by Ouida
He heard with a certain pity. He was bound himself in the chain of poverty and of the world’s forgetfulness, and he had not even so much poor freedom as lies in the gilded imprisonment of fame.
“It is not free,” was all he answered her. “It obeys the laws that govern it, and cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux are not liberty, but obedience — just such obedience to natural law as our life shows when it springs into being and slowly wears itself out and then perishes in its human form to live again in the motes of the air and the blades of the grass. There is no such thing as liberty; men have dreamed of it, but nature has never accorded it.”
The words passed coldly over her: with her senses steeped in the radiance of light, that divinity of calm, that breadth of vision, that trance of awe, the chilliness and the bitterness of fact recoiled from off her intelligence, unabsorbed, as the cold rain-drops roll off a rose.
“It is so free!” she murmured, regardless of his words. “If I had only known — I would have asked it to take me so long ago. To float dead on it — as that bird floats — it would be so quiet there and it would not fling me back, I think. It would have pity.”
Her voice was dreamy and gentle. The softness of an indescribable desire was in it.
“Is it too late?” he said, with that cruelty which characterized all his words to her. “Can you have grown in love with life?”
“You live,” she said, simply.
He was silent; the brief innocent words rebuked him. They said, so clearly yet so unconsciously, the influence that his life already had gained on hers, whilst hers was to him no more than the brown seaweed was to the rock on which the waters tossed it.
“Let us go down!” he said, abruptly, at length; “it grows late.”
With one longing backward look she obeyed him, moving like a creature in a dream, as she went away, along the side of the cliff through the shadows, while the goats lying down for their night’s rest started and fled at the human footsteps.
CHAPTER VIII.
She was his absolute slave; and he used his influence with little scruple. Whatever he told her she believed: whatever he desired, she obeyed.
With little effort he persuaded her that to lend her beauty to the purpose of his art was a sacrifice pure and supreme; repaid, it might be, with immortality, like the immortality of the Mona Lisa.
It was ever painful and even loathsome to her to give her beauty to the callous scrutiny and to the merciless imitations of art; it stung the dignity and the purity that were inborn in this daughter of an outlawed people; it wounded, and hurt, and humiliated her. She knew that these things were only done that one day the eyes of thousands and of tens of thousands might gaze on them; and the knowledge was hateful to her.
But as she would have borne wood or carried water for him, as she would have denied her lips the least morsel of bread that his might have fed thereon, as she would have gone straight to the river’s edge at his bidding, and have stood still for the stream to swell and the floods to cover her, so she obeyed him, and let him make of her what he would.
He painted or sketched her in nearly every attitude, and rendered her the center of innumerable stories.
He placed her form in the crowd of dancing-women that followed after Barabbas. He took her for Persephone, as for Phryne. He couched her on the bleak rocks and the sea-sands on barren Tenedos. He made her beauty burn through the purple vines and the roses of silence of the Venusberg. He drew her as the fairest spirit fleeing with the autumn leaves in her streaming hair from the pursuit of his own Storm God Othyr. He portrayed her as Daphne, with all her soft human form changing and merging into the bitter roots and the poisonous leaves of the laurel that was the fruit of passion He drew her as Leonice, whose venal lips yet, being purified by a perfect love, were sealed mute unto death, and for love’s sake spoke not.
He sketched her in a hundred shapes and for a hundred stories, taking her wild deerlike grace, and her supple mountain-bred strength, and her beauty which had all the richness and the freshness that sun and wind and rain and the dews of the nights can give, taking these as he in other years had taken the bloom of the grape, the blush of the seashell, the red glow of the desert reed, the fleeting glory of anything that, by its life or by its death, would minister to his dreams or his desires.
Of all the studies he made from her — he all the while cold to her as any priest of old to the bird that he seethed in its blood on his altars of sacrifice, — those which were slightest of all, yet of all pleased him best, were those studies which were fullest of that ruthless and unsparing irony with which, in every stroke of his pencil, he cut as with a knife into the humanity he dissected.
In the first, he painted her in all the warm, dreaming, palpitating slumber of youth, asleep in a field of poppies: thousands of brilliant blossoms were crushed under her slender, pliant, folded limbs; the intense scarlet of the dream-flowers burned everywhere, above, beneath, around her; purple shadow and amber light contended for the mastery upon her; her arms were lightly tossed above her head; her mouth smiled in her dreams; over her a butterfly flew, spreading golden wings to the sun; against her breast the great crimson cups of the flowers of sleep curled and glowed; among them, hiding and gibbering and glaring at her with an elf’s eyes, was the Red Mouse of the Brocken — the one touch of pitiless irony, of unsparing metaphor, that stole like a snake through the hush and the harmony and the innocence of repose.
In the second, there was still the same attitude, the same solitude, the same rest, but the sleep was the sleep of death. Stretched on a block of white marble, there were the same limbs, but livid and lifeless, and twisted in the contortions of a last agony: there was the same loveliness, but on it the hues of corruption already had stolen; the face was still turned upward, but the blank eyes stared hideously, and the mouth was drawn back from teeth closely clinched; upon the stone there lay a surgeon’s knife and a sculptor’s scalpel; between her lips the Red Mouse sat, watching, mouthing, triumphant. All the beauty was left still, but it was left ghastly, discolored, ruined, — ready for the mockery of the clay, for the violation of the knife, — ready for the feast of the blind worm, for the narrow home dug in darkness and in dust.
And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so unsparing and unfaltering a hand.
Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power, because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder, which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his bidding.
She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.
She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would. That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslàn seemed sweet as the south wind.
To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life sublime to her.
“Is that all the devil has done for you?” cried the gardener’s wife from the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Yprès went down the water-street beneath.
“It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are — the little mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they say — sooner or later — to every creature that lives again for him in his art?”
Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses
.
“I have heard it,” she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.
“And you have no fear?”
“I have no fear.”
The gardener’s wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow tresses.
“Well — the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for the devil’s wage. A fine office he sets you — his daughter — to lend yourself to a painter’s eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that for you — his own-begotten — I will cleave close to the saints and the angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer.”
The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around which they beat with their wings the empty air.
The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched. If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing, she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.
Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.
The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen down, — she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a human joy.
Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely, with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her — nay, unfelt — went on her daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes, and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and entered into a heritage of grace.
She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity; proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God for it — that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries of the starlit skies.
Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him, and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave; she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.
To be of use to him, — to be held of any worth to him, — to have his eyes find any loveliness to study in her, — to be to him only as a flower that he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out on the land to wither as it would, — this, even this, seemed to her the noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.
That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme, passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated all that they consumed.
“Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts,” she told herself perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.
CHAPTER IX.
One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.
The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn; she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain.
He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for his art: — a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable passion.
Art is so vast; and human life is so little.
It is to him only supremely just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to Arslàn base to turn her ignorance and submission to his will, to the gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses and slew in sacrifice to the sun were in the sight of the Mexican nation.
The youth whom the Mexicans slew, on the high hill of the city, with his face to the west, was always the choicest and the noblest of all the opening flower of their manhood: for it was his fate to be called to enter into the realms of eternal light, and to dwell face to face with the unbearable brightness without whose rays the universe would have perished frozen in perpetual night.
So the artist, who is true to his art, regards every human sacrifice that he renders up to it; how can he feel pity for a thing which perishes to feed a flame that he deems the life of the world?
The steel that he draws out from the severed heart of his victim he is ready to plunge into his own vitals: no other religion can vaunt as much of its priests.
“What are you thinking of to-night?” he asked her where she came through the fields by the course of a little flower-sown brook, fringed with tall bulrushes and waving willow-stems.
She lifted her eyelids with a dreamy and wistful regard.
“I was thinking, — I wonder what the reed felt that you told me of, — the one reed that a god chose from all its millions by the waterside and cut down to make into a flute.”
“Ah? — you see there are no reeds that make music nowadays; the reeds are only good to be woven into creels for the fruits and the fish of the market.”
“That is not the fault of the reeds?”
“Not that I know;
it is the fault of men most likely who find the chink of coin in barter sweeter music than the song of the syrinx. But what do you think the reed felt then? — pain to be so sharply severed from its fellows?”
“No — or the god would not have chosen it”
“What, then?”
A troubled sigh parted her lips; these old fables were fairest truths to her, and gave a grace to every humblest thing that the sun shone on, or the waters begat from their foam, or the winds blew with their breath into the little life of a day.
“I was trying to think. But I cannot be sure. These reeds have forgotten. They have lost their soul. They want nothing but to feed among the sand and the mud, and grow in millions together, and shelter the toads and the newts, — there is not a note of music in them all — except when the wind rises and makes them sigh, and then they remember that long — long — ago, the breath of a great god was in them.”
Arslàn looked at her where she stood; her eyes resting on the reeds, and the brook at her feet; the crimson heat of the evening all about her, on the brazen amphora, on the red girdle on her loins, on the thoughtful parted lips, on the proud bent brows above which a golden butterfly floated as above the brows of Psyche.
He smiled; the smile that was so cold to her.
“Look; away over the fields, there comes a peasant with a sickle; he comes to mow down the reeds to make a bed for his cattle. If he heard you, he would think you mad.”
“They have thought me many things worse. What matter?”
“Nothing at all; — that I know. But you seem to envy that reed — so long ago — that was chosen?”
“Who would not?”
“Are you so sure? The life of the reed was always pleasant; — dancing there in the light, playing with the shadows, blowing in the winds; with the cool waters all about it all day long, and the yellow daffodils and the blue bell-flowers for its brethren.”
“Nay; — how do you know?”