sun and smell at flowers--you? Pouf-f-f!"

Folle-Farine did not move.

"Pick up the sacks this moment, little brute," said the miller. "If you
stand still a second before they are all housed, you shall have as many
stripes as there are sacks left untouched. Oh-hè, do you hear?"

She heard, but she did not move.

"Do you hear?" he pursued. "As many strokes as there are sacks, little
wretch. Now--I will give you three moments to choose. One!"

Folle-Farine still stood mute and immovable, her head erect, her arms
crossed on her chest. A small, slender, bronze-hued, half-nude figure
among the ruby hues of the gladioli and the pure snowlike whiteness of
the lilies.

"Two!"

She stood in the same attitude, the sacks lying untouched at her feet, a
purple-winged butterfly lighting on her head.

"Three!"

She was still mute; still motionless.

He seized her by the shoulder with one hand, and with the other lifted
the rope.

It curled round her breast and back, again and again and again; she
shuddered, but she did not utter a single cry. He struck her the ten
times; with the same number of strokes as there remained sacks
uncarried. He did not exert any great strength, for had he used his
uttermost he would have killed her, and she was of value to him; but he
scourged her with a merciless exactitude in the execution of his threat,
and the rope was soon wet with drops of her bright young blood.

The noonday sun fell golden all around; the deep sweet peace of the
silent country reigned everywhere; the pigeons fled to and fro in and
out of their little arched homes; the millstream flowed on, singing a
pleasant song; now and then a ripe apricot dropped with a low sound on
the turf; close about was all the radiance of summer flowers; of heavy
rich roses, of yellow lime tufts, of sheaves of old-fashioned comely
phlox, and all the delicate shafts of the graceful lilies. And in the
warmth the child shuddered under the scourge; against the light the
black rope curled like a serpent darting to sting; among the sun-fed
blossoms there fell a crimson stain.

But never a word had she uttered. She endured to the tenth stroke in
silence.

He flung the cord aside among the grass. "Daughter of devils!--what
strength the devil gives!" he muttered.

Folle-Farine said nothing. Her face was livid, her back bruised and
lacerated, her eyes still glanced with undaunted scorn and untamed
passion. Still she said nothing; but, as his hand released her, she
darted as noiselessly as a lizard to the water's edge, set her foot on
the lowest range of the woodwork, and in a second leaped aloft to the
highest point, and seated herself astride on that crossbar of black
timber on which she had been throned when he had summoned her first,
above the foam of the churning wheels, and in the deepest shadow of
innumerable leaves.

Then she lifted up a voice as pure, as strong, as fresh as the voice of
a mavis in May-time, and sang, with reckless indifference, a stave of
song in a language unknown to any of the people of that place; a loud
fierce air, with broken words of curious and most dulcet melody, which
rang loud and defiant, yet melancholy, even in their rebellion, through
the foliage, and above the sound of the loud mill water.

"It is a chant to the foul fiend," the miller muttered to himself.
"Well, why does he not come and take his own? he would be welcome to
it."

And he went and sprinkled holy water on his rope, and said an ave or two
over it to exorcise it.

Every fiber of her childish body ached and throbbed; the stripes on her
shoulders burned like flame; her little brain was dizzy; her little
breast was black with bruises; but still she sang on, clutching the
timber with her hands to keep her from falling into the foam below, and
flashing her fierce proud eyes down through the shade of the leaves.

"Can one never cut the devil out of her?" muttered the miller, going
back to his work among the beans.

After awhile the song ceased; the pain she suffered stifled her voice
despite herself; she felt giddy and sick, but she sat there still in the
shadow, holding on by the jutting woodwork, and watching the water foam
and eddy below.

The hours went away; the golden day died; the grayness of evening stole
the glow from the gladioli and shut up the buds of the roses; the great
lilies gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of twilight; the vesper
chimes were rung from the cathedral two leagues away over the fields.

The miller stopped the gear of the mill; the grindstones and the
water-wheels were set at rest; the peace of the night came down; the
pigeons flew to roost in their niches; but the sacks still lay unearned
on the grass, and a spider had found time to spin his fairy ropes about
them.

The miller stood on his threshold, and looked up at her where she sat
aloft in the dusky shades of the leaves.

"Come down and carry these sacks, little brute," he said. "If not--no
supper for you to-night."

Folle-Farine obeyed him and came down from the huge black pile slowly,
her bands crossed behind her back, her head erect, her eyes glancing
like the eyes of a wild hawk.

She walked straight past the sacks, across the dew-laden turf, through
the tufts of the lilies, and so silently into the house.

The entrance was a wide kitchen, paved with blue and white tiles, clean
as a watercress, filled with the pungent odor of dried herbs, and
furnished with brass pots and pans, with walnut presses, and with
pinewood trestles, and with strange little quaint pictures and images of
saints. On one of the trestles were set a jug of steaming milk, some
rolls of black bread, and a big dish of stewed cabbages. At the meal
there was already seated a lean, brown, wrinkled, careworn old
serving-woman, clad in the blue-gray kirtle and the white head-gear of
Normandy.

The miller stayed the child at the threshold.

"Little devil--not a bit nor drop to-night if you do not carry the
sacks."

Folle-Farine said nothing, but moved on, past the food on the board,
past the images of the saints, past the high lancet window, through
which the moonlight had begun to stream, and out at the opposite door.

There she climbed a steep winding stairway on to which that door had
opened, pushed aside a little wooden wicket, entered a loft in the roof,
loosened the single garment that she wore, shook it off from her, and
plunged into the fragrant mass of daisied hay and of dry orchard mosses
which served her as a bed. Covered in these, and curled like a dormouse
in its nest, she clasped her hands above her head and sought to forget
in sleep her hunger and her wounds. She was well used to both.

Below there was a crucifix, with a bleeding god upon it; there was a
little rudely-sculptured representation of the Nativity; there was a
wooden figure of St. Christopher; a portrait of the Madonna, and many
other symbols of the church. But the child went to her bed without a
prayer on her lips, and with a curse on her head and bruises on her
body.

Sleep, for once, would not come to her. She was too hurt and sore to be
able to lie without pain; the dried grasses, so soft to her usually,
were like thorns beneath the skin that still swelled and smarted from
the stripes of the rope. She was feverish; she tossed and turned in
vain; she suffered too much to be still; she sat up and stared with her
passionate wistful eyes at the leaves that were swaying against the
square casement in the wall, and the moonbeam that shone so cold and
bright across her bed.

She listened, all her senses awake, to the noises of the house. They
were not many: a cat's mew, a mouse's scratch, the click-clack of the
old woman's step, the shrill monotony of the old man's voice, these were
all. After awhile even these ceased; the wooden shoes clattered up the
wooden stairs, the house became quite still; there was only in the
silence the endless flowing murmur of the water breaking against the
motionless wheels of the mill.

Neither man nor woman had come near to bring her anything to eat or
drink. She had heard them muttering their prayers before they went to
rest, but no hand unlatched her door. She had no disappointment, because
she had had no hope.

She had rebellion, because Nature had implanted it in her; but she went
no further. She did not know what it was to hope. She was only a young
wild animal, well used to blows, and drilled by them, but not tamed.

As soon as the place was silent, she got out of her nest of grass,
slipped on her linen skirt, and opened her casement--a small square hole
in the wall, and merely closed by a loose deal shutter, with a hole cut
in it scarcely bigger than her head. A delicious sudden rush of summer
air met her burning face; a cool cluster of foliage hit her a soft blow
across the eyes as the wind stirred it. They were enough to allure her.

Like any other young cub of the woods, she had only two instincts--air
and liberty.

She thrust herself out of the narrow window with the agility that only
is born of frequent custom, and got upon the shelving thatch of a shed
that sloped a foot or so below, slid down the roof, and swung herself by
the jutting bricks of the outhouse wall on to the grass. The housedog, a
brindled mastiff, that roamed loose all night about the mill, growled
and sprang at her; then, seeing who she was, put up his gaunt head and
licked her face, and turned again to resume the rounds of his vigilant
patrol.

Ere he went, she caught and kissed him, closely and fervently, without
a word. The mastiff was the only living thing that did not hate her; she
was grateful, in a passionate, dumb, unconscious fashion. Then she took
to her feet, ran as swiftly as she could along the margin of the water,
and leaped like a squirrel into the wood, on whose edge the mill-house
stood.

Once there she was content.

The silence, the shadows, the darkness where the trees stood thick, the
pale quivering luminance of the moon, the mystical eerie sounds that
fill a woodland by night, all which would have had terror for tamer and
happier creatures of her years, had only for her a vague entranced
delight. Nature had made her without one pulse of fear; and she had
remained too ignorant to have been ever taught it.

It was still warm with all the balmy breath of midsummer; there were
heavy dews everywhere; here and there, on the surface of the water,
there gleamed the white closed cups of the lotos; through the air there
passed, now and then, the soft, gray, dim body of a night-bird on the
wing; the wood, whose trees were pines, and limes, and maples, was full
of a deep dreamy odor; the mosses that clothed many of the branches
hung, film-like, in the wind in lovely coils and weblike fantasies.

Around stretched the vast country, dark and silent as in a trance, the
stillness only broken by some faint note of a sheep's bell, some distant
song of a mule-driver passing homeward.

The child strayed onward through the trees, insensibly soothed and made
glad, she knew not why, by all the dimness and the fragrance round her.

She stood up to her knees in the shallow freshets that every now and
then broke up through the grasses; she felt the dews, shaken off the
leaves above, fall deliciously upon her face and hair; she filled her
hands with the night-blooming marvel-flower, and drank in its sweetness
as though it were milk and honey; she crouched down and watched her own
eyes look back at her from the dark gliding water of the river.

Then she threw herself on her back upon the mosses--so cool and moist
that they seemed like balm upon the bruised hot skin--and lay there
looking upward at the swift mute passage of the flitting owls, at the
stately flight of the broad-winged moths, at the movement of the swift
brown bats, at the soft trembling of the foliage in the breeze, at the
great clouds slowly sailing across the brightness of the moon. All these
things were vaguely sweet to her--with the sweetness of freedom, of
love, of idleness, of rest, of all things which her life had never
known: so may the young large-eyed antelope feel the beauty of the
forest in the hot lull of tropic nights, when the speed of the pursuer
has relaxed and the aromatic breath of the panther is no more against
its flank.

She lay there long, quite motionless, tracing with a sort of voluptuous
delight, all movements in the air, all changes in the clouds, all
shadows in the leaves. All the immense multitude of ephemeral life
which, unheard in the day, fills the earth with innumerable whispering
voices after the sun has set, now stirred in every herb and under every
bough around her. The silvery ghostlike wing of an owl touched her
forehead once. A little dormouse ran across her feet. Strange shapes
floated across the cold white surface of the water. Quaint things,
hairy, film-winged, swam between her and the stars. But none of these
things had terror for her; they were things of the night, with which she
felt vaguely the instinct of kinship.

She was only a little wild beast, they said, the offspring of darkness,
and vileness, and rage and disgrace. And yet, in a vague, imperfect way,
the glories of the night, its mysterious and solemn beauty, its
melancholy and lustrous charm, quenched the fierceness in her dauntless
eyes, and filled them with dim wondering tears, and stirred the
half-dead soul in her to some dull pain, some nameless ecstasy, that
were not merely physical.

And then, in her way, being stung by these, and moved, she knew not why,
to a strange sad sense of loneliness and shame, and knowing no better
she prayed.

She raised herself on her knees, and crossed her hands upon her chest,
and prayed after the fashion that she had seen men and women and
children pray at roadside shrines and crosses; prayed aloud, with a
little beating, breaking heart, like the young child she was.

"O Devil! if I be indeed thy daughter, stay with me; leave me not alone:
lend me thy strength and power, and let me inherit of thy kingdom. Give
me this, O great lord! and I will praise thee and love thee always."

She prayed in all earnestness, in all simplicity, in broken, faltering
language; knowing no better; knowing only that she was alone on the
earth and friendless, and very hungry and in sore pain, while this
mighty unknown King of the dominion of darkness, whose child she ever
heard she was, had lost her or abandoned her, and reigned afar in some
great world, oblivious of her misery.

The silence of the night alone gave back the echo of her own voice. She
waited breathless for some answer, for some revelation, some reply;
there only came the pure cold moon, sailing straight from out a cloud
and striking on the waters.

She rose sadly to her feet and went back along the shining course of the
stream, through the grasses and the mosses and under the boughs, to her
little nest under the eaves.

As she left the obscurity of the wood and passed into the fuller light,
her bare feet glistening and her shoulders wet with the showers of dew,
a large dark shape flying down the wind smote her with his wings upon
the eyes, lighted one moment on her head, and then swept onward lost in
shade. At that moment, likewise, a radiant golden globe flashed to her
sight, dropped to her footsteps, and shone an instant in the glisten
from the skies.

It was but a great goshawk seeking for its prey; it was but a great
meteor fading and falling at its due appointed hour; but to the heated,
savage, dreamy fancy of the child it seemed an omen, an answer, a thing
of prophecy, a spirit of air; nay, why not Him himself?

In legends, which had been the only lore her ears had ever heard, it had
been often told her that he took such shapes as this.

"If he should give me his kingdom!" she thought; and her eyes flashed
alight; her heart swelled; her cheeks burned. The little dim untutored
brain could not hold the thought long or close enough to grasp, or sift,
or measure it; but some rude rich glory, impalpable, unutterable, seemed
to come to her and bathe her in its heat and color. She was his
offspring, so they all told her; why not, then, also his heir?

She felt, as felt the goatherd or the charcoal-burner in those legends
she had fed on, who was suddenly called from poverty and toil, from
hunger and fatigue, from a tireless hearth and a bed of leaves, to
inherit some fairy empire, to ascend to some region of the gods. Like
one of these, hearing the summons to some great unknown imperial power
smite all his poor pale barren life to splendor, so Folle-Farine,
standing by the water's side in the light of the moon, desolate,
ignorant, brutelike, felt elected to some mighty heritage unseen of men.
If this were waiting for her in the future, what matter now were stripes
or wounds or woe?

She smiled a little, dreamily, like one who beholds fair visions in his
sleep, and stole back over the starlit grass, and swung herself upward
by the tendrils of ivy, and crouched once more down in her nest of
mosses.

And either the courage of the spirits of darkness, or the influence of
instincts dumb but nascent, was with her, for she fell asleep in her
little loft in the roof as though she were a thing cherished of heaven
and earth, and dreamed happily all through the hours of the
slowly-rising dawn; her bruised body and her languid brain and her
aching heart all stilled and soothed, and her hunger and passion and
pain forgotten; with the night-blooming flowers still clasped in her
hands, and on her closed mouth a smile.

For she dreamed of her Father's Kingdom, a kingdom which no man denies
to the creature that has beauty and youth, and is poor and yet proud,
and is of the sex of its mother.




CHAPTER II.


In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
there was a little Norman town, very very old, and beautiful exceedingly
by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its marvelous
galleries and carvings, its exquisite grays and browns, its silence and
its color, and its rich still life. Its center was a great cathedral,
noble as York or Chartres; a cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds,
and whose innumerable towers and pinnacles were all pierced to the day,
so that the blue sky shone and the birds of the air flew all through
them. A slow brown river, broad enough for market-boats and for
corn-barges, stole through the place to the sea, lapping as it went the
wooden piles of the houses, and reflecting the quaint shapes of the
carvings, the hues of the signs and the draperies, the dark spaces of
the dormer windows, the bright heads of some casement-cluster of
carnations, the laughing face of a girl leaning out to smile on her
lover.

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
the fields of colza, where the white bead-dress of the women workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west were the
deep-green woods and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's and
of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the great dim
stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
and, whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with
poplar-trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by
a little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place; picturesque everywhere; often
silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
bells or the chanting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only light;
with wondrous scroll-works and quaint signs at the doors of all its
traders; with monks' cowls and golden croziers and white-robed acolytes
in its streets; with the subtle smoke of incense coming out from the
cathedral door to mingle with the odors of the fruits and flowers in the
market-place; with great flat-bottomed boats drifting down the river
under the leaning eaves of its dwellings; and with the galleries of its
opposing houses touching so nearly that a girl leaning in one could
stretch a Provence rose or toss an Easter-egg across to her neighbor in
the other.

Doubtless there were often squalor, poverty, dust, filth, and
uncomeliness within these old and beautiful homes. Doubtless often the
dwellers therein were housed like cattle and slept like pigs, and looked
but once out to the woods and waters of the landscapes round for one
hundred times that they looked at their hidden silver in an old delf
jug, or at their tawdry colored prints of St. Victorian or St. Scævola.

But yet much of the beauty and the nobility of the old, simple, restful
rich-hued life of the past still abode there, and remained with them. In
the straight lithe form of their maidens, untrammeled by modern garb,
and moving with the free majestic grace of forest does. In the vast,
dim, sculptured chambers, where the grandam span by the wood fire and
the little children played in the shadows, and the lovers whispered in
the embrasured window. In the broad market-place, where the mules
cropped the clover, and the tawny awnings caught the sunlight, and the
white caps of the girls framed faces fitted for the pencils of missal
painters, and the wondrous flush of color from mellow fruits and flowers
glanced amidst the shelter of deepest, freshest green. In the perpetual
presence of their cathedral, which through sun and storm, through frost
and summer, through noon and midnight, stood there amidst them, and
beheld the galled oxen tread their painful way, and the scourged mules
droop their humble heads, and the helpless harmless flocks go forth to
the slaughter, and the old weary lives of the men and women pass through
hunger and cold to the grave, and the sun and the moon rise and set, and
the flowers and the children blossom and fade, and the endless years
come and go, bringing peace, bringing war; bringing harvest, bringing
famine; bringing life, bringing death; and, beholding these, still said
to the multitude in its terrible irony, "Lo! your God is Love."

This little town lay far from the great Paris highway and all greatly
frequented tracks. It was but a short distance from the coast, but near
no harbor of greater extent than such as some small fishing village had
made in the rocks for the trawlers. Few strangers ever came to it,
except some wandering painters or antiquaries. It sent its apples and
eggs, its poultry and honey, its colza and corn, to the use of the great
cities; but it was rarely that any of its own people went thither.

Now and then some one of the oval-faced, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed maidens
of its little homely households would sigh and flush and grow restless,
and murmur of Paris; and would steal out in the break of a warm gray
morning whilst only the birds were still waking; and would patter away
in her wooden shoes over the broad, white, southern road, with a stick
over her shoulder, and a bundle of all her worldly goods upon the stick.
And she would look back often, often as she went; and when all was lost
in the blue haze of distance save the lofty spire that she still saw
through her tears, she would say in her heart, with her lips parched and
trembling, "I will come back again. I will come back again."

But none such ever did come back.

They came back no more than did the white sweet sheaves of the lilies
that the women gathered and sent to be bought and sold in the city--to
gleam one faint summer night in a gilded balcony, and to be flung out
the next morning, withered and dead.

One among the few who had thus gone whither the lilies went, and of whom
the people would still talk as their mules paced homewards through the
lanes at twilight, had been Reine Flamma, the daughter of the miller of
Yprès.

Yprès was a beechen-wooded hamlet on the northern outskirt of the town,
a place of orchards and wooded tangle; through which there ran a branch
of the brimming river, hastening to seek and join the sea, and caught a
moment on its impetuous way, and forced to work by the grim mill-wheels
that had churned the foam-bells there for centuries. The mill-house was
very ancient; its timbers were carved all over into the semblance of
shields and helmets, and crosses, and fleur-de-lis, and its frontage was
of quaint pargeted work, black and white, except where the old
blazonries had been.

It had been handed down from sire to son of the same race through many
generations--a race hard, keen, unlearned, superstitious, and
caustic-tongued--a race wedded to old ways, credulous of legend, chaste
of life, cruel of judgment; harshly strong, yet ignorantly weak; a race
holding dearer its heir-loom of loveless, joyless, bigoted virtue even
than those gold and silver pieces which had ever been its passion,
hidden away in earthen pipkins under old apple-roots, or in the crannies
of wall timber, or in secret nooks of oaken cupboards.

Claudis Flamma, the last of this toilsome, God-fearing, man-begrudging,
Norman stock, was true to the type and the traditions of his people.

He was too ignorant even to read; but priests do not deem this a fault.
He was avaricious; but many will honor a miser quicker than a
spendthrift. He was cruel; but in the market-place he always took heed
to give his mare a full feed, so that if she were pinched of her hay in
her stall at home none were the wiser, for she had no language but that
of her wistful black eyes; and this is a speech to which men stay but
little to listen. The shrewd, old bitter-tongued, stern-living man was
feared and respected with the respect that fear begets; and in truth he
had a rigid virtue in his way, and was proud of it, with scorn for those
who found it hard to walk less straightly and less circumspectly than
himself.

He married late; his wife died in childbirth; his daughter grew into the
perfection of womanhood under the cold, hard, narrow rule of his
severity and his superstition. He loved her, indeed, with as much love
as it was possible for him ever to feel, and was proud of her beyond all
other things; saved for her, toiled for her, muttered ever that it was
for her when at confession he related how his measures of flour had
been falsely weighted, and how he had filched from the corn brought by
the widow and the fatherless. For her he had sinned: from one to whom
the good report of his neighbors and the respect of his own conscience
were as the very breath of life, it was the strongest proof of love that
he could give. But this love never gleamed one instant in his small
sharp gray eyes, nor escaped ever by a single utterance from his lips.
Reprimand, or homily, or cynical rasping sarcasm, was all that she ever
heard from him. She believed that he despised, and almost hated her; he
held it well for women to be tutored in subjection and in trembling.

At twenty-two Reine Flamma was the most beautiful woman in Calvados, and
the most wretched.

She was straight as a pine; cold as snow; graceful as a stem of wheat;
lovely and silent; with a mute proud face, in which the great blue eyes
alone glowed with a strange, repressed, speechless passion and
wishfulness. Her life was simple, pure, chaste, blameless, as the lives
of the many women of her race who, before her, had lived and died in the
shadow of that water-fed wood had always been. Her father rebuked and
girded at her, continually dreaming that he could paint whiter even the
spotlessness of this lily, refine even the purity of this virgin gold.

She never answered him anything, nor in anything contradicted his will;
not one among all the youths and maidens of her birthplace had ever
heard so much as a murmur of rebellion from her; and the priests said
that such a life as this would be fitter for the cloister than the
marriage-bed. None of them ever read the warning that these dark-blue
slumbering eyes would have given to any who should have had the skill to
construe them right. There were none of such skill there; and so, she
holding her peace, the men and women noted her ever with a curious dumb
reverence, and said among themselves that the race of Flamma would die
well and nobly in her.

"A saint!" said the good old gentle bishop of the district, as he
blessed her one summer evening in her father's house, and rode his mule
slowly through the pleasant poplar lanes and breeze-blown fields of
colza back to his little quiet homestead, where he tended his own
cabbages and garnered his own honey.

Reine Flamma bowed her tall head meekly, and took his benediction in
silence.

The morning after, the miller, rising, as his custom was, at daybreak,
and reciting his paternosters, thanked the Mother of the World that she
had given him thus strength and power to rear up his motherless daughter
in purity and peace. Then he dressed himself in his gray patched blouse,
groped his way down the narrow stair, and went in his daily habit to
undraw the bolts and unloose the chains of his dwelling.

There was no need that morning for him; the bolts were already back; the
house-door stood wide open; on the threshold a brown hen perched pluming
herself; there were the ticking of the clock, the chirming of the birds,
the rushing of the water, these were the only sounds upon the silence.

He called his daughter's name: there was no answer. He mounted to her
chamber: it had no tenant. He searched hither and thither, in the house,
and the stable, and the granary: in the mill, and the garden, and the
wood; he shouted, he ran, he roused his neighbors, he looked in every
likely and unlikely place: there was no reply.

There was only the howl of the watch-dog, who sat with his face to the
south and mourned unceasingly.

And from that day neither he nor any man living there ever heard again
of Reine Flamma.

Some indeed did notice that at the same time there disappeared from the
town one who had been there through all that spring and summer. One who
had lived strangely, and been clad in an odd rich fashion, and had been
whispered as an Eastern prince by reason of his scattered gold, his
unfamiliar tongue, his black-browed, star-eyed, deep-hued beauty, like
the beauty of the passion-flower. But none had ever seen this stranger
and Reine Flamma in each other's presence; and the rumor was discredited
as a foulness absurd and unseemly to be said of a woman whom their
bishop had called a saint. So it died out, breathed only by a few
mouths, and it came to be accepted as a fact that she must have perished
in the deep fast-flowing river by some false step on the mill-timber, as
she went at dawn to feed her doves, or by some strange sad trance of
sleep-walking, from which she had been known more than once to suffer.

Claudis Flamma said little; it was a wound that bled inwardly. He
toiled, and chaffered, and drove hard bargains, and worked early and
late with his hireling, and took for the household service an old Norman
peasant woman more aged than himself, and told no man that he suffered.
All that he ever said was, "She was a saint: God took her;" and in his
martyrdom he found a hard pride and a dull consolation.

It was no mere metaphoric form of words with him. He believed in
miracles and all manner of divine interposition, and he believed
likewise that she, his angel, being too pure for earth, had been taken
by God's own hand up to the bosom of Mary; and this honor which had
befallen his first-begotten shed a sanctity and splendor on his
cheerless days; and when the little children and the women saw him pass,
they cleared from his way as from a prince's, and crossed themselves as
they changed words with one whose daughter was the bride of Christ.

So six years passed away; and the name of Reine Flamma was almost
forgotten, but embalmed in memories of religious sanctity, as the dead
heart of a saint is imbedded in amber and myrrh.

At the close of the sixth year there happened what many said was a thing
devil-conceived and wrought out by the devil to the shame of a pure
name, and to the hinderance of the people of God.

One winter's night Claudis Flamma was seated in his kitchen, having
recently ridden home his mare from the market in the town. The fire
burned in ancient fashion on the hearth, and it was so bitter without
that even his parsimonious habits had relaxed, and he had piled some
wood, liberally mingled with dry moss, that cracked, and glowed, and
shot flame up the wide black shaft of the chimney. The day's work was
over; the old woman-servant sat spinning flax on the other side of the
fire; the great mastiff was stretched sleeping quietly on the brick
floor; the blue pottery, the brass pans, the oaken presses that had been
the riches of his race for generations, glimmered in the light; the
doors were barred, the shutters closed; around the house the winds
howled, and beneath its walls the fretting water hissed.

The miller, overcome with the past cold and present warmth, nodded in
his wooden settle and slept, and muttered dreamily in his sleep, "A
saint--a saint!--God took her."

The old woman, hearing, looked across at him, and shook her head, and
went on with her spinning with lips that moved inaudibly: she had been
wont to say, out of her taskmaster's hearing, that no woman who was
beautiful ever was a saint as well. And some thought that this old
creature, Marie Pitchou, who used to live in a miserable hut on the
other side of the wood, had known more than she had chosen to tell of
the true fate of Reine Flamma.

Suddenly a blow on the panels of the door sounded through the silence.
The miller, awakened in a moment, started to his feet and grasped his
ash staff with one hand, and with the other the oil-lamp burning on the
trestle. The watch-dog arose, but made no hostile sound.

A step crushed the dead leaves without and passed away faintly; there
was stillness again; the mastiff went to the bolted door, smelt beneath
it, and scratched at the panels.

On the silence there sounded a small, timid, feeble beating on the wood
from without; such a slight fluttering noise as a wounded bird might
make in striving to rise.

"It is nothing evil," muttered Flamma. "If it were evil the beast would
not want to have the door opened. It may be some one sick or stray."

All this time he was in a manner charitable, often conquering the
niggardly instincts of his character to try and save his soul by serving
the wretched. He was a miser, and he loved to gain, and loathed to give;
but since his daughter had been taken to the saints he had striven with
all his might to do good enough to be taken likewise to that Heavenly
rest.

Any crust bestowed on the starveling, any bed of straw afforded to the
tramp, caused him a sharp pang; but since his daughter had been taken he
had tried to please God by this mortification of his own avarice and
diminution of his own gains. He could not vanquish the nature that was
ingrained in him. He would rob the widow of an ephah of wheat, and leave
his mare famished in her stall, because it was his nature to find in all
such saving a sweet savor; but he would not turn away a beggar or refuse
a crust to a wayfarer, lest, thus refusing, he might turn away from him
an angel unawares.

The mastiff scratched still at the panels; the sound outside had ceased.

The miller, setting the lamp down on the floor, gripped more firmly the
ashen stick, undrew the bolts, turned the stout key, and opened the door
slowly, and with caution. A loud gust of wind blew dead leaves against
his face; a blinding spray of snow scattered itself over his bent
stretching form. In the darkness without, whitened from head to foot,
there stood a little child.

The dog went up to her and licked her face with kindly welcome. Claudis
Flamma drew her with a rough grasp across the threshold, and went out
into the air to find whose footsteps had been those which had trodden
heavily away after the first knock. The snow, however, was falling fast;
it was a cloudy moonless night. He did not dare to go many yards from
his own portals, lest he should fall into some ambush set by robbers.
The mastiff too was quiet, which indicated that there was no danger
near, so the old man returned, closed the door carefully, drew the bolts
into their places, and came towards the child, whom the woman Pitchou
had drawn towards the fire.

She was a child of four or five years old; huddled in coarse linen and
in a little red garment of fox's skin, and blanched from head to foot,
for the flakes were frozen on her and on the little hood that covered,
gypsy-like, her curls. It was a strange, little, ice-cold, ghostlike
figure, but out of this mass of icicles and whiteness there glowed great
beaming frightened eyes and a mouth like a scarlet berry; the radiance
and the contrast of it were like the glow of holly fruit thrust out
from a pile of drifted snow.

The miller shook her by the shoulder.

"Who brought you?"

"Phratos," answered the child, with a stifled sob in her throat.

"And who is that?"

"Phratos," answered the child again.

"Is that a man or a woman?"

The child made no reply; she seemed not to comprehend his meaning. The
miller shook her again, and some drops of water fell from the ice that
was dissolving in the warmth.

"Why are you come here?" he asked, impatiently.

She shook her head, as though to say none knew so little of herself as
she.

"You must have a name," he pursued harshly and in perplexity. "What are
you called? Who are you?"

The child suddenly raised her great eyes that had been fastened on the
leaping flames, and flashed them upon his in a terror of bewildered
ignorance--the piteous terror of a stray dog.

"Phratos," she cried once more, and the cry now was half a sigh, half a
shriek.

Something in that regard pierced him and startled him; he dropped his
hand off her shoulder, and breathed quickly; the old woman gave a low
cry, and staring with all her might at the child's small, dark, fierce,
lovely face, fell to counting her wooden beads and mumbling many
prayers.

Claudis Flamma turned savagely on her as if stung by some unseen snake,
and willing to wreak his vengeance on the nearest thing that was at
hand.

"Fool! cease your prating!" he muttered, with a brutal oath. "Take the
animal and search her. Bring me what you find."

Then he sat down on the stool by the fire, and braced his lips tightly,
and locked his bony hands upon his knees. He knew what blow awaited him;
he was no coward, and he had manhood enough in him to press any iron
into his soul and tell none that it hurt him.

The old woman drew the child aside to a dusky corner of the chamber, and
began to despoil her of her coverings. The creature did not resist; the
freezing cold and long fatigue had numbed and silenced her; her eyelids
were heavy with the sleep such cold produces, and she had not strength,
because she had not consciousness enough, to oppose whatsoever they
might choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes opened, as they
had opened on him, with a sudden luster and fierceness, like those in a
netted animal's impatient but untamed regard.

Pitchou seized and searched her eagerly, stripping her of her warm
fox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of wool, her little rough hempen shirt,
which were all dripping with the water from the melted snow.

The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom on it; it had been
tanned by hot suns, but it was soft as silk in texture, and transparent,
showing the course of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,
but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and the feet were the
long, arched, slender feet of the southern side of the Pyrenees.

She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a coarse piece of
homespun linen; she was still half frozen, and in a state of stupor,
either from amazement or from fear. She was quite passive, and she never
spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who took it for docility, and
who, trusting to it, proceeded to take advantage of it, after the manner
of her kind. About the child's head there hung a little band of
glittering coins; they were not gold, but the woman Pitchou thought they
were, and seized them with gloating hands and ravenous eyes.

The child started from her torpor, shook herself free, and fought to
guard them--fiercely, with tooth and nail, as the young fox whose skin
she had worn might have fought for its dear life. The old woman on her
side strove as resolutely; long curls of the child's hair were clutched
out in the struggle; she did not wince or scream, but she fought--fought
with all the breath and the blood that were in her tiny body.

She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for the sinewy grip
of the old peasant; and the coins were torn off her forehead and hidden
away in a hole in the wood, out of her sight, where the old peasant
hoarded all her precious treasures of copper coins and other trifles
that she managed to secrete from her master's all-seeing eyes.

They were little Oriental sequins engraved with Arabic characters,
chained together after the Eastern fashion. To Pitchou they looked a
diadem of gold worthy of an empress. The child watched them removed in
perfect silence; from the moment they had been wrenched away, and the
battle had been finally lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as
though disdainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered in
her eyes, and smouldered there like a half-stifled fire--it burned on
and on for many a long year afterwards, unquenched.

When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll of bread, she would
neither eat nor drink, but turned her face to the wall,--mute.

"Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman muttered. She had seen
them burn in the gloom of the evening through the orchard trees, as the
stars rose, and as Reine Flamma listened to the voice that wooed her to
her destruction.

She let the child be, and searched her soaked garments for any written
word or any token that might be on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's
skin there was a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it to
her master.

Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its superscription to the
light of the lamp.

He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the characters his tough
frame trembled, and his withered skin grew red with a sickly, feverish
quickening of the blood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he had
been proud of those slender letters that had been so far more legible
than any that the women of her class could pen, and on beholding which
the good bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concerning her
being almost fitted to be his own clerk and scribe. For a moment,
watching those written ciphers that had no tongue for him, and yet
seemed to tell their tale so that they scorched and withered up all the
fair honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faintness, a sudden
swooning sense seized him for the first time in all his life; his limbs
failed him, he sank down on his seat again, he gasped for breath; he
needed not to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the creature,
whom he had believed so pure that God had deemed the earth unworthy of
her youth, was----

His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam, his ears were
filled with a rushing hollow sound, like the roaring of his own
mill-waters in a time of storm. All at once he started to his feet, and
glared at the empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his hands
wildly together in the air, and cried aloud:

"She was a saint, I said--a saint! A saint in body and soul! And I
thought that God begrudged her, and held her too pure for man!"

And he laughed aloud--thrice.

The child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly desiring warmth, as
a little frozen beast that coils itself in snow to slumber into death,
startled by that horrible mirth, came forward.

The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked limbs glimmered
like gold in the dusky light; her hair was as a cloud behind her; her
little scarlet mouth was half open, like the mouth of a child seeking
its mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame, flashed and
burned and shone like stars. They had seen the same face ere then in
Calvados.

She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though drawn by that awful and
discordant laughter, and by that leaping ruddy flame upon the hearth,
and she stretched out her arms and murmured a word and smiled, a little
dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be caressed, desiring she knew not
what.

He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground. She fell without a
sound. The blood flowed from her mouth.

He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once more.

"She was a saint!--a saint! And the devil begot in her _that_!"

Then he went out across the threshold and into the night, with the
letter still clinched in his hand.

The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was covered with ice and
water; he took no heed, but passed through it, his head bare and his
eyes blind.

The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the child.




CHAPTER III.


All night long he was absent.

The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull brutish nature
could be roused to fear, did what she knew, what she dared. She raised
the little wounded naked creature, and carried her to her own pallet
bed; restored her to consciousness by such rude means as she had
knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood. She did all this harshly,
as it was her custom to do all things, and without tenderness or even
pity, for the sight of this stranger was unwelcome to her, and she also
had guessed the message of that unread letter.

The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had lost some blood, and
was weakened and stupefied and dazed; yet there seemed to her rough
nurse no peril for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,
tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and crying perpetually
on the unknown name of Phratos.

The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She who had always known
the true story of that disappearance which some had called death and
some had deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that transparent
brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips like the carnation leaves,
that rich, sunfed, dusky beauty, those straight dark brows.

"She is his sure enough," she muttered. "He was the first with Reine
Flamma. I wonder has he been the last."

And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low human brute will at
any evil thought.

The mastiff stayed beside the child.

She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat down again to her
spinning-wheel, and span and dozed, and span and dozed again.

She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread to the secret of the
past which her master and her townfolk had never held, it all seemed
natural. It was an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it
was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held a saint.

The hours passed on; the lamp paled, and its flame at last died out; in
the loft above, where the dog watched, there was no sound; the old woman
slumbered undisturbed, unless some falling ember of the wood aroused
her.

She was not curious, nor did she care how the child fared. She had led
that deadening life of perpetual labor and of perpetual want in which
the human animal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a machine;
put to what use she might be--to spin flax, to card wool, to wring a
pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a
prayer, or drown a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a
preference, it might be for the office that hurt some living thing; but
she did not care: all she heeded was whether she had pottage enough to
eat at noonday, and the leaden effigy of her Mary safe around her throat
at night.

The night went on, and passed away: one gleam of dawn shone through a
round hole in the shutter; she wakened with a start to find the sun
arisen, and the fire dead upon the hearth.

She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon the bricks, and
tottered on her feeble way, with frozen body, to the house-door. She
drew it slowly open, and saw by the light of the sun that it had been
for some time morning.

The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar frost sparkled over all
the branches; great sheets of ice were whirled down the rapid
mill-stream; in one of the leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the
bough a cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes, patient even
in its famished impatience.

Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she started as she saw her
master there.

Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude toil, which he spared
to himself no more than to those who were his hirelings. He was carting
wood; going to and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth would
have found it a severe task to move; he was laboring breathlessly,
giving himself no pause, and the sweat was on his brow, although he trod
ankle deep in snow, and although his clothes were heavy with icicles.

He did not see or hear her; she went up to him and called him by his
name; he started, and raised his head and looked at her.

Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened by the change upon
his face; it had been lean, furrowed, weather-beaten always, but it was
livid now, with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal savage
look that terrified her. He did not speak, but gazed at her like a man
recalled from some drugged sleep back to the deeds and memories of the
living world.

The old woman held her peace a few moments; then spoke out in her old
blunt, dogged fashion,--

"Is she to stay?"

Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity; she only cared to know
if the child stayed: only so much as would concern her soup-kettle, her
kneaded dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.

He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped fox may make,
held fast, yet striving to essay a death-grip; then he checked himself,
and gave a mute sign of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and
went on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways too well to
venture to ask more. She knew, too, that when he worked like this,
fasting and in silence, there had been long and fierce warfare in his
soul, and some great evil done for which he sought to make atonement.

So she left him, and passed in to the house, and built up afresh her
fire, and swept her chamber out, and fastened up her round black pot to
boil, and muttered all the while,--

"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."

And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave trouble and took food.

Now, what the letter had been, or who had deciphered it for him, Claudis
Flamma never told to any man; and from the little strange creature no
utterance could be ever got.

But the child who had come in the night and the snow tarried at Yprès
from that time thenceforward.

Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her; but he did all these
begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and he did all these with an acrid hate
and scorn, which did not cease but rather grew with time.

The blow which had been her earliest welcome was not the last that she
received from him by many; and whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she
showed it, not as children do, but rather like some chained and untamed
animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp ferocity. And this the
more because she spoke but a very few words of the language of the
people among whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one full of
round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue unknown to them.

For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast not one look at her; he
let her lead the same life that was led by the brutes that crawled in
the timbers, or by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw.
The woman Pitchou gave her such poor scraps of garments or of victuals
as she chose; she could crouch in the corner of the hearth where the
fire warmth reached; she could sleep in the hay in the little loft under
the roof; so much she could do and no more.

After that first moment in which her vague appeal for pity and for rest
had been answered by the blow that struck her senseless, the child had
never made a moan, nor sought for any solace.

All the winter through she lay curled up on the tiles by the fence, with
her arms round the great body of the dog and his head upon her chest;
they were both starved, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with brutal words
oftentimes; they had the community of misfortune, and they loved one
another.

The blow on her head, the coldness of the season, the scanty food that
was cast to her, all united to keep her brain stupefied and her body
almost motionless. She was like a young bear that is motherless,
wounded, frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an almost continual
slumber, keeps its blood flowing and its limbs alive. And, like the
bear, with the spring she awakened.

When the townsfolk and the peasants came to the mill, and first saw this
creature there, with her wondrous vivid hues, and her bronzed half-naked
limbs, they regarded her in amazement, and asked the miller whence she
came. He set his teeth, and answered ever:

"The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma."

The avowal was a penance set to himself, but to it he never added more;
and they feared his bitter temper and his caustic tongue too greatly to
press it on him, or even to ask him whether his daughter were with the
living or the dead.

With the unfolding of the young leaves, and the loosening of the
frost-bound waters, and the unveiling of the violet and the primrose
under the shadows of the wood, all budding life revives, and so did
hers. For she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmosphere of the
silent loveless house, where her bread was begrudged, and the cudgel was
her teacher, out into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young
blossoming world, where the birds and the beasts and tender blue flowers
and the curling green boughs were her comrades, and where she could
stretch her limbs in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and
steep her limbs in the coolness of waters, and bathe her aching feet in
the moisture of rain-filled grasses.

With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she was; wild, fleet,
incapable of fear, sure of foot, in unison with all the things of the
earth and the air, and stirred by them to a strange, dumb, ignorant,
passionate gladness.

She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the breaking of the year
the people from more distant places who rode their mules down to the
mill on their various errands stared at this child, and wondered among
themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis Flamma whence she came.

He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:

"The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom men deemed a
saint--Reine Flamma."

And he never added more. To tell the truth, the horrible, biting,
burning, loathsome truth, was a penance that he had set to himself, and
from which he never wavered.

They dared not ask him more; for many were his debtors, and all feared
his scourging tongue. But when they went away, and gossiped among
themselves by the wayside well or under the awnings of the
market-stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they had
thought long ago; the creature had been no better than her kind; and
they had never credited the fable that God had taken her, though they
had humored the miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one old
woman, a withered and witchlike crone, who had toiled in from the
fishing village with a creel upon her back and the smell of the sea
about her rags, heard, standing in the market-place, and laughed, and
mocked them, these seers who were so wise after the years had gone, and
when the truth was clear.

"You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with a grin upon her face.
"Oh, yes! you were so wise! Who said seven years through that Reine
Flamma was a saint, and taken by the saints into their keeping? And who
hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when I said that the devil had
more to do with her than the good God, and that the black-browed gypsy,
with jewels for eyes in his head, like the toad, was the only master to
whom she gave herself? Oh-hè, you were so wise!"

So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and held their peace; well
knowing that indeed no creature among them had ever been esteemed so
pure, so chaste, and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's
daughter.

Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled eyes," and saw those
brilliant, fathomless, midnight eyes reproduced in the small rich face
of the child whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had borne in
shame whilst they had been glorifying her apotheosis. And it came to be
said, as time went on, that this unknown stranger had been the fiend
himself, taking human shape for the destruction of one pure soul, and
the mocking of all true children of the church.

Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this remote,
ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief the devil was still a
living power, traversing the earth and air in search of souls, and not
seldom triumphing: of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to them
was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irresistible, assuming at
will shapes grotesque or awful, human or spiritual. Their forefathers
had beheld him; why not they?

So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers and tanners, the
fisherfolk from the seaboard, and the peasant proprietors from the
country round, came at length in all seriousness to regard the young
child at Yprès as a devil-born thing. "She was hell-begotten," they
would mutter when they saw her; and they would cross themselves, and
avoid her if they could.

The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered, when men had been
permitted to burn such creatures as this; they knew it and were sorry
for it; the world, they thought, had been better when Jews had blazed
like torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such treats were
forbidden now, they knew, but many, for all that, thought within
themselves that it was a pity it should be so, and that it was mistaken
mercy in the age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the earth
by fire of such as she.

In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual floods swept the
country, and destroyed much of their property; in the spring which
followed there were mildew and sickness everywhere; in the summer there
was a long drought, and by consequence there came a bad harvest, and
great suffering and scarcity.

There were not a few in the district who attributed all these woes to
the advent of the child of darkness, and who murmured openly in their
huts and homesteads that no good would befall them so long as this
offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.

Since, however, the time was past when the broad market-place could have
been filled with a curious, breathless, eager crowd, and the gray
cathedral have grown red in the glare of flames fed by a young living
body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and said these things
only in their own ingle-nooks, and contented themselves with forbidding
their children to consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the
other side of the road when they met her. They did not mean to be cruel,
they only acted in their own self-defense, and dealt with her as their
fellow-countrymen dealt with a cagote--"only."

Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's dulled brain awakened,
and all the animal activity in her sprang into vigorous action, she
found herself shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks of
mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the devil!" she heard again and
again muttered as they passed her; she grew to take shelter in this
repute as in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of her
imputed origin.

It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-daring, and
all-enduring animal. An animal in her ferocities, her mute instincts,
her supreme patience, her physical perfectness of body and of health.
Perfect of shape and hue; full of force to resist; ignorant either of
hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with no knowledge, but
with unerring instinct.

She was at an age when happier creatures have scarce escaped from their
mother's arms; but she had not even thus early a memory of her mother,
and she had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish, as a
young fox whose dam has been flung to the hounds is driven away to
starve in the winter woods, or save himself, if he have strength, by
slaughter.

She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took blows uncomplainingly,
and as though comprehending that they were her inevitable portion.

"The child of the devil!" they said. In a dumb, half-unconscious
fashion, this five-year-old creature wondered sometimes why the devil
had not been good enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and
veins that would not bleed.

She had always been beaten ever since her birth; she was beaten here;
she thought it a law of life, as other children think it such to have
their mother's kiss and their daily food and nightly prayer.

Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by her. She was to him a
thing accursed, possessed, loathsome, imbued with evil from her origin;
but he did what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily; he fed
her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the caustic gibes that came
naturally to his tongue; he set her hard tasks to keep her from
idleness; he beat her when she did not, and not seldom when she did,
them. He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a stick to her
without mercy.

After this light he did his duty. That he should hate her, was to
fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always been told that it was
right to abhor the things of darkness; and to him she was a thing of
utter darkness, a thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul,
begotten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal tempter.

He never questioned her as to her past--that short past, like the span
of an insect's life, which yet had sufficed to gift her with passions,
with instincts, with desires, even with memories,--in a word, with
character:--a character he could neither change nor break; a thing
formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.

He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in curt command. He set
her hard tasks of bodily labor which she did not dispute, but
accomplished so far as her small strength lay, with a mute dogged
patience, half ferocity, half passiveness.

In those first winter days of her arrival he called her Folle-Farine;
taking the most worthless, the most useless, the most abject, the most
despised thing he knew in all his daily life from which to name her; and
the name adhered to her, and was the only one by which she was ever
known.

Folle-Farine!--as one may say, the Dust.

In time she grew to believe that it was really hers; even as in time she
began to forget that strange, deep, rich tongue in which she had babbled
her first words, and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French
about her.

Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness, gratitude, and a
certain wild and true nobility, though the old man Flamma would never
have looked for them, never have believed in them. She was devil-born:
she was of devil nature: in his eyes.

Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would sometimes gather,
and receiving the seed of the lily, would give birth to blossoms born
stainless out of corruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.
Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken the speaker into
his orchard, and said:

"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the nightshade give out
sweetness and honey? Fool!--as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the
blossom."

And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his sight.




CHAPTER IV.


The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not a blank; it was
indeed filled to overflowing with pictures that her tongue could not
have told of, even had she spoken the language of the people amidst whom
she had been cast.

A land altogether unlike that in which she had been set down that bitter
night of snow and storm: a land noble and wild, and full of color,
broken into vast heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech
woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled with the noise of
torrents leaping from crag to crag, and of brown mountain-streams
rushing broad and angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful
by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray rock; and still
shadowy pools, in which the bright fish leaped, and mules' bells that
rang drowsily through leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the
clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes; and high blue
crests of snow-topped mountains, whose pinnacles glowed to the divinest
flush of rose and amber with the setting of the sun.

This land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously, as the splendors of a
dream of Paradise rest on the brain of some young sleeper wakening in
squalor, cold, and pain. But the people of the place she had been
brought to could not comprehend her few, shy, sullen words, and her
strange, imperfect trills of song; and she could not tell them that this
land had been no realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the
forest region of the Liebana.

Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had made their camp.
They were a score in all; they held themselves one of the noblest
branches of their wide family; they were people with pure Eastern blood
in them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental in their
forms and postures.

They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle; they stopped the mules
in the passes, and lightened their load of wine-skins: they entered the
posada, when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither civil
question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of the teeth, like a
threatening dog, and the flash of the knife, half drawn out of the
girdle. They were low thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose
livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and plundering nights;
yet they were beautiful, with the noble, calm, scornful beauty of the
East, and they wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.

They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their old three-stringed
viols; and when their women danced on the sward by moonlight, under the
broken shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their tambourines
above their graceful heads, and tossing the shining sequins that bound
their heavy hair, the muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar,
shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him in his childhood by
his grandam of the spirits of the dead Moors that rose to revelry, at
midnight, in the haunts of their old lost kingdom.

Among them was a man yet more handsome than the rest, taller and lither
still; wondrous at leaping and wrestling, and all athletic things;
surest of any to win a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at
a blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a single glance of
his terrible eyes.

His name was Taric.

He had left them often to wander by himself into many countries, and at
times when, by talent or by terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play
the fool to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where credulity
and luxury prevailed, and there had lived like a prince, as his own
phrase ran, and gamed and intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right
royally whilst his gains lasted.

Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead the common, roving,
thieving life of his friends and brethren, till the fit of ambition or
the run of luck were again on him. Then his people would afresh lose
sight of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing, in some
painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome him ragged, famished, and
footweary, on their own sunburnt sierras.

And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them; and they made him
welcome whenever he returned, and never quarreled with him for his
faithlessness; but if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or
keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always say--"Let Taric
lead."

One day their camp was made in a gorge under the great shadows of the
Picos da Europa, a place that they loved much, and settled in often,
finding the chestnut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the
heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout, fair for
feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-long absence, suddenly
standing, dark and mighty, between them and the light, as they lay
around their soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.

"There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the great cork-tree,
against the bridge," he said to them. "Go to her some of you."

And, with a look to the women which singled out two for the errand, he
stretched himself in the warmth of the fire, and helped himself to the
soup, and lay quiet, vouchsafing them never a word, but playing
meaningly with the knife handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw that
some of the men were about to oppose his share of a common meal which he
had not earned by a common right.

It was Taric--a name of some terror came to their fierce souls.

Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored of them all;
Taric, who had slain the bull that all the matadors had failed to daunt;
Taric, who had torn up the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a
flood, as easily as a child plucks up a reed; Taric, who had stopped the
fiercest contrabandista in all those parts, and cut the man's throat
with no more ado than a butcher slits a lamb's.

So they were silent, and let him take his portion of the fire and of the
broth, and of the thin red wine.

Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quità and Zarâ, went on their quest, and
found things as he had said.

Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long and damp, and the
wood grew thickly, and an old rude bridge of unhewn blocks of rock
spanned, with one arch, the river as it rushed downward from its
limestone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a child just born.

Quità looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by any chance, any
gold or jewels might be on her; there were none. There was only an ivory
cross on her chest, which Quità drew off and hid. Quità covered her with
a few boughs and left her.

Zarâ wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt, and held it warm in
her breast, and hastened to the camp with it.

"She is dead, Taric," said Quità, meaning the woman she had left.

He nodded his handsome head.

"This is yours, Taric?" said Zarâ, meaning the child she held.

He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine, and stretched himself.

"What shall we do with her?" asked Quità.

"Let her lie there," he answered her.

"What shall we do with it?" asked Zarâ.

He laughed, and drew his knife against his own brown throat in a
significant gesture.

Zarâ said no word to him, but she went away with the child under some
branches, on which was hung a tattered piece of awning, orange striped,
that marked her own especial resting-place.

Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, advanced, and looked
Taric full in the eyes.

"Has the woman died by foul means?"

Taric, who never let any living soul molest or menace him, answered him
without offense, and with a savage candor,--

"No--that I swear. I used no foul play against her. Go look at her if
you like. I loved her well enough while she lived. But what does that
matter? She is dead. So best. Women are as many as the mulberries."

"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her body?"

Taric laughed.

"There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her if you choose,
Phratos."

"I will," the other answered him; and he took his way to the cork-tree
by the bridge.

The man who spoke was called Phratos.

He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a mutual love for a
life that wandered always, and was to no man responsible, and needed no
roof-tree, and wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell wild
with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and unclad, rather than to
eat the good things of the earth in submission and in durance.

He had not their physical perfection: an accident at his birth had made
his spine misshapen, and his gait halting. His features would have been
grotesque in their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes and
the gay archness of the mouth.

Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face and form, Phratos
alone was deformed and unlovely; and yet both deformity and unloveliness
were in a way poetic and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin garments,
knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and with his thick tangled
hair falling down on his shoulders, they were rather the deformity of
the brake-haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing satyr,
than those of a man and a vagrant. With the likeness he had the temper
of the old dead gods of the forests and rivers, he loved music, and
could make it, in all its innumerable sighs and songs, give a voice to
all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and the woodlands;
and for many things he was sorrowful continually, and for other things
he forever laughed and was glad.

Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said, not altogether straight
in his wits, yet his kin honored him.

For he could draw music from the rude strings of his old viol that
surpassed their own melodies as far as the shining of the sun on the
summits of the Europa surpassed the trembling of the little lamps under
the painted roadside Cavaries.

He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy moved him, by a bright
fountain at a noonday halt, under the ruined arches of a Saracenic
temple, before the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a cool
shadowy court where the vines shut out all light; beneath a balcony at
night, when the moonbeams gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for
a moment from the darkness through the white magnolia flowers. Yet he
played in suchwise as makes women weep, and holds children and dogs
still to listen, and moves grown men to shade their eyes with their
hands, and think of old dead times, when they played and prayed at their
mothers' knees.

And his music had so spoken to himself that, although true to his tribe
and all their traditions, loving the vagrant life in the open air, and
being incapable of pursuing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew,
neither tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty and
candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so that none could turn
him; living on such scant gains as were thrown to him for his music from
balconies and posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets and
towns through which he passed, and making a handful of pulse and a slice
of melon, a couch of leaves and a draught of water, suffice to him for
his few and simple wants.

His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning their race by taking
payment in lieu of making thefts; and they mocked him often, and taunted
him, though in a manner they all loved him,--the reckless and
blood-stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would never quarrel
with them, neither would he give over his strange ways which so incensed
them, and with time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who, like
other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go on his own way
unmolested and without contradiction.

If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they would have missed
his music sorely; that music which awoke them at break of day soaring up
through their roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the
skies.

Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off the boughs, and looked
at her. She was quite dead. She had died where she had first sunk down,
unable to reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp green nook on
the edge of the bright mountain-river, at the entrance of that narrow
gorge in which the encampment had been made.

The face, which was white and young, lay upward, with the shadows of the
flickering foliage on it; and the eyes, which Quità had not closed, were
large and blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose, and had
got wet among the grass, and had little buds of flowers and stray golden
leaves twisted in it.

Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.

He could imagine her history.

Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought many a one thus to share
his fierce free life for a little space, and then drift away out of it
by chance, or be driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken
away like this one by death.

In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It was written in a
tongue he did not know. He held it awhile, thinking, then he folded it
up and put it in his girdle,--it might be of use, who could tell? There
was the child, there, that might live; unless the camp broke up, and
Zarâ left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the last butterflies of
the fading summer, which was in all likelihood all she would do.

Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had looked long enough at
the dead creature, he turned to the tools he had brought with him, and
set patiently to make her grave.

He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body, and his infirmity
made all manual toil painful to him. His task was hard, even though the
earth was so soft from recent heavy rains.

The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it was quite
nightfall before he had fully accomplished it. When the grave was ready
he filled it carefully with the golden leaves that had fallen, and the
thick many-colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpet.

Then he laid the body tenderly down within that forest shroud, and, with
the moss like a winding-sheet between it and the earth which had to fall
on it, he committed the dead woman to her resting-place.

It did not seem strange to him, or awful, to leave her there.

He was a gypsy, and to him the grave under a forest-tree and by a
mountain-stream seemed the most natural rest at last that any creature
could desire or claim. No rites seemed needful to him, and no sense of
any neglect, cruel or unfitting, jarred on him in thus leaving her in
her loneliness, with only the cry of the bittern or the bell of the wild
roe as a requiem.

Yet a certain sorrow for this unknown and lost life was on him, bohemian
though he was, as he took up his mattock and turned away, and went
backward down the gorge, and left her to lie there forever, through rain
and sunshine, through wind and storm, through the calm of the summer and
the flush of the autumn, and the wildness of the winter, when the
swollen stream should sweep above her tomb, and the famished beasts of
the hills would lift up their voices around it.

When he reached the camp, he gave the letter to Taric.

Taric, knowing the tongue it was written in, and being able to
understand the character, looked at it and read it through by the light
of the flaming wood. When he had done so he tossed it behind, in among
the boughs, in scorn.

"The poor fool's prayer to the brute that she hated!" he said, with a
scoff.

Phratos lifted up the letter and kept it.

In a later time he found some one who could decipher it for him.

It was the letter of Reine Flamma to the miller at Yprès, telling him
the brief story of her fatal passion, and imploring from him mercy to
her unborn child should it survive her and be ever taken to him.

Remorse and absence had softened to her the harshness and the meanness
of her father's character; she only remembered that he had loved her,
and had deemed her pure and faithful as the saints of God. There was no
word in the appeal by which it could have been inferred that Claudis
Flamma had been other than a man much wronged and loving much, patient
of heart, and without blame in his simple life.

Phratos took the letter and cherished it. He thought it might some day
save her offspring. This old man's vengeance could not, he thought, be
so cruel to the child as might be the curse and the knife of Taric.

"She must have been beautiful?" said Phratos to him, after awhile, that
night; "and you care no more for her than that."

Taric stretched his mighty limbs in the warmth of the flame and made his
answer:

"There will be as good grapes on the vines next year as any we gathered
this. What does it signify?--she was only a woman.

"She loved me; she thought me a god, a devil, a prince, a chief,--all
manner of things;--the people thought so too. She was sick of her life.
She was sick of the priests and the beads, and the mill and the market.
She was fair to look at, and the fools called her a saint. When a woman
is young and has beauty, it is dull to be worshiped--in that way.

"I met her in the wood one summer night. The sun was setting. I do not
know why I cared for her--I did. She was like a tall white lily; these
women of ours are only great tawny sunflowers.

"She was pure and straight of life; she believed in heaven and hell; she
was innocent as the child unborn; it was tempting to kill all that. It
is so easy to kill it when a woman loves you. I taught her what passion
and freedom and pleasure and torment all meant. She came with me,--after
a struggle, a hard one. I kept her loyally while the gold lasted; that I
swear. I took her to many cities. I let her have jewels and music, and
silk dresses, and fine linen. I was good to her; that I swear.

"But after a bit she pined, and grew dull again, and wept in secret, and
at times I caught her praying to the white cross which she wore on her
breast. That made me mad. I cursed her and beat her. She never said
anything; she seemed only to love me more, and that made me more mad.

"Then I got poor again, and I had to sell her things one by one. Not
that she minded that, she would have sold her soul for me. We wandered
north and south; and I made money sometimes by the dice, or by breaking
a horse, or by fooling a woman, or by snatching a jewel off one of their
dolls in their churches; and I wanted to get rid of her, and I could not
tell how. I had not the heart to kill her outright.

"But she never said a rough word, you know, and that makes a man mad.
Maddalena or Kara or Rachel--any of them--would have flown and struck a
knife at me, and hissed like a snake, and there would have been blows
and furious words and bloodshed; and then we should have kissed, and
been lovers again, fast and fierce. But a woman who is quiet, and only
looks at you with great, sad, soft eyes, when you strike her,--what is
one to do?

"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate
berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk.
Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway
or on the plains, and I did not,--one is so foolish sometimes for sake
of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,--I may have said
so, perhaps; I do not remember.

"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on
the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I
thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she
fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as
it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who
would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his
cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even
show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone--for I tried to make
her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we
could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw
her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the
sun set----"

His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and
drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat
of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from
his heart,--truthfully.

Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.

He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and
of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the
earth-clogged mosses.

"The child lives?" he said at length.

Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp
through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.

"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.

And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the
nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.

That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zarâ,
who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves,
strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.

"The child lives still?" he asked.

Zarâ nodded her head.

"You will try and keep it alive?" he pursued.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"What is the use? Taric would rather it were dead."

"What matter what Taric wishes. Living or dead, it will not hinder him.
A child more or less with us, what is it? Only a draught of goat's milk
or a handful of meal. So little; it cannot be felt. You have a child of
your own, Zarâ; you cared for it?"

"Yes," she answered, with a sudden softening gleam of her bright savage
eyes.

She had a brown, strong, year-old boy, who kicked his naked limbs on the
sward with joy at Phratos's music.

"Then have pity on this motherless creature," said Phratos, wooingly. "I
buried that dead woman; and her eyes, though there was no sight in them,
still seemed to pray to mine--and to pray for her child. Be merciful,
Zarâ. Let the child have the warmth of your arms and the defense of your
strength. Be merciful, Zarâ; and your seed shall multiply and increase
tenfold, and shall be stately and strong, and shall spread as the
branches of the plane-trees, on which the storm spends its fury in vain,
and beneath which all things of the earth can find refuge. For never was
a woman's pity fruitless, nor the fair deeds of her days without
recompense."

Zarâ listened quietly, as the dreamy, poetic, persuasive words stole on
her ear like music. Like the rest of her people, she half believed in
him as a seer and prophet; her teeth shone out in a soft sudden smile.

"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you
fancy."

And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn
night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had
been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky
fir-needles.

"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our
people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien
creature to her bosom.

"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the
sleeping face of her own son.

Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and
soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the
forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the
only payment in his power.

Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half
touched, half angered.

"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played
once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead
woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat
together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.

For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours'
span was rejected as unworthy and despised.

Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and
nevertheless, the child grew and throve.

The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along
the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely
losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy
peaks of the Europa.

He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning
some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to
distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the
woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.

His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the defense
of Phratos.

Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as
the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at
her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the
weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in
time to come, she--who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on
the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples--might bring him a
fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its
weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.

Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his
leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay
asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.

Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he
left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the
Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children.
Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana;
for besides them there was Phratos.

Phratos never abandoned her.

Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zarâ's tent there was misery very
often.

Zarâ had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a
besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and
blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children,
brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs,
and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin
round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and
slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in
another like young bears.

But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of
their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood,
was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they
wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but
left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to
wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there
were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males
when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern
bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was
Phratos.

Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes
had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.

Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or
died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in
the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the
northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for
his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as
she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the
gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of
hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in
gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.

When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he
who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which
the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze
unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry
and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge
broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones
for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and
the mulberry.

When the sons of Zarâ had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the
tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew
thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter
seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging
boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard
from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths
cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen
shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the
steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the
flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than
her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half
pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to
pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was
the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his
tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.

Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of
Taric had entered her sixth year.

She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its
higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild
as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the
postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the
fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage,
to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to
him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given
her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the
peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green
woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they
took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over
their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a
round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.

In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed
fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the
children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana
she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free--free to lie
in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things
of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under
the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to
climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the
snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in
dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.

One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more
than two years.

He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and
form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and
in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of
subtle ferocity new to them.

His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence, the passions,
the rapacity, the slothful sensuality of the gypsy--who had retained all
the vices of his race whilst losing the virtues of simplicity in living,
and of endurance under hardship--the gall of a sharp poverty had become
unendurable: and to live without dice, and women, and wine, and boastful
brawling, seemed to him to be worse than any death.

The day he returned, they were still camped in the Liebana; in one of
its narrow gorges, overhung with a thick growth of trees, and coursed
through by a headlong hill-stream that spread itself into darkling
breadths and leafy pools, in which the fish were astir under great snowy
lilies and a tangled web of water-plants.

He strode into the midst of them, as they sat round their camp-fire lit
beneath a shelf of rock, as his wont was; and was welcomed, and fed, and
plied with such as they had, with that mixture of sullen respect and
incurable attachment which his tribe preserved, through all their
quarrels, for this, the finest and the fiercest, the most fickle and the
most faithless, of them all.

He gorged himself, and drank, and said little.

When the meal was done, the young of the tribe scattered themselves in
the red evening light under the great walnuts; some at feud, some at
play.

"Which is mine?" he asked, surveying the children. They showed her to
him. The sequins were round her head; she swung on a bough of ash; the
pool beneath mirrored her; she was singing as children sing, without
words, yet musically and gladly, catching at the fireflies that danced
above her in the leaves.

"Can she dance?" he asked lazily of them.

"In her own fashion,--as a flower in the wind," Phratos answered him,
with a smile; and, willing to woo for her the good graces of her father,
he slung his viol off his shoulders and tuned it, and beckoned the
child.

She came, knowing nothing who Taric was; he was only to her a
fierce-eyed man like the rest, who would beat her, most likely, if she
stood between him and the sun, or overturned by mischance his horn of
liquor.

Phratos played, and all the gypsy children, as their wont was, danced.

But she danced all alone, and with a grace and a fire that surpassed
theirs. She was only a baby still; she had only her quick ear to guide
her, and her only teacher was such inborn instinct as makes the birds
sing and the young kids gambol.

Yet she danced with a wondrous subtlety and intensity of ardor beyond
her years; her small brown limbs glancing like bronze in the fire-glow,
the sequins flashing in her flying hair, and her form flung high in air,
like a bird on the wing, or a leaf on the wind; never still, never
ceasing to dart, and to leap, and to whirl, and to sway, yet always with
a sweet dreamy indolence, even in her fiery unrest.

Taric watched her under his bent brow until the music ceased, and she
dropped on the grass spent and panting like a swallow after a long ocean
flight.

"She will do," he muttered.

"What is it you mean with the child?" some women asked.

Taric laughed.

"The little vermin is good for a gold piece or two," he answered.

Phratos said nothing, but he heard.

After awhile the camp was still; the gypsies slept. Two or three of
their men went out to try and harry cattle by the light of the moon if
they should be in luck; two others went forth to set snares for the wood
partridges and rabbits; the rest slumbered soundly, the dogs curled to a
watching sleep of vigilant guard in their midst.

Taric alone sat by the dying fire. When all was very quiet, and the
stars were clear in midnight skies, the woman Zarâ stole out of her tent
to him.

"You signed to me," she said to him in a low voice. "You want the child
killed?"

Taric showed his white teeth like a wolf.

"Not I; what should I gain?"

"What is it you want, then, with her?"

"I mean to take her, that is all. See here--a month ago, on the other
side of the mountains, I met a fantoccini player. It was at a wineshop,
hard by Luzarches. He had a woman-child with him who danced to his
music, and whom the people praised for her beauty, and who anticked like
a dancing-dog, and who made a great deal of silver. We got friends, he
and I. At the week's end the brat died: some sickness of the throat,
they said. Her master tore his hair and raved; the little wretch was
worth handfuls of coin to him. For such another he would give twelve
gold pieces. He shall have her. She will dance for him and me; there is
plenty to be made in that way. The women are fools over a handsome
child; they open their larders and their purses. I shall take her away
before sunrise; he says he teaches them in seven days, by starving and
giving the stick. She will dance while she is a child. Later on--there
are the theaters; she will be strong and handsome, and in the great
cities, now, a woman's comeliness is as a mine of gold ore. I shall take
her away by sunrise."

"To sell her?"

The hard fierce heart of Zarâ rebelled against him; she had no
tenderness save for her own offspring, and she had maltreated the stray
child many a time; yet the proud liberty and the savage chastity of her
race were roused against him by his words.

Taric laughed again.

"Surely; why not? I will make a dancing-dog of her for the peasants'
pastime; and in time she will make dancing-dogs of the nobles and the
princes for her own sport. It is a brave life--none better."

The gypsy woman stood, astonished and irresolute. If he had flung his
child in the river, or thrown her off a rock, he would have less
offended the instincts and prejudices of her clan.

"What will Phratos say?" she asked at length.

"Phratos? A rotten fig for Phratos! What can he say--or do? The little
beast is mine; I can wring its neck if I choose, and if it refuse to
pipe when we play for it, I will."

The woman sought in vain to dissuade him; he was inflexible. She left
him at last, telling herself that it was no business of hers. He had a
right to do what he chose with his own. So went and lay down among her
brown-faced boys, and was indifferent, and slept.

Taric likewise slept, upon a pile of moss under the ledge of the rock,
lulled by the heat of the fire, which, ere lying down, he had fed with
fresh boughs of resinous wood.

When all was quite still, and his deep quiet breathing told that his
slumber was one not easily broken, a man softly rose from the ground and
threw off a mass of dead leaves that had covered him, and stood erect, a
dark, strange, misshapen figure, in the moonlight: it was Phratos.

He had heard, and understood all that Taric meant for the present and
the future of the child: and he knew that when Taric vowed to do a thing
for his own gain, it were easier to uproot the chain of the Europa than
to turn him aside from his purpose.

"It was my doing!" said Phratos to himself bitterly, as he stood there,
and his heart was sick and sore in him, as with self-reproach for a
crime.

He thought awhile, standing still in the hush of the midnight; then he
went softly, with a footfall that did not waken a dog, and lifted up the
skins of Zarâ's tent as they hung over the fir-poles. The moonbeams
slanting through the foliage strayed in, and showed him the woman,
sleeping among her rosy robust children, like a mastiff with her litter
of tawny pups; and away from them, on the bare ground closer to the
entrance, the slumbering form of the young daughter of Taric.

She woke as he touched her, opening bright bewildered eyes.

"Hush! it is I, Phratos," he murmured over her, and the stifled cry died
on her lips.

He lifted her up in his arms and left the tent with her, and dropped the
curtain of sheepskin, and went out into the clear, crisp, autumn night.
Her eyes had closed again, and her head had sunk on his shoulder heavy
with sleep; she had not tried to keep awake one moment after knowing
that it was Phratos who had come for her; she loved him, and in his hold
feared nothing.

Taric lay on the ledge of the rock, deaf with the torpor of a
half-drunken slumber, dreaming gloomily; his hand playing in his dreams
with the knife that was thrust in his waistband.

Phratos stepped gently past him, and through the outstretched forms of
the dogs and men, and across the died-out embers of the fire, over which
the emptied soup-kettle still swung, as the night-breeze blew to and fro
its chain. No one heard him.

He went out from their circle and down the path of the gorge in silence,
carrying the child. She was folded in a piece of sheepskin, and in her
hair there were still the sequins. They glittered in the white light as
he went; as the wind blew, it touched the chords of the viol on his
shoulder, and struck a faint, musical, sighing sound from them.

"Is it morning?" the child murmured, half asleep.

"No, dear; it is night," he answered her, and she was content and slept
again--the strings of the viol sending a soft whisper in her drowsy ear,
each time that the breeze arose and swept across them.

When the morning came it found him far on his road, leaving behind him
the Liebana.

There followed a bright month of autumn weather. The child was happy as
she had never been.

They moved on continually through the plains and the fields, the hills
and the woods, the hamlets and the cities; but she and the viol were
never weary. They rode aloft whilst he toiled on. Yet neither was he
weary, for the viol murmured in the wind, and the child laughed in the
sunshine.




CHAPTER V.


It was late in the year.

The earth and sky were a blaze of russet and purple, and scarlet and
gold. The air was keen and swift, and strong like wine. A summer
fragrance blended with a winter frost. The grape harvest had been
gathered in, and had been plentiful, and the people were liberal and of
good humor.

Sometimes before a wineshop or beneath a balcony, or in a broad
market-square at evening, Phratos played; and the silver and copper
coins were dropped fast to him. When he had enough by him to get a crust
for himself, and milk and fruit for her, he did not pause to play, but
moved on resolutely all the day, resting at night only.

He bought her a little garment of red foxes' furs; her head and her feet
were bare. She bathed in clear running waters, and slept in a nest of
hay. She saw vast towers, and wondrous spires, and strange piles of wood
and stone, and rivers spanned by arches, and great forests half
leafless, and plains red in stormy sunset light, and towns that lay hid
in soft gold mists of vapor; and saw all these as in a dream, herself
borne high in air, wrapped warm in fur, and lulled by the sweet familiar
fraternity of the old viol. She asked no questions, she was content,
like a mole or a dormouse; she was not beaten or mocked, she was never
hungry nor cold; no one cursed her, and she was with Phratos.

It takes time to go on foot across a great country, and Phratos was
nearly always on foot.

Now and then he gave a coin or two, or a tune or two, for a lift on some
straw-laden wagon, or some mule-cart full of pottery or of vegetables,
that was crawling on its slow way through the plains of the marshy
lands, or the poplar-lined leagues of the public highways. But as a rule
he plodded on by himself, shunning the people of his own race, and
shunned in return by the ordinary populace of the places through which
he traveled. For they knew him to be a Spanish gypsy by his skin and his
garb and his language, and by the starry-eyed Arab-faced child who ran
by his side in her red fur and her flashing sequins.

"There is a curse written against all honest folk on every one of those
shaking coins," the peasants muttered as she passed them.

She did not comprehend their sayings, for she knew none but her gypsy
tongue, and that only very imperfectly; but she knew by their glance
that they meant that she was something evil; and she gripped tighter
Phratos's hand--half terrified, half triumphant.

The weather grew colder and the ground harder. The golden and scarlet
glories of the south and of the west, their red leafage and purple
flowers, gorgeous sunsets and leaping waters, gave place to the level
pastures, pale skies, leafless woods, and dim gray tints of the
northerly lands.

The frosts became sharp, and mists that came from unseen seas enveloped
them. There were marvelous old towns; cathedral spires that arose,
ethereal as vapor; still dusky cities, aged with many centuries, that
seemed to sleep eternally in the watery halo of the fog; green
cultivated hills, from whose smooth brows the earth-touching clouds
seemed never to lift themselves; straight sluggish streams, that flowed
with leisurely laziness through broad flat meadow-lands, white with snow
and obscure with vapor. These were for what they exchanged the pomp of
dying foliage, the glory of crimson fruits, the fierce rush of the
mistral, the odors of the nowel-born violets, the fantastic shapes of
the aloes and olives raising their dark spears and their silvery network
against the amber fires of a winter dawn in the rich southwest.

The child was chilled, oppressed, vaguely awestruck, and disquieted; but
she said nothing; Phratos was there and the viol.

She missed the red forests and the leaping torrents, and the prickly
fruits, and the smell of the violets and the vineyards, and the wild
shapes of the cactus, and the old myrtles that were hoary and contorted
with age. But she did not complain nor ask any questions; she had
supreme faith in Phratos.

One night, at the close of a black day in midwinter, the sharpest and
hardest in cold that they had ever encountered, they passed through a
little town whose roadways were mostly canals, and whose spires and
roofs and pinnacles and turrets and towers were all beautiful with the
poetry and the majesty of a long-perished age.

The day had been bitter; there was snow everywhere; great blocks of ice
choked up the water; the belfry chimes rang shrilly through the rarefied
air; the few folks that were astir were wrapped in wool or sheepskin;
through the casements there glowed the ruddy flush of burning logs; and
the muffled watchmen passing to and fro in antique custom on their
rounds called out, under the closed houses, that it was eight of the
night in a heavy snowstorm.

Phratos paused in the town at an old hostelry to give the child a hot
drink of milk and a roll of rye bread. There he asked the way to the
wood and the mill of Yprès.

They told it him sullenly and suspiciously: since for a wild gypsy of
Spain the shrewd, thrifty, plain people of the north had no liking.

He thanked them, and went on his way, out of the barriers of the little
town along a road by the river towards the country.

"Art thou cold, dear?" he asked her, with more tenderness than common in
his voice.

The child shivered under her little fur-skin, which would not keep out
the searching of the hurricane and the driving of the snowflakes; but
she drew her breath quickly, and answered him, "No."

They came to a little wood, leafless and black in the gloomy night; a
dead crow swung in their faces on a swaying pear-tree; the roar of the
mill-stream loudly filled what otherwise would have been an intense
silence.

He made his way in by a little wicket, through an orchard and through a
garden, and so to the front of the mill-house. The shutters were not
closed; through the driving of the snow he could see within. It looked
to him--a houseless wanderer from his youth up--strangely warm and safe
and still.

An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span,
on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs
smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of
the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves;
from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of
onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and
carved wood.

He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be
sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell
that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal
selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other
souls in eternal damnation.

He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what
the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.

"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and
prosperous, and alone by their fireside."

It seemed that they must be so.

Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.

His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and
to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the
hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who
was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and
often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a
woman-child,--and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as
Taric.

To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his
tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them,
wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found
him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way
to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to
place her with her mother's people.

She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at
the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.

He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the
letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.

"Thou wilt go in there to the old man yonder, and sleep by that pleasant
fire to-night," he murmured to her. "And thou wilt be good and gentle,
and even as thou art to me always; and to-morrow at noontide I will come
and see how it fares with thee."

Her small hands tightened upon his.

"I will not go without thee," she muttered in the broken tongue of the
gypsy children.

There were food and milk, fire and shelter, safety from the night and
the storm there, she saw; but these were naught to her without Phratos.
She struggled against her fate as the young bird struggles against being
thrust into the cage,--not knowing what captivity means, and yet afraid
of it and rebelling by instinct.

He took her up in his arms, and pressed her close to him, and for the
first time kissed her. For Phratos, though tender to her, had no woman's
foolishness, but had taught her to be hardy and strong, and to look for
neither caresses nor compassion--knowing well that to the love-child of
Taric in her future years the first could only mean shame, and the last
could only mean alms, which would be shame likewise.

"Go, dear," he said softly to her; and then he struck with his staff on
the wooden door, and, lifting its latch, unclosed it; and thrust the
child forward, ere she could resist, into the darkness of the low
entrance-place.

Then he turned and went swiftly himself through the orchard and wood
into the gloom and the storm of the night.

He knew that to show himself to a northern householder were to do her
evil and hurt; for between the wanderer of the Spanish forests and the
peasant of the Norman pastures there could be only defiance, mistrust,
and disdain.

"I will see how it is with her to-morrow," he said to himself as he
faced again the wind and the sleet. "If it be well with her--let it be
well. If not, she must come forth with me, and we must seek some lair
where her wolf-sire shall not prowl and discover her. But it will be
hard to find; for the vengeance of Taric is swift of foot and has a
far-stretching hand and eyes that are sleepless."

And his heart was heavy in him as he went. He had done what seemed to
him just and due to the child and her mother; he had been true to the
vow he had made answering the mute prayer of the sightless dead eyes; he
had saved the flesh of the child from the whip of the trainer, and the
future of the child from the shame of the brothel; he had done thus much
in saving her from her father, and he had done it in the only way that
was possible to him.

Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though
he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the
clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise
with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into
the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for
evermore.

"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague
remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.

But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which
forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in
all the many years that came.

For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow,
lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and
wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert,
on which no single star-ray shone.

The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of
snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen
in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All
lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the
tempest of the winds.

The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was.
Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow.
Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a
strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the
silence and then died again.

At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in
the great colorless waste.

But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face
again.

"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew
their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their
saints that they were safe beneath a roof.

He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the
blast.

A hundred times he strove to set his steps backwards to the town, and a
hundred times he failed; and moved only round and round vainly, never
escaping the maze of the endless white fields.

Now the night was long, and he was weakly.

In the midst of the fields there was a cross, and at the head of the
cross hung a lantern. The wind tossed the light to and fro. It flickered
on the head of a woman. She lay in the snow, and her hand grasped his
foot as he passed her.

"I am dead," she said to him: "dead of hunger But the lad lives--save
him."

And as she spoke, her lips closed together, her throat rattled, and she
died.

The boy slept at her feet, and babbled in his sleep, delirious.

Phratos stooped down and raised him. He was a child of eight years, and
worn with famine and fever, and his gaunt eyes stared hideously up at
the driving snow.

Phratos folded him in his arms, and went on with him: the snow had
nearly covered the body of his mother.

All around were the fields. There was no light, except from the lantern
on the cross. A few sheep huddled near without a shepherd. The stillness
was intense. The bells had ceased to ring or he had wandered far from
the sound of them.

The lad was senseless; he muttered drearily foolish words of fever; his
limbs hung in a dead weight; his teeth chattered. Phratos, bearing him,
struggled on: the snow was deep and drifted heavily; every now and then
he stumbled and plunged to his knees in a rift of earth or in a shallow
pool of ice.

At last his strength, feeble at all times, failed him; his arms could
bear their burden no longer; he let the young boy slip from his hold
upon the ground; and stood, breathless and broken, with the snowflakes
beating on him.

"The woman trusted me," he thought; she was a stranger, she was a
beggar, she was dead. She had no bond upon him. Neither could she ever
bear witness against him. Yet he was loyal to her.

He unwound the sheepskin that he wore, and stripped himself of it and
folded it about the sick child, and with a slow laborious effort drew
the little body away under the frail shelter of a knot of furze, and
wrapped it closely round, and left it there.

It was all that he could do.

Then, with no defense between him and the driving cold, he strove once
more to find his road.

It was quite dark; quite still.

The snow fell ceaselessly; the white wide land was patchless as the sea.

He stumbled on, as a mule may which being blind and bruised yet holds
its way from the sheer instinct of its sad dumb patience. His veins were
frozen; his beard was ice; the wind cut his flesh like a scourge; a
sickly dreamy sleepiness stole on him.

He knew well what it meant.

He tried to rouse himself; he was young, and his life had its sweetness;
and there were faces he would fain have seen again, and voices whose
laughter he would fain have heard.

He drew the viol round and touched its strings; but his frozen fingers
had lost their cunning, and the soul of the music was chilled and dumb:
it only sighed in answer.

He kissed it softly as he would have kissed a woman's lips, and put it
in his bosom. It had all his youth in it.

Then he stumbled onward yet again, feebly, being a cripple, and cold to
the bone, and pierced with a million thorns of pain.

There was no light anywhere.

The endless wilderness of the white plowed lands stretched all around
him; where the little hamlets clustered the storm hid them; no light
could penetrate the denseness of that changeless gloom; and the only
sound that rose upon the ghastly silence was the moaning of some
perishing flock locked in a flood of ice, and deserted by its shepherd.

But what he saw and what he heard were not these going barefoot and
blindfold to his death, the things of his own land were with him; the
golden glories of sunsets of paradise; the scarlet blaze of a wilderness
of flowers; the sound of the fountains at midnight; the glancing of the
swift feet in the dances; the sweetness of songs sad as death sung in
the desolate courts of old palaces; the deep dreamy hush of white moons
shining through lines of palms straight on a silvery sea.

These arose and drifted before him, and he ceased to suffer or to know,
and sleep conquered him; he dropped down on the white earth noiselessly
and powerlessly as a leaf sinks; the snow fell and covered him.

When the morning broke, a peasant, going to his labor in the fields,
while the stormy winter sun rose red over the whitened world, found both
his body and the child's.

The boy was warm and living still beneath the shelter of the sheepskin:
Phratos was dead.

The people succored the child, and nursed and fed him so that his life
was saved; but to Phratos they only gave such burial as the corby gives
the stricken deer.

"It is only a gypsy; let him lie," they said; and they left him there,
and the snow kept him.

His viol they robbed him of, and cast it as a plaything to their
children.

But the children could make no melody from its dumb strings. For the
viol was faithful; and its music was dead too.

And his own land and his own people knew him never again; and never
again at evening was the voice of his viol heard in the stillness, and
never again did the young men and maidens dance to his bidding, and the
tears and the laughter rise and fall at his will, and the beasts and the
birds frisk and sing at his coming, and the children in his footsteps
cry, "Lo, it is summer, since Phratos is here!"




BOOK II.




CHAPTER I.


The hottest sun of a hot summer shone on a straight white dusty road.

An old man was breaking stones by the wayside; he was very old, very
bent, very lean, worn by nigh a hundred years if he had been worn by
one; but he struck yet with a will, and the flints flew in a thousand
pieces under his hammer, as though the youth and the force of nineteen
years instead of ninety were at work on them.

When the noon bell rang from a little odd straight steeple, with a
slanting roof, that peered out of the trees to the westward, he laid his
hammer aside, took off his brass-plated cap, wiped his forehead of its
heat and dust, sat down on his pile of stones, took out a hard black
crust and munched with teeth that were still strong and wiry.

The noontide was very quiet; the heat was intense, for there had been no
rainfall for several weeks; there was one lark singing high up in the
air, with its little breast lifted to the sun; but all the other birds
were mute and invisible, doubtless hidden safely in some delicious
shadow, swinging drowsily on tufts of linden bloom, or underneath the
roofing of broad chestnut leaves.

The road on either side was lined by the straight forms of endless
poplars, standing side by side in sentinel. The fields were all ablaze
around on every side with the gold of ripening corn or mustard, and the
scarlet flame of innumerable poppies.

Here and there they were broken by some little house, white or black, or
painted in bright colors, which lifted up among its leaves a little
tower like a sugar-loaf, or a black gable, and a pointed arch beneath
it. Now and then they were divided by rows of trees standing breathless
in the heat, or breadths of apple orchards, some with fruits ruby red,
some with fruits as yet green as their foliage.

Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords,
where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient
picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.

The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score
of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all
long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.

He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread;
he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the
dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky,
the air and the landscape: why not?

They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him,
and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and
bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.

He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his
hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were
cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the
gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue
piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and
his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.

His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time--a
time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the
sun.

With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the
lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to
kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and
because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all
that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a
thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so
intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray
and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in
its humanity.

For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White
Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody;
the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"

He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour
was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a bacchanal;
when the same scythe that had severed the flowering grasses, served also
to cleave the fair breasts of the mother, the tender throat of the
child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the
juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the
bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat
here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of
the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him,
because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed
God and died.

Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering
sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road
a girl.

She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight
and supple as one who passed her life on the open lands and was abroad
in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless
measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia;
she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs
were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor
of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country,
but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket,
filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a mass of color and of
blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes,
blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the
sun.

She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that
were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.
Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet
as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one
another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep
it--until death.

As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which
for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes,
and made them mellow and lustrous as a southern sun.

She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth,
small and even, like rows of cowry shells.

"You are well, Marcellin?"

The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own
keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and
absorbed retrospection will lend.

"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know
that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"

"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"

She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a
voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any
peasantry.

She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk
of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.

"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said
curtly.

Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.

He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her
head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk
that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed
nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her
made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was
fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a
galley-slave.

The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.

"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not
understand."

The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.

"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that
a fowler may hide in the grasses; it is possible that it may be shot as
it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to
grace a rich man's table. You see?"

She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but
barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy
track of a metaphorical utterance.

But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face
again.

"The 'possible,' then, is only--the worse?" she said slowly.

The old man smiled still grimly.

"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will
give--one day--the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and
the lark's power to sing _Laus Deo_ in heaven. _I_ do not say--they do."

"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable
curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was
unfathomable and mute.

"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that
priests hold the gifts of it?"

Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance
fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.

"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have
beauty: the devil will give you one."

"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of
the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that
is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.

"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of
men."

His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and passed her; she stood
leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless
and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.

"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do
they, then, so hate me?"

The old man stroked his beard.

"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but God would not believe
him."

She mused over the saying; silent still.

The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air,
mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against
the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which
flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the
shelter of the grass, and bore it away within his talons.

Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.

"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'----"

"When it means Death," she added.

The old man took his pipe back and smoked.

"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."

Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the luster of her
eyes.

"But the lark praised God--why should it be so dealt with?"

Marcellin smiled grimly.

"Abel was praising God; but that did not turn aside the steel."

She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons
born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied
had been Cain.

At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and
through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of
scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not
from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that
burned on the hillside.

There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from
it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber
wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew
larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green
water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.

It was a procession of the Church.

It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it
approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his
head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest
against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.

The Church passed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and
the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains
and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing
children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of
the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells
ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.

The Church passed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a
choking mass; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit
air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and
pierced through the noonday silence.

It passed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were
choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old
man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting
eyelids.

"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.
"Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded eyes."

Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.

The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and
to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."

The procession passed away out of sight, going along the highway and
winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens
for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the
priests prayed themselves hoarse, and the peasants toiled footsore, and
the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the
grasses and the bright butterfly dead in the dust.

The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids;
the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a
little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of
defiance and opprobrium as they had passed these twain beneath the
wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.

"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one
fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little,
white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the
sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.

"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a
handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow
to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village
chapel.

And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched
more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they
went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of
darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because
they had thus passed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their
lips, with the cross as their symbol.

So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of
sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the river,
into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the
great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then
rose and sang the "Angelus."

Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under
the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored
God, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of
harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of God.

The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their breasts;
and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears,
dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:--"We have had
no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to
dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We had never such droughts
as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of hell
was among us."

For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the
earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."




CHAPTER II.


In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were
dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to
few men to know--a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and
delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams;
a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers
blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid,
unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out
of an air that was death, off an earth that was hell.

When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had
seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he
had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had
been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of
Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he
had cast in his vote for the death of a king; passions had been his
playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had
beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within
king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay,
and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white
beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats
that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had
his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been gods or devils, and
all women martyrs or furies.

And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who passed him
by cursed him, saying,--

"This man slew a king."

For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red
at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for
in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so
deadly as age.

Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the
Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the
fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full
crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all
around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once
looked his eyes rested there.

She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among
the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had
seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the
red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as
the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the
land.

The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire;
above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple;
around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as
gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders,
blue and black from the marks of a thong.

He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a
look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the
same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he
hated.

"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put
her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.

"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be
hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.

"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"

She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.

"Who beat you?" he pursued.

A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.

"Flamma."

"You were wicked?"

"They said so."

"And what do you do when you are beaten?"

"I shut my mouth."

"For what?"

"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be glad."

Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen,
passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was
shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.

"Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret
and the ache out of your bruises."

The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first
creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of
his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only
those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on
their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling
and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped
hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and
passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a
curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she
had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading
cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched
down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway--a
hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old
republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in
solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without
content.

He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with
water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand
was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with
carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh,
from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his
only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of
woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried
life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with
greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.

"Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold.
The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and
timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a
blow.

"After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human
thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after
her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the
poppies.

"They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child,
who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it
seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom--which they
called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises;
and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.

"Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red
poppies.

And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved
to one another, being outcasts from all others.




CHAPTER III.


As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to
wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed
stillness--a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand
sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old
dead centuries.

On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual
chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population.
The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of
mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt
smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own
tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by
the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers
had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to
adhere.

But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the
peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at
their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned
into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place
was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely
a dog asleep in the sun.

When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and
donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily
avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were
put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy
choristers and the little children put their white linen and their
scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and
sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to
their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to
their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the
poor flies they killed in the sun.

The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy
silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places
about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons
dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken
carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of
lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.

Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone,
there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the
wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.

She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her
burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched
out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.

The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a
moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that
spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall--an ancient well, with a
stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone
running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved
loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its
service.

She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick
green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain,
she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it
again and again thirstily.

The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered
limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many
feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket
which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries,
melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had
not taken even one to freshen her dry mouth.

Folle-Farine stooped to the water, and played with it, and drank it, and
steeped her lips and her arms in it; lying there on the stone bench,
with her bare feet curled one in another, and her slender round limbs
full of the voluptuous repose of a resting panther.

The coolness, the murmur, the clearness, the peace, the soft flowing
movement of water, possess an ineffable charm for natures that are
passion-tossed, feverish, and full of storm.

There was a dreamy peace about the place, too, which had charms likewise
for her, in the dusky arch of the long cloisters, in the lichen-grown
walls, in the broad pamments of the paven court, in the clusters of
delicate carvings beneath and below; in the sculptured frieze where
little nests that the birds had made in the spring still rested; in the
dense brooding thickness of the boughs that brought the sweetness and
the shadows of the woods into the heart of the peopled town.

She stayed there, loath to move; loath to return where a jeer, a bruise,
a lifted stick, a muttered curse, were all her greeting and her guerdon.

As she lay thus, one of the doors in the old houses in the cloisters
opened; the head of an old woman was thrust out, crowned with the high,
fan-shaped comb, and the towering white linen cap that are the female
note of that especial town.

The woman was the mother of the sacristan, and she, looking out,
shrieked shrilly to her son,--

"Georges, Georges! come hither. The devil's daughter is drinking the
blest water!"

The sacristan was hoeing among his cabbages in the little garden behind
his house, surrounded with clipt yew, and damp from the deep shade of
the cathedral, that overshadowed it.

He ran out at his mother's call, hoe in hand, himself an old man, though
stout and strong.

The well in the wall was his especial charge and pride; immeasurable
sanctity attached to it.

According to tradition, the water had spouted from the stone itself, at
the touch of a branch of blossoming pear, held in the hand of St.
Jerome, who had returned to earth in the middle of the fourteenth
century, and dwelt for awhile near the cathedral, working at the
honorable trade of a cordwainer, and accomplishing mighty miracles
throughout the district.

It was said that some of his miraculous power still remained in the
fountain, and that even yet, those who drank on St. Jerome's day in full
faith and with believing hearts, were, oftentimes, cleansed of sin, and
purified of bodily disease. Wherefore on that day, throngs of peasantry
flocked in from all sides, and crowded round it, and drank; to the
benefit of the sacristan in charge, if not to that of their souls and
bodies.

Summoned by his mother, he flew to the rescue of the sanctified spring.

"Get you gone!" he shouted. "Get you gone, you child of hell! How durst
you touch the blessed basin? Do you think that God struck water from the
stone for such as you?"

Folle-Farine lifted her head and looked him in the face with her
audacious eyes and laughed; then tossed her head again and plunged it
into the bright living water, till her lips, and her cheeks, and all the
rippling hair about her temples sparkled with its silvery drops.

The sacristan, infuriated at once by the impiety and the defiance,
shrieked aloud:

"Insolent animal! Daughter of Satan! I will teach you to taint the gift
of God with lips of the devil!"

And he seized her roughly with one hand upon her shoulder, and with the
other raised the hoe and brandished the wooden staff of it above her
head in threat to strike her; whilst his old mother, still thrusting her
lofty headgear and her wrinkled face from out the door, screamed to him
to show he was a man, and have no mercy.

As his grasp touched her, and the staff cast its shadow across her,
Folle-Farine sprang up, defiance and fury breathing from all her
beautiful fierce face.

She seized the staff in her right hand, wrenched it with a swift
movement from its hold, and, catching his head under her left arm,
rained blows on him from his own weapon, with a sudden gust of
breathless rage which blinded him, and lent to her slender muscular
limbs the strength and the force of man.

Then, as rapidly as she had seized and struck him, she flung him from
her with such violence that he fell prostrate on the pavement of the
court, caught up the metal pail which stood by ready filled, dashed the
water over him where he lay, and, turning from him without a word,
walked across the courtyard, slowly, and with a haughty grace in all the
carriage of her bare limbs and the folds of her ragged garments, bearing
the empty osier basket on her head, deaf as the stones around her to the
screams of the sacristan and his mother.

In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were
sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old
woman's voice remained unheard.

The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their
niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog
aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out
into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living
creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open
country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of
the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace
shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.

She laughed a little as she saw.

"They will not come after _me_," she said to herself. "They are too
afraid of the devil."

She judged rightly; they did not come.

She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in
the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat
prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling
heap of refuse.

The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed
like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.

The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed
motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing
of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles
of the cathedral.

Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked
streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old,
twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its
only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of
timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and
grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing
beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to
be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and
honesty to a noble offspring.

The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound
that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique
mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.

In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and
color.

The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted
pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow
casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and
rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail,
which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a
little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the
sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.

From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the
rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.

She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her
amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to
Folle-Farine,--

"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"

Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.

"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things
had a fascination for her.

This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she
looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down
through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral
windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands
full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the
laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she
passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the
things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had
no part or likeness.

She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the
jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above
in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins
shaking in her yellow tresses.

"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy
nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"

"Yes."

"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and
fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your
father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good
things?"

"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him
endlessly with breathless prayer?

"Will he not? Wait a year--wait a year."

"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.

"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."

"He hears you."

The fair woman above laughed:

"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."

And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the
rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but
a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.

"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you
witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if
you stare so."

Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart.
That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a
time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only
mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.

The street was dark for her like all the others now.

The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the
vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.

"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the
thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.

Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head
dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.

She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and
usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But
from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden
leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of
light might wander even to her.

She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls,
where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts
and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.

The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges,
the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the
fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen
were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the
scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.

Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and
there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The
cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers;
the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.

At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a
spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.

Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty,
and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins,
keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.

The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.

A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of
wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its
garden.

Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on
her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from
under the tower of her high white cap. She was reaching a carnation to a
student who stood below, with long fair locks and ruddy cheeks, and a
beard yellow with the amber down of twenty years; and who kissed her
white wrist as he caught the red flower.

Folle-Farine glanced at the pretty picture with a dull wonder and a
nameless pain: what could it mean to be happy like that?

Half a league onward she passed another cottage shadowed by a
sycamore-tree, and with the swallows whirling around its tall twisted
stone chimneys, and a beurré pear covering with branch and bloom its old
gray walls.

An aged woman sat sipping coffee in the sun, and a young one was
sweeping the blue and white tiles with a broom, singing gayly as she
swept.

"Art thou well placed, my mother?" she asked, pausing to look tenderly
at the withered brown face, on which the shadows of the sycamore leaves
were playing.

The old mother smiled, steeping her bread in the coffee-bowl.

"Surely, child; I can feel the sun and hear you sing."

She was happy though she was blind.

Folle-Farine stood a moment and looked at them across a hedge of
honeysuckle.

"How odd it must feel to have any one to care to hear your voice like
that!" she thought; and she went on her way through the poppies and the
corn, half softened, half enraged.

Was she lower than they because she could find no one to care for her or
take gladness in her life? Or was she greater than they because all
human delights were to her as the dead letters of an unknown tongue?

Down a pathway fronting her that ran midway between the yellowing seas
of wheat and a belt of lilac clover, over which a swarm of bees was
murmuring, there came a countrywoman, crushing the herbage under her
heavy shoes, ragged, picturesque, sunbrowned, swinging deep brass pails
as she went to the herds on the hillside.

She carried a child twisted into the folds of her dress; a boy, half
asleep, with his curly head against her breast. As she passed, the woman
drew her kerchief over her bosom and over the brown rosy face of the
child.

"She shall not look at thee, my darling," she muttered. "Her look
withered Rémy's little limb."

And she covered the child jealously, and turned aside, so that she
should tread a separate pathway through the clover, and did not brush
the garments of the one she was compelled to pass.

Folle-Farine heard, and laughed aloud.

She knew of what the woman was thinking.

In the summer of the previous year, as she had passed the tanyard on the
western bank of the river, the tanner's little son, rushing out in
haste, had curled his mouth in insult at her, and clapping his hands,
hissed in a child's love of cruelty the mocking words which he had heard
his elders use of her. In answer, she had only turned her head and
looked down at him with calm eyes of scorn.

But the child, running out fast, and startled by that regard, had
stepped upon a shred of leather and had fallen heavily, breaking his
left leg at the knee. The limb, unskillfully dealt with, and enfeebled
by a tendency to disease, had never been restored, but hung limp,
crooked, useless, withered from below the knee.

Through all the country side the little cripple, Rémy, creeping out into
the sun upon his crutches, was pointed out in a passionate pity as the
object of her sorcery, the victim of her vengeance. When she had heard
what they said she had laughed as she laughed now, drawing together her
straight brows and showing her glistening teeth.

All the momentary softness died in her as the peasant covered the boy's
face and turned aside into the clover. She laughed aloud and swept on
through the half-ripe corn with that swift, harmonious, majestic
movement which was inborn in her, as it is inborn in the deer or the
antelope, singing again as she went those strange wild airs, like the
sigh of the wind, which were all the language that lingered in her
memory from the land that had seen her birth.

To such aversion as this she was too well used for it to be a matter of
even notice to her. She knew that she was marked and shunned by the
community amidst which her lot was cast; and she accepted proscription
without wonder and without resistance.

Folle-Farine: the Dust. What lower thing did earth hold?

In this old-world district, amidst the pastures and cornlands of
Normandy, superstition had taken a hold which the passage of centuries
and the advent of revolution had done very little to lessen.

Few of the people could read and fewer still could write. They knew
nothing but what their priests and their politicians told them to
believe. They went to their beds with the poultry, and rose as the cock
crew: they went to mass, as their ducks to the osier and weed ponds; and
to the conscription as their lambs to the slaughter. They understood
that there was a world beyond them, but they remembered it only as the
best market for their fruit, their fowls, their lace, their skins.

Their brains were as dim as were their oil-lit streets at night; though
their lives were content and mirthful, and the most part pious. They
went out into the summer meadows chanting aves, in seasons of drought to
pray for rain on their parching orchards, in the same credulity with
which they groped through the winter fog, bearing torches and chanting
dirges to gain a blessing at seed-time on their bleak black fallows.

The beauty and the faith of the old Mediæval life were with them still;
and with its beauty and its faith were its bigotry and its cruelty
likewise. They led simple and contented lives; for the most part honest,
and among themselves cheerful and kindly; preserving much grace of
color, of costume, of idiosyncrasy, because apart from the hueless
communism and characterless monotony of modern cities.

But they believed in sorcery and in devilry; they were brutal to their
beasts, and could be as brutal to their foes; they were steeped in
legend and tradition from their cradles; and all the darkest
superstitions of dead ages still found home and treasury in their hearts
and at their hearths.

Therefore, believing her a creature of evil, they were inexorable
against her, and thought that in being so they did their duty.

They had always been a religious people in this birth country of the
Flamma race; the strong poetic veneration of their forefathers, which
had symbolized itself in the carving of every lintel, corbel, or
buttress in their streets, and in the fashion of every spire on which a
weather-vane could gleam against their suns, was still in their blood;
the poetry had departed, but the bigotry remained.

Their ancestors had burned wizards and witches by the score in the open
square of the cathedral place, and their grandsires and grandams had in
brave, dumb, ignorant peasant fashion held fast to the lily and the
cross, and gone by hundreds to the salutation of the axe and the baptism
of the sword in the red days of revolution.

They were the same people still: industrious, frugal, peaceful, loyal,
wedded to old ways and to old relics, content on little, and serene of
heart; yet, withal, where they feared or where they hated, brutal with
the brutality begotten of abject ignorance. And they had been so to this
outcast whom they all called Folle-Farine.

When she had first come amidst them, a little desolate foreign child,
mute with the dumbness of an unknown tongue, and cast adrift among
strange people, unfamiliar ways, and chill blank glances, she had shyly
tried in a child's vague instincts of appeal and trust to make friends
with the other children that she saw, and to share a little in the
mothers' smiles and the babies' pastimes that were all around her in the
glad green world of summer.

But she had been denied and rejected with hard words and harder blows;
at her coming the smiles had changed to frowns, and the pastime into
terror. She was proud, she was shy, she was savage; she felt rather than
understood that she was suspected and reviled; she ceased to seek her
own kind, and only went for companionship and sympathy to the creatures
of the fields and the woods, to the things of the earth and the sky and
the water.

"Thou art the devil's daughter!" half in sport hissed the youths in the
market-place against her as the little child went among them, carrying a
load for her grandsire heavier than her arms knew how to bear.

"Thou wert plague-spotted from thy birth," said the old man himself, as
she strained her small limbs to and fro the floors of his storehouses,
carrying wood or flour or tiles or rushes, or whatever there chanced to
need such convoy.

"Get thee away, we are not to touch thee!" hissed the six-year-old
infants at play by the river when she waded in amidst them to reach with
her lither arm the far-off water-flowers they were too timorous to
pluck, and tender it to the one who had desired it.

"The devil begot thee, and my cow fell ill yesternight after thou hadst
laid hands on her!" muttered the old women, lifting a stick as she went
near to their cattle in the meadows to brush off with a broad dockleaf
the flies that were teasing the poor, meek, patient beasts.

So, cursed when she did her duty, and driven away when she tried to do
good, her young soul had hardened itself and grown fierce, mute,
callous, isolated.

There were only the four-footed things, so wise, so silent, so tender of
heart, so bruised of body, so innocent, and so agonized, that had
compassion for her, and saved her from utter desolation. In the mild sad
gaze of the cow, in the lustrous suffering eyes of the horse, in the
noble frank faith of the dog, in the soft-bounding glee of the lamb, in
the unwearied toil of the ass, in the tender industry of the bird, she
had sympathy and she had example.

She loved them and they loved her. She saw that they were sinless,
diligent, faithful, devoted, loyal servers of base masters; loving
greatly, and for their love goaded, beaten, overtasked, slaughtered.

She took the lesson to heart; and hated men and women with a bitter
hatred.

So she had grown up for ten years, caring for no human thing, except in
a manner for the old man Marcellin, who was, like her, proscribed.

The priests had striven to turn her soul what they had termed
heavenward; but their weapons had been wrath and intimidation. She would
have none of them. No efforts that they or her grandsire made had
availed; she would be starved, thrashed, cursed, maltreated as they
would; she could not understand their meaning, or would not submit
herself to their religion.

As years went on they had found the contest hopeless, so had abandoned
her to the devil, who had made her; and the daughter of one whom the
whole province had called saint had never passed within church-doors or
known the touch of holy water save when they had cast it on her as an
exorcism. And when she met a priest in the open roads or on the bypaths
of the fields, she always sang in loud defiance her wildest melodies.

Where had she learnt these?

They had been sung to her by Phratos, and taught by him.

Who had he been?

Her old life was obscure to her memory, and yet glorious even in its
dimness.

She did not know who those people had been with whom she had wandered,
nor in what land they had dwelt. But that wondrous free life remained on
her remembrance as a thing never to be forgotten or to be known again; a
life odorous with bursting fruits and budding flowers; full of strangest
and of sweetest music; spent forever under green leaves and suns that
had no setting; forever beside fathomless waters and winding forests;
forever rhymed to melody and soothed to the measure of deep winds and
drifting clouds.

For she had forgotten all except its liberty and its loveliness; and the
old gypsy life of the Liebana remained with her only as some stray
fragment of an existence passed in another world from which she was now
an exile, and revived in her only in the fierce passion of her nature,
in her bitter, vague rebellion, in her longing to be free, in her
anguish of vain desires for richer hues and bluer skies and wilder winds
than those amidst which she toiled. At times she remembered likewise the
songs and the melodies of Phratos; remembered them when the moon rays
swept across the white breadth of water-lilies, or the breath of spring
stole through the awakening woods; and when she remembered them she
wept--wept bitterly, where none could look on her.

She never thought of Phratos as a man; as of one who had lived in a
human form and was now dead in an earthly grave; her memory of him was
of some nameless creature, half divine, whose footsteps brought laughter
and music, with eyes bright as a bird's, yet sad as a dog's, and a voice
forever singing; clad in goat's hair, and gigantic and gay; a creature
that had spoken tenderly to her, that had bidden her laugh and rejoice,
that had carried her when she was weary; that had taught her to sleep
under the dewy leaves, and to greet the things of the night as soft
sisters, and to fear nothing in the whole living world, in the earth,
or the air, or the sky, and to tell the truth though a falsehood were to
spare the bare feet flintstones, and naked shoulders the stick, and an
empty body hunger and thirst. A creature that seemed to her in her
memories even as the faun seemed to the fancies of the children of the
Piræus; a creature half man and half animal, glad and grotesque, full of
mirth and of music, belonging to the forest, to the brook, to the stars,
to the leaves, wandering like the wind, and, like the wind, homeless.

This was all her memory; but she cherished it; in the face of the
priests she bent her straight black brows and curled her scornful
scarlet lips, but for the sake of Phratos she held one religion; though
she hated men she told them never a lie, and asked them never an alms.

She went now along the white level roads, the empty basket balanced on
her head, her form moving with the free harmonious grace of desert
women, and she sang as she went the old sweet songs of the broken viol.

She was friendless and desolate; she was ill fed, she was heavily
tasked; she toiled without thanks; she was ignorant of even so much
knowledge as the peasants about her had; she was without a past or a
future, and her present had in it but daily toil and bitter words;
hunger, and thirst, and chastisement.

Yet for all that she sang;--sang because the vitality in her made her
dauntless of all evil; because the abundant life opening in her made her
glad in despite of fate; because the youth, and the strength, and the
soul that were in her could not utterly be brutalized, could not wholly
cease from feeling the gladness of the sun, the coursing of the breeze,
the liberty of nature, the sweet quick sense of living.

Before long she reached the spot where the old man Marcellin was
breaking stones.

His pile was raised much higher; he sat astride on a log of timber and
hammered the flints on and on, on and on, without looking up; the dust
was still thick on the leaves and the herbage where the tramp of the
people had raised it; and the prayers and the chants had failed as yet
to bring one slightest cloud, one faintest rain mist across the hot
unbroken azure of the skies.

Marcellin was her only friend; the proscribed always adhere to one
another; when they are few they can only brood and suffer, harmlessly;
when they are many they rise as with one foot and strike as with one
hand. Therefore, it is always perilous to make the lists of any
proscription overlong.

The child, who was also an outcast, went to him and paused; in a
curious, lifeless bitter way they cared for one another; this girl who
had grown to believe herself born of hell, and this man who had grown to
believe that he had served hell.

With the bastard Folle-Farine and with the regicide Marcellin the people
had no association, and for them no pity; therefore they had found each
other by the kinship of proscription; and in a way there was love
between them.

"You are glad, since you sing!" said the old man to her, as she passed
him again on her homeward way, and paused again beside him.

"The birds in cage sing," she answered him. "But, think you they are
glad?"

"Are they not?"

She sat down a moment beside him, on the bank which was soft with moss,
and odorous with wild flowers curling up the stems of the poplars and
straying over into the corn beyond.

"Are they? Look. Yesterday I passed a cottage, it is on the great south
road; far away from here. The house was empty; the people, no doubt,
were gone to labor in the fields; there was a wicker cage hanging to the
wall, and in the cage there was a blackbird. The sun beat on his head;
his square of sod was a dry clod of bare earth; the heat had dried every
drop of water in his pan; and yet the bird was singing. Singing how? In
torment, beating his breast against the bars till the blood started,
crying to the skies to have mercy on him and to let rain fall. His song
was shrill; it had a scream in it; still he sang. Do you say the merle
was glad?"

"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a
monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.

"I took the cage down and opened the door."

"And he?"

"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses,
where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running;
and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of
the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among
the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"

"And what do you mean by that?"

Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to
herself, but it was beyond her to express it.

All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy
was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and
too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into
metaphor or deduction.

The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he
had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was
not gladness, and neither was silence pain.

Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also
knew.

"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the
cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing
sound of the falling hammer.

A smile curled her lips.

"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done
wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their
thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."

"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh
lean face.

He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and
left.

"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept
over her.

"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could
not understand it in connection with herself.

A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working
her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice
tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the
open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was
a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her
child at her breast.

She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a
beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to
fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope,
neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious
hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.

"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You
might be a man worth something; but a woman!--a thing that has no
medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the
hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into
the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which
will you do in the future?"

"What?"

She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures
round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their
peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's
nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a
future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant
to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low
lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.

She had one desire, indeed--a desire vague but yet fierce--the desire
for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had
known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind
was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of
hope she knew nothing.

The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He
smiled with a certain bitter pity.

"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But
yet----"

Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of
her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as
great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew
that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its
hand the tender of at least one future--one election, one kingdom, one
destiny.

"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"

Marcellin smiled bitterly.

"Many will love you, doubtless--as the wasp loves the peach that he
kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"

She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in
the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which
it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she
now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.

"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she
said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves
the peach?"

Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,--

"Wait!"

She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her
thoughts--strange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as
incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.

"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not,
and that is to come--is it so?"

"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old
man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses
in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and
yet a thing that one sees always--sees even when one lies a-dying, they
say--for men are fools."

Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of
her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching
a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the
hot, pale, sickly dust.

"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded
insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."

Marcellin smiled.

"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish
things, called poets, do."

"What is a poet?"

"A foolish thing, I tell you--mad enough to believe that men will care
to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who
never looks and never listens."

"Ah!"

She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others,
and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the
simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat
quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by
the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the
dawn.

"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most
often. I seem to remember, when I dream--so much! so much!"

"Remember--what should you remember? You were but a baby when they
brought you hither."

"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdom--in the
devil's kingdom. Why not?"

Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all
through all our lives hanker to get back to it.

"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."

"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a
woman."

"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no
fitness with herself.

A woman!--she!--a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned,
and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!

"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and
wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty
years. I remember the woman that they say bore you--Reine Flamma. She
was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She
wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot
of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away
her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God
never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heard--and
replied."

"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"

Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and
strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.

"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his
following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens.
That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul,
striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer.
The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the
world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like
the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the
shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets,
where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It
is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is
perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to
itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the
trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor,
yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in
distress--since of such are the largest sheaves of his harvest--comes to
the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards
the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet
passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in
its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems
divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made
the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its
weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its
cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."

He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint
stones.

She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike
eyes dilated.

In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he
had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a
raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare
times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the
unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her,
but to no other.

Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to
the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of
purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though
she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb
unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.

"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.

He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now,
freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove
in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.

"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes,
and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and
in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill
it--with one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soul--no more."

She freed it from his hand.

"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much 

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