FOLLE-FARINE.
27
her, except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon
Pax.
The heat was great, though the season was but mid-
April.
The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The
pink blossoms of peach-trees bloomed between the old
brown vrrX.3 of the wooden houses. In the galleries,
between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns,
there were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and
thick flowering bushes of golden genista. The smell of
mignonette was sweet upon the languid breeze, and
here and there, from out the darkness of some open
easement, some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea
shrub glowed: for the people's merchandise was
flowers, and all the silent water-streets were made
lovely ad fragrant by their fair abundance.
The tide of the river was ilowing in, the stream was
swelling over all the black piles, and the broad smooth
strips of sand that were visible at low water-: it floated
her boat inward with it without trouble past the last
houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray
stone walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the
cornfields and the poplars of the open country. A cer-
tain faintness had stolen on bar with the gliding of the
vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and
the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar
weakness; she felt giddy and half blind, and almost
powerless to guide her course.
When she had reached the old granary where it stood
among the waterdocks and rushes, she checked the
boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift in amidst
the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up
through the shallow pools. Then she went across the
stone sill of the casenrent into the chamber where she
had learned to live a life that was utterly apart from
the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.
It was the height of noon ; at such an hour the creator
of these things that she loved was always absent at the
toil which brought him his bread; she knew that he
never returned until evening, never painted except at
earliest dawn.
The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all
these shapes and shadows in which imagination and
tradition had taken visible shape was free to her; she
had grown to love them with a great passion, to seek
them as consolers and as friends.    She crept into the
room ; and its coolness, its calm, its dimmed ref resiling
light seemed like balm after the noise of the busy
market-place and the glare of the cloudless sunshine.
A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had assailed
her- more strongly.   She dropped down in the gloom of
the place on the broad, cold Hags of the floor in the
deepest shadow, where the light from without did not
reach, and beneath the car-toon of the gods of Oblivion.
Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneli-
ness, these had the most profound influence on her in
their fair-, passionless,  majestic beauty, in which it
seemed to her that the mart who had begotten them
had repeated his own likeness.   Forthey were all alike,
yet unlike; of the same form and feature, yet different
even in their strong resemblance; like elder and younger
brethren who hold a close companionship.   For Hypnos
was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed,
and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumber-
ing child, and above his golden head a star rose in the
purple night.   Oneiros.  standing next, was a youth
whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that
were welcome to him; in his hand, among the white
roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, arrd around his
berrded head there hovered a  dim   silvery   nimbus.
Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his
calm and colorless face there were blended an unutter-
able sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were
fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as
though they had seen at once the heights of heaven
and the depths of hell; and Ire, having thus seerr, and
knowing all things, had learned that there was but one
good possible in all the universethat one gift which
his touch gave, and which men in their blindness shud-
dered from and cursed.   And above him and around
him there was a great darkness.
So the gods stood, and so they spoke, even to her;
they seemed to her as brethren, masters, friendsthese
three immortals who looked down on her in their mute
They are the gods of the poor, of the wretched, of the
proscribedthey are the gods who respect not persons
nor palaceswho stay with the exile and flee from the
kingwho leave the tyrant of a world to writhe inter-
ment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the
face of a beggar childwho turn from the purple beds
where wealth, and lust, and brutal power lie, and fill
with purest visiorrs the darkest hours of the loneliest
nights for genirrs and youththey are the gods of con-
solation and of compensation-the gods of the orphan,
of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose
bodies ache with the infinite pang-s of famine, and
whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world,
of all who hunger with the body or with the soul.
And looking at them, she seemed to know them as
her only friendsas the only rulers who ever could
loose the bands of her fate and let her forth to freedom
Sleep, and Dreams, and Death.
They were above her where she sank upon the stone
floor; the shadows were dark upen the ground; but
the sunrays striking through the distant window
against the opposite wall fell across the golden head ot
the boy Hypnos, and played before his silver sandaled
feet.                                                                   ,      .    ,
She sat gazing at him, forgetful of her woe, her task,
rhe populace that had hooted her abroad, the stripes
that, awaited her at home. The answering gaze of the
gods magnetized her; the poetic virus which had stirred
dumbly in her- from her birth awoke in her bewildered
brain. Without knowing what she wanted, she longed
for freedom, for light, for passion, for peace, for love:
Shadowy fancies passed over her in a tumultous
pageantry; the higher instincts of her nature rose and
struggled to burst the bonds in which slavery aird
ignorance and brutish toil had bound them; she knew
nothing, knew no more than the grass knew that blew
in the wind, than the passion-flower knew that slept
unborn in ths uncurled leaf: and -et withal she felt,
jraw, trembler, imagined, and desired, all mutely, all
blindly, all in confusion and in pain.
The weakness of tears rushed into her fearless eyes,
that had never qrrailed before the fury of any living
thing; her head fell on her chest; she wept bitterly
not because the people had injured hernot because
her wounded flesh ached and her limbs were sore-
but because a distance so immeasurable, so unalterable,
severed her from all of which these gods told her with-
out speech.
the stones on which she sat and her own form were
dark in shadow; and as though the bright boy Hypnos
pitied her, as though he, the world's consoler, had
compassion for this thing so lonely and accursed of her
kind, the dumb violence of her weeping brought its
own exhaustion with it.
The drowsy beat of noon, pain, weariness, the faint-
ness of fasting, the fatigue of conflict, the dreamy in-
fluences of the place, had their weight on her. Crouch-
ing there half on her knees, looking up ever in the
faces of the three Immortals, Hie gift of Hypnos
descended upon her and stilled her; its languor stole
through her veins; its gentle pressure closed her eye-
lids: gradually her rigid limbs and her lient body re-
laxed and unnerved ; she sank forward, her head lying
on her outstretched arms, and the stillness of a pro-
found sleep encompassed her.
Oneiros added his gift also; ard a throng of dim. df 
tirious dreams floated through her brain, and peopled
her slumber with fairer things than the earth holds,
and made her mouth smile while yet her lids were wet.
Thanatos alone gave nothing, but looked down on her
with his dark sad eyes, and held his finger on his close-
pressed lips, as though he said""Not yet."
CHAPTER   III.
The sunrays still shone on the three brethren, whilst ! license which, in the days of his comparative affluencA
i he had not denied himself.   He thought always
" De ces baisers puissants comme un dictante,
De ces transporta plrrs vils que rayons.
Que reste-t-il 1   C'est affreux, o mon ame 1
Rir-n qu'un dessin for r pale aux trois crayons."
And for those growing colors of passion which burned
so hotly for an instant, only so soon to fade out into
the pallor of indifference or satiety, he had a contempt
which almost took the place and the semblance 
chastity.                                                                , .
He worked on arrd on. studying the sleeper at his feet
with the keenness of a science that was as merciless in
its way as the science which tortures and slaughters in
i order to penetrate the mysteries cf sentient existence.
I    She was beautiful in her way, this dark strange for-
eign child, who looked as though her-native home must
have been where tbe Nile lily blooms, and the black
brow of the Sphinx are bent against the sun.
i    She was beautiful like a young leopard, like a young
i python, coiled there, lightly breathing, and nrute and
motionless arrd unconscious.    He painted  her as he
would have painted the leopard or python lying asleep
in the heavy hush of a noon of the tropics.   And she
was no more to him than these would have been.
The shadows grew longer; the sunlight died off the
bright head of the boy Hypnos; the feathery reeds on
the bank without got a red flush from the west; there
came a sudden burst of song from a boat-load of chil-
dren going home from the meadows where they had
gathered the first cowslips of the season in great
sheaves that sent their sweetness on the air through
the open window as they went by beneath the walls.
The shouts of the joyous singing rang shrilly through
the silence; they pierced her ear and startled her from
her slumber; she sprang up suddenly, with a bound
like a hare that scents the hounds, and stood fronting
him; her eyes opened wide, her breath panting, her
nervfes strained to listen and striving to combat.
For in the first bewildered instant of her awakening
she thought that she was still in the market-place of
the town, and that the shouts were from the clamor of
her late tormentors.
He turned and looked at her.
" What do you fear?" he asked her, in the tongue of
the country.                                                .
She started afresh at the sound of his voice, and drew
her disordered dress together, and stood mute, with
her hands crossing on her bosom, and the blood coming
and going under her transparent skin.
"What do you fear?" he asked again.
"/fear?"                                       . ,     .   ...         ,
She echoed the cow-ardly word with a half-tremulous
defiance; the heroism of her nature, which an hour
earlier had been lashed to its fullest strength, cast back
the question as an insult; but her voice was low and
husky, and the blood dyed her face scarlet as she spoke.
For she feared him; and for the moment she hadfor-
Her sleep remained unbroken ; there was no sound to
disturb it. The caw of the rook in the top of the pop-
lar-tree, the rushing babble of the water, the cry of a
field-mouse caught among the rushes bv an otter, the
far-off jingle of mules' bells from the great southern
road that ran broad and white beyond the meadows,
the gnawing of the rats in the network of timbers
which formed the vaulted roof, these were all the
noises that reached this solitary place, and these were
both too faint and too familiar to awaken her. Heat
and pain made her slumber heavy, and the forms on
which her waking eyes had gazed made her sleep full
of dreams. Hour after hour went by; the shadows
lengthened, the day advanced: nothing came to rouse
her. At length the vesper bell rang over the pastures
and the peals of Ave Maria from the cathedral in the
town were audible in the intense stillness that reigned
around.
As the chimes died, Arsln crossed the threshold of
the granary and entered the desolate place where he
had made his home. For once his labor had been early
completed, and he had hastened to employ the rare and
precious moments of the remaining light.
He had almost stepped upon her ere he saw her, lying
beneath his cartoons of the sons of Nyk. He paused
and looked down.
Her attitude had slightly changed, and had in it all
the abandonment of youth and of sleep; her face was
turned upward, with quick, silent breathings parting
the lips; her bare feet were lightly crossed; the linen of
her loose tunic was open at the throat, and had fallen
back from her right arm and shoulder; the whole sup-
ple grace and force that were mingled in her form were
visible under the light folds of her simple garments.
The sun still lingered on the bright bowed head of
Hypnos, but all light had died from off the stone floor
where she was stretched.
As she had once looked on himself, so he now looked
on her.
But iu him there arose little curiosity and still less
pity; he recognized her as the girl whom, with a face of
old Egypt, he had seen rowing her boat-load of corn
down the river, and whom he had noticed for her
strange unlikeness to all around her.
He supposed that mere curiosity had brought her
there, and sleep overtaken her in the drowsiness of the
first heat of the budding year.
He did not seek to rouse her, nor to spare her any
shame or pain which, at her waking, she might feel.
He merely saw in her a barbaric yet beautiful creature ;
and his only desire was to use the strange charms in
her for'his art.
A smooth-planed panel stood on an easel near; turn-
ing it where best the light fell, he began to sketch her
attitude, rapidly, in black and white. It was quickly
done by a hand so long accustomed to make such tran-
scripts; and he soon went further, to that richer por-
traiture which color alone can accomplish. The gray
stone pavement; the brown and slender limbs; the
breadth of scarlet given by the sash about her loins; the
upturned face, whose bloom was as brilliant as that of
a red carnation blooming in the twilight of some old
wooden gallery; the eyelids, tear-laden still; the mouth
that smiled arid sighed in dreaming; while on the wall
above, the radiant figure of the young god remained in
full sunlight whilst all beneath was dark; these gave a
picture which required no correction from knowledge,
no addition from art.
He worked on for more than an hour, until the wood
began to beam with something of the hues of flesh and
blood, and the whole head was thrown out in color, al-
gotten how she had come there and all that had passed,
except that some instinct of the long-hunted animal
was astir in her to hide herself and fly.
But he stood between her and the passage outward,
and pride and shame held her motionless. _ Moreover,
she still listened intently: the confused voices of the
children still seemed to her like those of the multitude
bv whom she had been chased; and she was ready to
leap tiger-like upon them, rather than let them degrade
eHeniookecf at hei-with some touch of interest: she
was to him only some stray beggar-girl, who had tres-
passed into his solitude; yet her untamed regard,
her wide-open eyes, the stag-like grace ot her attitude,
the sullen strength which spoke in her replyall
attracted him to closer notice of these.
"Why are you in this place?" he asked her, slowly.
" You wen: asleep here when I came, more than an
hour ago."                                     ,        ,.      ...
The color burned in her face; she said nothing
The sinking of the children was waxing fainter, as
the boat floated from beneath the wall on its home-
ward way into the town. She ceased to fancy these
cries the cries of her foes, and recollection began to
revive in her.                                        ,         .        __.
" Why did you come?" he repeated, musing how-he
should persuade her to return to the attitude sketched
out upon his easel.                                       ,
She returned his look with the bold truthfulness
natural to her, joined with the apprehensiveness of
chastisement whieh becomes second nature to every
creature that is forever censured, cursed, and beaten
for every real or imagined fault.
" I carnet see those," sheanswerel him, withaback-
ward movement of her hand, which had a sort of rever-
ence in it, up to the forms of the: gods above'her.
The answer moved him ; he had not thought to find a
feeling so high as this in this ragged, lonely, sunburnt
child- and, to the man for whom, throughout a youth
of ambition and of disappointment, the world had
never found 'the voice of favor, even so much appre-
thouehthe "body and thelimbs still remained in their \ ciation as lay in this outcast's homage had its certain
mere outline.                                                               J       sweetness. For a man may be neglrgent of all sympathy
Once or twice she moved restlessly, and muttered a ! for himself, yet never, if he be poet or artist, will ne oe
1       _  .                ...      .___i_    i~ :__s.r.ie   it-.AifPar.anr'a   T.f   fill    RV1T1-
little, dully, as though the perpetual unsparing gaze,
bent on her with a scrutiny so cold and yet so search-
ing, disturbed or magnetized her even in her sleep.
But she never awakened, and he had time to study and
to trace out every curve and line of the half-developed
loveliness before him with as little pity, with as cruel
exactitude, as that with which the vivisector tears
asunder the living animal whose sinews he severs, or
the botanist plucks to pieces the new-born flower
whose structure he desires to examine.
The most beautiful women, who  had bared their i
charms that he might see them live again upon his
canvas, had seldom had power to make his hand trem-
ble a moment in such translation.
To tke surgeon all sex is dead, all charm is gone,
from the female corpse that his knife ravages in search
of the secrets of science ; and to Arsln the women
whom he modeled and portrayed were nearly as sex-
less, nearly as powerless to create passion or emotion.
They were the tools for his art: no more.
When, in the isolation of the long northern winters,
he had sat beside the pine-wood that blazed on his
hearth while the wolves howled down the deserted vil-
lage street and the snow drifted up and blocked from
sight the last pane of the lattice and the last glimpse
of the outer world, he had been more enamored of the
visions which visited him in that solitude than he had
ever been since of the living creatures whose beauty
he had recorded in his works.
He had little passion in him, or passion was dormant;
and he had sought women, even in the hours of love,
with coldness and with something of contempt for that
able utterly to teach himself indifference to all sym-
Pa"Vhosenfhl^choed, in surprise.   "What can they
besKoSored at the unconcealed contempt that lay in
his last word; her head drooped; she knew thatthey
were much to her-friends, masters, teachers divine
Ind full of pity. But she had no language in which to
tell Wm this; and if she could have told hrm, she would
have been ashamed. Also, the remembrance of those
benefits to him, of which he was ignorant, had now
come to her through the bewilderment of her thoughts,
and it locked her lips to silence.
Her eyes dropped under his; the strange love she
bore him made her blind and giddy and afraid; she
moled restlessly, glaring round with the halftrmrd,
lialf-fierce jances of a wild animal that desires to
eSwgtcWngChe.nmore closely, he noticed for the first
timV the ftains of blood upon her shoulder, and the
bruise on her chest, where the rent in her linen left it
'heaskedher, "orwounded?"
" You have been hurt?
She shook her head.
"No'tWng^ou have  fallen  or been ill treated,
surely?"                             
" The people struck me.
"Struckyou?   With what"
"Stones."
"And why?"                                 S?                                ;
"I am Folle-Farine.