by Ouida
“I know!” She gave a quick gesture of her head, tired, insolent, indifferent; and a terrible darkness stole over her face; what matter how beautiful she might be, she had no beauty in her own sight, for the eyes of Arslàn had dwelt on her cold, calm, unmoved, whilst he had said, “I would love you — if I could.”
“You know your value,” Sartorian said, dryly. “Well, then, why talk of poverty and of your future together? they need never be companions in this world.”
She rose and stood before him in the rosy glow of the fire that bathed her limbs until they glowed like jade and porphyry.
“No beautiful woman need be poor — no — no beautiful woman need be honest, I dare say.”
He smiled, holding his delicate palms to the warmth of his hearth.
“Your lover drew a grand vision of Barabbas. Well — we choose Barabbas still, just as Jerusalem chose; only now, our Barabbas is most often a woman. Why do you rise? It is a wet day, out there, and, for the spring-time, cold.”
“Is it?”
“And you have been ill?”
“So they say.”
“You will die of cold and exposure.”
“So best.”
“Wait a moment. In such weather I would not let a dog stir.”
“You would if the dog chose to go.”
“To a master who forsook it — for a kick and a curse?”
Her face burned; she hung her head instinctively. She sank down again on the seat which she had quitted. The old horror of shame which she had felt by the waterside under the orchards bent her strength under this man’s unmerciful pressure. She knew that he had her secret, and the haughty passion and courage of her nature writhed under his taunt of it.
“To refuse to stay is uncouth,” he said to her.
“I am uncouth, no doubt.”
“And it is ungrateful.”
“I would not be that.”
“Ungrateful! I did what you asked of me. I unloosed your Othyr of Art to spend his strength as he will, in essaying to raise a storm-blast which shall have force enough to echo through the endless tunnels of the time to come.”
“You gave him a handful of gold pieces for that!”
“Ah! if you thought that I should offer him the half of my possessions, you were disappointed, no doubt. But you forgot that ‘that’ would not sell in the world, as yet, for a handful of wheat.”
She touched the three sapphires.
“Are your blue stones of less worth, because I, being ignorant, esteem them of no more value than three sparrow’s eggs in the hedge?”
“My poor jewels! Well, stay here to-night; you need rest, shelter, and warmth; and to-morrow you shall go as poor as you came, if you wish. But the world is very hard. The world is always winter — to the poor,” he added, carelessly, resting his keen far-reaching eyes upon her.
Despite herself she shuddered; he recalled to her that the world was close at hand — the world in which she would be houseless, friendless, penniless, alone.
“A hard world, to those who will not worship its gods,” he repeated, musingly. “And you astray in it, you poor barbarian, with your noble madness, and your blindness of faith and of passion. Do you know what it is to be famished, and have none to hear your cries?”
“Do I know?” her voice suddenly gathered strength and scorn, and rang loud on the stillness. “Do you? The empty dish, the chill stove, the frozen feet, the long nights, with the roof dripping rain, the sour berries and hard roots that mock hunger, the mud floors, with the rats fighting to get first at your bed, the bitter black months, whose saints’ days are kept by new pains, and whose holy days are feasted by fresh diseases. Do I know? Do you?”
He did not answer her; he was absorbed in his study of her face; he was thinking how she would look in Paris in some theatre’s spectacle of Egypt, with anklets of dull gold and a cymar of dead white, and behind her a sea of palms and a red and sullen sky.
“What a fool he must have been!” he thought, as his eyes went from her to the study of her sleeping in the poppies. “What a fool! he left his lantern of Aladdin behind him.”
“You remember unlovely things,” he said, aloud. “No, I do not know them; and I should not have supposed that you, who did, could so much have cared to know them more, or could have clung to them as the only good, as you now seem to do. You cannot love such hardships?”
“I have never known luxuries; and I do not wish to know them.”
“Then you are no woman. What is your idea of the most perfect life?”
“I do not know — to be always in the open air, and to be quite free, and forever to see the sun.”
“Not a low ideal. You must await the Peruvian Paradise. Meanwhile there is a dayspring that represents the sun not ill; we call it Wealth.”
“Ah!” she could not deride this god, for she knew it was the greatest of them all; when the rod of riches had been lost, had not the Far-Striking King himself been brought low and bound down to a slave’s drudgery?
The small, keen, elfin, satiric face bent on her did not change from its musing study, its slow, vigilant smile; holding her under the subtle influence of his gaze, Sartorian began to speak, — speak as he could at choice, with accents sweet as silver, slow words persuasive as sorcery. With the terse, dainty, facile touches of a master, he placed before her that world of which she knew no more than any one of the reeds that blew by the sands of the river.
He painted to her that life of all others which was in most vital contrast and unlikeness to her own; the life of luxury, of indolence, of carelessness, of sovereignty, of endless pleasure, and supreme delight; he painted to her the years of a woman rich, caressed, omnipotent, beautiful, supreme, with all the world before her from which to choose her lovers, her playthings, her triumphs, her victories, her cruelties, and her seductions. He painted the long cloudless invigorating day of such a favorite of fortune, with its hours winged by love, and its laughter rhymed to music, and its wishes set to gold; the same day for the same woman, whether it were called of Rome or of Corinth, of Byzantium or of Athens, of Babylon or of Paris, and whether she herself were hailed hetaira or imperatrix. He drew such things as the skill of his words and the deep knowledge of his many years enabled him, in language which aroused her even from the absorption of her wretchedness, and stirred her dull disordered thoughts to a movement of restless discontent, and of strange wonder — Arslàn had never spoken to her thus.
He let his words dwell silently on her mind, awhile: then suddenly he asked her, —
“Such lives are; do you not envy them?”
She thought,— “Envy them? she? what could she envy save the eyes that looked on Arslàn’s face?” “What were the use?” she said aloud; “all my life I have seen all things are for others; nothing is for me.”
“Your life is but just opening. Henceforth you shall see all things for you, instead.”
She flashed her eyes upon him.
“How can that be?”
“Listen to me; you are alone in the world, Folle-Farine?”
“Alone; yes.”
“You have not a coin to stand a day between you and hunger?”
“Not one.”
“You know of no roof that will shelter you for so much as a night?”
“Not one.”
“You have just left a public place of pestilence?”
“Yes.”
“And you know that every one’s hand is against you because you are nameless and bastard, and come of a proscribed people, who are aliens alike in every land?”
“I am Folle-Farine; yes.”
For a moment he was silent. The simple, pathetic acceptance of the fate that made her name — merely because hers — a symbol of all things despised, and desolate, and forsaken, touched his heart and moved him to a sorrowful pity. But the pity died, and tie cruelty remained alive behind it.
He bent on her the magnetic power of his bright, sardonic, meaning eyes.
“Well — be Folle
-Farine still. Why not? But let Folle-Farine mean no longer a beggar, an outcast, a leper, a thing attainted, proscribed, and forever suspected; but let it mean on the ear of every man that hears it the name of the most famous, the most imperious, the most triumphant, the most beautiful woman of her time; a woman of whom the world says, ‘look on her face and die — you have lived enough.’”
Her breath came and went as she listened; the blood in her face flushed and paled; she trembled violently, and her whole frame seemed to dilate and strengthen and vibrate with the electric force of that subtlest temptation.
“I!” she murmured brokenly.
“Yes, you. All that I say you shall be: homeless, tribeless, nameless, nationless, though you stand there now, Folle-Farine.”
The wondrous promise swept her fancy for the moment on the strong current of its imagery, as a river sweeps a leaf. This empire hers? — hers? — when all mankind had driven and derided her, and shunned her sight and touch, and cursed and flouted her, and barely thought her worthy to be called “thou dog!”
He looked at her and smiled, and bent towards the warmth of the fire.
“All that I say you shall be; and — the year is all winter for the poor, Folle-Farine.”
The light on her face faded; a sudden apprehension tightened at her heart; on her face gathered the old fierce deadly antagonism which constant insult and attack had taught her to assume on the first instant of menace as her only buckler.
She knew not what evil threatened; but vaguely she felt that treason was close about her.
“If you do not mock me,” she said slowly, “if you do not — how will you make me what you promise?”
“I will show the world to you, you to the world; your beauty will do the rest.”
The darkness and the perplexed trouble deepened on her face; she rose and stood and looked at him, her teeth shut together with a quick sharp ring, her straight proud brows drew together in stormy silence; all the tigress in her was awoke and rising ready to spring; yet amid that dusky passion, that withering scorn of doubt, there was an innocent pathetic wonder, a vague desolation and disappointment, that were childlike and infinitely sad.
“This is a wondrous pear you offer me!” she said, bitterly. “And so cheap? — it must be rotten somewhere.”
“It is golden. Who need ask more?”
And he laughed his little low laugh in his throat.
Then, and then only, she understood him.
With a sudden unconscious instinctive action her hand sought her knife, but the girdle was empty; she sprang erect, her face on fire with a superb fury, her eyes blazing like the eyes of a wild beast’s by night, a magnificence of scorn and rage upon her quivering features.
Her voice rang clear and hard and cold as ring the blows of steel.
“I ask more, — that I should pluck it with clean hands, and eat of it with pure lips. Strange quibble for a beggar, — homeless, penniless, tribeless, nationless! So you think, no doubt. But we who are born outlawed are born free, — and do not sell our freedom. Let me go.”
He watched her with a musing smile, a dreamy calm content; all this tempest of her scorn, all this bitterness of her disdain, all this whirlwind of her passion and her suffering, seemed but to beguile him more and make him surer of her beauty, of her splendor, of her strength.
“She would be a great creature to show to the world,” he thought, as he drooped his head and watched her through his half-closed eyelids, as the Red Mouse watched the sleeper in the poppies. “Let you go?” he said, with that slow, ironic smile,— “let you go? Why should I let you go, Folle-Farine?”
She stooped as a tigress stoops to rise the stronger for her death spring, and her voice was low, on a level with his ear.
“Why? Why? To save your own life — if you are wise.”
He laughed in his throat again.
“Ah, ah! It is never wise to threaten, Folle-Farine. I do not threaten. You are foolish; you are unreasonable: and that is the privilege of a woman. I am not angered at it. On the contrary, it adds to your charm. You are a beautiful, reckless, stubborn, half-mad, half-savage creature. Passion and liberty become you, — become you like your ignorance and your ferocity. I would not for worlds that you should change them.”
“Let me go!” she cried, across his words.
“Oh, fool! the winter will be hard, — and you are bare of foot, — and you have not a crust!”
“Let me go.”
“Ah! Go? — to beg your way to Paris, and to creep through the cellars and the hospitals till you can see your lover’s face, and to crouch a moment at his feet to hear him mutter a curse on you in payment for your pilgrimage; and then to slit your throat or his — in your despair, and lie dead in all your loveliness in the common ditch.”
“Let me go, I say!”
“Or else, more like, come back to me in a week’s time and say, ‘I was mad but now I am wise. Give me the golden pear. What matter a little speck? What is golden may be rotten; but to all lips it is sweet.’”
“Let me go!”
She stood at bay before him, pale in her scorn of rags, her right hand clinched against her breast, her eyes breathing fire, her whole attitude instinct with the tempest of contempt and loathing, which she held down thus, passive and almost wordless, because she once had promised never to be thankless to this man.
He gazed at her and smiled, and thought how beautiful that chained whirlwind of her passions looked; but he did not touch her nor even go nearer to her. There was a dangerous gleam in her eyes that daunted him. Moreover, he was patient, humorous, gentle, cruel, wise, — all in one; and he desired to tame and to beguile her, and to see her slowly drawn into the subtle sweetness of the powers of gold; and to enjoy the yielding of each moral weakness one by one, as the southern boy slowly pulls limb from limb, wing from wing, of the cicala.
“I will let you go, surely,” he said, with his low, grim laugh. “I keep no woman prisoner against her will. But think one moment longer, Folle-Farine. You will take no gift at my hands?”
“None.”
“You want to go, — penniless as you are?”
“I will go so, — no other way.”
“You will fall ill on the road afresh.”
“That does not concern you.”
“You will starve.”
“That is my question.”
“You will have to herd with the street dogs.”
“Their bite is better than your welcome.”
“You will be suspected, — most likely imprisoned. You are an outcast.”
“That may be.”
“You will be driven to public charity.”
“Not till I need a public grave.”
“You will have never a glance of pity, never a look of softness, from your northern god; he has no love for you, and he is in his grave most likely. Icarus falls — always.”
For the first time she quailed as though struck by a sharp blow; but her voice remained inflexible and serene.
“I can live without love or pity, as I can without home or gold. Once for all, — let me go.”
“I will let you go,” he said, slowly, as he moved a little away. “I will let you go in seven days’ time. For seven days you shall do as you please; eat, drink, be clothed, be housed, be feasted, be served, be beguiled, — as the rich are. You shall taste all these things that gold gives, and which you, being ignorant, dare rashly deride and refuse. If, when seven days end, you still choose, you shall go, and as poor as you came. But you will not choose, for you are a woman, Folle-Farine!”
Ere she knew his intent he had moved the panel and drawn it behind him, and left her alone, — shut in a trap like the birds that Claudis Flamma had netted in his orchards.
That night, when the night without was quite dark, she knelt down before the study of the poppies, and kissed it softly, and prayed to the unknown God, of whom none had taught her in anywise, yet whose light she still had found, and followed in a dim, wondering,
imperfect fashion, as a little child lost in the twilight of some pathless wood, pursues in trembling the gleam of some great, still planet looming far above her through the leaves.
When she arose from her supplication, her choice was already made.
And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.
CHAPTER X.
AT sunrise a great peacock trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water’s edge.
The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the basement walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the garden palace, where the bird of Hêrê dwelt.
Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peacock swept in the light, there was an open casement, a narrow balcony of stone; a group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the night — the night wet and moonless, — waters a fathom deep, — a bed of sand treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.
On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of the Brocken.
But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long in the breast of the women whom men love.
The Sun came from the east, and passed through the pale stricken faces that watched from the casement, and came straight to where the Red Mouse sat amidst the poppies.
“Have you let a female soul escape you?” said the Sun.
The Red Mouse answered:
“Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch, and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to me.”