FOLLE-FAEINE.
43
pelled by passfoi.ate, reasonless instinct to hide herself
forever and forever from the only eyes she loved.
Before her were the maze of the poppy-flelds. In
the moonlight their blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or
at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud ami purpie pomp,
and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare iu the
midnight of calamity.
Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her
ankles Her brown limbs glistened in the gleam from
the skies. She tightened her re.l girdle round her loins
and ran, as a doc runs to reach the sanctuary.
Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew
among the grasses, caught her fleet feet and stopped
her. The earth was wet with dew. A tangle of boughs
and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure sreps
failed her.   She faltered and fell.
Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent
of the wet leaves was in her hair.    The rain-drops
flistened on her feet. The light of the stars seemed in
er burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the
night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On
her face the moon shone.
She was like a creature horn from the freshness of
dews, from the odor of foliage, from the hues of the
clouds, from the foam of the brooks, from all things of
the woods and the water. In that moment she was
beautiful with the beauty of women.
" If only she could content me!" he thought. If only
tre had eared for the song of the reed by the river!
But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived;
and a pursuit that was passionless had always seemed
to him base; and his feet were set on a stony and nar-
row road where he would not encumber his strength
with a thing of her sex, 'est the burden should draw
him backward one rood on his way.
He had never loved her; he never would love her; his
senses were awake to her beauty, indeed, and his reason
awed it beyond all usual gifts of her sex. But he had
used it in the service of his art, and therein had scru-
tinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to
ilkri all that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious
charm, which arouse the passion of love in a man to
a woman.                                           .           ,.'..,
So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk ot the
night with no light in his own eyes.
"Do not fly from me," he said to her.   "I have
sought you, to ask your forgiveness, and-----"
She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were
crossed upon her chest in the posture habitual to her
under any pain; her face was hidden in the shadow;
her little bundle of clothes had dropped on the grasses,
and was hidden by them. Of Flamma's death and of
her homelessness he had heard nothing.
" I was harsh to you," he said, gently.     " I spoke, in-
the bitterness of my heart, unworthily.   I was stung
with a great shame; I forgot that you could not know.
Can you forgive?"
"The madness was mine," she muttered.   "Itwas 1,
who forgot-----"
Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort;
she did not look up; she stood bloodless, breathless,
swaying to and fro, as a young tree which has been cut
through near the root sways ere it falls. She knew
well what his words would say.
"You are generous, and you shame me—indeed—
thus," he said with a certain softness as of unwilling
pain in his voice which shook its coldness and serenity.
This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to
himself, this silence, which bore all wounds from his
hand, and was never broken to utter one reproach
against him, these moved him. He could not choose
but see that this nature, which he bruised arrd forsook,
was noble beyond any common nobility of any human
thing.                                             ,                           ,
" I have deserved little at your hands, and you have
given me much," he said slowly. " I feel base and un-
worthy; for—1 have sought you to bid you farewell."
She had awaited her death-blow; she received its
stroke without a sound.
She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of
pain, brrt standing there her form curled within itself,
as a withered fern curls, and all her beauty changed
like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.
She did not look at him ; but waited with her head
bent, and her hands crossed on her breast as a crimi-
nal waits for his doom.
His nerve nearly failed lnm; his heart nearly yielded.
He had no love for her; she was nothing to him. No
more than any one of the dark, nude savage women
who had sat to his art on the broker, steps ot ruined
Temples of the Sun; or the antelope-eyed creatures ot
desert and plain, who had come on here before him in
the light of the East, and hail passed as the shadows
passed, and, like them, were forgotten.
She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose
but think—all this mighty love, all this majesvic
strength, all this superb and dreamy loveliness w-ould
die out, here, as the evening colors had died out of the,
skies in the west, none pausing even to note that they
were dead.                                                         ¦ _        ,„
He kirewthat he had but to say to her, "Come!"
and she would go beside him, whether to shame or
ignominy or famine or death, triumphant and rejoic-
ing as the martyrs of old went to the flames, which
were to them the gates of paradise.                   ¦
He knew that there would not be a blow his hand
could deal which could make her deem him cruel; he
her loveliness was like one of the poppies that his foot
had trodden on, discolored, broken, rained. 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. 1 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 deacly calm on her face
change ; but her voiee had a hai sh metallic sound, like
the jar of a bell that is broken.
He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance
of hi., heart were pained and humbled by her pardon of
them. He knew that he had been pitiless to her—with
a uiti'es-ness 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
our, and so bruised it, as he went, that never would any
w ind of heaven breathe music through its shattered
glance 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 upc n her breast—all the ruins of the trampled
poppy-bless, m were about her, blood-red as a field
where men have fought and died.
lie answered her, " At dawn."
"And where?"
" To Paris. I will find fame—or agrave."
A lona- silence fell between them. The church chimes,
far away irr the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She
stood passive, coloi less as the poppies w ere, 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 signs. It was her
natu. . 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 mur-
mured. " 1 have been base to you—brutal, and brtter,
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, 1 think, otherwise-----
She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his em-
brace. 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 pas-
sion 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, ail his coldness, all his cruelty.   And shewas
only a female thing—a reed of the river, songless, and
blown by the wind as the rest were.
He re'turned 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 mm.
CHAPTER V.
When the dawn came, it found her lying face down-
ward 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 sud-
denly had dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus
with the steel sheathed in his 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
Memory flashed on her with its light.
She rose a little, staggering ana blind, and weak-
ened by the loss of blood ; she crept feebly to the edge
of tbe 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
=3SrnAAhiefhAouftM   & «3= ^^^^«S^S^^S!
it for him wlrich would not seem to her a   in a solitary bend of the stream, its banks weie green
knew that
slay herself by any death he told her; he knew that
the deepest wretchedness lived through by his side
would be sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom
of the world or heaven. And hé knew well that to no
man is it, given to be loved twice with such love as this.
Yet—he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong,
and he drove the death-stroke home.with pity.with com-
passion, with gentleness, yet surely home—to the heart.
"A stranger came to mean hour or more ago, he
said to her; and it seemed even to him as though he
Slew a life godlier and purer and stronger than his
own~"anold man, who gave no name. I have seen
his face—far away, long ago—I am not sure. The
memory is too vague. He seemed a man of knowl-
edge, and a man critical and keen.   That study of y
.1------.... ~™~.,~ ft... T.ra.r.iw-vA.1 reir.emher—took 1
—tlie one among the poppies-you remember-took hrs
eyes and pleased him. He bore it away with him, and
left In its stead a roll of paper money-money enough
to take me back among men-to set me free for a little
space. Oh child: you have seen-this hell on earth
Mils me. It is a death in life. It has made me brutal
to you sometimes; sometimes I must hurt something,
"^"was'silent; her attitude had not changed, but all ' world.
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 g'rayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a
little and sat still, and wondered what had chanced to
Tire 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 m and out
among the sand of the river-shore; her eyes vacant y
followed the irrsect's aimless circles. She trred 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 stall, so chill,
she was afraid of it! Her limbs were stiffened by the
exposure and dews of the night.   She shivered, and
^ The sun rose—a globe of flame above the edge of the
dazzling heap of coins and trembling paper thin as
gauze. She saw it without seeing for aw-hile; 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 whieh had set him free.
Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasura-
ble shanre. 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 humiliation filled her with loath-
ing 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 un-
erring 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 herwith what he, had deemed shame to him-
self; 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. \\ hither?
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 blow-
ing poppies she had no more knowledge than the lizard
at her feet.
Cities, he had often sard, 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 ana
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 fhe would have bought
safety or succor by one coin et 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, m 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 further 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 «side 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
erasses 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 can-
vases 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, liv-
ing 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 Cifhasron in the moonlight; the young gladiator
wrestling with the Libyan lion—all the familiar shapes