FOLLE-FAKINE.
5
¦were inftiewand sickasess everywhere; in the summer
there was a long drought, and by consequence there
came a had harvest, and great suffering and scarcity.
There were not a few ia the district who attributed
all these woes to the advent of the child of darkness,
and who murmured .openly in their huts and home-
steads that no good would befall them so long as this
offspring of hell were suffered in their midst.
Since, however, the time was past when the broad
market-place could have been filled with a curious,
breathless, eager crowd, and the gray cathedral have
grown red in the glare of Hames fed by a young living
body, they held their hands from doing her harm, and
said these things only in their own ingle-nooks, and
eontented themselves with forbidding their children to
consort with her, and with drawing their mules to the
other side of the road when they met her. They did
not mean to be cruel, they only acted in their own
self-defense, and delt with her as their fellow-country-
men dealt with a cagote—" only."
Hence, when, with the reviving year the child's
dulled brain awakened, and all the animal activity in
her sprang into vigorous action, she found herself
shunned, marked, and glanced at with averted looks
of mingled dread and scorn. "A daughter of the
devill" she heard again and again muttered as they
passed her; she grew to take shelter in this repute as
in a fortress, and to be proud, with a savage pride, of
her imputed origin.
It made her a little fierce, mute, fearless, reckless, all-
daring, and all-enduring animal. An animal in her fero-
cities, her mute instincts, her supreme patience, her
physical perfectness of body ana health. Perfect of
shape and hue ; full of force to resist; ignorant either
of hope or fear; desiring only one thing, liberty; with
no knowledge, but with unerring instinct.
She was at an age when happier creatures have
scarce escaped from their mother s arms; but she had
not even thus early a memory of her mother, and she
had been shaken off to live or die, to fight or famish,
as a young fox whose dam has been flung to the
hounds is driven away to starve in the winter woods, or
..ave himself, if he have strength, by slau; bter.
She was a tame animal only in one thing: she took
alows uncomplainingly, as though comprehending that
hey were her inevitable portion.
" The child of the devil !" they said. In a dumb, half-
vnconscious fashion, this five-year-old creature won-
dered sometimes why the devil had not been good
«enough to give her a skin that would not feel, and
feins that would not bleed.
She had always been beaten ever since her birth ; she
was beaten here ; she thought it a law of life, as other
children think it such to have their mother's kiss and
their daily food and nightly prayer.
Claudis Flamma did after this manner his duty by
her. She was to him a thing accursed, possessed, loath-
some, imbued with evil from her origin; but he did
what he deemed his duty. He clothed her, if scantily;
he fed her, if meagerly; he lashed her with all the
caustic gibes that came naturally to his tongue, he set
her hard tasks to keep her from idleness; he beat her
when she did not, and not seldom when she did, them.
He dashed holy water on her many times; and used a
stick to her without mercy.
After this light he did his duty. That he should hate
her, was to fulfill a duty also in his eyes; he had always
been told that it was right to abhor the things of dark-
ness; and to him she was a thing of utter darkness, a
thing born of the black ruin of a stainless soul, begot-
ten by the pollution and corruption of an infernal
tempter.
He never questioned her as to her past—that short
past, like the span of an insect's life, which yet had
sufficed to gift her with passions, with instincts, with
desires, even with memories—in a word, with charac-
ter—a character he could neither change nor break; a
thing formed already, for good or for evil, abidingly.
He never spoke to her except in sharp irony or in
curt command. He set her hard tasks of bodily labor
which she did not dispute, but accomplished so far as
her small strength lay, with a mute dogged patience,
half ferocity, half passiveness.
In those first winter days of her arrival he called her
Folle-Farine ; taking the most worthless, the most use-
less, the most abject, the most despised thing he knew
in all his daily life from which to name her; and the
name adhered to her, and was the only one by which
she was ever known.
Folle-Farine !—as one may say, the Dust.
In time she grew to believe that it was really hers;
even as in time she began to forget that strange, deep,
rich tongue in which she had babbled her first words,
and to know no other tongue than the Norman-French
about her.
Yet in her there existed imagination, tenderness,
gratitude, and a certain wild and true nobility, though
the old man Flamma would never have looked for
them, never have believed in them. She was devil
born: she was of devil nature: in his eyes.
Upon his own mill-ditch, foul and fetid, refuse would
sometimes gather, and receiving the seed of the lily,
would give birth to blossoms born stainless out of cor-
ruption. But the allegory had no meaning for him.
Had any one pointed it out to him he would have taken
the speaker into his orchard, and said:
"Will the crab bear a fruit not bitter? Will the
nightshade give out sweetness and honey? Fool!—
as the stem so the branch, as the sap so the blossom."
And this fruit of sin and shame was poison in his
CHAPTER IV.
The little dim mind of the five-year-old child was not
a blank; it was indeed filled to overflowing with pic-
tures that her tongue could not have told of, even had
she spoken the language of the people amidst whom
she had been cast.
A land altogether unlike that in which she had been
set down that bitter night of snow and storm ; a land
noble and wild, and full of color, broken into vast
heights and narrow valleys, clothed with green beech
woods and with forests of oak and of walnut, filled
with the noise of torrents leaping from crag to crag,
and of brown mountain-streams rushing broad and
angry through wooded ravines. A land, made beautiful
by moss-grown water-mills, and lofty gateways of gray
rock; and still shadowy pools, in which tbe bright fish
leaped, and mules' bells that rang drowsily through
leafy gorges; and limestone crags that pierced the
clouds, spirelike, and fantastic in a thousand shapes;
and high blue crests of snow-topped mountains, whose
pinnacles glowed to the divinest flush of rose and
amber with the setting of the sun.
T>jis land she remembered vaguely, yet gloriously,
as the splendors of a dream of Paradise rest on the
brain of some young sleeper wakening in squalor
cold, and pam. But the people of the place she had
been brought to could not comprehend her few shy
sullen words, and her strange, imperfect trills of song-
and she could not tell them that this land had been no
realm enchanted of fairy or of fiend, but only the
forest region of the Liebana.
Thither, one rich autumn day, a tribe of gypsies had
made their camp. They were a score in all ; they held
themselves one of the noblest branches of their wide
family; they were people with pure Eastern blood in
them, and all the grace and the gravity of the Oriental
in their forms and postures.
They stole horses and sheep; they harried cattle;
they stopped the mules in the passes, and lightened
their load of wine-skins: they entered the posada,
when they deigned to enter one at all, with neither
civil question nor show of purse, but with a gleam of
the teeth, like a threatening dog, and a flash of the
knife, half drawn out of the girdle. They were low
thieves and mean liars; wild daredevils and loose
livers; loathers of labor and lovers of idle days and
plundering nights; yet they were beautiful, with the
noble, calm, scornful beauty of the East, and they
wore their rags with an air that was in itself an empire.
They could play, too, in heavenly fashion, on their
old three-strmged viols; and when their women
danced on the sward by moonlight, under the broken
shadows of some Moorish ruin, clanging high their
tambourines above their graceful heads, and tossing
the shining saquins that bound their heavy hair, the
muleteer or the herdsman, seeing them from afar
shook with fear, and thought of the tales told him rn
his childhood by his grandam of the spirits of the
dead Moors that rose to revelry, at midnight, in the
haunts of their old lost kingdom.
Among them was a man yet more handsome than
the rest, taller and lither still; wondrous at leaping and
wrestling, and all athletic things; surest of any to win
a woman, to tame a horse, to strike down a bull at a
blow, to silence an angry group at a wineshop with a
single glance ot his terrible eyes.
His name was Taric.
He had left them often to wander by himself into
many countries, and at times when, by talent or by
terrorism, he had netted gold enough to play the fool
to his fancy, he had gone to some strange city, where
credulity and luxury prevailed, and there had lived
like a prince, as his own phrase ran, and gamed and
intrigued, and feasted, and roystered right royally
whilst his gains lasted.
Those spent, he would always return awhile, and lead
the common, roving, thieving life of his friends and
brethren, till the fit of ambition or the run of luck were
again on him. Then his people would afresh lose sight
of him to light on him, velvet-clad, and wine-bibbing,
in some painter's den in some foreign town, or welcome
him ragged, famished, and footweary, on their own
sunburnt sierras.
And the mystery of his ways endeared him to them;
and they made him welcome whenever he returned,
and never quarreled with him for his faithlessness; but
if there were anything wilder or wickeder, bolder or
keener, on hand than was usual, his tribe would always
say: " Let Taric lead."
One day their camp was made in a gorge under the
great shadows of the Picos da Europa, a place that
they loved much, and settled in often, finding the chest-
nut woods and the cliff caverns fair for shelter, the
heather abounding in grouse, and the pools full of trout,
fair for feeding. That day Taric returned from a year-
long absence, suddenly standing, dark and mighty, be-
tween them and the light, as they lay around their
soup-kettle, awaiting their evening meal.
" There is a woman in labor, a league back; by the
great cork-tree, against the bridge," he said to them,
. Go to her some of you."
And, with a look to the women which singled out two
for the errand, he stretched himself in the warmth of
the fire, and helped himself to the soup, and lay quiet,
vouchsafing them never a word, but playing meaningly
with the knife-handle thrust into his shirt; for he saw
that some of the men were about to oppose his share
of a common meal which he had not earned by a com-
mon right.
It was Taric—a name of some terror came to their
fierce souls.
Taric, the strongest and fleetest and most well favored
of them all; Taric, who had slain the bull that all the
matadors had failed to daunt; Taric, who had torn up
the young elm, when they needed a bridge over a flood,
as easily as a child plucks up a reed ; Taric, who had
stopped the fiercest eontrabandista in all those parts,
and cut the man's throat with no more ado than a
butcher slits a lamb's.
So they were silent, and let him take his portion of
the fire and of the broth, and of the thin red wine.    ,
Meanwhile the two gypsies, Quità and Zarâ, went on
their quest, and found things as he had said.
Under the great cork-tree, where the grass was long
and damp, and the wood grew thickly, and an old rude
bridge of unhewn blocks of rock spanned, with one
arch, the river as it rushed downward from its lime-
stone bed aloft, they found a woman just dead and a
child just born.
Quità looked the woman all over hastily, to see if, by
any chance, any gold or jewels might be on her; there
were none. There was only an ivory cross on her
chest, which Quità drew off and hid. Quità covered
her with a few boughs and left her.
Zarâ wrapped the child in a bit of her woolen skirt,
and held it warm in her breast, and hastened to the
camp with it.
" She is dead, Taric," said Quità, meaning the woman
she had left.
He nodded his handsome head.
"This is yours, Taric?" said Zarâ, meaning the child
she held.
He nodded again, and drank another drop of wine,
and stretched himself.
" What shall we do with her?" asked Quità.
" Let her lie there," he answered her.
" What shall we do with it?" asked Zarâ.
He laughed and drew his knife against his own brown
throat in a significant gesture.
Zarâ said no word to him, but she went away with
the child under some branches, on which was hung a
tattered piece of awning, orange striped, that marked
her own especial resting-place.
Out of the group about the fire, one man, rising, ad-
vanced, and looked Taric full in the eyes.
" Has the woman died by foul means?"
Taric, wl*j never let any 'living soul molest or menace
him, answered him without offense, and with a savae»
candor:                                                                       ^
,-, ",N°—that I swear. I used no foul play against her
Golook at her if you hke. I loved her well enough
while she lived. But what does that matter? She is
dead, bo best. Women are as many as the mulber-
ries.
"You loved her, and you will let the wolves eat her
body?"
Taric laughed.
" There are no wolves in Liebana. Go and bury her
if you choose, Phratos."
"Iwill "the other answered him; and he took his
way to the cork-tree by the bridge.
The man who spoke was called Phratos.
He was not like his tribe in anything: except in a
mutual love for a life that wandered always, and was
to no man responsible, and needed no roof-tree, and
wanted no settled habitation, but preferred to dwell
wild with the roe and the cony, and to be hungry and
unclad, rather than to eat the good things of the earth
in submission and endurance.
He had not their physical perfection: an accident at
his birth had made his spine misshapen, and his gait
halting. His features would have .been grotesque in
their ugliness, except for the sweet pathos of the eyes
and the gay archness of the mouth.
Among a race noted for its singular beauty of face
and form, Phratos alone was deformed and unlovely ;
and yet both deformity and unloveliness were in a way
poetrc and uncommon; and in his rough sheepskin gar-
ments, knotted to his waist with a leathern thong, and
with his thick tangled hair falling down on his shoul-
ders, they were rather the deformity of the brake-
haunting faun, the unloveliness of the moon-dancing
satyr, than those of a man and a vagrant. With the
likeness he had the temper of the old dead gods of the
forests and rivers; he loved music, and could make it,
in all its innumerable sighs and songs, gave a voice to
all creatures and things of the world, of the waters and
the woodlands; and for many things he was sorrowful
continually, and for other things he forever laughed
and was glad.
Though he was misshapen, and even, as some said,
not altogether straight in his wits, yet his kin honored
him.
For he could draw music from the rude strings of his
old viol that surpassed their own melodies as far as the
shining of the sun on the summits of the Europa sur-
passed the trembling of the little lamps under the
painted roadside Cavaries.
He was only a gypsy; he only played as the fancy
moved him, by a bright fountain at a noonday halt,
under the ruined arches of a Saracenic temple, before
the tawny gleam of a vast dim plain at sunrise; in a
cool shadowy court where the vines shut out all light;
beneath a balcony at night, when the moonbeams
gleamed on some fair unknown face, thrust for a mo-
ment from the darkness through the white magnolia
flowers. Yet he played in suchwise as makes women
weep, and holds children and dogs still to listen, and
moves grown men to shade their eyes with their hands,
and think of old dead times, when they played and
prayed at their mothers' knees.
And his music had so spoken to himself that, although
true to his tribe and all their traditions, loving a va.
grant life in the open air, and being incapable of pur-
suing any other, he yet neither stole nor slew, neither
tricked nor lied, but found his way vaguely to honesty
and candor, and, having found them, clove to them, so
that none could turn him ; living on such scant gains as
were thrown to him for his music from balconies and
posada windows and winehouse doors in the hamlets
and towns through which he passed, and making a
handful of pulse and a slice of melon, a couch of leaves
and a draught of water, suffice to him for his few and
simple wants.
His people reproached him, indeed, with demeaning
their race by taking payment in lieu of making thefts;
and they mocked him often, and taunted him, though
in a manner they all loved him—the reckless and blood-
stained Taric most, perhaps, of all. But he would
never quarrel with them, neither would he give over
his strange ways which so incensed them, and with
time they saw that Phratos was a gifted fool, who,
like other mad simple creatures, had best be left to go
on his own way unmolested and without contradiction.
If, too, they had driven him from their midst, they
would have missed hrs music sorely; that music which
awoke them at break of day soaring up through their
roof of chestnut leaves like a lark's song piercing the
skies.
Phratos came now to the dead woman, and drew off
the boughs, and looked at her. She was quite dead.
She had died where she had first sunk down, unable to
reach her promised resting-place. It was a damp
green nook on the edge of the bright mountain-river,
at the entrance of that narrow gorge in which the en»
campment had been made.
The face, which was white and yt'ing, lay upward,
with the shadows of the flickering foliage on it; and
the eyes, which Quità had not closed, were large and
blue; her hair, which was long and brown, was loose,
and had got wet among the grass, and had little buds
of flowers and stray golden leaves twisted in it.
Phratos felt sorrow for her as he looked.
He could imagine her history.
Taric, whom many women had loved, had besought
many a one thus to share his fierce free life for ji little
space, and then drift away out of it by chance, or be
driven away from it by his fickle passions, or be taken
away like this one by death.                                 *¦ £p
In her bosom, slipped in her clothes, was a letter. It
was written in a tongue he did not know. He held it
awhile, thinking, then he folded it up and put it in his
girdle—it might be of use, who could tell? There was
the child, there, that might live ; unless the-can p broke
up, and Zarâ left it under a walnut-tree to die, with the
last butterflies of the fading summer, which was in all
likelihood all she would do.
Nevertheless he kept the letter, and when he had
looked long enough at the dead creature, he turned to
the tools he had brought with him, and set patiently to
make her grave.
He could only work slowly, for he was weak of body,
and his infirmity made all manual toil painful to him.
His task was hard, even though the earth was so soft
from recent heavy rains.
The sun set whilst he was still engaged on it; and it
was quite nightfall before he had fully accomplished
it. When the grave was ready he filled it carefufly with
the golden leaves that had fallen, and the thick many-
colored mosses that covered the ground like a carpe*
Then he laid the body tenderly down within that for-