Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The fall of evening always brought her to him; he let her come, finding a certain charm in that savage temper which grew so tame to him, in that fierce courage which to him was so humble, in that absolute ignorance which was yet so curiously blended with so strong a power of fancy and so quick an instinct of beauty. But he let her go again with indifference, and never tried by any word to keep her an hour later than she chose to stay. She was to him like some handsome dangerous beast that flew at all others and crouched to him. He had a certain pleasure in her color and her grace; in making her great eyes glow, and seeing the light of awakening intelligence break over all her beautiful, clouded, fierce face.

  As she learned, too, to hear more often the sound of her own voice, and to use a more varied and copious language, a rude eloquence came naturally to her; and when her silence was broken it was usually for some terse, vivid, picturesque utterance which had an artistic interest for him. In this simple and monotonous province, with its tedious sameness of life and its green arable country that tired the sight fed in youth on the grandeur of cloud-reaching mountains and the tumults of ice-tossing seas, this creature, so utterly unlike her kind, so golden with the glow of tawny desert suns, and so strong with the liberty and the ferocity and the dormant passion and the silent force of some free forest animal, was in a way welcome.

  All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another planet than his own.

  He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the tyranny of a human love.

  She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows, and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake what slumbered there.

  But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.

  The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.

  He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself; despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing — a thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself, — these were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own weakness.

  She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.

  Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at her.

  “She has found a lover, — oh-ho! — that brown wicked thing! A lover meet for her; — a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!” — so the women screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.

  At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.

  In a grim way, it was a pleasure to him to think that the thing he hated might be accursed body and soul: he had never cared either for her body or her soul; so that the first worked for him, the last might destroy itself in its own darkness: — he had never stretched a finger to hold it back.

  The pride and the honesty and the rude candor and instinctive purity of this young life of hers had been a perpetual hinderance and canker to him: begotten of evil, by all the laws of justice, in evil she should live and die. So Flamma reasoned; and to the sayings of his countryside he gave a stony ear and a stony glance. She never once, after the first day, breathed a word to Arslàn of the treatment that she received at Yprès. It was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred even his pity. Whatever she endured, she kept silence on it; when he asked her how her grandsire dealt with her, she always answered him, “It is well enough with me now.” He cared not enough for her to doubt her.

  And, in a manner, she had learned how to keep her tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her now that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown her teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture to sting her to revolt with too long use of scourge and chain.

  So she obtained more leisure; and what she did not spend in Arslàn’s tower she spent in acquiring another art, — she learned to read.

  There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who had now and then for her a rough kindly word out of gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This woman was better educated than most, and could even write a little.

  To her Folle-Farine went.

  “See here,” she said, “you are feeble, and I am strong. I know every nook and corner in the woods. I know a hundred rare herbs that you never find. I will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week if you will show me how to read those signs that the people call letters.”

  The old woman hesitated. “It were as much as my life is worth to have you seen with me. The lads will stone my window. Still — —” The wish for the rare herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would be spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, prevailed over her fears. She consented.

  Three times a week Folle-Farine rose while it was still dark, and scoured the wooded lands and the moss-green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows in search of every herb that grew. She knew those green places which had been her only kingdom and her only solace as no one else knew them; and the old dame’s herb-stall was the envy and despair of all the market-place.

  Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going through the darkness with her green bundle on her head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep in rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told how he had seen the Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the poison-weeds that made ships founder, and strong men droop and die, and women love unnatural and horrible things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake those she hated.

  Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke, she met Arslàn.

  It was his habit to be abroad when others slept: studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered largely into many of his paintings; the beauty of water rippling in the moonbeam, of gray reeds blowing against th
e first faint red of dawn, of dark fields with sleeping cattle and folded sheep, of dreamy pools made visible by the shine of their folded white lilies, — these were all things he cared to study.

  The earth has always most charm, and least pain, to the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. They do not then break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality, the vile and revolting coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breadths of shadow and the dim tender gleam of stars; and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to move abroad.

  Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the housewife opening her shutter in the wayside cabin, or the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet the fish that the night-trawlers had brought, saw them together thus, and talked of it; and said that these two, accursed of all honest folk, were after some unholy work — coming from the orgy of some witches’ sabbath, or seeking some devil’s root that would give them the treasured gold of misers’ tombs or the power of life and death.

  For these things are still believed by many a peasant’s hearth, and whispered darkly as night closes in and the wind rises.

  Wading in the shallow streams, with the breeze tossing her hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs, Folle-Farine paid thus the only wages she could for learning the art of letters.

  The acquisition was hard and hateful — a dull plodding task that she detested; and her teacher was old, and ignorant of all the grace and the lore of books. She could only learn too at odd snatches of time, with the cabin-window barred up and the light shut out, for the old peasant was fearful of gaining a bad name among her neighbors if she were seen in communion with the wicked thing of Yprès.

  Still she, the child, persevered, and before long possessed herself of the rudiments of letters, though she had only one primer to learn from that belonged to the herb-seller — a rude old tattered pamphlet recounting the life and death of Catherine of Siena. It was not that she had cared to read, for reading’s sake: books, she heard, only told the thoughts and the creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to know these; but one day he had said to her, half unconsciously, “If only you were not so ignorant!” — and since that day she had set herself to clear away her ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared brushwood with her hatchet.

  It was the sweetest hour she had ever known when she was able to stand before him and say, “The characters that men print are no longer riddles to me.”

  He praised her; and she was glad and proud.

  It was love that had entered into her, but a great and noble love, full of intense humility, of supreme self-sacrifice; — a love that unconsciously led her to chasten into gentleness the fierce soul in her, and to try and seek light for the darkness of her mind.

  He saw the influence he had on her, but he was careless of it.

  A gipsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house in these Norman woods, — what use would be to her beauty of thought, grace of fancy, the desire begotten of knowledge, the poetry learned from the past? Still he gave her these; partly because he pitied her, partly because in his exhaustion and solitude this creature, in her beauty and her submission, was welcome to him.

  And yet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when he thought of her, chose to perplex her or to wound her, that he might see her eyes dilate in wondering amaze, or her face quiver and flush, and then grow dark, with the torment of a mute and subdued pain.

  She was a study to him, as was the scarlet rose in the garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the woods; he dealt with her as he would have dealt with the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core, or casting a stone at the blue-rock on the wing.

  This was not cruelty in him; it was only habit — habit, and the callousness begotten by his own continual pain.

  The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is the daily and nightly penalty of those mad enough to believe that they have the force in them to change the sluggard appetites and the hungry cruelties of their kind into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.

  He held that a man’s chief passion is his destiny, and will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstance or as hazard may.

  His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition — a passion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be his own: and yet every hour he seemed to sink lower and lower into oblivion, further and further from the possibility of any fulfillment of his dreams; and the wasted years of his life fell away one by one into the gulf of the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words on the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.

  “What is the use?” he muttered, half aloud, one day before his paintings. “What is the use? If I die to-morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a bakery store. It is only a mad waste of hours — waste of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so many years. The world always knows what it wants. It selects unerringly. It must know better than I do. The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser than all his generation. If the world will have nothing to do with you, go and hang yourself — or if you fear to do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Give over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to shout for what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is no use what your own voice whispers you unless those great lungs also shout before you, Hosannah.”

  So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew over them.

  Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber, looked at him with the wistful, far-reaching comprehension which an unerring instinct taught her.

  “Of a winter night,” she said, slowly, “I have heard old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma, and she read of their God, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses here; and the story was that the populace scourged and nailed to death the one whom they knew afterwards, when too late, to have been the great man they looked for, and that then being bidden to make their choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true? — if the world’s choice were wrong once, why not twice?”

  Arslàn smiled; the smile she knew so well, and which had no more warmth than the ice floes of his native seas.

  “Why not twice? Why not a thousand times? A thief has the world’s sympathies always. It is always the Barabbas — the trickster in talent, the forger of stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huckster of plundered thoughts, the charlatan of false art, whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on his way rejoicing. ‘Will ye have Christ or Barabbas?’ Every generation is asked the same question, and every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed.”

  She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.

  “But the end?” she asked. “The dead God is the God of all these people round us now, and they have built great places in his honor, and they bow when they pass his likeness in the highway or the market-place. But with Barabbas — what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise him?”

  Arslàn laughed a little.

  “His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his bones, where they lay whitening on the plains — those times were primitive, the world was young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honor, and has a tomb that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all who run may read. In our day Barabbas — the Barabbas of money greeds and delicate cunning, and the theft, which has risen to science, and the assassination that destroys souls and not bodies,
and the crime that deals moral death and not material death — our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud in the place of mailed Force, — lives always in purple and fine linen, and ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his corpse.”

  He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right, where a great sea of gray paper was stretched, untouched and ready to his hand.

  She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.

  “Hush! be quiet,” he said to her, almost harshly. “I have thought of something.”

  And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him; a vision had arisen before him.

  The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The gray stone walls, the square windows through which the fading sunrays fell; the level pastures and sullen streams, and pallid skies without, all faded away as though they had existed only in a dream.

  All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld them.

  The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years before arose and glowed before him. The things of his own life died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the deep color of Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills olive-crested, the tumult of a city at high festival.

  And he could not rest until all he thus saw in his vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render it; and what he drew was this.

  A great thirsty, heated, seething crowd; a crowd that had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy, youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whose faces every animal lust and every human passion were let loose; a crowd on which a noonday sun without shadow streamed; a sun which parched and festered and engendered all corruption in the land on which it looked. This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat roofs the myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose gleaming marble walls the silver plumes of olives waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose lofty temple plates of gold glistened against the shining heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and goads in their hands; and in their midst they had one clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and whose eyes were filled with a god’s pity and a man’s reproach; and him they stoned, and lashed, and hooted.