Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 172
If the fortune of Flamma came to her, it might be possible, she thought, to spend it so as to release him from his bondage, without knowledge of his own; so to fashion with it a golden temple and a golden throne for the works of his hand, that the world, which as they all said worshiped gold, should be forced to gaze in homage on the creations of his mind and hand.
And yet he had said greater shame there could come to no man, than to rise by the aid of a woman. The apple of life, however sweet and fair in its color and savor, would be as poison in his mouth if her hand held it. That she knew, and in the humility of her great and reverent love, she submitted without question to its cruelty.
At night she went within to break her fast, and try to rest a little. The old peasant woman served her silently, and for the first time willingly. “Who can say?” the Norman thought to herself,— “who can say? She may yet get it all, who knows?”
At night as she slept, Pitchou peered at her, shading the light from her eyes.
“If only I could know who gets the gold?” she muttered. Her sole thought was the money; the money that the notary held under his lock and seal. She wished now that she had dealt better with the girl sometimes; it would have been safer, and it could have done no harm.
With earliest dawn Folle-Farine fled again to the refuge of the wood. She shunned, with the terror of a hunted doe, the sight of people coming and going, the priests and the gossips, the sights and the sounds, and none sought her.
All the day through she wandered in the cool dewy orchard-ways.
Beyond the walls of the foliage, she saw the shrouded window, the flash of the crucifix, the throngs of the mourners, the glisten of the white robes. She heard the deep sonorous swelling of the chants; she saw the little procession come out from the doorway and cross the old wooden bridge, and go slowly through the sunlight of the meadows. Many of the people followed, singing, and bearing tapers; for he who was dead had stood well with the Church, and from such there still issues for the living a fair savor.
No one came to her. What had they to do with her, — a creature unbaptized, and an outcast?
She watched the little line fade away, over the green and golden glory of the fields.
She did not think of herself — since Arslàn had looked at her, in his merciless scorn, she had had neither past nor future.
It did not even occur to her that her home would be in this place no longer; it was as natural to her as its burrow to the cony, its hole to the fox. It did not occur to her that the death of this her tyrant could not but make some sudden and startling change in all her ways and fortune.
She waited in the woods all day; it was so strange a sense to her to be free of the bitter bondage that had lain on her life so long; she could not at once arise and understand the meaning of her freedom; she was like a captive soldier, who has dragged the cannon-ball so long, that when it is loosened from his limb, it feels strange, and his step sounds uncompanioned.
She was thankful, too, for the tortured beasts, and the hunted birds; she fed them and looked in their gentle eyes, and told them that they were free. But in her own heart one vain wish, only, ached — she thought always:
“If only I might die for him, — as the reed for the god.”
The people returned, and then after awhile all went forth again; they and their priests with them. The place was left alone. The old solitude had come upon it; the sound of the wood-dove only filled the quiet.
The day grew on; in the orchards it was already twilight, whilst on the waters and in the open lands farther away the sun was bright. There was a wicket close by under the boughs; a bridle-path ran by, moss-grown, and little used, but leading from the public road beyond.
From the gleam of the twisted fruit trees a low flutelike noise came to her ear in the shadow of the solitude.
“Folle-Farine, — I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to stay me. Say — do you bid me still set your Norse-god free from the Cave of the Snakes?”
She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they noted the change in her since the last sun had set.
“What did he say to you for your gold?” the old man asked.
She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face; she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price for her chain of coins.
He laughed a little softly.
“Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine! — female things, with eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!”
She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon’s probe.
“What did he say to you?” pursued her questioner. “There should be but one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours.”
She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:
“He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the river.”
She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery to any debt or burden of a service done.
The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves, looked at her long and thoughtfully.
“He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?”
She gave a sign of assent.
“That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!” Her lips grew white and shut together.
“Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt.”
“You are very royal. I think your northern god was only thus cold because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine.”
A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.
“It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire.”
“You are so sure? Does he hate you, then — this god of yours?”
She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her faith would not be turned.
“Need a man hate the dust under his foot?” she muttered in her teeth; “because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks.”
“You are very truthful.”
She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young desert mare.
“All these in Paris,” he was thinking. “Just as she is, with just the same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?”
But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight of the curled lasso.
“Well,” he said, simply, “I understand; your eagle, in recompense for your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons? It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will bleed many a day.”
She lifted her head.
“Have I complained? — have I asked your pity, or any man’s?”
“Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man’s wound sometimes. He has been very base to you.”
“He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him for that?”
“Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?”
“Yes.”
“What, still?”
“Why not?”
“Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken yourself, is shaken from his feet!”
“No doubt.”
She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still upon the reaches of the river.
“No doubt,” he echoed. “And yet I think you hardly understand. This man is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always; he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him? Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage, or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form to a painter’s gaze. Child! what you have thought noble, men and women have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free — to forget you?”
She listened dumbly; her attitude unchanging, as she had stood in other days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her master.
“He shall be free — to forget me.”
The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were echoed through her locked teeth.
The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs quiver, and those bare nerves heave.
“Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother’s sex, Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your Norse-god alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and who has youth, and who has passion, need never fail to make a love-light beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against it to withstand it — this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily beauty of a woman.”
His voice ceased softly in the twilight — this voice of Mephistopheles — which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of straining this strength to see if it should break — of deriding this faith to see if it would bend — of alluring this soul to see if it would fall.
She stood abased in a piteous shame — the shame that any man should thus read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased to bear the gaze of any human eyes, — to bear the light of any noonday sun.
And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle force: the passions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood — the ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with her flesh and blood: to have been the passion-toy of the man she loved for one single day, — to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned, and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath, —
“I have lived: it is enough!”
He might be hers! The mere thought, uttered in another’s voice, thrilled through her with a tumultuous ecstasy, hot as flame, potent as wine.
He might be hers — all her own — each pulse of his heart echoing hers, each breath of his lips spent on her own. He might be hers! — she hid her face upon her hands; a million tongues of fire seemed to curl about her and lap her life. The temptation was stronger than her strength.
She was a friendless, loveless, nameless thing, and she had but one idolatry and one passion, and for this joy that they set to her lips she would have given her body and her soul. Her soul — if the gods and man allowed her one — her soul and all her life, mortal and immortal, for one single day of Arslàn’s love. Her soul, forever, to any hell they would — but his?
Not for this had she sold her life to the gods — not for this; not for the rapture of passion, the trance of the senses, the heaven of self.
What she had sworn to them, if they saved him, was forever to forget in him herself, to suffer dumbly for him, and, whensoever they would, in his stead to die.
“Choose,” said the soft wooing voice of her tempter, while his gaze smiled on her through the twilight. “Shall he consume his heart here in solitude till he loves you perforce, or shall he go free among the cities of men, to remember you no more than he remembers the reeds by the river?”
The reeds by the river.
The chance words that he used, by the mere hazards of speech, cut the bonds of passion which were binding so closely about her. As the river-reed to the god, so she had thought that her brief span of life might be to the immortality of his. Was this the fulfilling of her faith, — to hold him here with his strength in chains, and his genius perishing in darkness, that she, the thing of an hour, might know delight in the reluctant love, in the wearied embrace, of a man heart-sick and heart-broken?
She shook the deadly sweetness of the beguilement off her as she would have shaken an asp’s coils off her wrist, and rose against it, and was once more strong.
“What have you to do with me?” she muttered, feebly, while the fierce glare of her eyes burned through the gloom of the leaves. “Keep your word; set him free. His freedom let him use — as he will.”
Then, ere he could arrest her flight, she had plunged into the depths of the orchards, and was lost in their flickering shadows.
Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood, along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and alone.
“The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime unreason — that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold, as that fruit falls to the touch,” he thought, as he brushed a ripe yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh, at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was twisting.
He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from the porch.
In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the house.
She had lost all remembrance of Flamma’s death, and of the inheritance of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a man’s genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, “Will he forget? — forget quite — when he is free?”
The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the doorway.
Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.
She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated for her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the pain and the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke so plainly; at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through the gray, pure air, and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and stupor.
“She has been told,” thought the old serving-woman. “She has been told, and her heart breaks for the gold.”
