by Ouida
She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was like one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discolored, broken, ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.
He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing, — it was wearying to him; all he desired was power among men.
“I have been cruel to you,” he said, suddenly. “I have stung and wounded you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?”
“You have no sins to me,” she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.
He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been pitiless to her — with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is born of the fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe music through its shattered grace again.
“When do you go?” she asked.
Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast; — all the ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field where men have fought and died.
He answered her, “At dawn.”
“And where?”
“To Paris. I will find fame — or a grave.”
A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood passive, colorless as the poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken; but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in silence.
He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.
He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all warmth had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him, to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot — as he chose.
“Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me,” he murmured. “I have been base to you, — brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes; — yet I would have loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is dead in me, I think, otherwise — —”
She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under the sharpest throes of Flamma’s scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of the dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they never again will rest.
Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields, and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.
He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was tender. He had no love for her; and yet — now that he had thrown her from him forever — he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in their terrible eloquence upon his own.
But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.
He went back to his home alone.
“It is best so,” he said to himself.
For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing — a reed of the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.
He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the creations that alone he loved.
“They shall live — or I will die,” he said to his own heart. With the war to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?
That night Hermes had no voice for him.
Else might the wise god have said, “Many reeds grow together by the river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long, — yea, all the years of his life.”
But Hermes that night spake not.
And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.
CHAPTER V.
When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little from her mouth.
It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.
No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and wondered what had chanced to her.
The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon. She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick and dull.
A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of the river-shore; her eyes vacantly followed the insect’s aimless circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She shivered and was cold.
The sun rose — a globe of flame above the edge of the world.
Memory flashed on her with its light.
She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent, flowing water.
Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike grass, and thought, and thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.
She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through it as with tongues of flame.
The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand. He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile; then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth — that in his last embrace he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.
Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would have suffered far less if he had killed her.
He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.
The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.
Gold! — such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the corners of the streets!
The horror of the humili
ation filled her with loathing of herself. Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not have cast this shame upon her.
She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.
Her heart was breaking.
Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword, and killed forever.
She did not reason — all thought was stunned in her; but as a woman, who loves looking on the face she loves, will see sure death written there long ere any other can detect it, so she knew, by the fatal and unerring instinct of passion, that he was gone from her as utterly and as eternally as though his grave had closed on him.
She did not even in her own heart reproach him. Her love for him was too perfect to make rebuke against him possible to her. Had he not a right to go as he would, to do as he chose, to take her or leave her, as best might seem to him? Only he had no right to shame her with what he had deemed shame to himself; no right to insult what he had slain.
She gathered herself slowly up, and took his money in her hand, and went along the river-bank. Whither? She had no knowledge at first; but, as she moved against the white light and the cool currents of the morning air, her brain cleared a little. The purpose that had risen in her slowly matured and strengthened; without its sustenance she would have sunk down and perished, like a flower cut at the root.
Of all the world that lay beyond the pale of those golden and russet orchards and scarlet lakes of blowing poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard at her feet.
Cities, he had often said, were as fiery furnaces that consumed all youth and innocence which touched them; for such as she to go to them was, he had often said, to cast a luscious and golden peach of the summer into the core of a wasps’-nest. Nevertheless, her mind was resolute to follow him, — to follow him unknown by him; so that, if his footsteps turned to brighter paths, her shadow might never fall across his ways; but so that, if need were, if failure still pursued him, and by failure came misery and death, she would be there beside him, to share those fatal gifts which none would dispute with her or grudge her.
To follow him was to her an instinct as natural and as irresistible as it is to the dog to track his master’s wanderings.
She would have starved ere ever she would have told him that she hungered. She would have perished by the roadside ere ever she would have cried to him that she was homeless. She would have been torn asunder for a meal by wolves ere she would have bought safety or succor by one coin of that gold he had slid into her bosom, like the wages of a thing that was vile.
But to follow him she never hesitated: unless this had been possible to her, she would have refused to live another hour. The love in her, at once savage and sublime, at once strong as the lion’s rage and humble as the camel’s endurance, made her take patiently all wrongs at his hands, but made her powerless to imagine a life in which he was not.
She went slowly now through the country, in the hush of the waking day.
He had said that he would leave at dawn.
In her unconscious agony of the night gone by, she had run far and fast ere she had fallen; and now, upon her waking, she had found herself some league from the old mill-woods, and farther yet from the tower on the river where he dwelt.
She was weak, and the way seemed very long to her; ever and again, too, she started aside and hid herself, thinking each step were his. She wanted to give him back his gold, yet she felt as though one look of his eyes would kill her.
It was long, and the sun was high, ere she had dragged her stiff and feeble limbs through the long grasses of the shore and reached the ruined granary. Crouching down, and gazing through the spaces in the stones from which so often she had watched him, she saw at once that the place was desolate.
The great Barabbas, and the painted panels and canvases, and all the pigments and tools and articles of an artist’s store, were gone; but the figures on the walls were perforce left there to perish. The early light fell full upon them, sad and calm and pale, living their life upon the stone.
She entered and looked at them.
She loved them greatly; it pierced her heart to leave them there — alone.
The bound Helios working at the mill, with white Hermes watching, mute and content; — and Persephone crouching in the awful shadow of the dread winged King, — the Greek youths, with doves in their breasts and golden apples in their hands, — the women dancing upon Cithæron in the moonlight, — the young gladiator wrestling with the Libyan lion, — all the familiar shapes and stories that made the gray walls teem with the old sweet life of the heroic times, were there — left to the rat and the spider, the dust and the damp, the slow, sad death of a decay which no heart would sorrow for, nor any hand arrest.
The days would come and go, the suns would rise and set, the nights would fall, and the waters flow, and the great stars throb above in the skies, and they would be there — alone.
To her they were living things, beautiful and divine; they were bound up with all the hours of her love; and at their feet she had known the one brief dream of ecstasy that had sprung up for her, great and golden as the prophet’s gourd, and as the gourd in a night had withered.
She held them in a passionate tenderness — these, the first creatures who had spoken to her with a smile, and had brought light into the darkness of her life.
She flung herself on the ground and kissed its dust, and prayed for them in an agony of prayer — prayed for them that the hour might come, and come quickly, when men would see the greatness of their maker, and would remember them, and seek them, and bear them forth in honor and in worship to the nations. She prayed in an agony; prayed blindly, and to whom she knew not; prayed, in the sightless instinct of the human heart, towards some greater strength which could bestow at once retribution and consolation.
Nor was it so much for him as for them that she thus prayed: in loving them she had reached the pure and impersonal passion of the artist. To have them live, she would have given her own life.
Then the bonds of her agony seemed to be severed; and, for the first time, she fell into a passion of tears, and, stretched there on the floor of the forsaken chamber, wept as women weep upon a grave.
When she arose, at length, she met the eyes of Hypnos and Oneiros and Thanatos — the gentle gods who give forgetfulness to men.
They were her dear gods, her best beloved and most compassionate; yet their look struck coldly to her heart.
Sleep, Dreams, and Death, — were these the only gifts with which the gods, being merciful, could answer prayer?
CHAPTER VI.
At the little quay in the town many boats were lading and unlading, and many setting their sails to go southward with their loads of eggs, or of birds, of flowers, of fruit, or of herbage; all smelling of summer rain, and the odors of freshly plowed earths turned up with the nest of the lark and the root of the cowslip laid bare in them.
Folle-Farine lost herself in its little busy crowd, and learned what she needed without any asking, in turn, question of her.
Arslàn had sailed at sunrise.
There was a little boat, with an old man in it, loaded with Russian violets from a flower-farm. The old man was angered and in trouble: the lad who steered for him had failed him, and the young men and boys on the canals were all too busied to be willing to go the voyage for the wretched pittance he offered. She heard, and leaned towards him.
“Do you go the way to Paris?”
The old man nodded.
“I will steer for you, then,” she said to him; and leaped down among his fragrant freight. He was a stranger to her, and let her be. She did for him as well as another, since she said that she knew those waters well.
He was in haste, and, without more words, he loosened his sail, and cut his moor-rope, and set his little vessel adrift down the water-ways of the town, the violets filling the air with their odors and blue as the eyes of a child that wakes smiling.
All the old familiar streets, all the dusky gateways and dim passages, all the ropes on which the lanterns and the linen hung, all the wide carved stairways water-washed, all the dim windows that the women filled with pots of ivy and the song of birds, — she was drifting from them with every pulse of the tide, never again to return; but she looked at them without seeing them, indifferent, and having no memory of them; her brain, and her heart, and her soul were with the boat that she followed.
It was the day of the weekly market. The broad flat-bottomed boats were coming in at sunrise, in each some cargo of green food or of farm produce; a strong girl rowing with bare arms, and the sun catching the white glint of her head-gear. Boys with coils of spotted birds’ eggs, children with lapfuls of wood-gathered primroses, old women nursing a wicker cage of cackling hens or hissing geese, mules and asses, shaking their bells and worsted tassels, bearing their riders high on sheepskin saddles, — these all went by her on the river, or on the towing path, or on the broad highroad that ran for a space by the water’s edge.
All of these knew her well; all of these some time or another had jeered her, jostled her, flouted her, or fled from her. But no one stopped her. No one cared enough for her to care even to wonder whither she went.
She glided out of the town, past the banks she knew so well, along the line of the wood and the orchards of Yprès. But what at another time would have had pain for her, and held her with the bonds of a sad familiarity, now scarcely moved her. One great grief and one great passion had drowned all lesser woes, and scorched all slighter memories.
All day long they sailed.
At noon the old man gave her a little fruit and a crust as part of her wage; she tried to eat them, knowing she would want all her strength.
They left the course of the stream that she knew, and sailed farther than she had ever sailed; passed towns whose bells were ringing, and noble bridges gleaming in the sun, and water-mills black and gruesome, and bright orchards and vineyards heavy with the promise of fruit. She knew none of them. There were only the water flowing under the keel, and the blue sky above, with the rooks circling in it, which had the look of friends to her.