4
FOLLE-FARINE.
i
choose to do to her. Only now and then her eyes
opeusd, as they had opened on him, with a sudden
lustre and fierceness, hke those in a netted animal's
taoatrent but untamed regard.
' ffitor.71 seized and searched her eagerly, stripping
Iher of the w.''m rox-skin wrap, her scarlet hood of
wool, her liiae rough henipen shirt, which were all
dripping with the water from the melted snow.
The skin of the child was brown, with a golden bloom
 on it; it had been tanned by hot suns, but it was soft
as silk in texture, and transparent, showing the course
of each blue vein. Her limbs were not well nourished,
but they were of perfect shape and delicate bone; and
the feet were the long, arched, slender feet of the
southern side of the Pyrenees.
She allowed herself to be stripped and wrapped in a
coarse piece of homespun linen; she was still half
frozen, and in a state of stupor, either from amaze-
ment or from fear. She was quite passive, and she
never spoke. Her apathy deceived the old crone, who
took it for docility, and who, trusting to it, proceeded
to take advantage of it, after the manner of her kind.
About the child's head there hung a little band of glit-
tering coins; they were not gold, but the woman
Pitchou thought they were, and seized them with gloat-
ing hands and ravenous eyes.
The child started from her torpor, shook herself
free, and fought to guard themfiercely, with tooth
and nail, as the young fox whose skin she had worn
might have fought for its dear life. The old woman,
on her side, strove as resolutely; long curls of the
child's hair were clutched out in the struggle; she did
not wince or scream, but she foughtfought with all
the breath and the blood tha* were in her tiny body.
She was no match, with all her ferocity and fury, for
the sinewy grip of the old peasant; and the coins were
torn off her forehead and hidden away in a hole in the
wood, out of 1 er sight, where tbe old peasant hoarded
all her precious treasures of copper coins and other
trifles that she managed to secrete from her master's
all-seeing eyes.
They were little Oriental sequins engraved with
Arabic characters, chained together after the Eastern
fashion. To Pitchou they looked a diadem of gold
worthy of an empress. The child watched them re-
moved in perfect silence ; from the moment they had
been wrenched away, and the battle had been finally
lost to her, she had ceased to struggle, as though dis-
dainful of a fruitless contest. But a great hate gathered
in her eyes, and smoldered there like a half-stifled
fireit burned on and on for many a long year after-
wards unquenched.
When Pitchou brought her a cup of water, and a roll
of bread, she would neither eat nor drink, but turned
her face to the wallmute.
" Those are just her father's eyes," the old woman
muttered. She had seen them burn in the gloom of the
evening through the orchard trees, as the stars rose,
and asReine Flamma listened to tire voice that wooed
her to her destruction.
She let the child be, and searched her soaked gar-
ments for any written word or any token that might be
on them. Fastened roughly to the fox's skin there was
a faded letter. Pitchou could not read; she took it her
master.
Claudis Flamma grasped the paper and turned its
superscription to the light of the lamp.
He likewise could not read, yet at sight of the char-
acters his tough frame trembled, and his withered skin
frew red with a sickly, feverish quickening of the
lood. He knew them. Once, in a time long dead, he
had been proud of those slender letters that had been
so far more legible than any that the women of her
class could pen, and on beholding which the good
bishop had smiled, and passed a pleasant word concern-
ing her being almost fitted to be bis own clerk and
scribe. For a moment, watching those written ciphers
that had no tongue for him, and yet seemed to tell their
tale so that they scorched and withered up all the fair
honor and pious peace of his old age, a sudden faint-
ness, a srrdden swooning sense seized him for the first
time in all Iris life ; his limbs failed him, he rank down
on his seat again, he gasped f or breath ; he noeded not
to be told anything, he knew all. He knew that the
creature, whom be had believed so pure that God had
deemed tbe earth unworthy of her youth, was-----
His throat rattled, his lips were covered with foam,
his ears were filled with a rushing hollow sound, like
the roaring of his own mill-waters in a time of storm.
All at once he started to his feet, and glared at the
empty space of the dim chamber, and struck his
hands wildly together irr the air, aird cried aloud:
"She was a saint, I saida saint! A saint in body
and soul! And I thought that God begrudged her, and
held her too pure for man!"
And he laughed aloudthrice.
Tlie child hearing, and heavy with sleep, and eagerly
desiring warmth, as a little frozen beast that coils
itself in snow to slumber into death, startled by that
horrible mirth, came forward.
The serge fell off her as she moved. Her little naked
limbs glimmered like gold in the dusky light; her hair
was as a cloud behind her; her little scarlet mouth was
half open, like the mouth of a child seeking its
mother's kiss; her great eyes, dazzled by the flame,
flashed and burned and shone like stars. They had
seen tbe same face ere then in Calvados.
She came straight to Claudis Flamma as though
drawn by that awful and discordant laughter, and by
that leaping ruddy flame upon the earth, and she
stretched out her arms and murmured a word and
smiled, a little dreamily, seeking to sleep, asking to be
caressed, desiring she knew not what.
He clinched his fist, and struck her to the ground.
She fell without a sound. The blood flowed from her
mouth.
He looked at her where she lay, and laughed once
more.
" She was a saint !a saint 1 And the devil begot in
her thai!"
Then he went out across the threshold and into the
eht, with the letter still clinched in his hand.
The snow fell, the storm raged, the earth was cov-
ered with ice and water; he took no heed, but passed
through it. his head bare and his eyes blind.
The dog let him go forth alone, and waited by the
child.
CHAPTER m.
All night long he was absent.
The old serving-woman, terrified, in so far as her dull
brutish nature could be roused to fear, did what she
knew, what she dared.   She raised the little wounded I
oataK-: eroaiure, and carried her to her own palet bed;
restored her to eonactongnaw hy such rude means as '
nigh
Th
she had knowledge of, and stanched the flow of blood.
She did all this harshly, as it was her custom to do all
things, and without tenderness or even pity, for the
sight of this stranger was unwelcome to ner, and she
also had guessed the message of that unread letter.
The child had been stunned by the blow, and she had
lost some blood, and was weakened and stupefied and
dazed; yet there seemed to her rough nurse no peril
for her life, and by degrees she fell into a feverish,
tossing slumber, sobbing sometimes in her sleep, and
crying perpetually on the unknown name of Phratos.
The old woman Pitchou stood and looked at her. She
who had always known the true story of that disap-
pearance which sonre had called death and some had
deemed a divine interposition, had seen before that
transparent brown skin, those hues in cheeks and lips
like the carnation leaves, that rich, sunfed, dusky
beauty, those straight dark brows.
" She is his sure enough," she muttered. He was
the first with Eeine Flamma. 1 wonder has he been
the last."
And she went down the stairs chuckling, as the low
human brute will at any evil thought.
The mastiff stayed beside the child.
She went to the fire and threw more wood on, and sat
down again to her spinning-wheel, and span and dozed,
and span and dozed again.
She was not curious: to her, possessing that thread
to the secret of the past which her master and her
townf oik had never held, it all seemed natural. It was
an old, old story; there had been thousands like it; it
was only strange because Reine Flamma had been held
a saint.
The hours passed on ; the lamp paled, and its flame
at last died out; in the loft above, where the dog
watched, there was no sound; the old woman slum-
bered undisturbed, ut-.ess some falling ember of the
wood aroused her.
She was not curious, nor did she care how the child
fared. She had led that deadening life of perpetual
labor and of perpetual want in which the human ani-
mal becomes either a machine or a devil. She was a
machine; put to what use she might beto spi ' flax,
to card wool, to wring a pigeon's throat, to bleed a calf
to death, to bake or stew, to mumble a prayer, or drown
a kitten, it was all one to her. If she had a preference,
it might be for the office that hurt some living thing;
but she did not care : all she heeded was whether she
had pottage enough-to eat at noonday, and the leaden
effigy of her Mary safe around her throat at night.
The night went on, and passed away : one gleam of
dawn shone through a round hole in the shutter; she
wakened with a start to find the sun arisen, and the fire
dead upon the hearth.
She shook herself and stamped her chill feet upon
the bricks, and tottered on her feeble way, with frozen
body, to the house-door. She drew it slowly open, and
saw'by the light of the sun that it had been for some
time morning.
The earth was everywhere thick with snow; a hoar
frost sparkled over all the branches ; great sheets of ice
were whirled down the rapid mill-stream ; in one of tbe
leafless boughs a robin sang, and beneath the bough a
cat was crouched, waiting with hungry eager eyes,
patient even its famished impatience.
Dull as her sympathy was, and slow her mind, she
started as she saw ner master there.
Claudis Flamma was at work; the rough, hard, rude
toil, which he spared to himself no more than to those
who were his hirelings. He was carting wood ; going to
and fro with huge limbs of trees that men in youth
would have found it a severe task to move; he was
laboring breathlessly, giving himself no pause, and the
sweat was on his brow, although he trod ancle deep in
snow, .Tnd although his clothes were heavy with icicles.
He diO not see or hear her; she went up to him and
called hir.n by his name ; he started, and raised his head
and looker} at her.
Dull though she was, she was in a manner frightened
by the change upon his face ; it had been lean, fur-
rowed, weather-beaten always, but it was livid now,
with bloodshot eyes, and a bruised, broken, yet withal
savage look that terrified her. He did not speak, but
gazed at her like a man recalled from some drugged
sleep back to the deeds and memories of the living
world.
The old woman held her peace a few moments; then
spoke orrt in her old blunt, dogged fashion :
" Is she to stay?"
Her mind was not awake enough for any curiosity;
she only cared to know if the child stayed: only so
much as would concern her soup-kettle, her kneaded
dough, her spun hemp, her household labor.
He turned for a second with the gesture that a trapped
fox may make, held fast, yet striving to essay a death,
grip; then he checked himself, and gave a mute sign
of assent, and heaved up a fresh log of wood, and went
on with his labors, silently. She knew of old his ways
too well to venture to ask more. She knew, too, that
when he worked like this, fasting and in silence, there
had been long and fierce warfare in his soul, and some
great evil done for which he sought to make atone-
ment.
So she left him, and passed into the house, and built
up afresh her fire, and swept her chamber* out, and
fastened up her round black pot to boil, and muttered
all tbe while:
"Another mouth to feed; another beast to tend."
And the thing was bitter to her; because it gave
trouble and took food.
Now. what the letter had been, or who had deciphered
it for him, Claudis Flamma never told to any man; and
from the little strange creature no utterance could be
ever got.
But the child who had come in the night and the
snow tarried at Yprs from that time thenceforward.
Claudis Flamma nourished, sheltered, clothed her;
but he <lid all these begrudgingly, harshly, scantily; and
he did all these with an acrid Irate and scorn, which did
not cease but rather grew with time.
The blow which had been her earliest welcome was
not the last that she received from him by many; and
whilst she was miserable exceedingly, she showed it,
not as children do, but rather likt some chained and
untamed animal, in tearless stupor and in sudden, sharp
ferocity. And this the more because she spoke but a
very few words of the language of the people among
whom she had been brought; her own tongue was one
full of round vowels and strange sounds, a tongue
unknown to them.
For many weeks he said not one word to her, cast
not one look at her; he let her lead the same life that
was led by the brutes that crawled in the timbers, or
by the pigs that couched and were kicked in the straw,
The woman Pitchou gave her such poor-joraps of gar-
ments or of victuals as she chose: she csuldcroueh in.
the corner of the hearth where the' fire warmth i
reached; she could sleep in the hay ir; tire lit*le loft
under the roof; so much she could do and*no more.
After that first moment in which her vague appeal
for pity and for rest had been answered by the blow
that struck her senseless, the child had never made a
moan, n&s sought for any solace.
All the winter through she lay curled up-on the tiles
by the fence, with her arms round the great, body ot
tire dog and his head upon her chest; they were hoth
starved,, beaten, kicked, and scourged, with b'-rital:
words oftentimes; they had the community, o' mis-
fortune,, and they loved one another.
Tlie blow on her head, the coldness of the season,
the scanty food that was cast to her, all unf"editD keep
her brain stupefied and her body almost motionless.
She was Kke a young bear that is motherless^,wounded,
frozen, famished, but which, coiled in an. Unostr con-
tinual slumber, keeps its blood flowing, and. ita
limbs alive. And, hke the bear, with the spring she
awakened.
When the townsfolk and the peasants came- to- the
mill, and first saw this creature there, with, her.' won-
drous vivid hues, and her bronzed, half-naked* limbs,
they regarded her in amazement, and askedthe miller
whence sire came. He set his teeth, and answered
ever:
" The woman that bore her was Reine Flamma.'*
The avowal was a penance set to himself,, but to it h%
never added more; and they feared his bitten temper
and his caustic tongue too greatly to press it on. him.
or even to ask him whether his daughter were with th
living or the dead.   .
With the unfolding of the young leaveej, and th
loosening of the frost-bound waters, and the nnveilinst
of the violet and the primrose under the shadows or
the wood, all budding life revives, and so.did heirs. For
she could escape from the dead, cold, bitter atmos-
phere of the silent, loveless house, where- her bread
was begrudged, and the cudgel was her teacher, out
into the freshness and the living sunshine of the young
blossoming world, where the birds and th beasts and
tender blue flowers and the curling green beughs were
her comrades, and where she could stretch her limbs
in freedom, and coil herself among the branches, and
steep her limbs in , the coolness of waters, and bathe
her aching feet in the moisture of rain-filled grasses.
With the spring she arose, the true forest animal she
was; wild, fleet, incapable of fear, sure of foot, in
unison with all the thingsof the earth and the air, and
stirred by them to a strange, dumb* ignorant, passion-
ate gladness.
She had been scarce seen in the winter; with the
breaking of the year the people- from more distant
places who rode their mules down to the mill on tiieri
various errands stared at this child, arrd wondered
among themselves greatly, and at length asked Claudis
Flamma whence she came.
He answered ever, setting hard his teeth:
" The woman that bore her was one accursed, whom
men deemed a saintReine Flimma,"
And he never added more. To tell the truth, tha
horrible, biting, burning, loathsome truth, was a pen-
ance that he had set to himself, and from which he
never wavered !
They dared not ask him more; for many were hi
debtors, and all feared his scourging tongue. But when
they went away, and gossiped among themselves by
the wayside well or under the awnings of the market-
stalls, they said to one another that it was just as they
had thought long ago; the creature had been no better
than her kind ; and they had never credited the fable
that God had taken her, though they had humored the
miller because he was aged and in dotage. Whilst one
old woman, a withered and witch-like crone, who had
toiled in from the Ashing village with a creel upon her
back and the smell of the sea about her rags, heard,
standing in the market-place, and laughed, and mocked
them, these seers, who were so wise after the years had
gone, and when the truth was clear.
" You knew, you knew, you knew!" she echoed, with
a grin upon her face. "Oh, yes! you were so wise'
Who said seven years through that Reine Flamma was
a saint, and taken by tbe saints into their keeping*
And who hissed at me for a foul-mouthed crone when 
said that the devil bad more to do with her than the good
God, and that the black-browed gypsy, with jewels for
eyes in his head, like tbe toad, was the only master to
whom she gave herself?   Oh-he, you were so wise!"
So she mocked them, and they were ashamed, and
held their peace; well knowing that indeed no creature
among them had ever been esteemed so pure, so chaste,
and so honored of heaven as had been the miller's
daughter.
Many remembered the "gypsy with the jeweled
eyes," and saw those brilliant, fathomless, midnight
eyes reproduced in the small rich face of the child
whom Reine Flamma, as her own father said, had
borne in shame whilst they had been glorifying her
apotheosis. And it came to be said, as time went on,
that this unknown stranger had been the fiend himself,
taking human shape for the destruction of one pure
soul, and the mockmg of all true children of the church.
Legend and tradition still held fast their minds in this
remote, ancient, and priest-ridden place; in their belief
the devil was still a living power, traversing the earth
and air in search of souls, and not seldom triumphing:
of metaphor or myth they were ignorant, Satan to
them was a personality, terrific, and oftentimes irre-
sistible, assuming at will shapes grotesque or awful,
human or spiritual. Their forefathers had beheld him ;
why not they?
So the henhucksters and poulterers, the cider-makers
and *anners, the flsherfolk from the seaboard, and the
peasant proprietors from the country round, came at
length in all seriousness to regard the young child at
Yprs as a devil-born thing. " She was bell-begotten,"
they would mutter when they saw her; and they would
cross themselves, and avoid her if they could.
The time had gone by, unhappily, as they considered,
when men had been permitted to burn such creatures
as this; they knew it and were sorry for it; the world,
they thought, had been better when Jews had biased like
torches, and witches had crackled like firewood; such
treats were forbidden now, they knew, but many, for
all that, thought within themselves that it was a pity
it should be so, and that it was mistaken mercy in the
age they lived in which forbade the purifying of the
earth by fire of such as she.
In the winter-time, when they first saw her, unusual
floods swept the country, and destroyed much of
their property; in the spring which followed there