by Ouida
She sat on her couch with the Moorish coins in her hand, and gazed upon them. They were very precious to her. She had never forgotten or ceased to desire them, though to possess herself of them by force had never occurred to her until that night. Their theft had been a wrong which she had never pardoned, yet she had never avenged it until now.
As she held them in her hand for the first time in eleven years, a strong emotion came over her.
The time when she had worn them came out suddenly in sharp relief from the haze of her imperfect memories. All the old forest-life for a moment revived for her.
The mists of the mountains, the smell of the chestnut-woods, the curl of the white smoke among the leaves, the sweet wild strains of the music, the mad grace of the old Moorish dances, the tramp through the hill-passes, the leap and splash of the tumbling waters, — all arose to her for one moment from the oblivion in which years of toil and exile had buried them.
The tears started to her eyes; she kissed the little glittering coins, she thought of Phratos.
She had never known his fate.
The gypsy who had been found dead in the fields had been forgotten by the people before the same snows which had covered his body had melted at the first glimmer of the wintry sun.
Flamma could have told her; but he had never spoken one word in all her life to her, except in curt reprimand or in cruel irony.
All the old memories had died out; and no wanderers of her father’s race had ever come into the peaceful and pastoral district of the northern seaboard, where they could have gained no footing, and could have made no plunder.
The sight of the little band of coins which had danced so often among her curls under the moonlit leaves in the Liebana to the leaping and tuneful measures of the viol moved her to a wistful longing for the smile and the voice of Phratos.
“I would never part with them for myself,” she thought; “I would die of hunger first — were it only myself.”
And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little treasure — the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her, even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.
The sequins were worth no more than any baby’s woven crown of faded daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.
At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslàn, she spoke to him, timidly, —
“I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I might do there — for you?”
“Do? What should you do?” he answered her, with inattention and almost impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of inaction.
She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her lips.
She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.
“If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps,” she said to herself.
So she kept silence.
On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the two mules, to Rioz.
It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in either hand.
The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of a pastoral country in late summer.
She met few people; a market-woman or two on their asses, a walking peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd — these were all.
The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep’s bell was the only sound in the silence.
It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell, surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble and the gorse grew wild.
But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore; she herself grew tired and fevered.
She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway, where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her brass pails on the ground.
She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered them.
The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky, half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she would bring her food and drink.
But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches, refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.
The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the market-women had said, “What does the like of you want with the Prince?”
“I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will,” she answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.
The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.
“What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?” she muttered, watching the form of the girl as it passed up the steep sunshiny street.
“Some evil, no doubt,” answered her assistant, a stalwart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. “You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the ships, they say, and the wicked herb, bon plaisir, and the philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a cajote.”
Her old mistress, going within to toss a fritter for one of the mendicant friars, chuckled grimly to herself:
“No one would ask the road there for any good; that is sure. No doubt she had heard that Sartorian is a choice judge of color and shape in all the Arts!”
Folle-Farine went out by the gate, and along the water westward.
In a little satchel she carried some half score of oil-sketches that he had given her, rich, graceful, shadowy things — girls’ faces, coils of foliage, river-rushes in the moonlight, a purple passion-flower blooming on a gray ruin; a child, golden-headed and bare-limbed, wading in brown waters; — things that had caught his sight and fancy, and had been transcribed, and then tossed aside with the lavish carelessness of genius.
She asked one or two peasants, whom she met, her way; they stared, and grumbled, and pointed to some distant towers rising out of wooded slopes, — those they said were the towers of the dwelling of Prince Sartorian.
One hen-huckster, leading his ass to market with a load of live poultry, looked over his shoulder after her, and muttered with a grin to his wife:
“There goes a handsome piece of porcelain for the old man to lock in his velvet-lined cupboards.”
And the wife laughed in answer, —
“Ay; she will look well, gilded as Sartorian always gilds what he buys.”
The words came to the ear of Folle-Farine: she wondered what they could mean; but she would not turn back to ask.
Her feet were weary, like her mules’; the sun scorched her; she felt feeble, and longed to lie down and sleep; but she toiled on up the sharp ascent that ros
e in cliffs of limestone above the valley where the river ran.
At last she came to gates that were like those of the cathedral, all brazen, blazoned, and full of scrolls and shields. She pushed one open — there was no one there to say her nay, and boldly entered the domain which they guarded.
At first it seemed to be only like the woods at home; the trees were green, the grass long, the birds sang, the rabbits darted. But by-and-by she went farther; she grew bewildered; she was in a world strange to her.
Trees she had never seen rose like the pillars of temples; gorgeous flowers, she had never dreamed of, played in the sun; vast columns of water sprang aloft from the mouths of golden dragons or the silver breasts of dolphins; nude women, wondrous, and white, and still, stood here and there amidst the leavy darkness.
She paused among it all, dazzled, and thinking that she dreamed.
She had never seen any gardens, save the gardens of the poor.
A magnolia-tree was above her; she stooped her face to one of its great, fragrant, creamy cups and kissed it softly. A statue of Clytio was beside her; she looked timidly up at the musing face, and touched it, wondering why it was so very cold, and would not move or smile.
A fountain flung up its spray beside her; she leaned and caught it, thinking it so much silver, and gazed at it in sorrowful wonder as it changed to water in her grasp. She walked on like one enchanted, silently, and thinking that she had strayed into some sorcerer’s kingdom; she was not afraid, but glad. She walked on for a long while, always among these mazes of leaves, these splendors of blossom, these cloud-reaching waters, these marble forms so motionless and thoughtful.
At last she came on the edge of a great pool, fringed with the bulrush and the lotos, and the white pampas-grass, and the flamelike flowering reed, of the East and of the West.
All around, the pool was sheltered with dark woods of cedar and thickets of the sea-pine. Beyond them stood aloof a great pile that seemed to her to blaze like gold and silver in the sun. She approached it through a maze of roses, and ascended a flight of marble steps, on to a terrace. A door stood open near. She entered it.
She was intent on the object of her errand, and she had no touch of fear in her whole temper.
Hall after hall, room after room, opened to her amazed vision; an endless spectacle of marvelous color stretched before her eyes; the wonders that are gathered together by the world’s luxury were for the first time in her sight; she saw for the first time in her life how the rich lived.
She moved forward, curious, astonished, bewildered, but nothing daunted.
On the velvet of the floors her steps trod as firmly and as freely as on the moss of the orchard at Yprès. Her eyes glanced as gravely and as fearlessly over the frescoed walls, the gilded woods, the jeweled cups, the broidered hangings, as over the misty pastures where the sheep were folded.
It was not in the daughter of Taric to be daunted by the dazzle of mere wealth. She walked through the splendid and lonely rooms wondering, indeed, and eager to see more; but there was no spell here such as the gardens had flung over her. To the creature free born in the Liebana no life beneath a roof could seem beautiful.
She met no one.
At the end of the fourth chamber, which she traversed, she paused before a great picture in a heavy golden frame; it was the seizure of Persephone. She knew the story, for Arslàn had told her of it.
She saw for the first time how the pictures that men called great were installed in princely splendor; this was the fate which he wanted for his own.
A little lamp, burning perfume with a silvery smoke, stood before it: she recalled the words of the woman in the market-place; in her ignorance, she thought the picture was worshiped as a divinity, as the people worshiped the great picture of the Virgin that they burned incense before in the cathedral. She looked, with something of gloomy contempt in her eyes, at the painting which was mantled in massive gold, with purple draperies opening to display it; for it was the chief masterpiece upon those walls.
“And he cares for that!” she thought, with a sigh half of wonder, half of sorrow.
She did not reason on it, but it seemed to her that his works were greater hanging on their bare walls where the spiders wove.
“Who is ‘he’?” a voice asked behind her.
She turned and saw a small and feeble man, with keen, humorous eyes, and an elfin face, delicate in its form, malicious in its meaning.
She stood silent, regarding him; herself a strange figure in that lordly place, with her brown limbs, her bare head and feet, her linen tunic, her red knotted girdle.
“Who are you?” she asked him curtly, in counter-question.
The little old man laughed.
“I have the honor to be your host.”
A disappointed astonishment clouded her face.
“You! are you Sartorian?” she muttered— “the Sartorian whom they call a prince?”
“Even I!” he said with a smile. “I regret that I please you no more. May I ask to what I am indebted for your presence? You seem a fastidious critic.”
He spoke with good-humored irony, taking snuff whilst he looked at the lustrous beauty of this barefooted gypsy, as he thought her, whom he had found thus astray in his magnificent chambers.
She amused him; finding her silent, he sought to make her speak.
“How did you come in hither? You care for pictures, perhaps, since you seem to feed on them like some wood-pigeons on a sheaf of corn?”
“I know of finer than yours,” she answered him coldly, chilled by the amused and malicious ridicule of his tone into a sullen repose. “I did not come to see anything you have. I came to sell you these: they say in Yprès that you care for such bits of coin.”
She drew out of her bosom her string of sequins, and tendered them to him.
He took them, seeing at a glance that they were of no sort of value; such things as he could buy for a few coins in any bazaar of Africa or Asia. But he did not say so.
He looked at her keenly, as he asked:
“Whose were these?”
She looked in return at him with haughty defiance.
“They are mine. If you want such things, as they say you do, take them and give me their value — that is all.”
“Do you come here to sell them?”
“Yes. I came three leagues to-day. I heard a woman from near Rioz say that you liked such things. Take them, or leave them.”
“Who gave them to you?”
“Phratos.”
Her voice lingered sadly over the word. She still loved the memory of Phratos.
“And who may Phratos be?”
Her eyes flashed fire at the cross-questioning.
“That is none of your business. If you think that I stole them, say so. If you want them, buy them. One or the other.”
The old man watched her amusedly.
“You can be very fierce,” he said to her. “Be gentle a little, and tell me whence you came, and what story you have.”
But she would not.
“I have not come here to speak of myself,” she said obstinately. “Will you take the coins, or leave them?”
“I will take them,” he said; and he went to a cabinet in another room and brought out with him several shining gold pieces.
She fastened her eager eyes on them thirstily.
“Here is payment,” he said to her, holding them to her.
Her eyes fastened on the money entranced; she touched it with a light, half-fearful touch, and then drew back and gazed at it amazed.
“All that — all that?” she muttered. “Is it their worth? Are you sure?”
“Quite sure,” he said with a smile. He offered her in them some thirty times their value.
She paused for a moment, incredulous of her own good fortune, then darted on them as a swallow at a gnat, and took them and put them to her lips, and laughed a sweet glad laugh of triumph, and slid them in her bosom.
“I am grateful,” she said simpl
y; but the radiance in her eyes, the laughter on her mouth, the quivering excitement in all her face and form, said the same thing for her far better than her words.
The old man watched her narrowly.
“They are not for yourself?” he asked.
“That is my affair,” she answered him, all her pride rising in arms. “What concerned you was their value.”
He smiled and bent his head.
“Fairly rebuked. But say is this all you came for? Wherever you came from, is this all that brought you here?”
She looked awhile in his eyes steadily, then she brought the sketches from their hiding-place. She placed them before him.
“Look at those.”
He took them to the light and scanned them slowly and critically; he knew all the mysteries and intricacies of art, and he recognized in these slight things the hand and the color of a master. He did not say so, but held them for some time in silence.
“These also are for sale?” he asked at length.
She had drawn near him, her face flushed with intense expectation, her longing eyes dilated, her scarlet lips quivering with eagerness. That he was a stranger and a noble was nothing to her: she knew he had wealth; she saw he had perception.
“See here!” she said, swiftly, the music of her voice rising and falling in breathless, eloquent intonation. “Those things are to the great works of his hand as a broken leaf beside your gardens yonder. He touches a thing and it is beauty. He takes a reed, a stone, a breadth of sand, a woman’s face, and under his hand it grows glorious and gracious. He dreams things that are strange and sublime; he has talked with the gods, and he has seen the worlds beyond the sun. All the day he works for his bread, and in the gray night he wanders where none can follow him; and he brings back marvels and mysteries, and beautiful, terrible stories that are like the sound of the sea. Yet he is poor, and no man sees the things of his hand; and he is sick of his life, because the days go by and bring no message to him, and men will have nothing of him; and he has hunger of body and hunger of mind. For me, if I could do what he does, I would not care though no man ever looked on it. But to him it is bitter that it is only seen by the newt, and the beetle, and the night-hawk. It wears his soul away, because he is denied of men. ‘If I had gold, if I had gold!’ he says always, when he thinks that none can hear him.”