by Ouida
There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so much as a loaf or a fagot; even if the thought of human aid had ever dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human hand — to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child — was always clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged mercy or aid at any human hearth.
She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men, women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work hard for every bit or drop that passed her lips; she lived amidst multitudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to which appeal could in such straits be made.
If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.
What could she do? she pondered.
Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she stood irresolute.
To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.
In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.
All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to see the children and the maidens — those who held her accursed, and were themselves held so innocent and just — steal the ripe cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the boundary fence to reach another’s pear, speak a lie softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a soldier’s rough salute, while she, the daughter of hell, pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched.
It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, “I am stronger than they,” when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone, though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to the thing which she abhorred.
She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of passion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens around her were haunted; — so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of their vengeful and indolent masters.
She had been so proud! — and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this immunity from her enemies’ weakness, this independence which she had worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.
It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she had offered for his to the gods.
She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.
“That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to swine!” he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in the delirium of his brain.
The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung her to action as the spur stings a horse.
She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water; she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.
It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot deep.
She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue, of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of lead, — the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the watch of the cruel gods.
She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard, stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom, with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as familiar by night as day.
The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.
She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the body of the house.
Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.
She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done, that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor, she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue. She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred in her, blood and bone.
Knowing all the turns and steps of the obscure passages, she quickly found her way to the store-chambers where such food and fuel as were wanted in the house were stored.
The latter was burnt, and the former eaten, sparingly and grudgingly, but the store of both was at this season of the year fairly abundant. It had more than once happened that the mill had been cut off from all communication with the outer world by floods that reached its upper casements, and Claudis Flamma was provided against any such accidents; the more abundantly as he had more than once found it
a lucrative matter in such seasons of inundation to lower provisions from his roof to boats floating below, when the cotters around were in dire need and ready to sell their very souls for a bag of rice or string of onions.
Folle-Farine opened the shutter of the storeroom and let in the faint gray glimmer from the clearing skies.
A bat which had been resting from the storm against the rafters fluttered violently against the lattice; a sparrow driven down the chimney in the hurricane flew up from one of the shelves with a twittering outcry.
She paused to open the lattice for them both, and set them free to fly forth into the still sleeping world; then she took an old rush basket that hung upon a nail, and filled it with the best of such homely food as was to be found there — loaves, and meats, and rice, and oil, and a flask of the richest wine — wine of the south, of the hue of the violet, sold under secrecy at a high charge and profit.
That done, she tied together as large a bundle of brushwood and of fagots as she could push through the window, which was broad and square, and thrust it out by slow degrees; put her basket through likewise, and lowered it carefully to the ground; then followed them herself with the agility born of long practice, and dropped on the grass beneath.
She waited but to close and refasten the shutter from without, then threw the mass of fagots on her shoulders, and carrying in her arms the osier basket, took her backward way through the orchards to the river.
She had not taken either bit or drop for her own use.
She was well used to carry burdens as heavy as the mules bare, and to walk under them unassisted for many leagues to the hamlets and markets roundabout. But even her strength of bronze had become fatigued; she felt frozen to the bone; her clothes were saturated with water, and her limbs were chill and stiff. Yet she trudged on, unblenching and unpausing, over the soaked earth, and through the swollen water and the reeds; keeping always by the side of the stream that was so angry in the darkness; by the side of the gray flooded sands and the rushes that were blowing with a sound like the sea.
She met no living creature except a fox, who rushed between her feet, holding in its mouth a screaming chicken.
Once she stumbled and struck her head and breast with a dull blow against a pile of wood which, in the furious weather, was unseen by her. It stunned her for the instant, but she rallied and looked up with eyes as used to pierce the deepest gloom as any goshawk’s; she discerned the outline of the Calvary, towering high and weirdlike above the edge of the river, where the priests and people had placed it, so that the boatmen could abase themselves and do it honor as they passed the banks.
The lantern on the cross shone far across the stream, but shed no rays upon the path she followed.
At its foot she had stumbled and been bruised upon her errand of mercy; the reflection of its light streamed across to the opposing shore, and gave help to a boat-load of smugglers landing stolen tobacco in a little creek.
She recovered herself and trudged on once more along the lonely road.
“How like their god is to them!” she thought; the wooden crucifix was the type of her persecutors; of those who flouted and mocked her, who flung and pierced her as a witch; who cursed her because she was not of their people. The cross was the hatred of the world incarnated to her; it was in Christ’s name that Marcellin’s corpse had been cast on the dung and in the ditch; it was in Christ’s name that the women had avenged on her the pity which she had shown to Manon Dax; it was in Christ’s name that Flamma scourged her because she would not pass rotten figs for sweet.
For the name of Christ is used to cover every crime, by the peasant who cheats his neighbor of a copper coin, as by the sovereign who massacres a nation for a throne.
She left the black cross reared there against the rushes, and plodded on through sand and rain and flood, bearing her load: — in Christ’s name they would have seized her as a thief.
The storm abated a little, and every now and then a gleam of moonlight was shed upon the flooded meadows. She gained the base of the tower, and, by means of the length of rope, let by degrees the firewood and the basket through the open portion of the window on to the floor below, then again followed them herself.
Her heart thrilled as she entered.
Her first glance to the desolate hearth showed her that the hours of her absence had brought no change there. The gods had not kept faith with her, they had not raised him from the dead.
“They have left it all to me!” she thought, with a strange sweet yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.
She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made nestless by the hurricane.
He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a strong shudder shook him.
His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.
“J’avais quelque chose là!” he muttered, incoherently, his voice rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.
“J’avais quelque chose là!” and with a sigh he fell back once more — his head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.
Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with him — that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died like a dog, powerless to save them.
The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath — the one bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs — stayed on the blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create — that once it had been clear to record — that once it had dreamed the dreams which save men from the life of the swine — that once it had told to the world the truth divested of lies, — and that none had seen, none had listened, none had believed.
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the theft of the parasite.
She only dimly understood, and yet she was smitten with awe and reverence at that endless grief which had no taint of cowardice upon it, but was pure as the patriot’s despair, impersonal as the prophet’s agony.
For the first time the mind in her consciously awoke.
For the first time she heard a human mind find voice even in its stupor and its wretchedness to cry aloud, in reproach to its unknown Creator:
“I am yours! Shall I perish with the body? Why have bade me desire the light and seek it, if forever you must thrust me into the darkness of negation? Shall I be Nothing like the muscle that rots, like the bones that crumble, like the flesh that turns to ashes, and blow in a film on the winds? Shall I die so? I? — the mind of a man, the breath of a god?”
Time went by; the chimes from the cathedral tolled dully through the darkness over the expanse of the flood.
The light from the burning wood shone redly and fitfully. The sigh and moan of the tossed rushes and of the water-birds, aw
akened and afraid, came from the outer world on the winds that blew through the desolation of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the high roof, taking refuge from the night. Rats hurried, noiseless and eager, over the stones of the floor, seeking stray grains that fell through the rafters from the granaries above.
She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor around; all she heard was the throb of the delirious words on the silence, all she saw was the human face in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.
The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of Thanatos, the laughing eyes of Pan; Hermes’ fair cold derisive face, and the splendor of the Lykegènés toiling in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to grind bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips of men.
But at the gods she barely looked; her eyes were bent upon the human form before her. She crouched beside him, half kneeling and half sitting: her clothes were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of the air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since the noon of the day; but she had no other remembrance than of this life which had the beauty of the sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange sad words, at times of sense, at times of folly, but always, whether lucid or delirious, words of a passionate rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament for the soul in him that would be with the body quenched.
After awhile the feverish mutterings of his voice were lower and less frequent; his eyes seemed to become sensible of the glare of the fire, and to contract and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to sigh and shudder, and he grew quite still; his breath came tranquilly, his head fell back, he sank to a deep sleep.
The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would have assailed creatures at once less savage and less innocent never moved her for an instant. That there was any strangeness in her position, any peril in this solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the blood of Taric, could know no physical fear; and her mind at once ignorant and visionary, her temper at once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise an act like hers; suspicions such as would have made a woman less pure and less dauntless tremble at that lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and unheeding whether good or evil might be the issue thereof.