by Ouida
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-mor
row,” 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.