FOLLE-FARINE.
33
Arslàn of the treatment that she received at Yprts. It
was not in her nature to complain; and she abhorred
even his pity. Whatever she endured, she kept si lence
on it; when he asked her how irer graudsire dealt with
her, she always answered him, "It is well enough with
me now."   He cared not enough for her to doubt her.
And, In a manner, she had learned how to keep her
tyrant at bay. He did not dare to lay hands on her
now that her eyes had got that new fire, and her voice
that stern serene contempt. His wolf cub had shown
her teeth at last, at the lash, and he did not venture
to sting her to revolt with too long use of scourge and
chain.                                                      .         "   ...
So she obtained more leisure; and what she drd not
spend in Arslàn's tower she spent in acquiring another
art—she learned to read.
There was an old herb-seller in the market-place who
was not so harsh to her as the others were, but who
had now and then for her a rough kindly word out of
gentleness to the memory of Reine Flamma. This
woman was better educated than most, and could even
write a little.
To her Folle-Farine went.
"See here," she said, "you are feeble, and 1 am
strong I know every nook and corner in the woods.
I know a hundred rrrVe herbs that you never find. 1
will bring you a basketful of them twice in each week
if you will show me how to read those signs that the
people call letters."
Th<    '
T&s old woman hesitated. " It were as much as my
life is worth to have you seen with me.   The lads wrll
Btone my window,   ètill-----"   The wish for the rare
herbs, and the remembrance of the fatigue that would
be spared to her rheumatic body by compliance, pre-
vailed over her fears.   She consented.
Three times a reek, Folle-Farine rose while rt was
still dark, and scoured the wooded lands and the moss-
green orchards and the little brooks in the meadows
m search of every herb that grew. She knew those
green places which had been her only kingdom and her
only solace as no one else knew them; and the old
dame's herb-stall was the envy arrd despair of all the
market-place.                             -'¦-.,      u.       t
Now and then a laborer earlier than the rest, or a
vagrant sleeping under a hedge-row, saw her going
through the darkness with her green bundle on her
head, or stooping among the watercourses ankle-deep
in rushes, and he crossed himself and went and told
how he had seen the Evil Spirit of Yprès gathering the
poison-weeis tl:at made ships founder, and strong men
droop and die. and women love unnatural and horrible
things, and all manner of woe and sickness overtake
those she hated.                   .                          ,     ,,„„,,„
Often, too, at this lonely time, before the day broke,
she met Arslàn.                             ,               *         ,„„*.
It was his habit to be abroad when others slept:
studies of the night and its peculiar loveliness entered
largely into many of his paintings; the beauty of water
rippling in the moonbeam, ot gray reeds blowing
afainst the first faint red of dawn of dark fields with
sleeping cattle and folded sheep, ot dreamy pools made
visible by the shine of theirfolded white hhes^these
were all things he cared to study.
The earth has always most aharm, and least pain to
the poet or the artist when men are hidden away under
their roofs. They do not then break its calm with
either their mirth or their brutality, the vrle and revolt-
ing coarseness of their works, only built to blot it with
so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the
purple breadths of shadow and the dim tender gleam
of starss and it was thus that Arslàn loved best to move
a Sometimes the shepherd going to his flocks, or the
housewife opening her shutterin the wayside cabin, or
the huckster driving early his mule seawards to meet
the fish that the night-trawlers had brought saw them
together thus, and talked of it; and said that these
two, accursed of all honest folk, were after some im-
holy work-coming from the orgre of some witches
sabbath, or seeking some devil's root that would give
them-the treasured gold of misers' tombs or the power
°£Foritlie'se things are still believed by many a peas-
ants hearth, an§ whispered darkly as night closes m
aWading1fthe "shallow streams, with the breeze toss-
ingher hair, and the dew bright on her sheaf of herbs
Folle-Farinè paid thus the only wages she could for
learning the art of letters.
The acquisition was hard and ha teful-a dull plod-
dine task that she detested; and her teacher was old,
and ignorant of all the graces and the lore of books.
She roirld only learn, too, at odd snatches of time,
w^th the cS-wfndowbaiVed up and the hght shut
out for the old peasant was fearful of gaining a bad
name among he? neighbors if she were seenincom-
"^^^^^^^^^ *»$ P°|-
sessed herself of the rudiments of letters though
IhehadonW one primer to learn from that belonged
to the herb-seller-a rude old tattered pamphlet, re-
counting the life and death of Catherine of k.ena It
was not that she had cared to read, for^read.ing s sake
books, she heard, only told the thoughts.andI the
creeds of the human race, and she cared nothing to
know these; but one day he had said to.herS half-um
consciously, "If only you were not so 'S"»™^.^*
since that âay she had set herself to olear away her
ignorance little by little, as she would have cleared
brushwood with her hatchet.                                     ,
It was ?he sweetest hour she had ever-Uneg» whan
she was able to stand before him and say The char
acters that men print are no longer rifles tome.
He praised her; and she was glad and £">ud.
It Was love that had entered into her^Ut »8™«ang
noble love, full of intense humility of «"PJ^jS,
«acrifice-a love that unconsciously led her to chasten
into gentleness the fierce soul in her and to try and
seek light for the darkness of her mind.
He saw the influence he had on her, but he was care-
,l6ï gypsy-child working for bread at a little mill-house
in these Norman woods-what use would be to lier
beauty of thought, grace of fancy the desire begotten
of knowledge the poetry learned from the past/ btui
he SvTher? these partly because he pitied her, part y
heciuse i^hisexh'austion.and solitude this.creature, in
her beauty and her submission, was welcome to him.
And vet he thought so little of her, and chiefly, when
heAtSouy|ht of herUgchose to perplex her or to wound
her, that he might see.her eyes dilate in pondering
amaze or her face quiver and flush, and tnen grow
darif with the torment of a mute and subdued pam
She was astucStohim. as was tho scarlet rose in the
garden-ways, or the purple-breasted pigeon in the
woods; he dealt with her as he would have dealt with
the flower or the bird if he had wished to study them
more nearly, by tearing the rose open at its core or
casting a stone at the blue-rock on the wing.
This was not cruelty in him: it was only habit—habit,
and the callousness begotten by his own continual
The pain as of a knife forever thrust into the loins, of a
cord forever knotted hard about the temples, which is
the daily and nightly penalty of those mad enough to
believe that they have the force in them to change the
sluggard ai petites and the hungry crueltres of then-
kind into a life of high endeavor and divine desire.
He held that a man's chief passion is his destiny, and
will shape his fate, rough-hew his fate as circumstances
or as hazard may.
His chief, his sole, passion was a great ambition—a
passion pure as crystal, since the eminence he craved
was for his creations, not for his name. Yet it had
failed to compel the destiny that he had believed to be
his own ¦ and vet every hour he, seemed to sink lower and
lower-into oblivion, further and further from the pos-
siblity of any fulfillment of his dreams; and the wasted
years of his life fell away one by one into the gult ot
the past, vain, unheard, unfruitful, as the frozen words
on the deck of the ship of Pantagruel.
" What is the use?" he muttered, half aloud, one day
before his paintings. " What is the use? If I (he to-
morrow they will sell for so much rubbish to heat a
bakery stove. It is only a mad waste of hours—waste
of color, of canvas, of labor. The world has told me so
many years. The world always knows what it wants.
It selects unerringly. It must know better than I do.
The man is a fool, indeed, who presumes to be wiser
than all his generation. If the world will have nothing
to do with you, go and hang yourself—or if you fear to
do that, dig a ditch as a grave for a daily meal. Grve
over dreams. The world knows what it wants, and if
it wanted you would take you. It has brazen lungs to
shout for- what it needs; the lungs of a multitude. It is
no use what your own voice whispers you unless those
great lungs also shout before you, Hosannah.
So he spoke to himself in bitterness of soul, standing
before his cartoons into which he had thrown all the
genius there was in him, and which hung there unseen
save by the spider that wove and the moth that flew
Folle-Farine, who was that day in his chamber,
looked at him with the wistful, far-reaching compre-
hension which an unerring instinct taught her.
" Of a winter night," she said, slowly, "I have heard
old Pitchou read aloud to Flamma. and she read of
their G od, the one they hang everywhere on the crosses
here; and the story was that the populace scourged
and nailed to death the one whom they knew after-
wards, when too late, to have been the great man they
looked for', and that then being bidden to make therr
choice of one to save, they choose to ransom and honor
a thief: one called Barabbas. Is it true f-if the world's
choice, were wrong once, why not twice?
Arslàn smiled; the snrile she knew so well, an* which
had no more warmth than the ice floes of  his native
S6"SWhy not twice? Why not a thousand times? A
thief has the world's sympathies always. It is always
the Barabbas-the trickster in talent, the forger of
stolen wisdom, the bravo of political crime, the huck-
ster of plundered thoughts, the charlaton ot false ait,
whom the vox populi elects and sets free, and sends on
his way rejoicing 'Will ye have Christ pr Barabbas?'
Every generation is asked the same question, arrd every
generation gives the same answer: ;and scourges the
divinity out of its midst, and finds its idol in brute force
an4e°onf dimly comprehended, not well knowing why
her words had thus roused him.   She pondered awhile,
thf-lm\hTenaf'lt asked. "The dead God is the
God of all these people round us now, and they have
built great places in his honor, and they bow when they
pass Ids likeness in the highway or the market-place
But with Barabbas-what was the end? It seems that
they loathe and despise him?"
Arslàn laughed a little.                                             ...
"His end? In Syria maybe the vultures picked his
bones where they lay whitening on the plaurs-those
times were primitive, the world was young. But in our
day Barabbas lives and dies in honor and has a tomb
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues,
so that all who run may read. In our day Bar abbas-
the Barabbas of money greeds and delrcate cunning,
and the theft, which has risen to science, and the assas-
sination that destroys souls; and not bodies and the
crime that deals moral death and not material death-
our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud in the place of
mailed Force-lives always in purple and fine linen, and
ends in the odor of sanctity with the prayers of priests
°VHe^pokerwith"a certain fierce passion that rose in him
whenever he thought of that world which had rejected
Sn Ind had accepted so many others, weaker in brain
and nerve but stronger in one sense, because more dis-
honest aiidlas he spoke he went straight to a wall on
h°s right where a great sea of gray paper was stretched,
untouched and ready to hrs hand.                   __«h«i to
She would have spoken, but he made a motion to
Sll"Elush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly.
" I have thought of something."                    .
And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it
ore? thedull blank surface till the vacancy glowed with
Ufe.   A thought had kindled in him ; a vision had arisen
bTheesce1nle around him vanished utterly from his sight
The gray stone walls, the square windows through
which the fading sunrays fell; the level pastures and
sullenstreams, and pallia skies without, all faded away
as though they had existed only m a dream.
An th! empty space about him becamepeopred with
many human shapes that for him had breath and
being, though no other eye could have beheld them.
The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years be-
fore arose and glowed before him. The things of his
own hfe died away, and in their stead he saw the fierce
flame of Eastern suns, the gleaming range of marble
palaces, the purple flush of pomegranate flowers, the
Seep color of Oriental robes, the soft silver of hills
olive-crested, the tumult of a city at high festival.
And he "ould not rest until all he thus saw m his
vision he had rendered as far as his hand could render
it,- and what h» drew was this.                                       _
A great thirsry, heated, seething crowd; a crowd
that had manhood and womanhood, age and infancy,
youths and maidens within its ranks; a crowd in whos«
faces every animal lust and every human paaeion were
let loose; a crowd on which a noonday Sun without
shadow streamed; a sun which parched and fe-stered
and engendered all corruption in the land on wuicn it
looked This crowd was in a city, a city on whose flat
roofs the myrtle and the cystus bloomed; above whose
gleaming marble walls the silver plumes of olives
waved; upon whose distant slopes the darkling cedar
groves rose straight against the sky, and on whose
lofty temple plates of gold glistened against the shining
heavens. This crowd had scourges, and stones, and
goads in their hands; arrd in their midst they had one
clothed in white, whose head was thorn-crowned, and
whose eyes were filled with a god's pity and a mans
reproach; and bimthey stoned, and lashed, and hooted.
And triumphant in the throng, whose choice lie was
seated aloft upon men's shoulders, wrth a purple robe
thrown on his shoulders, there sat a brawny, (finning
bloated, jibbering thing, with curled lips and savage
eyes, and satyr's leer: the creature of greed of hist,
of obscenity, of brutality, of avance, of desire. This
man the people followed, rejoicing exceedingly, con-
tent in the guide whom they had cWn, victorious in
the tond for whom they spurned a deity ; crying, with,
wide-open throats and brazen lungs,    Baraboas1
There was nota form in all this closely-packed throng
whieh had not a terrible irony in it, which was not in
itself a symbol of some lust or of some vice, for which,
women and men abjure the godhead m them.
One gorged drunkard lay asleep with his SJEphora
broken beneath him, the stream of the purpia wine-
lTt^iy-cïZer^i Me\eçeipt of eristom
eager to watch and shout, and a thief clutched both
hands full of the forsaken coins and fled.
A miser had dropped a bag of gold, and stopped to-
catch at all the rolling pieces, regardless in his greed
how the crowd trampled and trod on him.
A mother chid and struck her little brown curly chi d,
because he stretched his arms and turned his face to-
wards the thorn-crowned captive.                  .     ....
A priest of the temple, with a blood-stained knife
thrusfinhis girdle, dragged beside him by the throat,
a little tender lamb doomed for the sacrifice.
A dancing-woman with jewels m her ears, and half
naked to th! waist, sounding the brazen ^.™^!»^
her head, drew a score of youths after her in Barabbas
trOn'one of the flat roof-tops, reclining on purple and
fine linen looking down on the street below from the
thick foUage of her citron boughs and her red Syrian
roses was an Egyptian wanton; and leaning beside
her tossing golden apples into her bosom, was a young
clnturion of the Roman guard, langrnd and laughing
with his fair chest bare to the heat, and his armor Hung
inA„Pd ftuftal^manner, every figure bore its para,
ble- whilst above all was the hard, hot, cruel cloudless
sky of blue without one faintest mist to break its hor-
rible serenity and, high in the azure ether and against
the sunfau eagle an# a vulture fought, locked close,
and tearing at each other's breasts.
Six nights the conception occupied him—bis.days
were not his own, he spent them in a rough mechanical
klbor which his strength executed whileX.s: mindI was
far awav from it; but the nights were all his. and at
the end of the sixth night the thing arose, perfect as
far .iïhtotond could perfect it; begotten by a chance
he stood motionless; the red glow of the da,.n lighting
the dreamy depths of his sleepless eyes.
"He knew that his work was good.
The ârtïs? for-one moment? of ecstasy, realizes the
more swiftly will discontent and misgiving overtake
him the more quickly will the feebleness of hrs execu-
ton'dteSt him in comparison withthe sptentorofhto
ideal- the more surely will he—though the v oi ia rmg
wrth kpP?are ofShi.,7be enraged and derisive and .m- #
nSrwWleThfmoment lasts it is a n^jk»
Kth^r'he^bTeSeS a^fe-ssing Œ
falls on any other'creature. The work of his brain
andof his LndContents him; it is the purest joy on
eaArsiàn knew that joy as he looked on the vast imag-
inafionfo? which he had giv-n up sleep, and absorbed
InwhichtohsldalmostfoWten hunger and thirst and
^HeTacf knowîTno rest until he had embodied the
sh^es that pursued him. He had scarcely spoken
blrelv Numbered an hour; tired out, consumed wrth
restkSs feve"-weak from want of sleep and neglect of
food to had worked on, and on, and on,jintil the vis-
ion as he had beheld it lived there, recorded for tha
Ts toYooked on it'to felt his own strength and. was
glad; he had faith in himself though.hehad taUvmjj
Xrw thin?- he ceased to care what other late oeren.
Sim, sothft'only tWs supreme power of creatron re-
mHVstmp1d!ed out; the bell of a distant clock chimed
wmmmm
be taken with the rest to satisfy some petty debt of
bTherero°n that'wall, he had written, with all the might
rose up about him, incarnated by his mind and foiSanfl
¦KBOBOHH