Through it all the river ran, silver in the light, with shallow fords, where the deep-flanked bullocks drank; and ever and anon an ancient picturesque bridge of wood, time-bronzed and moss-imbedded.

The old man did not look round once; he had been on these roads a score of years; the place had to him the monotony and colorlessness which all long familiar scenes wear to the eyes that are weary of them.

He was ninety-five; he had to labor for his living; he ate black bread; he had no living kith or kin; no friend save in the mighty legion of the dead; he sat in the scorch of the sun; he hated the earth and the sky, the air and the landscape: why not?

They had no loveliness for him; he only knew that the flies stung him, and that the red ants could crawl through the holes in his shoes, and bite him sharply with their little piercing teeth.

He sat in such scanty shade as the tall lean poplar gave, munching his hard crusts; he had a fine keen profile and a long white beard that were cut as sharply as an intaglio against the golden sunlight, in which the gnats were dancing. His eyes were fastened on the dust as he ate; blue piercing eyes which had still something of the fire of their youth; and his lips under the white hair moved a little now and then, half audibly.

His thoughts were with the long dead years of an unforgotten time--a time that will be remembered as long as the earth shall circle round the sun.

With the present he had nothing to do; he worked to satisfy the lingering cravings of a body that age seemed to have lost all power to kill; he worked because he was too much of a man still to beg, and because suicide looked to his fancy like a weakness. But life for all that was over with him; life in the years of his boyhood had been a thing so splendid, so terrible, so drunken, so divine, so tragic, so intense, that the world seemed now to him to have grown pale and gray and pulseless, with no sap in its vines, no hue in its suns, no blood in its humanity.

For his memory held the days of Thermidor; the weeks of the White Terror; the winter dawn, when the drums rolled out a King's threnody; the summer nights, when all the throats of Paris cried "Marengo!"

He had lived in the wondrous awe of that abundant time when every hour was an agony or a victory, when every woman was a martyr or a baccha.n.a.l; when the same scythe that had severed the flowering gra.s.ses, served also to cleave the fair b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the mother, the tender throat of the child; when the ground was purple with the blue blood of men as with the juices of out-trodden grapes, and when the waters were white with the bodies of virgins as with the moon-fed lilies of summer. And now he sat here by the wayside in the dust and the sun, only feeling the sting of the fly and the bite of the ant; and the world seemed dead to him, because so long ago, though his body still lived on, his soul had cursed G.o.d and died.

Through the golden motes of the dancing air and of the quivering sunbeams, whilst high above the lark sang on, there came along the road a girl.

She was bare-footed, and bare-throated, lithe of movement, and straight and supple as one who pa.s.sed her life on the open lands and was abroad in all changes of the weather. She walked with the free and fearless measure of the countrywomen of Rome or the desert-born women of Nubia; she had barely completed her sixteenth year, but her bosom and limbs were full and firm, and moulded with almost all the luxuriant splendor of maturity; her head was not covered after the fashion of the country, but had a scarlet kerchief wound about. On it she bore a flat basket, filled high with fruits and herbs and flowers; a ma.s.s of color and of blossom, through which her dark level brows and her great eyes, blue-black as a tempestuous night, looked out, set straight against the sun.

She came on, treading down the dust with her long and slender feet, that were such feet as a sculptor would give to his Cleopatra or his Phryne.

Her face was grave, shadowed, even fierce; and her mouth, though scarlet as a berry and full and curled, had its lips pressed close on one another, like the lips of one who has long kept silence, and may keep it--until death.

As she saw the old man her eyes changed and lightened with a smile which for the moment banished all the gloom and savage patience from her eyes, and made them mellow and l.u.s.trous as a southern sun.

She paused before him, and spoke, showing her beautiful white teeth, small and even, like rows of cowry sh.e.l.ls.

"You are well, Marcellin?"

The old man started, and looked up with a certain gladness on his own keen visage, which had lost all expression save such as an intense and absorbed retrospection will lend.

"Fool!" he made answer, harshly yet not unkindly. "When will you know that so long as an old man lives so long it cannot be 'well' with him?"

"Need one be a man, or old, to answer so?"

She spoke in the accent and the language of the province, but with a voice rich and pure and cold; not the voice of the north, or of any peasantry.

She put her basket down from off her head, and leaned against the trunk of the poplar beside him, crossing her arms upon her bare chest.

"To the young everything is possible; to the old nothing," he said curtly.

Her eyes gleamed with a thirsty longing; she made him no reply.

He broke off half his dry bread and tendered it to her. She shook her head and motioned it away; yet she was as sharp-hungered as any hawk that has hunted all through the night and the woods, and has killed nothing. The growing life, the superb strength, the lofty stature of her made her need constant nourishment, as young trees need it; and she was fed as scantily as a blind beggar's dog, and less willingly than a galley-slave.

The kindly air had fed her richly, strongly, continually; that was all.

"Possible!" she said slowly, after awhile. "What is 'possible'? I do not understand."

The old man, Marcellin, smiled grimly.

"You see that lark? It soars there, and sings there. It is possible that a fowler may hide in the gra.s.ses; it is possible that it may be shot as it sings; it is possible that it may have the honor to die in agony, to grace a rich man's table. You see?"

She mused a moment; her brain was rapid in intuitive perception, but barren of all culture; it took her many moments to follow the filmy track of a metaphorical utterance.

But by degrees she saw his meaning, and the shadow settled over her face again.

"The 'possible,' then, is only--the worse?" she said slowly.

The old man smiled still grimly.

"Nay; our friends the priests say there is a 'possible' which will give--one day--the fowler who kills the lark the wings of the lark, and the lark's power to sing _Laus Deo_ in heaven. _I_ do not say--they do."

"The priests!" All the scorn of which her curved lips were capable curled on them, and a deep hate gathered in her eyes--a hate that was unfathomable and mute.

"Then there is no 'possible' for me," she said bitterly, "if so be that priests hold the gifts of it?"

Marcellin looked up at her from under his bushy white eyebrows; a glance fleet and keen as the gleam of blue steel.

"Yes, there is," he said curtly. "You are a woman-child, and have beauty: the devil will give you one."

"Always the devil!" she muttered. There was impatience in her echo of the words, and yet there was an awe also as of one who uses a name that is mighty and full of majesty, although familiar.

"Always the devil!" repeated Marcellin. "For the world is always of men."

His meaning this time lay too deep for her, and pa.s.sed her; she stood leaning against the poplar, with her head bent and her form motionless and golden in the sunlight like a statue of bronze.

"If men be devils they are my brethren," she said suddenly; "why do they, then, so hate me?"

The old man stroked his beard.

"Because Fraternity is Hate. Cain said so; but G.o.d would not believe him."

She mused over the saying; silent still.

The lark dropped down from heaven, suddenly falling through the air, mute. It had been struck by a sparrow-hawk, which flashed back against the azure of the skies and the white haze of the atmosphere; and which flew down in the track of the lark, and seized it ere it gained the shelter of the gra.s.s, and bore it away within his talons.

Marcellin pointed to it with his pipe-stem.

"You see, there are many forms of the 'possible'----"

"When it means Death," she added.

The old man took his pipe back and smoked.

"Of course. Death is the key-note of creation."