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The long hot day of torment passed slowly by.
Outside there were cool woods, flower-filled paths, broad fields of grass, children tossing blow-balls down the wind, lovers counting the leaves of yellow-eyed autumn daisies; but within there were only foul smells, intense nausea, cruel heats, the stings of a thousand insects, the buzz of a hundred carrion-flies, muddy water, and black mouldy bread.
She held her silence. She would not let her enemies see that they hurt her.
When the day had gone down, and the people had tired of their sport and left her a little while, an old feeble man stole timidly to her, glancing round lest any should see his charity and quote it as a crime, and tendered her through the bars with a gentle hand a little ripe autumnal fruit upon a cool green leaf.
The kindness made the tears start to eyes too proud to weep for pain.
She took the peaches and thanked him lovingly and gratefully; cooled her aching, burning, dust-drenched throat with their fragrant moisture.
"Hush! it is nothing," he whispered, frightenedly, glancing over his shoulder lest any one should see. "But tell me—tell me—why did you say you starved when you had all that gold?"
"I did starve," she answered him.
"But why—with all that gold?"
"It was another's."
The old man stared at her, trembling and amazed.
"What—what! die of hunger and keep your hands off money in your girdle?"
A dreary smile came on her face.
"What! is that inhuman too?"
"Inhuman?" he murmured. "Oh, child—oh, child, tell any tale you will, save such a tale as that!"
And he stole away sorrowful, because sure that for his fruit of charity she had given him back a lie.
He shambled away, afraid that his neighbors should see the little thing which he had done.
She was left alone.
It began to grow dark. She felt scorched with fever, and her head throbbed. Long hunger, intense fatigue, and all the agony of thought in which she had struggled on her way, had their reaction on her. She shivered where she sat on the damp straw which they had cast upon the stones; and strange noises sang in her ears, and strange lights glimmered and flashed before her eyes. She did not know what ailed her.
The dogs came and smelt at her, and one little early robin sang a twilight song in an elder-bush near. These were the only things that had any pity on her.
By-and-by, when it was quite night, they opened the grated door and thrust in another captive, a vagrant they had found drunk or delirious on the highroad, whom they locked up for the night, that on the morrow they might determine what to do with him.
He threw himself heavily forward as he was pushed in by the old soldier whose place it was to guard the miserable den.
She shrank away into the farthest corner of the den, and crouched there, breathing heavily, and staring with dull, dilated eyes.
She thought,—surely they could not mean to leave them there alone, all the night through, in the horrible darkness.
The slamming of the iron door answered her; and the old soldier, as he turned the rusty key in the lock, grumbled that the world was surely at a pretty pass, when two tramps became too coy to roost together. And he stumbled up the ladder-like stairs of the guard-house to his own little chamber; and there, smoking and drinking, and playing dominoes with a comrade, dismissed his prisoners from his recollection.
Meanwhile, the man whom he had thrust into the cell was stretched where he had fallen, drunk or insensible, and moaning heavily.
She, crouching against the wall, as though praying the stones to yield and hold her, gazed at him with horror and pity that together strove in the confusion of her dizzy brain, and made her dully wonder whether she were wicked thus to shrink in loathing from a creature in distress so like her own.
The bright moon rose on the other side of the trees beyond the grating; its light fell across the figure of the vagrant whom they had locked in with her, as in the wild-beast shows of old they locked a lion with an antelope in the same cage—out of sport.
She saw the looming massive shadow of an immense form, couched like a crouching beast; she saw the fire of burning, wide-open, sullen eyes; she saw the restless, feeble gesture of two lean hands, that clutched at the barren stones with the futile action of a chained vulture clutching at his rock; she saw that the man suffered horribly, and she tried to pity him—tried not to shrink from him—tried to tell herself that he might be as guiltless as was herself. But she could not prevail: nature, instinct, youth, sex, sickness, exhaustion, all conquered her, and broke her strength. She recoiled from the unbearable agony of that horrible probation; she sprang to the grated aperture, and seized the iron in her hands, and shook it with all her might, and tore at it, and bruised her chest and arms against it, and clung to it convulsively, shriek after shriek pealing from her lips.
No one heard, or no one answered to her prayer.
A stray dog came and howled in unison; the moon sailed on behind the trees; the old soldier above slept over his toss of brandy; at the only dwelling near they were dancing at a bridal, and had no ear to hear.
The passionate outcries wailed themselves to silence on her trembling mouth; her strained hands gave way from their hold on the irons; she grew silent from sheer exhaustion, and dropped in a heap at the foot of the iron door, clinging to it, and crushed against it, and turning her face to the night without, feeling some little sense of solace in the calm clear moon;—some little sense of comfort in the mere presence of the dog.
Meanwhile the dusky prostrate form of the man had not stirred.
He had not spoken, save to curse heaven and earth and every living thing. He had not ceased to glare at her with eyes that had the red light of a tiger's in their pain. He was a man of superb stature and frame; he was worn by disease and delirium, but he had in him a wild, leonine tawny beauty still. His clothes were of rags, and his whole look was of wretchedness; yet there was about him a certain reckless majesty and splendor still, as the scattered beams of the white moonlight broke themselves upon him.
Of a sudden he spoke aloud, with a glitter of terrible laughter on his white teeth and his flashing eyes. He was delirious, and had no consciousness of where he was.
"The fourth bull I had killed that Easter-day. Look! do you see? It was a red Andalusian. He had wounded three picadors, and ripped the bellies of eight horses,—a brave bull, but I was one too many for him. She was there. All the winter she had flouted over and taunted me; all the winter she had cast her scorn at me—the beautiful brown thing, with her cruel eyes. But she was there when I slew the great red bull—straight above there, looking over her fan. Do you see? And when my sword went up to the hilt in his throat, and the brave blood spouted, she laughed such a little sweet laugh, and cast her yellow jasmine flower at me, down in the blood and the sand there. And that night, after the red bull died, the rope was thrown from the balcony! So—so! Only a year ago; only a year ago!"
Then he laughed loud again; and, laughing, sang—
"Avez-vous vu en Barcelonne
Une belle dame, au sein bruni,
Pâle comme un beau soir d'automne?
C'est ma maîtresse, ma lionne,
La Marchesa d'Amaguï."
The rich, loud challenge of the love-song snapped short in two. With a groan and a curse he flung himself on the mud floor, and clutched at it with his empty hands.
"Wine!—wine!" he moaned, lying athirst there as the red bull had lain on the sands of the circus; longing for the purple draughts of his old feast-nights, as the red bull had longed for the mountain streams, so cold and strong, of its own Andalusian birthplace.
Then he laughed again, and sang old songs of Spain, broken and marred by discord—their majestic melodies wedded strangely to many a stave of lewd riot and of amorous verse.
Then for awhile he was quiet, moaning dully, staring upward at the white face of the moon.
After awhile he mocked it—the cold, chaste thing that was the meek trickster of so many mole-eyed lords.
Through the terror and the confusion of her mind, with the sonorous melody of the tongue, with the flaming darkness of the eyes, with the wild barbaric dissolute grandeur of this shattered manhood, vague memories floated, distorted and intangible, before her. Of deep forests whose shade was cool even in midsummer and at mid-day; of glancing torrents rushing through their beds of stone; of mountain snows flashing in sunset to all the hues of the roses that grew in millions by the river-water; of wondrous nights, sultry and serene, in which women with flashing glances and bare breasts danced with their spangled anklets glittering in the rays of the moon; of roofless palaces where the crescent still glistened on the colors of the walls; of marble pomps, empty and desolate, where only the oleander held pomp and the wild fig-vine held possession; of a dead nation which at midnight thronged through the desecrated halls of its kings and passed in shadowy hosts through the fated land which had rejected the faith and the empire of Islam; sowing as they went upon the blood-soaked soil the vengeance of the dead in pestilence, in feud, in anarchy, in barren passions, in endless riot and revolt, so that no sovereign should sit in peace on the ruined throne of the Moslem, and no light shine ever again upon the people whose boast it once had been that on them the sun in heaven never set:—all these memories floated before her and only served to make her fear more ghastly, her horror more unearthly.
There he lay delirious—a madman chained at her feet, so close in the little den that, shrink as she would against the wall, she could barely keep from the touch of his hands as they were flung forth in the air, from the scorch of his breath as he raved and cursed.
And there was no light except the fire in his fierce, hot eyes; except the flicker of the moonbeam through the leaves.
She spent her strength in piteous shrieks. They were the first cries that had ever broken from her lips for human aid; and they were vain.
The guard above slept heavy with brandy and a dotard's dreams. The village was not aroused. What cared any of its sleepers how these outcasts fared?
She crouched in the farthest corner, when her agony had spent itself in the passion of appeal.
The night—would it ever end?
Besides its horror, all the wretchedness and bondage of her old life seemed like peace and freedom.
Writhing in his pain and frenzy, the wounded drunkard struck her—all unconscious of the blow—across her eyes, and fell, contorted and senseless, with his head upon her knees.
He had ceased to shout his amorous songs, and vaunt his lustful triumphs. His voice was hollow in his throat, and babbled with a strange sound, low and fast and inarticulate.
"In the little green wood—in the little green wood," he muttered. "Hark! do you hear the mill-water run? She looked so white and so cold; and they all called her a saint. What could a man do but kill that? Does she cry out against me? You say so? You lie. You lie—be you devil or god. You sit on a great white throne and judge us all. So they say. You can send us to hell?… Well, do. You shall never wring a word from her to my hurt. She thinks I killed the child? Nay—that I swear. Phratos knew, I think. But he is dead;—so they say. Ask him.... My brown queen, who saw me kill the red bull,—are you there too? Ay. How the white jewels shine in your breast! Stoop a little, and kiss me. So! Your mouth burns; and the yellow jasmine flower—there is a snake in it. Look! You love me?—oh-ho!—what does your priest say, and your lord? Love!—so many of you swore that. But she,—she, standing next to her god there,—I hurt her most, and yet she alone of you all says nothing!"
When, at daylight, the people unbarred the prison-door, they found the sightless face of the dead man lying full in the light of the sun: beside him the girl crouched with a senseless stare in the horror of her eyes, and on her lips a ghastly laugh.
For Folle-Farine had entered at length into her Father's kingdom.
CHAPTER VIII
For many months she knew nothing of the flight of time. All she was conscious of were burning intolerable pain, continual thirst, and the presence of as an iron hand upon her head, weighing down the imprisoned brain. All she saw in the horrible darkness, which no ray of light ever broke, was the face of Thanatos, with the white rose pressed against his mouth, to whom endlessly she stretched her arms in vain entreaty, but who said only, with the passionless pity of his gaze, "I come in my own time, and neither tarry nor hasten for any supplication of a mortal creature."
She lived as a reed torn up from the root may live by the winds that waft it, by the birds that carry it, by the sands that draw its fibers down into themselves, to root afresh whether it will or no.
"The reed was worthy to die!—the reed was worthy to die!" was all that she said, again and again, lying staring with her hot distended eyes into the void as of perpetual night, which was all that she saw around her. The words were to those who heard her, however, the mere meaningless babble of madness.
When they had found her in the cell of the guard-house, she was far beyond any reach of harm from them, or any sensibility of the worst which they might do to her. She was in a delirious stupor, which left her no more sense of place, or sound, or time than if her brain had been drugged to the agonies and ecstasies of the opium-eater.
They found her homeless, friendless, nameless; a thing accursed, destitute, unknown; as useless and as rootless as the dead Spanish vagrant lying on the stones beside her. They cast him to the public ditch; they sent her to the public sick wards, a league away; an ancient palace, whose innumerable chambers and whose vast corridors had been given to a sisterhood of mercy, and employed for nigh a century as a public hospital.
In this prison she lay without any sense of the passing of hours and days and months.
The accusation against her fell to the ground harmless; no one pursued it: the gold was gone—somewhere, nowhere. No one knew, unless it were the bee-wife, and she held her peace.
She was borne, senseless, to the old hospice in the great, dull, saintly, historic town, and there perished from all memories as all time perished to her.
Once or twice the sister of charity who had the charge of her sought to exorcise the demon tormenting this stricken brain and burning body, by thrusting into the hands that clinched the air a leaden image or a cross of sacred wood. But those heathen hands, even in delirium, threw those emblems away always, and the captive would mutter in a vague incoherence that froze the blood of her hearers:
"The old gods are not dead; they only wait—they only wait! I am theirs—theirs! They forget, perhaps. But I remember. I keep my faith; they must keep theirs, for shame's sake. Heaven or hell? what does it matter? Can it matter to me, so that he has his desire? And that they must give, or break faith, as men do. Persephone ate the pomegranate,—you know—and she went back to hell. So will I—if they will it. What can it matter how the reed dies?—by fire, by steel, by storm?—what matter, so that the earth hear the music? Ah, God! the reed was found worthy to die! And I—I am too vile, too poor, too shameful even for that!"
And then her voice would rise in a passion of hysteric weeping, or sink away into the feeble wailing of the brain, mortally stricken and yet dimly sensible of its own madness and weakness; and all through the hours she, in her unconsciousness, would lament for this—for this alone—that the gods had not deemed her worthy of the stroke of death by which, through her, a divine melody might have arisen, and saved the world.
For the fable—which had grown to hold the place of so implicit a faith to her—was in her delirium always present with her; and she had retained no sense of herself except as the bruised and trampled reed which man and the gods alike had rejected as unworthy of sacrifice.
All the late autumn and the early winter came and went; and the cloud was dark upon her mind, and the pain of the blow dealt to her by Taric's hand gnawed at her brain.
When the winter turned, the darkness in which her reason had been engulfed began to clear, little by little.
As the first small trill of the wren stirred the silence in the old elm-boughs; as the first feeble gleam of the new-year sunshine struggled through the matted branches of the yews; as the first frail blossom of the pale hepatica timidly peeped forth in the damp moss-grown walls without, so consciousness slowly returned to her. She was so young; the youth in her refused to be quenched, and recovered its hold upon life as did the song of the birds, the light in the skies, the corn in the seed-sown earth.
She awakened to strength, to health, to knowledge; though she awoke thus blinded and confused and capable of little save the sense of some loathsome bondage, of some irreparable loss, of some great duty which she had left undone, of some great errand to which she had been summoned, and found wanting.
She saw four close stone walls around her; she saw her wrists and her ankles bound; she saw a hole high up above her head, braced with iron bars, which served to let in a few pallid streaks of daylight which alone ever found their way thither; she saw a black cross in one corner, and before it two women in black, who prayed.
She tried to rise, and could not, being fettered. She tore at the rope on her wrists with her teeth, like a young tigress at her chains.
They essayed to soothe her, but in vain; they then made trial first of threats, then of coercion; neither affected her; she bit at the knotted cords with her white, strong teeth, and, being unable to free herself, fell backward in a savage despair, glaring in mute impotent rage upon her keepers.
"I must go to Paris," she muttered again and again. "I must go to Paris."
So much escaped her;—but her secret she was still strong to keep buried in silence in her heart, as she had still kept it even in her madness.
Her old strength, her old patience, her old ferocity and stubbornness and habits of mute resistance, had revived in her with the return of life and reason. Slowly she remembered all things—remembered that she had been accused and hunted down as a thief and brought thither into this prison, as she deemed it, where the closeness of the walls pent her in and shut out the clouds and the stars, the water and the moonrise, the flicker of the green leaves against the gold of sunset, and all the liberty and loveliness of earth and air for which she was devoured by a continual thirst of longing, like the thirst of the caged lark for the fair heights of heaven.
So when they spoke of their god, she answered always as the lark answers when his jailers speak to him of song:—"Set me free."
But they thought this madness no less, and kept her bound there in the little dark stone den, where no sound ever reached, unless it were the wailing of a bell, and no glimpse of the sky or the trees could ever come to charm to peaceful rest her aching eyes.
At length they grew afraid of what they did. She refused all food; she turned her face to the wall; she stretched herself on her bed of straw motionless and rigid. The confinement, the absence of air, were a living death to the creature whose lungs were stifled unless they drank in the fresh cool draught of winds blowing unchecked over the width of the fields and forests, and whose eyes ached and grew blind unless they could gaze into the depths of free-flowing water, or feed themselves in far-reaching sight upon the radiant skies.
The errant passions in her, the inborn instincts towards perpetual liberty, and the life of the desert and of the mountains which came with the blood of the Zingari, made her prison-house a torture to her such as is unknown to the house-born and hearth-fettered races.
If this wild moorbird died of self-imposed famine rather than live only to beat its cut wings against the four walls of their pent prison-house, it might turn ill for themselves; so the religious community meditated. They became afraid of their own work.
One day they said to her:
"Eat and live, and you will be set free to-morrow."
She turned for the first time, and lifted her face from the straw in which she buried it, and looked them in the eyes.
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Ay," they answered her. "We swear it by the cross of our blessed Master."
"If a Christian swear it,—it must be a lie," she said, with the smile that froze their timid blood.
But she accepted the food and the drink which they brought her, and broke her fast, and slept through many hours; strengthened, as by strong wine, by that one hope of freedom beneath the wide pure skies.
She asked them on awakening what the season of the year was then. They told her it was the early spring.
"The spring," she echoed dully,—all the months were a blank to her, which had rolled by since that red autumn evening when in the cell of the guard-house the voice of Taric had chanted in drink and delirium the passion songs of Spain.
"Yes. It is spring," they said again; and one sister, younger and gentler than the rest, reached from its place above the crucifix the bough of the golden catkins of the willow, which served them at their holy season as an emblem of the palms of Palestine.
She looked at the drooping grace of the branches, with their buds of amber, long and in silence; then with a passion of weeping she turned her face from them as from the presence of some intolerable memory.
All down the shore of the river, amongst the silver of the reeds, the willows had been in blossom when she had first looked upon the face of Arslàn.
"Stay with us," the women murmured, drawn to her by the humanity of those the first tears that she had ever shed in her imprisonment. "Stay with us; and it shall go hard if we cannot find a means to bring you to eternal peace."
She shook her head wearily.
"It is not peace that I seek," she murmured.
Peace?
He would care nothing for peace on earth or in heaven, she knew. What she had sought to gain for him—what she would seek still when once she should get free—was the eternal conflict of a great fame in the world of men; since this was the only fate which in his sight had any grace or any glory in it.
They kept their faith with her. They opened the doors of her prison-house and bade her depart in peace, pagan and criminal though they deemed her.
She reeled a little dizzily as the first blaze of the full daylight fell on her. She walked out with unsteady steps into the open air where they took her, and felt it cool and fresh upon her cheek, and saw the blue sky above her.
The gates which they unbarred were those at the back of the hospital, where the country stretched around. They did not care that she should be seen by the people of the streets.
She was left alone on a road outside the great building that had been her prison-house; the road was full of light, it was straight and shadowless; there was a tall tree near her full of leaf; there was a little bird fluttering in the sand at her feet; the ground was wet, and sparkled with rain-drops.
All the little things came to her like the notes of a song heard far away—far away—in another world. They were all so familiar, yet so strange.
There was a little yellow flower growing in a tuft of grasses straight in front of her; a little wayside weed; a root and blossom of the field-born celandine.
She fell on her knees in the dust by it, and laughed and wept, and, quivering, kissed it and blessed it that it grew there. It was the first thing of summer and of sunshine that she had seen for so long.
A man in the gateway saw her, and shook her, and bade her get from the ground.
"You are fitter to go back again," he muttered; "you are mad still, I think."
Like a hunted animal she stumbled to her feet and fled from him; winged by the one ghastly terror that they would claim her and chain her back again.
They had said that she was free: but what were words? They had taken her once; they might take her twice.
She ran, and ran, and ran.
The intense fear that possessed her lent her irresistible force. She coursed the earth with the swiftness of a hare. She took no heed whence she went; she only knew that she fled from that one unutterable horror of the place. She thought that they were right; that she was mad.
It was a level, green, silent country which was round her, with little loveliness and little color; but as she went she laughed incessantly in the delirious gladness of her liberty.
She tossed her head back to watch the flight of a single swallow; she caught a handful of green leaves and buried her face in them. She listened in a very agony of memory to the rippling moisture of a little brook. She followed with her eyes the sweeping vapors of the rain-clouds, and when a west wind rose and blew a cluster of loose apple-blossoms between her eyes, she could no longer bear the passionate pain of all the long-lost sweetness, but, flinging herself downward, sobbed with the ecstasy of an exile's memories.
The hell in which she had dwelt had denied them to her for so long.
"Ah, God!" she thought, "I know now—one cannot be utterly wretched whilst one has still the air and the light and the winds of the sky."
And she arose, calmer, and went on her way; wondering, even in that hour, why men and women trod the daily measures of their lives with their eyes downward, and their ears choked with the dust, hearkening so little to the sound of the breeze in the grasses, looking so little to the passage of the clouds against the sun.
When the first blindness and rapture of her liberty had a little passed away, and abated in violence, she stood in the midst of the green fields and the fresh woods, a strange, sad, lonely figure of absolute desolation.
Her clothes were in rags; her red girdle had been changed by weather to a dusky purple; her thick clustering hair had been cut to her throat; her radiant hues were blanched, and her immense eyes gazed woefully from beneath their heavy dreamy lids, like the eyes of an antelope whom men vainly starve in the attempt to tame.
She knew neither where to go nor what to do. She had not a coin nor a crust upon her. She could not tell where she then stood, nor where the only home that she had ever known might lie.
She had not a friend on earth; and she was seventeen years old, and was beautiful, and was a woman.
She stood and looked; she did not weep; she did not pray; her heart seemed frozen in her. She had the gift she had craved,—and how could she use it?
The light was obscured by clouds, great, sweet rain-clouds which came trooping from the west. Woods were all round, and close against her were low brown cattle, cropping clovered grass. Away on the horizon was a vague, vast, golden cloud, like a million threads of gossamer glowing in the sun.
She did not know what it was; yet it drew her eyes to it. She thought of the palaces.
A herdsman came by her to the cattle. She pointed to the cloud.
"What is that light?" she asked him.
The cowherd stared and laughed.
"That light? It is only the sun shining on the domes and the spires of Paris."
"Paris!"
She echoed the name with a great sob, and crossed her hands upon her breast, and in her way thanked God.
She had had no thought that she could be thus near to it.
She asked no more, but set straight on her way thither. It looked quite close.
She had exhausted the scanty strength which she had in her first flight; she could go but slowly; and the roads were heavy across the plowed lands, and through the edges of the woods. She walked on and on till it grew dusk, then she asked of a woman weeding in a field how far it might be yet to Paris.
The woman told her four leagues and more.
She grew deadly cold with fear. She was weak, and she had no hope that she could reach it before dawn; and she had nothing with which to buy shelter for the night. She could see it still; a cloud, now as of fireflies, upon the purple and black of the night; and in a passionate agony of longing she once more bent her limbs and ran—thinking of him.
To her the city of the world, the city of the kings, the city of the eagles, was only of value for the sake of this one life it held.
It was useless. All the strength she possessed was already spent. The feebleness of fever still sang in her ears and trembled in her blood. She was sick and faint, and very thirsty.
She struck timidly at a little cottage door, and asked to rest the night there.
The woman glanced at her and slammed to the door. At another and yet another she tried; but at neither had she any welcome; they muttered of the hospitals and drove her onward. Finally, tired out, she dropped down on the curled hollow of an old oak stump that stood by the wayside, and fell asleep, seeing to the last through her sinking lids that cloud of light where the great city lay.
The night was cold; the earth damp; she stretched her limbs out wearily and sighed, and dreamed that Thanatos touched her with his asphodels and whispered, "Come."
