Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Where she went at her labors, to and fro among the bushes and by the glancing water, she saw the steel hook and caught his sideway gaze, and read his meditation.

  She laughed, and did not fear. Only she thought, “He shall not do it till I have been back there.”

  Before the day was done, thither she went.

  He had kept her close since the sunrise.

  Not sending her out on any of the errands to and fro the country, which had a certain pleasure to her, because she gained by them liberty and air, and the contentment of swift movement against fresh blowing winds. Nor did he send her to the town. He employed her through ten whole hours in outdoor garden labor, and in fetching and carrying from his yard to his lofts, always within sight of his own quick eye, and within call of his harsh voice.

  She did not revolt. She did what he bade her do swiftly and well. There was no fault to find in any of her labors.

  When the last sack was carried, the last sod turned, the last burden borne, the sun was sinking, he bade her roughly go indoors and winnow last year’s wheat in the store chambers till he should bid her cease.

  She came and stood before him, her eyes very quiet in their look of patient strength.

  “I have worked from daybreak through to sunset,” she said, slowly, to him. “It is enough for man and beast. The rest I claim.”

  Before he could reply she had leaped the low stone wall that parted the timber-yard from the orchard, and was out of sight, flying far and fast through the twilight of the boughs.

  He muttered a curse, and let her go. His head drooped on his breast, his hands worked restlessly on the stone coping of the wall, his withered lips muttered in wrath.

  “There is hell in her,” he said to himself. “Let her go to her rightful home. There is one thing — —”

  “There is one thing?” echoed the old woman, hanging washed linen out to dry on the boughs of the half-bloomed almond-shrubs.

  He gave a dreary, greedy, miser’s chuckle:

  “One thing; — I have made the devil work for me hard and well ten whole years through!”

  “The devil!” mumbled the woman Pitchou, in contemptuous iteration. “Dost think the devil was ever such a fool as to work for thy wage of blows and of black bread? Why, he rules the world, they say! And how should he rule unless he paid his people well?”

  Folle-Farine fled on, through the calm woodlands, through the pastures where the leek herds dreamed their days away, through the young wheat and the springing colza, and the little fields all bright with promise of the spring, and all the sunset’s wealth of golden light.

  The league was but as a step to her, trained as her muscles were to speed and strength until her feet were as fleet as are the doe’s. When she had gained her goal then only she paused, stricken with a sudden shyness and terror of what she hardly knew.

  An instinct, rather than a thought, turned her towards a little grass-hidden pool behind the granary, whose water never stirred, save by a pigeon’s rosy foot, or by a timid plover’s beak, was motionless and clear as any mirror.

  Instinct, rather than thought, bent her head over it, and taught her eyes to seek her own reflection. It had a certain wonder in it to her now that fascinated her with a curious indefinable attraction. For the first time in her life she had thought of it, and done such slight things as she could to make it greater. They were but few, — linen a little whiter and less coarse — the dust shaken from her scarlet sash; her bronze-hued hair burnished to richer darkness; a knot of wild narcissi in her bosom gathered with the dew on them as she came through the wood.

  This was all; yet this was something; something that showed the dawn of human impulses, of womanly desires. As she looked, she blushed for her own foolishness; and, with a quick hand, cast the white wood-flowers into the center of the pool. It seemed to her now, though only a moment earlier she had gathered them, so senseless and so idle to have decked herself with their borrowed loveliness. As if for such things as these he cared!

  Then, slowly, and with her head sunk, she entered his dwelling-place.

  Arslàn stood with his face turned from her, bending down over a trestle of wood.

  He did not hear her as she approached; she drew quite close to him and looked where she saw that he looked; down on the wooden bench. What she saw were a long falling stream of light-hued hair, a gray still face, closed eyes, and naked limbs, which did not stir save when his hand moved them a little in their posture, and which then dropped from his hold like lead.

  She did not shudder nor exclaim; she only looked with quiet and incurious eyes. In the life of the poor such a sight has neither novelty nor terror.

  It did not even seem strange to her to see it in such a place. He started slightly as he grew sensible of her presence, and turned, and threw a black cloth over the trestle.

  “Do not look there,” he said to her. “I had forgotten you. Otherwise — —”

  “I have looked there. It is only a dead woman.”

  “Only! What makes you say that?”

  “I do not know. There are many — are there not?”

  He looked at her in surprise seeing that this utter lack of interest or curiosity was true and not assumed; that awe, and reverence, and dread, and all emotions which rise in human hearts before the sight or memory of death were wholly absent from her.

  “There are many indeed,” he made answer, slowly. “Just there is the toughest problem — it is the insect life of the world; it is the clouds of human ephemeræ, begotten one summer day to die the next; it is the millions on millions of men and women born, as it were, only to be choked by the reek of cities, and then fade out to nothing; it is the numbers that kill one’s dreams of immortality!”

  She looked wearily up at him, not comprehending, and, indeed, he had spoken to himself and not to her; she lifted up one corner of the cere cloth and gazed a little while at the dead face, the face of a girl young, and in a slight, soft, youthful manner, fair.

  “It is Fortis, the ragpicker’s daughter,” she said, indifferently, and dropped back the sheltering cloth. She did not know what nor why she envied, and yet she was jealous of this white dead thing that abode there so peacefully and so happily with the caress of his touch on its calm limbs.

  “Yes,” he answered her. “It is his daughter. She died twenty hours ago, — of low fever, they say — famine, no doubt.”

  “Why do you have her here?” She felt no sorrow for the dead girl; the girl had mocked and jibed her many a time as a dark witch devil-born; she only felt a jealous and restless hatred of her intrusion here.

  “The dead sit to me often,” he said, with a certain smile that had sadness and yet coldness in it.

  “Why?”

  “That they may tell me the secrets of life.”

  “Do they tell them?”

  “A few; — most they keep. See, — I paint death; I must watch it to paint it. It is dreary work, you think? It is not so to me. The surgeon seeks his kind of truth; I seek mine. The man Fortis came to me on the riverside last night. He said to me, ‘You like studying the dead, they say; have my dead for a copper coin. I am starving; — and it cannot hurt her.’ So I gave him the coin — though I am as poor as he — and I took the dead woman. Why do you look like that? It is nothing to you; the girl shall go to her grave when I have done with her.”

  She bent her head in assent. It was nothing to her; and yet it filled her with a cruel feverish jealousy, it weighed on her with a curious pain.

  She did not care for the body lying there — it had been but the other day that the dead girl had shot her lips out at her in mockery and called her names from a balcony in an old ruined house as the boat drifted past it; but there passed over her a dreary shuddering remembrance that she, likewise, might one day lie thus before him and be no more to him than this. The people said that he who studied death, brought death.

  The old wistful longing that had moved her, when Marcellin had died, to lay her down in the cool water and
let it take her to long sleep and to complete forgetfulness returned to her again. Since the dead were of value to him, best, she thought, be of them, and lie here in that dumb still serenity, caressed by his touch and his regard. For, in a manner, she was jealous of this woman, as of some living rival who had, in her absence, filled her place and been of use to him and escaped his thought.

  Any ghastliness or inhumanity in this search of his for the truth of his art amidst the frozen limbs and rigid muscles of a corpse, never occurred to her. To her he was like a deity; to her these poor weak shreds of broken human lives, these fragile empty vessels, whose wine of life had been spilled like water that runs to waste, seemed beyond measurement to be exalted when deemed by him of value.

  She would have thought no more of grudging them if his employ and in his service than priests of Isis or of Eleusis would have begrudged the sacrificed lives of beasts and birds that smoked upon their temple altars. To die at his will and be of use to him; — this seemed to her the most supreme glory fate could hold; and she envied the ragpicker’s daughter lying there in such calm content.

  “Why do you look so much at her?” he said at length. “I shall do her no harm; if I did, what would she know?”

  “I was not thinking of her,” she answered slowly, with a certain perplexed pain upon her face. “I was thinking I might be of more use to you if I were dead. You must not kill me, because men would hurt you for that; but, if you wish, I will kill myself to-night. I have often thought of it lately.”

  He started at the strangeness and the suddenness of the words spoken steadily and with perfect sincerity and simplicity in the dialect of the district, with no sense in their speaker of anything unusual being offered in them. His eyes tried to search the expression of her face with greater interest and curiosity than they had ever done; and they gained from their study but little.

  For the innumerable emotions awakening in her were only dimly shadowed there, and had in them the confusion of all imperfect expression. He could not tell whether here was a great soul struggling through the bonds of an intense ignorance and stupefaction, or whether there were only before him an animal perfect, wonderfully perfect, in its physical development, but mindless as any clod of earth.

  He did not know how to answer her.

  “Why should you think of death?” he said at last. “Is your life so bitter to you?”

  She stared at him.

  “Is a beaten dog’s bitter? or is a goaded ox’s sweet?”

  “But you are so young, — and you are handsome, and a woman?”

  She laughed a little.

  “A woman! Marcellin said that.”

  “Well! What is there strange in saying it?”

  She pointed to the corpse which the last sunrays were brightening, till the limbs were as alabaster and the hair was as gold.

  “That was a woman — a creature that is white and rose, and has yellow hair and laughs in the faces of men, and has a mother that kisses her lips, and sees the children come to play at her knees. I am not one. I am a devil, they say.”

  His mouth smiled with a touch of sardonic humor, whose acrimony and whose irony escaped her.

  “What have you done so good, or so great, that your world should call you so?”

  Her eyes clouded and lightened alternately.

  “You do not believe that I am a devil?”

  “How should I tell? If you covet the title claim it, — you have a right, — you are a woman!”

  “Always a woman!” she muttered with disappointment and with impatience.

  “Always a woman,” he echoed as he pointed to the god Hermes. “And there is your creator.”

  “He!”

  She looked rapidly and wistfully at the white-winged god.

  “Yes. He made Woman; for he made her mind out of treachery and her words out of the empty wind. Hephæstus made her heart, fusing for it brass and iron. Their work has worn well. It has not changed in all these ages. But what is your history? Go and lie yonder, where you were last night, and tell me your story while I work.”

  She obeyed him and told him what she knew; lying there, where he had motioned her, in the shadow under the figures of the three grandsons of Chaos. He listened, and wrought on at her likeness.

  The story, as she told it in her curt imperfect words, was plain enough to him, though to herself obscure. It had in some little measure a likeness to his own.

  It awakened a certain compassion for her in his heart, which was rarely moved to anything like pity. For to him nature was so much and man so little, the one so majestic and so exhaustless, the other so small and so ephemeral, that human wants and human woes touched him but very slightly. His own, even at their darkest, moved him rather to self-contempt than to self-compassion, for these were evils of the body and of the senses.

  As a boy he had had no ear to the wail of the frozen and famishing people wandering homeless over the waste of drifted snow, where but the night before a village had nestled in the mountain hollow; all his senses had been given in a trance of awe and rapture to the voices of the great winds sweeping down from the heights through the pine-forests, and the furious seas below gnashing and raging on the wreck-strewn strand. It was with these last that he had had kinship and communion: these endured always; but for the men they slew, what were they more in the great sum of time than forest-leaves or ocean driftwood?

  And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the grasses of the fields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of water that ripples in a brook — to these the mortal life of man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent; tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity. Hence pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly assails the unknown God in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind: — the horse staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore and shivering to its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its noble life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable hell in which all these gentle, kindly and long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of men, — these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.

  But when he saw men and women suffer he often smiled, not ill pleased. It seemed to him that the worst they could ever endure was only such simple retribution, such mere fair measure of all the agonies they cast broadcast.

  Therefore he pitied her now for what repulsed all others from her — that she had so little apparent humanity, and that she was so like an animal in her strength and weakness, and in her ignorance of both her rights and wrongs. Therefore he pitied her; and there was that in her strange kind of beauty, in her half-savage, half-timid attitudes, in her curt, unlearned, yet picturesque speech, which attracted him. Besides, although solitude was his preference, he had been for more than two years utterly alone, his loneliness broken only by the companionship of boors,
with whom he had not had one thought in common. The extreme poverty in which the latter months of his life had been passed, had excluded him from all human society, since he could have sought none without betraying his necessities. The alms-seeking visit of some man even more famished and desperate than himself, such as the ragpicker who had brought the dead girl to him for a few brass coins, had been the only relief to the endless monotony of his existence, a relief that made such change in it worse than its continuance.

  In Folle-Farine, for the first time in two long, bitter, colorless, hated years, there was something which aroused his interest and his curiosity, some one to whom impulse led him to speak the thoughts of his mind with little concealment. She seemed, indeed, scarcely more than a wild beast, half tamed, inarticulate, defiant, shy, it might be even, if aroused, ferocious; but it was an animal whose eyes dilated in quickening sympathy with all his moods, and an animal whom, at a glance, he knew would, in time, crawl to him or combat for him as he chose.

  He talked to her now, much on the same impulse that moves a man, long imprisoned, to converse with the spider that creeps on the floor, with the mouse that drinks from his pitcher, and makes him treat like an intelligent being the tiny flower growing blue and bright between the stones, which is all that brings life into his loneliness.

  The prison door once flung open, the sunshine once streaming across the darkness, the fetters once struck off, the captive once free to go out again among his fellows, then — the spider is left to miss the human love that it has learnt, the mouse is left to die of thirst, the little blue flower is left to fade out as it may in the stillness and the gloom alone. Then they are nothing: but while the prison doors are still locked they are much.

  Here the jailer was poverty, and the prison was the world’s neglect, and they who lay bound were high hopes, great aspirations, impossible dreams, immeasurable ambitions, all swathed and fettered, and straining to be free with dumb, mad force against bonds that would not break.