by Ouida
And some of these in turn loved her.
Neither poverty nor wretchedness could dull the lustrous, deep-hued, flowerlike beauty that was hers by nature. As she ascended the dark stone stairs with the little candle raised above her head, and, knocking low, entered the place where they slept, the men and the children alike dreamed of strange shapes of paradise and things of sorcery.
“When she wakes us, the children never cry,” said a woman whom she always summoned an hour before dawn to rise and walk two leagues to a distant factory. It was new to her to be welcomed; it was new to see the children smile because she touched them. It lifted a little the ice that had closed about her heart.
It had become the height of the summer. The burning days and the sultry nights poured down on her bare head and blinded her, and filled her throat with the dust of the public ways, and parched her mouth with the thirst of overdriven cattle.
All the while in the hard hot glare she searched for one face. All the while in the hard brazen din she listened for one voice.
She wandered all the day, half the night. They wondered that she woke so surely with every dawn; they did not know that seldom did she ever sleep. She sought for him always; — sought the busy crowds of the living; sought the burial-grounds of the dead.
As she passed through the endless ways in the wondrous city; as she passed by the vast temples of art; as she passed by the open doors of the sacred places which the country had raised to the great memories that it treasured; it became clearer to her — this thing of his desires, this deathless name amidst a nation, this throne on the awed homage of a world for which his life had labored, and striven, and sickened, and endlessly yearned.
The great purpose, the great end, to which he had lived grew tangible and present to her; and in her heart, as she went, she said ever, “Let me only die as the reed died, — what matter, — so that only the world speak his name!”
CHAPTER XIII.
One night she stood on the height of the leads of the tower. The pigeons had gone to roost; the bells had swung themselves into stillness; far below the changing crowds were moving ceaselessly, but to that calm altitude no sound arose from them. The stars were out, and a great silver moon bathed half the skies in its white glory. In the stones of the parapet wind-sown blossoms blew to and fro heavy with dew.
The day had been one of oppressive heat. She had toiled all through it, seeking, seeking, seeking, what she never found. She was covered with dust; parched with thirst; foot-weary; sick at heart. She looked down on the mighty maze of the city, and thought, “How long, — how long?”
Suddenly a cool hand touched her, a soft voice murmured at her ear, —
“You are not tired, Folle-Farine?”
Turning in the gloom she faced Sartorian. A great terror held her mute and breathless there; gazing in the paralysis of horror at this frail life, which was for her the incarnation of the world, and by whose lips the world said to her, “Come, eat and drink, and sew your garments with gems, and kiss men on the mouth whilst you slay them, and plunder and poison, and laugh and be wise. For all your gods are dead; and there is but one god now, — that god is gold.”
“You must be tired, surely,” the old man said, with soft insistance. “You never find what you seek; you are always alone, always hungered and poor; always wretched, Folle-Farine. Ah! you would not eat my golden pear. It was not wise.”
He said so little; and yet, those slow, subtle, brief phrases pierced her heart with the full force of their odious meaning. She leaned against the wall, breathing hard and fast, mute, for the moment paralyzed.
“You fled away from me that night. It was heroic, foolish, mad. Yet I bear no anger against it. You have not loved the old, dead gods for naught. You have the temper of their times. You obey them; though they betray you and forget you, Folle-Farine.”
She gazed at him, fascinated by her very loathing of him, as the bird by the snake.
“Who told you?” she muttered. “Who told you that I dwell here?”
“The sun has a million rays; so has gold a million eyes; do you not know? There is nothing you have not done that has not been told to me. But I can always wait, Folle-Farine. You are very strong; you are very weak, of course; — you have a faith, and you follow it; and it leads you on and on, on and on, and one day it will disappear, — and you will plunge after it, — and it will drown you. You seek for this man and you cannot find even his grave. You are like a woman who seeks for her lover on a battle-field. But the world is a carnage where the vultures soon pick bare the bones of the slain, and all skeletons look alike, and are alike, unlovely, Folle-Farine.”
“You came — to say this?” she said, through her locked teeth.
“Nay — I came to see your beauty: your ice-god tired soon; but I —— My golden pear would have been better vengeance for a slighted passion than his beggar’s quarter, and these wretched rags — —”
She held her misery and her shame and her hatred alike down under enforced composure.
“There is no shame here,” she said, between her teeth. “A beggar’s quarter, perhaps; but these poor copper coins and these rags I earn with clean hands.”
He smiled with that benignant pity, with that malign mockery, which stung her so ruthlessly.
“No shame? Oh, Folle-Farine, did I not tell you, that, live as you may, shame will be always your garment in life and in death? You — a thing beautiful, nameless, homeless, accursed, who dares to dream to be innocent likewise! The world will clothe you with shame, whether you choose it or not. But the world, as I say, will give you one choice. Take its red robe boldly from it, and weight it with gold and incrust it with jewels. Believe me, the women who wear the white garments of virtue will envy you the red robe bitterly then.”
Her arms were crossed upon her breast; her eyes gazed at him with the look he had seen in the gloom of the evening, under the orchards by the side of the rushing mill-water.
“You came — to say this?”
“Nay: I came to see your beauty, Folle-Farine. Your northern god soon tired, I say; but I —— Look yonder a moment,” he pursued; and he motioned downward to where the long lines of light gleamed in the wondrous city which was stretched at their feet; and the endless murmur of its eternal sea of pleasure floated dimly to them on the soft night air. “See here, Folle-Farine: you dwell with the lowest; you are the slave of street mimes; no eyes see you except those of the harlot, the beggar, the thief, the outcast; your wage is a crust and a copper coin; you have the fate of your namesake, the dust, to wander a little while, and then sink on the stones of the streets. Yet that you think worthy and faithful, because it is pure of alms and of vice. Oh, beautiful fool! what would your lost lover say if beholding you here amidst the reek of the mob and the homage of thieves? He would say of you the most bitter thing that a man can say of a woman: ‘She has sunk into sin, but she has been powerless to gild her sin, or make it of more profit than was her innocence.’ And a man has no scorn like the scorn which he feels for a woman who sells her soul — at a loss. You see? — ah, surely, you see, Folle-Farine?”
She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous moonlight about her. She saw — she saw now!
And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty, and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least believe — believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and merciless gift.
“You see?” pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor’s voice. “You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies
the world, which when I saw you last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it — know it, at least, enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine, — to stand homeless under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired, Folle-Farine!”
She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
Tired! — ah, God! — tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he spake.
“You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer’s wand, to bring you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised! — what vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed! — what retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance — so symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to wither at your birth, — a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way, you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men; and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is; — nothing as you are, Folle-Farine!”
She heard in silence to the end.
On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness, in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted in the spaces of the stones.
As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the void of the darkness.
“What do I say?” she said, slowly. “What? Well, this: I could seize you, and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just.”
And she turned away and walked from him in the gloom, slowly, as though the deed she spake of tempted her.
CHAPTER XIV.
The poverties of the city devoured her incessantly, like wolves; the temptations of the city crouched in wait for her incessantly, like tigers. She was always hungry, always heartsick, always alone; and there was always at her ear some tempting voice, telling her that she was beautiful and was a fool. Yet she never dreamed once of listening, of yielding, of taking any pity on herself. Was this virtue? She never thought of it as such; it was simply instinct; the instinct of a supreme fidelity, in which all slighter and meaner passions were absorbed and slain.
Once or twice, through some lighted casement in some lamp-lit wood, where the little gay boats flashed on fairy lakes, she would coldly watch that luxury, that indolence, that rest of the senses, with a curl on her lips, where she sat or stood, in the shadow of the trees.
“To wear soft stuffs and rich colors, to have jewels in their breasts, to sleep in satin, to hear fools laugh, to have both hands full of gold, that is what women love,” she thought; and laughed a little in her cold wonder, and went back to her high cage in the tower, and called the pigeons in from the rooftops at sunset, and kissed their purple throats, and broke among them her one dry crust, and, supperless herself, sat on the parapet and watched the round white moon rise over the shining roofs of Paris.
She was ignorant, she was friendless, she was savage, she was very wretched; but she had a supreme love in her, and she was strong.
A hundred times the Red Mouse tried to steal through the lips which hunger, his servile and unfailing minister, would surely, the Red Mouse thought, disbar and unclose to him sooner or later.
“You will tire, and I can wait, Folle-Farine,” the Red Mouse had said to her, by the tongue of the old man Sartorian; and he kept his word very patiently.
He was patient, he was wise; he believed in the power of gold, and he had no faith in the strength of a woman. He knew how to wait — unseen, so that this rare bird should not perceive the net spread for it in its wildness and weariness. He did not pursue, nor too quickly incense, her.
Only in the dark, cheerless mists, when she rose to go among the world of the sleeping poor, at her threshold she would step on some gift worthy of a queen’s acceptance, without date or word, gleaming there against the stone of the stairs.
When she climbed to her hole in the roof at the close of a day, all pain, all fatigue, all vain endeavor, all bootless labor to and fro the labyrinth of streets, there would be on her bare bench such fruits and flowers as Dorothea might have sent from Paradise, and curled amidst them some thin leaf that would have bought the weight of the pines and of the grapes in gold.
When in the dusk of the night she went, wearily and footsore, through the byways and over the sharp-set flints of the quarters of the outcasts and the beggars, sick with the tumult and the stench and the squalor, parched with dust, worn with hunger, blind with the endless search for one face amidst the millions, — going home! — oh, mockery of the word! — to a bed of straw, to a cage in the roof, to a handful of rice as a meal, to a night of loneliness and cold and misery; at such a moment now and then through the gloom a voice would steal to her, saying, —
“Are you not tired yet, Folle-Farine?”
But she never paused to hear the voice, nor gave it any answer.
The mill dust; the reed by the river; the nameless, friendless, rootless thing that her fate made her, should have been weak, and so lightly blown by every chance breeze — so the Red Mouse told her; should have asked no better ending than to be wafted up a little while upon the winds of praise, or woven with a golden braid into a crown of pleasure.
Yet she was so stubborn and would not; yet she dared deride her tempters, and defy her destiny, and be strong.
For Love was with her.
And though the Red Mouse lies often in Love’s breast, and is cradled there a welcome guest, yet when Love, once in a million times, shakes off his sloth, and flings the Red Mouse with it from him, he flings with a hand of force; and the beast crouches and flees, and dares meddle with Love no more.
In one of the first weeks of the wilder weather, weather that had the purple glow of the autumnal storms and the chills of coming winter on it, she arose, as her habit was, ere the night was altogether spent, and lit her little taper, and went out upon her rounds to rouse the sleepers.
She had barely tasted food that day, worst of all she had not had even a few grains to scatter to the hungry pigeons as they had fluttered to her on the housetop in the stormy twilight as the evening fell.
She had lain awake all the night hearing the strokes of the bells sound the hours, and seeming to say to her as they beat on the silence, —
“Dost thou dare to be strong, thou? a grain of dust, a reed of the river, a Nothing?”
When she rose, and drew back the iron staple that fastened her door, and went out on the crazy stairway, she struck her foot against a thing of metal. It glittered in the feeble beams from her lamp. She took it up; it was a little precious casket, such as of old the Red Mouse lurked in, among the pearls, to spring out from their whiteness into the purer snow of Gretchen’s bread.
With it was only one written line:
“When you are tired, Folle-Farine?”
She was already tired, tired with the horrible thirsty weariness of the young lioness starved and cramped in a cage in a city.
An old crone sat on a niche on the wall. She thrust her lean bony face, lit with wolf’s eyes, through the gloom.