FOLLE-FARINE.
21
The light from the burning wood shone redly and fit-
fully The sigh and moan of the tossed rushes and of
the water-birds, awakened and afraid, came from the
outer world on the winds that blew through the desola-
tion of the haunted chamber. Gray owls flew in the
high roof, taking refuge from the night. Rats hurried,
noiseless and eager, over the stones of the floor, seek-
ing stray grains that fell through the rafters from the
granaries above.
She noticed none of these; she never looked up nor
around; all she heard was the throb of the dehrious
words on the silence, all she saw was the human face
in the clouded light through the smoke from the hearth.
The glow of the fire shone on the bowed head of
Thanatos, the laughing eyes of Pan; Hermes' fair cold
derisive face, and the splendor of the Ly kegns toiling
in the ropes that bound him to the mill-stones to grind
bread for the mortal appetites and the ineloquent lips
of men.
But at the gods she barely looked; hei-eyes were
bent upon the human form before her. She crouched
beside him, half kneeling and half sitting: her clothes
were drenched, the fire scorched, the draughts of the
air froze her; she had neither eaten nor drunk since
the noon of the day; but she had no other remem-
brance than of this life which had the beauty of the
sun-king and the misery of the beggar.
He lay long restless, unconscious, muttering strange
sad words, at times of sense, at times of folly, but al-
ways, whether lucid or delirious, words of a passionate
rebellion against his fate, a despairing lament for the
soul in him that would be with the body quenched.
After awhile the feverish mutterings of hrs voice
were lower and less frquent; Iris eyes seemed to be-
come sensible of the glare of the lire, and to contract
and close in a more conscious pain; after a yet longer
time he ceased to stir so restlessly, ceased to srgh and
shudder, and he grew quite still; his breath came tran-
quilly, his head fell back, he sank to a deep sleep.
The personal fears, the womanly terrors, which would
have assailed creatures at once less savage and less in-
nocent never moved her for an instant. That there
was any strangeness in her position, any peril ini this
solitude, she never dreamed. Her heart, bold with the
blood of Taric, could know no physical fear; and her
mind at orrce ignorant and visionary, her temper at
once fierce and unselfish, kept from her all thought of
those suspicions which would fall on her, and chastise
an act like hers; suspicions such as would have made
a woman less pure and less dauntless tremble at that
lonely house, that night of storm, that unknown fate
which she had taken into her own hands, unwitting and
unheeding, whether good or evil might be the issue
To her he was beautiful, he suffered, she had saved
him from death, and he was hers: and this was all that
she remembered. She dealt with him as she would
have done with some forest beast or bird that she
should have found frozen in the woods of winter.
His head had fallen on her, and she crouched un-
wearied in the posture that gave him easiest rest.
With a touch so soft that it could not awaken hrm, she
stroked the lusterless gold of his hair, and from trme to
time felt for the inaudible beating of his heart.
Innumerable dreams, shapeless, delicious, swept
through her brain,-like the echoes of some music, faint
yet unutterably sweet, that half arouses and half
soothes some sleeper in a gray drowsy summer dawn
For the first time since the. melodies of Phratos had
ied forever from off her ear she was happy.
She did not ask wherefore^neither of herself or of
the gods did she question whence came this wonder-
Ilower of her nameless joy.
She only sat quiet, and 1
let the hours drift by, and
watched him as fie slept, and was content.
So the hours passed.
Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled
with the pipe of waking birds, the darkness quivered
with the first pale rays of dawn.
Over the flood aird the fields the first light broke.
From the unseen world behind the mist, faint bells rang
in the coming day.
He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and
looked at her face as it hung above him, like some
drooped rose that was heavy with the too great sweet-
ness of a summer shower.                      ,.,.,,          ,
It was but the gaze of a moment, and hrs lrds dropped
again weighted with the intense weariness of a slumber
that held all his senses close in its leaden chains. But
the glance, brief though it was, had been conscrous;
under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrrll
stirred in her,.as the life stirs in the young trees at the
near coming of the spring. For the first time since her
birth she became wholly hum in.
A sharp terror made her trimble lrke a leaf; she put
his head softly from her on the ground, arrd rose, qurv-
ering, to her feet.                                   ,
It was not the gods she fear-id, it was herself.
She had never once known t' .at she had beauty, more
than the flower knows it blow, rrg on the wind. She had
passed through the crowds of fair and market, not
knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel
eyes all aglow. She had walked through them, indif-
ferent and unconscious, thinl .tag that they wanted to
hunt 'her down as an unclean beast, and dared not,
because her teeth were strong,       ,      y
She had taken a vague plewiure in the supple grace
of her own form, as she had reen it mirrored in some
woodland pool where she had bathed amidst the water-
lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and
unstudied pleasure as the flwan takes in seeing her
silver breast shine back to her, on the glassy current
adown which she sails.
Now, as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, besrde
him, on the hearth, and hear'! the birds' first waking
notes, that told her the sun was even then touchmg the
edge of the veiled world to light, a hot shame smote her,
and the womanhood in her yoke.
She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked
skirts were knotted above her knees, as she had bound
them when she had leaped from the boat's side; that
her limbs were wet and gar tening with river water, and
the moisture f ?om the grasses, and the sand and shmgle
of the shore: a-Jd that the linen of her vest, threadbare
with age, left her arms bare, and showed through its
rents the glam of her warm brown skinnnd the curves
of her shining shoulders.
A sudden horror came upon her, lest he should awake
again and see her as she was; wet, miserable, half-
clothed, wind-tossed like the rushes, outcast and
ashamed.                                                                ,    ...
She did not know that she had beauty in her; she did
know that even as she was, she had an exquisitely
savage grace, as storm-birds have in theirs against the
thunder-cloud and the lightning blaee, of their water-
world in tempest.
She felt a sudden shrinking from all chance of his
clearer and more conscious gaze; a sudden shv dread
and longing to hide herself under the earth, or take
refuge in the depth of the waters, rather than meet
those eyes to which she had given back the light of life
cast on her in abhorrence and in scornand that he
could have any other look, for her, she had no thought.
She had been an outcast among an alien people too
long to dream that any human love could ever fall on
her. She had been too long cursed by every tongue,
to dream that any human voice could ever arise in
honor or in welcome to a thing so despised and crimi-
nal as she.
For the gift which she had given this man, too, would
curse herthat she had known when she had offered it.
She drew her rude garments closer, and stole away
with velvet footfall, through the twilight of the dawn;
her head hung down, and her face was flushed as with
some great guilt.
With the rising of the day, all her new joy was ban-
ished.                                               ,,       ,             i       ,
With the waking of the world, all her dreams shrank
back into secrecy and shame.
The mere timid song of the linnet in the leafless
bushes seemed sharp on her ear, calling^n her to rise
and go forth to her work, as the creature of tori, ot
exile, of namelessness, and of despair, that men had
made her.
At the casement, she turned and cast one long but
lingering glance upon him where he slept; then once
more she launched herself into the dusky and watery
mists of the cold dawn.
She had made no more sound in her passing than a
bird makes in her flight.
The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motion-
less, in the darkness and the silence, and the drowsy
warmth.                                             .            ,   ,. ,
He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare,
golden of hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined and
flushed to changing rose heats, like an opal's fire; with
limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with water,
and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands;
with mystical eyes, black as nightand amorous-lidded,
and a mouth like the half-closed bud of a flower, which
sighing seemed to breathe upon him all the fragrance
of dim cedar woods shrouded in summer rams, of
honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of
almond blossoms tossed like snow against a purple
sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed, fair and free.
But he saw these only as in a dream ; and, as a dream,
when he awakened they had passed.
Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew
into morning as she went noiselessly away over the
gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the sighing rushes.
Tire river-meadows were all flooded, and on the oppo-
site banks the road was impassable; but on her side
she could still find footing, for the ground there had a
steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached m
any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw
herself by the half-merged bushes, through it on the
homeward tracks to Yprs.                                         .
The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. Ihe old
convent bells of all the country-side sang through the
mists The day was still young; but the life ot the sou
and the stream was waking as the birds were Boats
went down the current, bearing a sad freightage ot
sheep drowned in the night, and of ruined peasants,
whose little wealth of stack and henhouse had been
swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
From the distant banks the vorces of women came
muffled through the fog, weeping and wailing for some
lost lamb, choked by the water in its fold, or some
pretty breadth of garden just fragrant With snowdrops
and with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed
^'hr'ough the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense
opaque smoke from the wet earth, there loomed the
dusky shape of oxen, their belled horns sending forth a
pleasant music from the gloom. On the air there
was a sweet, damp odor from soaked grasses and up-
turned sods, from the breath of the herds lowing hock
deep in water, from the green knots of broken primrose
roots sailing by on the brown, rough river
A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the
stream; it had the fresh molds of its lost garden-home
still about it, and in its stems a robin had built her
little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and rum on the
wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and
uttering shrill notes of woe.
Folle-Farine saw nothing.                             -
She held on her way blindly, mutely, mechanically,
by sheer force of long habit. Her mind was in a trance;
she was insensible of pain or cold, of hunger or fever,
of time or place.                           ,    ,             .     ...   .   -
Yet she went straight home, as the horse being Winded
will do, to the place where its patience and fealty have
never been recompensed with any other thing than
IT'she had groped her way through the gloom of
the night, and found it, though the hght of the oad-
side Christ had been turned from her, so in the same
blind manner she had groaped her way to her own
conceptions of honesty and duty. She hated the bitter
and cruel old man, with a passion fierce and endui ing
that nothing could have changed; yet all the same she
served him faithfully.   This was an untamed animal
Once when she had lost an osier basket, not an hun-
dredth part the cost of this vessel, he had beaten her
till every bone in her frame had seemed broken for
many a week.   But she looked up quietly there among
the dripping bushes and the cheerless grassy ways.
That she never told a lie he above in the loft knew by-
long proof ; but this was in his sight only on a piece with
the strength born in her from the devil; the devil had
in all ages told so many truths^ to the confusion of the
saints God.
" Drifted where?"
" I do not knowon the face of the floodwith the
tide."
"You had left it loose."                                         ,   .
" I got out to push it off the sand.   It had grounded.
I forgot it.   It went aJ.rift. "
" What foul thing were you at meanwhile?"
She was silent.
" If you do not say, I will cut your heart out with a
hundred stripes!"
" You can."
"lean!   You shall know truly that I can.   Go, get
the boatfind it above or below wateror to the town
prison you go as a thief."
The words smote her with a sudden pang.
For the first time her courage failed her.   She turned
and went in silence at his bidding.
In the wet daybreak, through the swollen pools and
the soaked thickets, she searched for the lost vessel;
knowing'well that it would be scarcely less than a mir-
acle which could restore it to her;  and that the God
upon the cross worked no miracles for her- a child of
sin.                                                                      ...
For several hours she searched; hungry, drenched
with water, ready to drop with exhaustion, as she was
used to see the overdriven cattle sink upon the road.
She passed many peasants; women on their mules, men
in their barges, children searching for such flotsam and
jetsam as might have been flung upon the land from the
little flooded gardens and the few riverside cabins that
had been invaded in the night.
She asked tidings of the missing treasure from none
of these.   What she could not do for herself, it never
occurred to her that others could do for her. It was an
ignorance that was strength.   At length, to her amaae,
she found it; saved for her by the branches of a young
tree   which   being  blown down  had fallen  into the
stream, and had caught the boat hard and fast as in a
net.                                                          .       ...   ..  .,
At peril to her life, she dislodged it, with infinite
labor, from tbe entanglement of the boughs; and at
scarce less peril, rowed on her homeward way upon
the swollen force of the turbid river; full against the
tide which again was flowing inland, from the sea that
beat the bar, away to the northward, in the full sunrise.
It was far on in the forenoon as she drew near the
orchards of Yprs, brown in their leaflessness, and with
gray lichens blowing from their boughs, like hoary
beards of trembling paupers shaking in the icy breaths
of charity.                                                         ,         ...
She saw that Claudis Flamma was at work amidst
his trees, pruning and delving in the red and dully
asiie went up the winding stain, planks green and
slippery with wet river weeds, which lea straight
through the apple orchands to the mill.
"I have found the boat," she said, standing before
him ; her voice was faint and very tired, her whole body
drooped with fatigue, her head for once was bowed.
He turned with his billhook in his hand. There was
a leap of gladness at his heart; the miser's gladness
over recovered treasure; but heshowed such weakness
neither in his eye nor words.
" It is well for you that you have," said he with bitter
meaning.    " I will spare you half the stripesstrip.
Without a word of remonstrance, standing before
him in the gray shadow of the lichens, and the red
mists of the morning, she pushed the rough garments
from her breast and shoulders, and vanquishing her
weakness, drew herself erect to receive the familiar
chastisement.                                             ,                ..
"lam guiltythis time," she said to herself as the
lash fellshe was thinking of her theft.
CHAPTER IV.
A score of years before, in a valley of the far north,
a group of eager and silent listeners stood gathered
about one man, who spoke aloud with fervent and rap-
sei veu niiii laiwimuj.    ....j  ....... -------
indeed, that he had yoked to his plowshare; but she
did her work loyally and doggedly ; and whenever she
had shaken her neck free of the yoke, she returned and
did her work
had shaken hex neeiv .
thrust her head through it again, whether he scourged
Ler back^ to it or not.
It was
strong upon
vague instinct ru ner iv wvix. vw. ..... -----
grudged shelter  which she recerved, and not to bo
beholden for it for one single hour to any charity.
The mill was at work in the twilight when she reached
Claudis Flamma screamed at her from the open door
of the loft, where he was weighing corn for the grind-
to it or not.                             ,   ...     , . ,   .
partially from the force of habit which is
upon all creatures;  it was partially from   a
vague instinct in her to work out her right to the be-
ing,
her.
You have been away all night long," he cried to
She was silent; standing below in the wet garden
He cast a foul word ather, new upon his lips.   She
was silent all the same ; her arms crossed on her br east,
he"Whedre1stheb6at?-thatis worth more than your
body.   And soul you have none."
She raised her head and looked upward.
ShehSht Zt2ty likely, he would kill herforit.
turous oratory.
It was in the green Norwegian spring, when the
silence of the winter world had given way to a, million
sounds of waking life from budding leaves, and nesting
birds, and melting torrents, and warm winds fanning
the tender primrose into being, and wooing the red
alpine rose to blossom.                                               -,
The little valley was peopled by a hardy race ot
herdsmen and of fishers; men who kept their goat-
flocks on the steep sides of the mountains or wen*
down to the deep waters in search of a scanty subsist-
ence. But they were a people simple, noble, grave,
even in a manner heroic and poetic, a people nurtured
on the old grand songs of a mighty past, .and holding a
pure faith in the traditions of a great sea-sovereignty^
They listened, breathless, to the man who addressed
them, raised on a tribune of rough rock, and feeingthe
ocean, where it stretched at the northward.endof the
vale; aman peasant-born himself, but g>fted?wtha
native eloquence, half-poet, half-preacher; fanatic and
enthusiast; onewhoheld.it as his errand to go to and
fro the land, raising his voice against the powers of the
world and of wealth, and who spoke against these
with a fervor and force which, to the unlearned and
topre^oIablmXtudes that heard him, seemed the
^helatt^l^a^h^anddr^i^
iSe^dfeslarw^ro^al^
human ?ifo, a madness, innocent, and in its way beautr-
"MwSSS ISS** to. carry the message of
grace to the nations; and to raise his voice up against
those passions whose fury had never assailed hnn,
and agatastthose riches whose sweetness he had never
t-rsted So. he had wandered from crty to city, from
vfllage to village; mocked in some places, revered m
o lS, protesting always against the dominion of
wealth, and speaking with a strange pathos and poetry
which thrille the hearts of his listeners, and had
almost in it, at times, the menace and the mystery of
a prophet's upbraiding.                            .. . j,M' Im
He lived very poorly; he was gentle as a child, be
was a cripple and very feeble; Be drank at the way-
side rills with the dogs; he lay down on the open Adda
with the cattle; yet he had a power in him that had Its
Tway over the people, and held tlie Booffers a*i the