by Ouida
“I thought to be the reed chosen by the gods!” she said bitterly in her heart, “but I am not worthy — even to die.”
For she would have asked of fate no nobler thing than this — to be cut down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.
She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head; the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from the high towers and spires of the town.
At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the casements under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers under the roof.
The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees. The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of timber, kicking his feet among the long grasses, and blowing thistle down above his head upon the breeze.
The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as though it were still night.
She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
“What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?”
The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned, and answered on his hands, “Flamma is almost dead, they say.”
And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of laughter.
She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant in unison.
He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her — and to the country round — that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even by age or death? — it seemed to her impossible.
All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered with a scared face out from her master’s chamber.
“Where hast been all night?” she whispered in her grating voice; “thy grandsire lies a-dying.”
“Dying?”
“Ay,” muttered the old peasant. “He had a stroke yester-night as he came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as good as dead. You are glad.”
“Hush!” muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for; and yet there was that in the coarse congratulation which jarred on her and hurt her.
She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor coming — coming — coming — through so many winters to beg bread, and going away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing God. Was this death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.
Old Pitchou stood and looked at her.
“Will he leave her the gold or no?” she questioned in herself; musing whether or no it were better to be civil to the one who might inherit all his wealth, or might be cast adrift upon the world — who could say which?
After awhile Folle-Farine rose silently and brushed her aside, and went into the room.
It was a poor chamber; with a bed of straw and a rough bench or two, and a wooden cross with the picture of the Ascension hung above it. The square window was open, a knot of golden pear-leaves nodded to and fro; a linnet sang.
On the bed Claudis Flamma lay; dead already, except for the twitching of his mouth, and the restless wanderings of his eyes. Yet not so lost to life but that he knew her at a glance; and as she entered, glared upon her, and clinched his numbed hands upon the straw, and with a horrible effort in his almost lifeless limbs, raised the right arm, that alone had any strength or warmth left in it, and pointed at her with a shriek:
“She was a saint — a saint: God took her. So I said: — and was proud. While all the while man begot on her that!”
Then with a ghastly rattle in his throat, he quivered, and lay paralyzed again: only the eyes were alive, and were still speaking — awfully.
Folle-Farine went up to his bed, and stood beside it, looking down on him.
“You mean — my mother?”
It was the first time that she had ever said the word. Her voice lingered on the word, as though loath to leave its unfamiliar sweetness.
He lay and looked at her, motionless, impatient, lifeless; save only for the bleak and bloodshot stare of the stony eyes.
She thought that he had heard; but he made no sign in answer.
She sank down on her knees beside his bed, and put her lips close to him.
“Try and speak to me of my mother — once — once,” she murmured, with a pathetic longing in her voice.
A shudder shook his frozen limbs. He made no answer, he only glared on her with a terrible stare that might be horror, repentance, grief, memory, fear — she could not tell.
Old Pitchou stretched her head from the corner, as a hooded snake from its hole.
“Ask where the money is hid,” she hissed in a shrill whisper. “Ask — ask — while he can yet understand.”
He understood, for a smile grim and horrible disturbed his tight lips a moment.
Folle-Farine did not hear.
“Tell me of my mother; — tell me, tell me,” she muttered. Since a human love had been born in her heart, she had thought often of that mother whose eyes had never looked on her, and whose breast had never fed her.
His face changed, but he did not speak; he gasped for breath, and lay silent; his eyes trembled and confused; it might be that in that moment remorse was with him, and the vain regrets of cruel years.
It might be that dying thus, he knew that from his hearth, as from hell, mother and child had both been driven whilst his lips had talked of God.
A little bell rang softly in the orchard below the casement; the clear voice of a young boy singing a canticle crossed the voice of the linnet; there was a gleam of silver in the sun. The Church bore its Host to the dying man.
They turned her from the chamber.
The eyes of one unsanctified might not gaze upon mysteries of the blest.
She went out without resistance; she was oppressed and stupefied; she went to the stairs, and there sat down again, resting her forehead on her hands.
The door of the chamber was a little open, and she could hear the murmurs of the priest’s words, and smell the odors of the sacred chrism. A great bitterness came on her mouth.
“One crust in love — to them — in the deadly winters, had been better worth than all this oil and pray
er,” she thought. And she could see nothing but the old famished face of Manon Dax in the snow and the moonlight, as the old woman had muttered, “God is good.”
The officers of the Church ceased; there reigned an intense stillness; a stillness as of cold.
Suddenly the voice of Claudis Flamma rang out loud and shrill, —
“I loved her! Oh, God! — Thou knowest!”
She rose and looked through the space of the open door into the death-chamber.
He had sprung half erect, and with his arms outstretched, gazed at the gladness and the brightness of the day. In his eyes there was a mortal agony, a passion of reproach.
With one last supreme effort, he raised the crucifix which the priests had laid upon his bare anointed breast, and held it aloft, and shook it, and spat on it, and cast it forth from him broken upon the ground.
“Even Thou art a liar!” he cried, — it was the cry of the soul leaving the body, — with the next moment he fell back — dead.
In that one cry his heart had spoken; the cold, hard heart that yet had shut one great love and one great faith in it, and losing these, had broken and shown no wound.
For what agony had been like unto his?
Since who could render him back on earth, or in the grave, that pure white soul he had believed in once? Yea — who? Not man; not even God.
Therefore had he suffered without hope.
She went away from the house and down the stairs, and out into the ruddy noon. She took her way by instinct to the orchard, and there sat down upon a moss-grown stone within the shadow of the leaves.
All sense was deadened in her under a deep unutterable pity.
From where she sat she could see the wicket window, the gabled end of the chamber, and where the linnet sang, and the yellow fruit of the pear-tree swung. All about was the drowsy hot weather of the fruit harvest; the murmur of bees; the sweep of the boughs in the water.
Never, in all the years that they had dwelt together beneath one roof, had any good word or fair glance been given her; he had nourished her on bitterness, and for his wage paid her a curse. Yet her heart was sore for him; and judged him without hatred.
All things seemed clear to her, now that a human love had reached her; and this man also, having loved greatly and been betrayed, became sanctified in her sight.
She forgot his brutality, his avarice, his hatred; she remembered only that he had loved, and in his love been fooled, and so had lost his faith in God and man, and had thus staggered wretchedly down the darkness of his life, hating himself and every other, and hurting every other human thing that touched him, and crying ever in his blindness, “O Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!”
And now he was dead.
What did it matter?
Whether any soul of his lived again, or whether body and mind both died forever, what would it benefit all those whom he had slain? — the little fair birds, poisoned in their song; the little sickly children, starved in the long winters; the miserable women, hunted to their graves for some small debt of fuel or bread; the wretched poor, mocked in their famine by his greed and gain?
It had been woe for him that his loved had wronged him, and turned the hard excellence of his life to stone: but none the less had it been woe to them to fall and perish, because his hand would never spare, his heart would never soften.
Her heart was sick with the cold, bitter, and inexorable law, which had let this man drag out his seventy years, cursing and being cursed; and lose all things for a dream of God; and then at the last, upon his death-bed, know that dream likewise to be false.
“It is so cruel! It is so cruel!” she muttered, where she sat with dry eyes in the shade of the leaves, looking at that window where death was.
And she had reason.
For there is nothing so cruel in life as a Faith; — the Faith, whatever its name may be, that draws a man on all his years through, on one narrow path, by one tremulous light, and then at the last, with a laugh, drowns him.
CHAPTER IV.
The summer day went by. No one sought her. She did not leave the precincts of the still mill-gardens; a sort of secrecy and stillness seemed to bind her footsteps there, and she dreaded to venture forth, lest she should meet the eyes of Arslàn.
The notary had put seals upon all the cupboards and desks. Two hired watchers sat in the little darkened room above. Some tapers burned beside his bed. The great clock ticked heavily. All the house was closed. Without burned the great roses of the late summer, and the scorch of a cloudless sun. The wheels of the mill stood still. People came and went; many women among them. The death of the miller of Yprès was a shock to all his countryside. There was scarce a face that did not lighten, as the peasants going home at the evening met one another in the mellow fields, and called across, “Hast heard? Flamma is dead — at last.”
No woman came across the meadows with a little candle, and kneeled down by his body and wept and blessed the stiff and withered hands for the good that they had wrought, and for the gifts that they had given.
The hot day-hours stole slowly by; all was noiseless there where she sat, lost in the stupefied pain of her thoughts, in the deep shadow of the leaves, where the first breath of the autumn had gilded them and varied them, here and there, with streaks of red.
No one saw her; no one remembered her; no one came to her. She was left in peace, such peace as is the lot of those for whose sigh no human ear is open, for whose need no human hand is stretched. Once indeed at noonday, the old serving-woman sought her, and had forced on her some simple meal of crusts and eggs.
“For who can tell?” the shrewd old Norway crone thought to herself,— “who can tell? She may get all the treasure: who knows? And if so, it will be best to have been a little good to her this day, and to seem as if one had forgiven about the chain of coins.”
For Pitchou, like the world at large, would pardon offenses, if for pardon she saw a sure profit in gold.
“Who will he have left all the wealth to, think you?” the old peasant muttered, with a cunning glitter in her sunken eyes, standing by her at noon, in the solitude, where the orchards touched the mill-stream.
“The wealth, — whose wealth?” Folle-Farine echoed the word stupidly. She had had no thought of the hoarded savings of that long life of theft, and of oppression. She had had no remembrance of any possible inheritance which might accrue to her by this sudden death. She had been too long his goaded and galled slave to be able to imagine herself his heir.
“Ay, his wealth,” answered the woman, standing against the water with her wooden shoes deep in dock-leaves and grass, gazing, with a curious eager grasping greed in her eyes, at the creature whom she had always done her best to thwart, to hurt, to starve and to slander. “Ay, his wealth. You who look so sharp after your bits of heathen coins, cannot for sure pretend to forget the value he must have laid by, living as he has lived all the days from his youth upward. There must be a rare mass of gold hid away somewhere or another — the notary knows, I suppose — it is all in the place, that I am sure. He was too wise ever to trust money far from home; he knew well it was a gad-about, that once you part with never comes back to you. It must be all in the secret places; in the thatch, under the hearthstone, in the rafters, under the bricks. And, maybe, there will be quite a fortune. He had so much, and he lived so near. Where think you it will go?”
A faint bitter smile flickered a moment over Folle-Farine’s mouth.
“It should go to the poor. It belongs to them. It was all coined out of their hearts and their bodies.”
“Then you have no hope for yourself: — you?”
“I?”
She muttered the word dreamily; and raised her aching eyelids, and stared in stupefaction at the old, haggard, dark, ravenous face of Pitchou.
“Pshaw! You cannot cheat me that way,” said the woman, moving away through the orchard branches, muttering to herself. “As if a thing of hell like you ever served like a slave all these years, on any
other hope than the hope of the gold! Well, — as for me, — I never pretend to lie in that fashion. If it had not been for the hope of a share in the gold, I would never have eaten for seventeen years the old wretch’s mouldy crusts and lentil-washings.”
She hobbled, grumbling on her way back to the house, through the russet shadows and the glowing gold of the orchards.
Folle-Farine sat by the water, musing on the future which had opened to her with the woman’s words of greed.
Before another day had sped, it was possible, — so even said one who hated her, and begrudged her every bit and drop that she had taken at the miser’s board, — possible that she would enter into the heritage of all that this long life, spent in rapacious greed and gain, had gathered together.
One night earlier, paradise itself would have seemed to open before her with such a hope; for she would have hastened to the feet of Arslàn, and there poured all treasure that chance might have given her, and would have cried out of the fullness of her heart, “Take, enjoy, be free, do as you will. So that you make the world of men own your greatness, I will live as a beggar all the years of my life, and think myself richer than kings!”
But now, what use would it be, though she were called to an empire? She would not dare to say to him, as a day earlier she would have said with her first breath, “All that is mine is thine.”
She would not even dare to give him all and creep away unseen, unthanked, unhonored into obscurity and oblivion, for had he not said, “You have no right to burden me with debt”?
Yet as she sat there lonely among the grasses, with the great mill-wheels at rest in the water, and the swallows skimming the surface that was freed from the churn and the foam of the wheels, as though the day of Flamma’s death had been a saint’s day, the fancy which had been set so suddenly before her, dazzled her, and her aching brain and her sick despair could not choose but play with it despite themselves.