by Ouida
Her voice trembled and was still for a second; she struggled with herself and kept it clear and strong.
The old man never interrupted her.
“He must not know: he would kill himself if he knew; he would sooner die than tell any man. But, look you, you drape your pictures here with gold and with purple, you place them high in the light; you make idols of them, and burn your incense before them. That is what he wants for his: they are the life of his life. If they could be honored, he would not care, though you should slay him to-morrow. Go to him, and make you idols of his: they are worthier gods than yours. And what his heart is sick for is to have them seen by men. Were I he, I would not care; but he cares, so that he perishes.”
She shivered as she spoke; in her earnestness and eagerness, she laid her hand on the stranger’s arm, and held it there; she prayed, with more passion than she would have cast into any prayer to save her own life.
“Where is he; and what do you call him?” the old man asked her quietly.
He understood the meaning that ran beneath the unconscious extravagance of her fanciful and impassioned language.
“He is called Arslàn; he lives in the granary-tower, by the river, between the town and Yprès. He comes from the north, far away — very, very far, where the seas are all ice and the sun shines at midnight. Will you make the things that he does to be known to the people? You have gold; and gold, he says, is the compeller of men.”
“Arslàn?” he echoed.
The name was not utterly unknown to him; he had seen works signed with it at Paris and at Rome — strange things of a singular power, of a union of cynicism and idealism, which was too coarse for one-half the world, and too pure for the other half.
“Arslàn? — I think I remember. I will see what I can do.”
“You will say nothing to him of me.”
“I could not say much. Who are you? Whence do you come?”
“I live at the water-mill of Yprès. They say that Reine Flamma was my mother. I do not know: it does not matter.”
“What is your name?”
“Folle-Farine. They called me after the mill-dust.”
“A strange namesake.”
“What does it matter? Any name is only a little puff of breath — less than the dust, anyhow.”
“Is it? I see, you are a Communist.”
“What?”
“A Communist — a Socialist. You know what that is. You would like to level my house to the ashes, I fancy, by the look on your face.”
“No,” she said, simply, with a taint of scorn, “I do not care to do that. If I had cared to burn anything it would have been the Flandrins’ village. It is odd that you should live in a palace and he should want for bread; but then he can create things, and you can only buy them. So it is even, perhaps.”
The old man smiled, amused.
“You are no respecter of persons, that is certain. Come in another chamber and take some wine, and break your fast. There will be many things here that you never saw or tasted.”
She shook her head.
“The thought is good of you,” she said, more gently than she had before spoken. “But I never took a crust out of charity, and I will not begin.”
“Charity! Do you call an invitation a charity?”
“When the rich ask the poor — yes.”
He looked in her eyes with a smile.
“But when a man, old and ugly, asks a woman that is young and beautiful, on which side lies the charity then?”
“I do not favor fine phrases,” she answered curtly, returning his look with a steady indifference.
“You are hard to please in anything, it would seem. Well, come hither, a moment at least.”
She hesitated; then, thinking to herself that to refuse would seem like fear, she followed him through several chambers into one where his own mid-day breakfast was set forth.
She moved through all the magnificence of the place with fearless steps, and meditative glances, and a grave measured easy grace, as tranquil and as unimpressed as though she walked through the tall ranks of the seeding grasses on a meadow slope.
It was all full of the color, the brilliancy, the choice adornment, the unnumbered treasures, and the familiar luxuries of a great noble’s residence; but such things as these had no awe for her.
The mere splendors of wealth, the mere accumulations of luxury, could not impress her for an instant; she passed through them indifferent and undaunted, thinking to herself, “However they may gild their roofs, the roofs shut out the sky no less.”
Only, as she passed by some dream of a great poet cast in the visible shape of sculpture or of painting, did her glance grow reverent and humid; only when she recognized amidst the marble forms, or the pictured stories, some one of those dear gods in whom she had a faith as pure and true as ever stirred in the heart of an Ionian child, did she falter and pause a little to gaze there with a tender homage in her eyes.
The old man watched her with a musing studious glance from time to time.
“Let me tempt you,” he said to her when they reached the breakfast-chamber. “Sit down with me and eat and drink. No? Taste these sweetmeats at the least. To refuse to break bread with me is churlish.”
“I never owed any man a crust, and I will not begin now,” she answered obstinately, indifferent to the blaze of gold and silver before her, to the rare fruits and flowers, to the wines in their quaint flagons, to the numerous attendants who waited motionless around her.
She was sharply hungered, and her throat was parched with the heat and the dust, and the sweet unwonted odors of the wines and the fruits assailed all her senses; but he besought her in vain.
She poured herself out some water into a goblet of ruby glass, rimmed with a band of pearls, and drank it, and set down the cup as indifferently as though she had drunk from the old wooden bowl chained among the ivy to the well in the mill-yard.
“Your denial is very churlish,” he said, after many a honeyed entreaty, which had met with no other answer from her. “How shall you bind me to keep bond with you, and rescue your Northern Regner from his cave of snakes, unless you break bread with me, and so compel my faith?”
She looked at him from under the dusky cloud of her hair, with the golden threads gleaming on it like sunrays through darkness.
“A word that needs compelling,” she answered him curtly, “is broken by the heart before the lips give it. It is to plant a tree without a root, to put faith in a man that needs a bond.”
He watched her with keen humorous eyes of amusement.
“Where have you got all your wisdom?” he asked.
“It is not wisdom; it is truth.”
“And truth is not wisdom? You would seem to know the world well.”
She laughed a little short laugh, whilst her face clouded.
“I know it not at all. But I will tell you what I have seen.”
“And that is — —”
“I have seen a great toadstool spring up all in one night, after rain, so big, and so white, and so smooth, and so round, — and I knew its birth was so quick, and its growth was so strong, because it was a false thing that would poison all that should eat of it.”
“Well?”
“Well — when men speak overquick and overfair, what is that but the toadstool that springs from their breath?”
“Who taught you so much suspicion?”
Her face darkened in anger.
“Suspicion? That is a thing that steals in the dark and is afraid. I am afraid of nothing.”
“So it would seem.”
He mused a moment whether he should offer her back her sequins as a gift; he thought not. He divined aright that she had only sold them because she had innocently believed in the fullness of their value. He tried to tempt her otherwise.
She was young; she had a beautiful face, and a form like an Atalanta. She wore a scarlet sash girt to her loins, and seemed to care for color and for grace. There was about her a dauntless
and imperious freedom. She could not be indifferent to all those powers which she besought with such passion for another.
He had various treasures shown to her, — treasures of jewels, of gold and silver, of fine workmanship, of woven stuffs delicate and gorgeous as the wing of a butterfly. She looked at them tranquilly, as though her eyes had rested on such things all her days.
“They are beautiful, no doubt,” she said simply. “But I marvel that you — being a man — care for such things as these.”
“Nay; I care to give them to beautiful women, when such come to me, — as one has come to-day. Do me one trifling grace; choose some one thing at least out of these to keep in remembrance of me.”
Her eyes burned in anger.
“If I think your bread would soil my lips, is it likely I should think to touch your treasure with my hands and have them still clean?”
“You are very perverse,” he said, relinquishing his efforts with regret.
He knew how to wait for a netted fruit to ripen under the rays of temptation: gold was a forcing-heat — slow, but sure.
She watched him with musing eyes that had a gleam of scorn in them, and yet a vague apprehension.
“Are you the Red Mouse?” she said suddenly.
He looked at her surprised, and for the moment perplexed; then he laughed — his little low cynical laugh.
“What makes you think that?”
“I do not know. You look like it — that is all. He has made one sketch of me as I shall be when I am dead; and the Red Mouse sits on my chest, and it is glad. You see that, by its glance. I never asked him what he meant by it. Some evil, I think; and you look like it. You have the same triumph in your eye.”
He laughed again, not displeased, as she had thought that he would be.
“He has painted you so? I must see that. But believe me, Folle-Farine, I shall wish for my triumph before your beauty is dead — if I am indeed, the Red Mouse.”
She shrunk a little with an unconscious and uncontrollable gesture of aversion.
“I must go,” she said abruptly. “The mules wait. Remember him, and I will remember you.”
He smiled.
“Wait: have you thought what a golden key for him will do for you when it unlocks your eagle’s cage and unbinds his wings?”
“What?”
She did not understand; when she had come on this eager errand, no memory of her own fate had retarded or hastened her footsteps.
“Well, you look to take the same flight to the same heights, I suppose?”
“I?”
“Yes, you. You must know you are beautiful. You must know so much?”
A proud light laughed like sunshine over all her face.
“Ah, yes!” she said, with a low, glad breath, and the blaze of a superb triumph in her eyes. “He has painted me in a thousand ways. I shall live as the rose lives, on his canvas — a thing of a day that he can make immortal!”
The keen elfin eyes of the old man sparkled with a malign mirth; he had found what he wanted — as he thought.
“And so, if this dust of oblivion blots out his canvas forever from the world’s sight, your beauty will be blotted with it? I see. Well, I can understand how eager you are to have your eagle fly free. The fame of the Farnarina stands only second to the fame of Cleopatra.”
“Farnarina? What is that?”
“Farnarina? One who, like you, gave the day’s life of a rose, and who got eternal life for it, — as you think to do.”
She started a little, and a tremulous pain passed over the dauntless brilliance of her face and stole its color for awhile.
“I?” she murmured. “Ah, what does it matter for me? If there be just a little place — anywhere — wherever my life can live with his on the canvas, so that men say once now and then, in all the centuries, to each other, ‘See, it is true — he thought her worthy of that, though she was less than a grain of dust under the hollow of his foot,’ it will be enough for me — more than enough.”
The old man was silent; watching her, the mockery had faded from his eyes; they were surprised and contemplative.
She stood with her head drooped, with her face pale, an infinite yearning and resignation stole into the place of the exultant triumph which had blazed there like the light of the morning a moment earlier.
She had lost all remembrance of time and place; the words died softly, as in a sigh of love, upon her lips.
He waited awhile; then he spoke:
“But, if you were sure that, even thus much would be denied to you; if you were sure that, in casting your eagle loose on the wind, you would lose him forever in the heights of a heaven you would never enter yourself; if you were sure that he would never give you one thought, one wish, one memory, but leave every trace of your beauty to perish as fast as the damp could rot or the worm could gnaw it; if you were sure that his immortality would be your annihilation, say, would you still bid me turn a gold key in the lock of his cage, and release him?”
She roused herself slowly from her reverie, and gazed at him with a smile he could not fathom; it was so far away from him, so full of memory, so pitiful of his doubt.
She was thinking of the night when she had found a man dying, and had bought his life back for him, with her own, from the gods. For the pact was sacred to her, and the old wild faith to her was still a truth.
But of it her lips never spoke.
“What is that to you?” she said, briefly. “If you turn the key, you will see. It was not of myself that I came here to speak. Give him liberty, and I will give you gratitude. Farewell.”
Before he had perceived what she was about to do, she had left his side, and had vanished through one of the doors which stood open, on to the gardens without.
He sent his people to search for her on the terraces and lawns, but vainly; she was fleeter than they, and had gone through the green glades in the sunlight as fast as a doe flies down the glades of her native forest.
The old man sat silent.
CHAPTER II.
When she had outrun her strength for the moment, and was forced to slacken her speed, she paused to take breath on the edge of the wooded lands.
She looked neither to right nor left; on her backward flight the waters had no song, the marble forms no charm, the wonder-flowers no magic for her as she went; she had no ear for the melodies of the birds, no sight for the paradise of the rose-hung ways; she had only one thought left — the gold that she had gained.
The cruelty of his remarks had stabbed her with each of their slow keen words as with a knife; the sickness of a mortal terror had touched her for the instant, as she had remembered that it might be her fate to be not even so much as a memory in the life which she had saved from the grave. But with the first breath of the outer air the feebleness passed. The strength of the passion that possessed her was too pure to leave her long a prey to any thought of her own fate.
She smiled again as she looked up through the leaves at the noonday sun.
“What will it matter how or when the gods take my life, so only they keep their faith and give me his?” she thought.
And her step was firm and free, and her glance cloudless, and her heart content, as she went on her homeward path through the heat of the day.
She was so young, she was so ignorant, she was still so astray in the human world about her, that she thought she held a talisman in those nine gold pieces.
“A little gold,” he had said; and here she had it — honest, clean, worthy of his touch and usage.
Her heart leaped to the glad and bounding music of early youth: youth which does not reason, which only believes, and which sees the golden haze of its own faiths, and thinks them the promise of the future, as young children see the golden haze of their own hair and think it the shade of angels above their heads.
When she at length reached the mill-house the sun had sunk; she had been sixteen hours on foot, taking nothing all the while but a roll of rye bread that she had carried in her
pouch, and a few water-cresses that she had gathered in a little brook when the mules had paused to drink there.
Yet when she had housed the grain, turned the tired animals into their own nook of meadow to graze and rest for the night, she entered the house neither for repose nor food, but flew off again through the dusk of the falling night.
She had no remembrance of hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue; she had only a buoyant sense of an ecstatic joy; she felt as though she had wings, and clove the air with no more effort than the belated starling which flew by her over the fields.
“A little gold,” he had said; and in her bosom, wrapped in a green chestnut leaf, were there not the little, broad, round, glittering pieces which in the world of men seemed to have power to gain all love, all honor, all peace, and all fealty?
“Phratos would have wished his gift to go so,” she thought to herself, with a swift, penitent, remorseful memory.
For a moment she paused and took them once more out of their hiding-place, and undid the green leaf that enwrapped them, and kissed them and laughed, the hot tears falling down her cheeks, where she stood alone in the fields amid the honey-smell of the clover in the grass, and the fruit-fragrance of the orchards all about her in the dimness.
“A little gold! — a little gold!” she murmured, and she laughed aloud in her great joy, and blessed the gods that they had given her to hear the voice of his desire.
“A little gold,” he had said, only; and here she had so much!
No sorcerer, she thought, ever had power wider than this wealth bestowed on her. She did not know; she had no measurement. Flamma’s eyes she had seen glisten over a tithe of such a sum as over the riches of an emperor’s treasury.
She slipped them in her breast again and ran on, past the reeds silvering in the rising moon, past the waters quiet on a windless air, past the dark Christ who would not look, — who had never looked, or she had loved him with her earliest love, even as for his pity she loved Thanatos.
Breathless and noiseless she severed the reeds with her swift feet, and lightly as a swallow on the wing passed through the dreary portals into Arslàn’s chamber.