by Ouida
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 pai
nful 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-fl
ower. 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.