by Ouida
His lamp was lighted.
He stood before the cartoon of the Barabbas, touching it here and there with his charcoal, adding those latest thoughts, those after-graces, with which the artist delights to caress his picture, with a hand as soft and as lingering as the hand with which a mother caresses the yellow sunshine of her first-born’s curls.
His face as he stood was very pale, passionless, weary, with a sadness sardonic and full of scorn for himself on his mouth, and in his eyes those dreams which went so far — so far — into worlds whose glories his hand could portray for no human sight.
He was thinking, as he worked, of the Barabbas.
“You must rot,” he thought. “You will feed the rat and the mouse; the squirrel will come and gnaw you to line his nest; and the beetle and the fly will take you for a spawning-bed. You will serve no other end — since you are mine. And yet I am so great a fool that I love you, and try to bring you closer and closer to the thing I see, and which you are not, and never can be. For what man lives so happy as to see the Canaan of his ideals, — save as Moses saw it from afar off, only to raise his arms to it vainly, and die?”
There came a soft shiver of the air, as though it were severed by some eager bird.
She came and stood beside him, a flash like the sunrise on her face, a radiance in her eyes, more lustrous than any smile; her body tremulous and breathless from the impatient speed with which her footsteps had been winged; about her all the dew and fragrance of the night.
“Here is the gold!” she cried.
Her voice was eager and broken with its too great haste.
“Gold?”
He turned and looked at her, ignorant of her meaning, astonished at her sudden presence there.
“Here is the gold!” she murmured, her voice rising swift and clear, and full of the music of triumph with which her heart was thrilling. “‘A little gold,’ you said, you remember?— ‘only a little.’ And this is much. Take it — take it! Do you not hear?”
“Gold?” he echoed again, shaken from his trance of thought, and comprehending nothing and remembering nothing of the words that he had spoken in his solitude.
“Yes! It is mine,” she said, her voice broken in its tumult of ecstasy— “it is mine — all mine. It is no charity, no gift to me. The chain was worth it, and I would only take what it was worth. A little gold, you said; and now you can make the Barabbas live forever upon canvas, and compel men to say that it is great.”
As the impetuous, tremulous words broke from her, she drew the green leaf with the coins in it from her bosom, and thrust it into his hand, eager, exultant, laughing, weeping, all the silence and the control of her nature swept away in the flood of this immeasurable joy possessing her.
The touch of the glittering pieces against his hands stung him to comprehension; his face flushed over all its pallor; he thrust it away with a gesture of abhorrence and rejection.
“Money!” he muttered. “What money? — yours?”
“Yes, mine entirely; mine indeed!” she answered, with a sweet, glad ring of victory in her rejoicing voice. “It is true, quite true. They were the chains of sequins that Phratos gave me when I used to dance to his music in the mountains; and I have sold them. ‘A little gold,’ you said; ‘and the Barabbas can live forever.’ Why do you look so? It is all mine; all yours — —”
In the last words her voice lost all its proud exultation, and sank low, with a dull startled wonder in it.
Why did he look so?
His gesture of refusal she had not noticed. But the language his glance spoke was one plain to her. It terrified her, amazed her, struck her chill and dumb.
In it there were disgust, anger, loathing, — even horror; and yet there was in it also an unwonted softness, which in a woman’s would have shown itself by a rush of sudden tears.
“What do you think that I have done?” she murmured under her breath. “The gold is mine — mine honestly. I have not stolen it, nor begged it. I got it as I say. Why will you not take it? Why do you look at me so?”
“I? Your money? God in heaven! what can you think me?”
She grew white to the lips, all the impetuous, radiant tumult of her innocent rapture frozen into terror.
“I have done nothing wrong,” she murmured with a piteous wistfulness and wonder— “nothing wrong, indeed; there is no shame in it. Will you not take it — for their sake?”
He turned on her with severity almost savage:
“It is impossible! Good God! Was I not low enough already? How dared you think a thing so vile of me? Have I ever asked pity of any living soul?”
His voice was choked in his throat; he was wounded to the heart.
He had no thought that he was cruel; he had no intent to terrify or hurt her; but the sting of this last and lowest humiliation was so horrible to all the pride of his manhood, and so bitterly reminded him of his own abject poverty; and with all this there was an emotion in him that he had difficulty to control — being touched by her ignorance and by her gift as few things in his life had ever touched him.
She stood before him trembling, wondering, sorely afraid; all the light had died out of her face; she was very pale, and her eyes dilated strangely.
For some moments there was silence between them.
“You will not take it?” she said at last, in a hushed, fearful voice, like that of one who speaks in the sight of some dead thing which makes all quiet around it.
“Take it!” he echoed. “I could sooner kill a man out yonder and rob him. Can you not understand? Greater shame could never come to me. You do not know what you would do. There may be beasts that fall as low, no doubt, but they are curs too base for hanging. Have I frightened you? I did not mean to frighten you. You mean well and nobly, no doubt — no doubt. You do not know what you would do. Gifts of gold from man to man are bitter, and sap the strength of the receiver; but from woman to man they are — to the man shameful. Can you not understand?”
Her face burned duskily; she moved with a troubled, confused effort to get away from his gaze.
“No,” she said in her shut teeth. “I do not know what you mean. Flamma takes all the gold I make. Why not you, if it be gold that is honest?”
“Flamma is your grandsire — your keeper — your master. He has a right to do as he chooses. He gives you food and shelter, and in return he takes the gains of your labor. But I, — what have I ever given you? I am a stranger to you, and should have no claim on you, if I could be base enough to seek one. I am hideously poor. I make no disguise with you, — you know too well how I live. But can you not see? — if I were mean enough to take the worth of a crust from you, I should be no more worthy of the very name of man. It is for the man to give to the woman. You see?”
She heard him in silence, her face still dark with the confused pain on it of one who has fallen or been struck upon the head, and half forgets and half remembers.
“I do not see,” she muttered. “Whoever has, gives: what does it matter? The folly in me was its littleness: it could not be of use. But it was all I had.”
“Little or great, — the riches of empires, or a beggar’s dole, — there could be no difference in the infamy to me. Have I seemed to you a creature so vile or weak that you could have a title to put such shame upon me?”
Out of the bitter passion of his soul, words more cruel than he had consciousness of rose to his lips and leaped to speech, and stung her as scorpions sting.
She said nothing; her teeth clinched, her face changed as it had used to do when Flamma had beaten her.
She said nothing, but turned away; and with one twist of her hand she flung the pieces through the open casement into the river that flowed below.
They sank with a little shiver of the severed water.
He caught her wrist a second too late.
“What madness! What have you done? You throw your gold away to the river-swamp for me, when I have not a shred worth a copper-piece to pay you back in their stead! I did
not mean to hurt you; it was only the truth, — you could not have shamed me more. You bring on me an indignity that I can neither requite nor revenge. You have no right to load me with debts that I cannot pay — with gifts that I would die sooner than receive. But, then, how should you know? — how should you know? If I wounded you with sharp words, I did wrong.”
There was a softness that was almost tenderness in his voice as he spoke the last phrases in his self-reproach; but her face did not change, her eyes did not lose their startled horror; she put her hand to her throat as though she choked.
“You cannot do wrong — to me,” she muttered, true, even in such a moment, to the absolute adoration which possessed her.
Then, ere he could stay her, she turned, without another word, and fled out from his presence into the dusk of the night.
The rushes in the moonlight sighed where they grew by the waterside above the sands where the gold had sunk.
A thing more precious than gold was dead; and only the reeds mourned for it. A thing of the river as they were, born like them from the dust, from the flood, and the wind, and the foam; a thing that a god might desire, a thing that a breeze might break.
CHAPTER III.
The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground, while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed in the rolling woods.
An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven palpitating breaths.
It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing, and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather. The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy wooden shoe on his right foot.
“Get up!” he muttered. “Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely.”
She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience begotten by long slavery.
There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had wandered sleepless all night long.
“Beast,” muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at her. “You have been at a witches’ sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only thing worth a rush in the house.”
She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she went, “A little gold! a little gold!”
“Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn,” thought the peasant, shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut ash-sticks for the market. “She looks half dead already; and they say the devil-begotten never bleed.”
The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any should blame the slayer.
The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy warmth of the early morning.
She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among his fellows — and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest shame that his life had ever known.
“What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?” he had cried out against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked, she had laid on him the debt of life.
If ever he should know ——
She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn of his reproaches.
He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the old Hellenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves, to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as Adrastus upon Atys.
On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened grasses tossed in waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth, chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian skies.
She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.
She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of a leaf, under a night-bird’s passage, every motion of the water, as the willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great guilt was on her soul.
Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat. She saw “no snakes but the keen stars,” which looked on her cold and luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslàn.
Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes of death as children in their mother’s.
The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her and beyond her.
All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the passionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as the sound of a hare’s step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel, broke the silence.
The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her — mysterious, unreal.
She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead. And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide from his and every eye.
She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.
The bitterness, the cruelty, the passion of his reproaches stung her with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.
; She had thought that as the god to the reed, so might he to her say hereafter, “You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music arisen,” — and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.
Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets of elder and thorn — where she had made her bed in her childhood many a summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the mill-house; — there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.
In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that she slept folded close in the arms of Arslàn, and in her dreams she felt the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.
Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and muttered, “Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed when the sun breaks?”
She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled in her brief oblivion. The passion of her dreams was still about her; her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.
Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.
She did not heed the old man’s words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Yprès by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which takes the ox or the ass back undriven through the old accustomed ways to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and unbidden.
Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.