"What did you do?" asked the old man, still breaking the stones with a monotonous rise and fall of his hammer.
"I took the cage down and opened the door."
"And he?"
"He shot up in the air first, then dropped down amidst the grasses, where a little brook which the drought had not dried, was still running; and he bathed and drank and bathed again, seeming mad with the joy of the water. When I lost him from sight he was swaying on a bough among the leaves over the river; but then he was silent!"
"And what do you mean by that?"
Her eyes clouded; she was mute. She vaguely knew the meaning it bore to herself, but it was beyond her to express it.
All things of nature had voices and parables for her, because her fancy was vivid and her mind was dreamy; but that mind was still too dark, and too profoundly ignorant, for her to be able to shape her thoughts into metaphor or deduction.
The bird had spoken to her; by his silence as by his song; but what he had uttered she could not well utter again. Save, indeed, that song was not gladness, and neither was silence pain.
Marcellin, although he had asked her, had asked needlessly; for he also knew.
"And what, think you, the people said, when they went back and found the cage empty?" he pursued, still echoing his words and hers by the ringing sound of the falling hammer.
A smile curled her lips.
"That was no thought of mine," she said carelessly. "They had done wickedly to cage him; to set him free I would have pulled down their thatch, or stove in their door, had need been."
"Good!" said the old man briefly, with a gleam of light over his harsh lean face.
He looked up at her as he worked, the shivered flints flying right and left.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," he muttered, as his keen gaze swept over her.
"A woman!" She echoed the words dully and half wonderingly; she could not understand it in connection with herself.
A woman; that was a woman who sat in the sun under the fig-tree, working her lace on a frame; that was a woman who leaned out of her lattice tossing a red carnation to her lover; that was a woman who swept the open porch of her house, singing as she cleared the dust away; that was a woman who strode on her blithe way through the clover, carrying her child at her breast.
She seemed to have no likeness to them, no kindred with them; she a beast of burden, a creature soulless and homeless, an animal made to fetch and carry, to be cursed and beaten, to know neither love nor hope, neither past nor future, but only a certain dull patience and furious hate, a certain dim pleasure in labor and indifference to pain.
"It was a pity to make you a woman," said the old man once more. "You might be a man worth something; but a woman!a thing that has no medium; no haven between hell and heaven; no option save to sit by the hearth to watch the pot boil and suckle the children, or to go out into the streets and the taverns to mock at men and to murder them. Which will you do in the future?"
"What?"
She scarcely knew the meaning of the word. She saw the female creatures round her were of all shades of age, from the young girls with their peachlike cheeks to the old crones brown and withered as last year's nuts; she knew that if she lived on she would be old likewise; but of a future she had no conception, no ideal. She had been left too ignorant to have visions of any other world hereafter than this one which the low lying green hills and the arc of the pale blue sky shut in upon her.
She had one desire, indeeda desire vague but yet fiercethe desire for liberty. But it was such desire as the bird which she had freed had known; the desire of instinct, the desire of existence only; her mind was powerless to conceive a future, because a future is a hope, and of hope she knew nothing.
The old man glanced at her, and saw that she had not comprehended. He smiled with a certain bitter pity.
"I spoke idly," he said to himself; "slaves cannot have a future. But yet"
Yet he saw that the creature who was so ignorant of her own powers, of her own splendors, of her own possibilities, had even now a beauty as great as that of a lustrous Eastern-eyed passion-flower; and he knew that to a woman who has such beauty as this the world holds out in its hand the tender of at least one futureone election, one kingdom, one destiny.
"Women are loved," she said, suddenly; "will any one love me?"
Marcellin smiled bitterly.
"Many will love you, doubtlessas the wasp loves the peach that he kisses with his sting, and leaves rotten to drop from the stem!"
She was silent again, revolving his meaning; it lay beyond her, both in the peril which it embodied from others, and the beauty in herself which it implied. She could reach no conception of herself, save as what she now was, a body-servant of toil, a beast of burden like a young mule.
"But all shun me, as even the wasp shuns the bitter oak apple," she said, slowly and dreamily; "who should love me, even as the wasp loves the peach?"
Marcellin smiled his grim and shadowy smile. He made answer,
"Wait!"
She sat mute once more, revolving this strange, brief word in her thoughtsstrange to her, with a promise as vague, as splendid, and as incomprehensible as the prophecy of empire to a slave.
"The future?" she said, at last. "That means something that one has not, and that is to comeis it so?"
"Something that one never has, and that never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two; "something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees alwayssees even when one lies a-dying, they sayfor men are fools."
Folle-Farine listened, musing, with her hands clasped on the handle of her empty basket, and her chin resting upon them, and her eyes watching a maimed butterfly drag its wings of emerald and diamond through the hot, pale, sickly dust.
"I dream!" she said, suddenly, as she stooped and lifted the wounded insect gently on to the edge of a leaf. "But I dream wide awake."
Marcellin smiled.
"Never say so. They will think you mad. That is only what foolish things, called poets, do."
"What is a poet?"
"A foolish thing, I tell youmad enough to believe that men will care to strain their eyes, as he strains his, to see the face of a God who never looks and never listens."
"Ah!"
She was so accustomed to be told that all she did was unlike to others, and was either wicked or was senseless, that she saw nothing except the simple statement of a fact in the rebuke which he had given her. She sat quiet, gazing down into the thick white dust of the road, bestirred by the many feet of mules and men that had trodden through it since the dawn.
"I dream beautiful things," she pursued, slowly. "In the moonlight most often. I seem to remember, when I dreamso much! so much!"
"Rememberwhat should you remember? You were but a baby when they brought you hither."
"So they say. But I might live before, in my father's kingdomin the devil's kingdom. Why not?"
Why not, indeed! Perhaps we all lived there once; and that is why we all through all our lives hanker to get back to it.
"I ask him so often to take me back, but he does not seem ever to hear."
"Chut! He will hear in his own good time. The devil never passes by a woman."
"A woman!" she repeated. The word seemed to have no likeness and no fitness with herself.
A woman!she!a creature made to be beaten, and sworn at, and shunned, and loaded like a mule, and driven like a bullock!
"Look you," said the old man, resting his hammer for a moment, and wiping the sweat from his brow, "I have lived in this vile place forty years. I remember the woman that they say bore youReine Flamma. She was a beautiful woman, and pure as snow, and noble, and innocent. She wearied God incessantly. I have seen her stretched for hours at the foot of that cross. She was wretched; and she entreated her God to take away her monotonous misery, and to give her some life new and fair. But God never answered. He left her to herself. It was the devil that heardand replied."
"Then, is the devil juster than their God?"
Marcellin leaned his hammer on his knees and his voice rose clear and strong as it had done of yore from the Tribune.
"He looks so, at the least. It is his wisdom, and that is why his following is so large. Nay, I say, when God is deaf the devil listens. That is his wisdom, see you. So often the poor little weak human soul, striving to find the right way, cries feebly for help, and none answer. The poor little weak soul is blind and astray in the busy streets of the world. It lifts its voice, but its voice is so young and so feeble, like the pipe of a newly-born bird in the dawn, that it is drowned in the shouts and the manifold sounds of those hard, crowded, cruel streets, where every one is for himself, and no man has ears for his neighbor. It is hungered, it is athirst, it is sorrowful, it is blinded, it is perplexed, it is afraid. It cries often, but God and man leave it to itself. Then the devil, who harkens always, and who, though all the trumpets blowing their brazen music in the streets bray in his honor, yet is too wise to lose even the slightest sound of any in distresssince of such are the largest sheaves of his harvestcomes to the little soul, and teaches it with tenderness, and guides it towards the paths of gladness, and fills its lips with the bread of sweet passions, and its nostrils with the savor of fair vanities, and blows in its ear the empty breath of men's lungs, till that sickly wind seems divinest music. Then is the little soul dazzled and captured, and made the devil's for evermore; half through its innocence, half through its weakness; but chiefly of all because God and man would not hear its cries whilst yet it was sinless and only astray."
He ceased, and the strokes of his hammer rang again on the sharp flint stones.
She had listened with her lips parted breathlessly, and her nightlike eyes dilated.
In the far distant time, when he had been amidst the world of men, he had known how to utter the words that burned, and charm to stillness a raging multitude. He had not altogether lost this power, at such rare times as he still cared to break his silence, and to unfold the unforgotten memories of a life long dead. He would speak thus to her, but to no other.
Folle-Farine listened, mute and breathless, her great eyes uplifted to the sun, where it was sinking westward through a pomp of golden and of purple cloud. He was the only creature who ever spoke to her as though she likewise were human, and she followed his words with dumb unquestioning faith, as a dog its master's footsteps.
"The soul! What is the soul?" she muttered, at length.
He caught in his hand the beautiful diamond-winged butterfly, which now, freed of the dust and drinking in the sunlight, was poised on a foxglove in the hedge near him, and held it against the light.
"What is it that moves this creature's wings, and glances in its eyes, and gives it delight in the summer's warmth, in the orchid's honey, and in the lime-tree's leaves? I do not know; but I know that I can kill itwith one grind of my heel. So much we know of the soulno more."
She freed it from his hand.
"Whoever made it, then, was cruel. If he could give it so much power, why not have given it a little more, so that it could escape you always?"
"You ask what men have asked ten times ten thousand yearssince the world beganwithout an answer. Because the law of all creation is cruelty, I suppose; because the dust of death is always the breath of life. The great man, dead, changes to a million worms, and lives again in the juices of the grass above his grave. It matters little. The worms destroy; the grasses nourish. Few great men do more than the first, or do as much as the last."
"But get you homeward," he continued, breaking off his parable; "it is two hours past noon, and if you be late on the way you pay for it with your body. Begone."
She nodded her head, and went; he seldom used gentle words to her, and yet she knew, in a vague way, that he cared for her; moreover, she rejoiced in that bitter, caustic contempt in which he, the oldest man amidst them, held all men.
His words were the only thing that had aroused her dulled brain to its natural faculties; in a manner, from him she had caught something of knowledgesomething, too, of intellect; he alone prevented her from sinking to that absolute unquestioning despair which surely ends in idiocy or in self-murder.
She pursued her way in silence across the fields, and along the straight white road, and across a wooden bridge that spanned the river, to her home.
There was a gentler luster in her eyes, and her mouth had the faint light of a half smile upon it; she did not know what hope meant; it never seemed possible to her that her fate could be other than it was, since so long the messengers and emissaries of her father's empire had been silent and leaden-footed to her call.
Yet, in a manner, she was comforted, for had not two mouths that day bidden her "wait"?
She entered at length the little wood of Yprès, and heard that rush and music of the deep mill water which was the sole thing she had learned to love in all the place.
Beyond it were the apple orchards and fruit gardens which rendered Claudis Flamma back full recompense for all the toil they cost himrecompense so large, indeed, that many disbelieved in that poverty which he was wont to aver weighed so hardly and so lightly on him. Both were now rich in all their maturer abundance, since the stream which rushed through them had saved them from the evil effects of the long drought so severely felt in all other districts.
The cherry-trees were scarlet with their latest fruit; the great pumpkins glowed among their leaves in tawny orange heaps; little russet-breasted bullfinches beat their wings vainly at the fine network that enshrouded the paler gold of the wall apricots; a gray cat was stealing among the delicate yellows of the pear-shaped marrows; where a round green wrinkled melon lay a-ripening in the sun, a gorgeous dragon-fly was hovering, and a mother-mavis, in her simple coif of brown and white and gray, was singing with all the gladness of her sunny summer joys.
Beyond a hedge of prickly thorn the narrower flower-garden stretched, spanned by low stone walls, made venerable by the silvery beards of lichens; and the earth was full of color from the crimson and the golden gladioli; from the carmine-hued carnations; from the deep-blue lupins, and the Gloire de Dijon roses; from the green slender stems and the pure white cups of the virginal lilies; and from the gorgeous beetles, with their purple tunics and their shields of bronze, like Grecian hoplites drawn in battle array. While everywhere, above this sweet glad garden world, the butterflies, purple and jeweled, the redstarts in their ruby dress, the dainty azure-winged and blue warblers, the golden-girdled wasp with his pinions light as mist, and the velvet-coated bee with his pleasant harvest song, flew ever in the sunlight, murmuring, poising, praising, rejoicing.
The place was beautiful in its own simple, quiet way; lying in a hollow, where the river tumbled down in two or three short breaks and leaps which broke its habitual smooth and sluggish form, and brought it in a sheet of dark water and with a million foam-bells against the walls of the mill-house and under the ponderous wheels.
The wooden house itself also was picturesque in the old fashion when men builded their dwellings slowly and for love; common with all its countless carvings black by age, its jutting beams shapen into grotesque human likeness and tragic masks; its parquetted work run over by the green cups of stoneworts, and its high roof with deep shelving eaves bright with diapered tiles of blue and white and rose, and alive all day with curling swallows, with pluming pigeons, with cooing doves.