by Ouida
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 re
moved 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 recal
led 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.