by Ouida
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 w
eeds 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.