Again she did not comprehend; a puzzled pain clouded the l.u.s.ter of her eyes.

"But the lark praised G.o.d--why should it be so dealt with?"

Marcellin smiled grimly.

"Abel was praising G.o.d; but that did not turn aside the steel."

She was silent yet again; he had told her that old story of the sons born of Eve, and the one whom, hearing it, she had understood and pitied had been Cain.

At that moment, through the roadway that wound across the meadows and through the corn lands and the trees, there came in sight a gleam of scarlet that was not from the poppies, a flash of silver that was not from the river, a column of smoke that was not from the weeds that burned on the hillside.

There came a moving cloud, with a melodious murmur softly rising from it; a cloud that moved between the high flowering hedges, the tall amber wheat, the slender poplars, and the fruitful orchards; a cloud that grew larger and clearer as it drew more near to them, and left the green water-meadows and the winding field-paths for the great highroad.

It was a procession of the Church.

It drew closer and closer by slow imperceptible degrees, until it approached them; the old man sat upright, not taking his cap from his head nor his pipe from his mouth; the young girl ceased to lean for rest against the tree, and stood with her arms crossed on her breast.

The Church pa.s.sed them; the gilt crucifix held aloft, the scarlet and the white of the floating robes catching the sunlight; the silver chains and the silver censers gleaming, the fresh young voices of the singing children cleaving the air like a rush of wind; the dark shorn faces of the priests bowed over open books, the tender sound of little bells ringing across the low deep monotony of prayer.

The Church pa.s.sed them; the dust of the parched road rose up in a choking ma.s.s; the heavy mist of the incense hung darkly on the sunlit air; the tramp of the many feet startled the birds from their rest, and pierced through the noonday silence.

It pa.s.sed them, and left them behind it; but the fresh leaves were choked and whitened; the birds were fluttered and affrightened; the old man coughed, the girl strove to brush the dust motes from her smarting eyelids.

"That is the Church!" said the stone-breaker, with a smile.

"Dust--terror--a choked voice--and blinded eyes."

Now she understood; and her beautiful curled lips laughed mutely.

The old man rammed some more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.

"That is the Church!" he said. "To burn incense and pray for rain, and to fell the forests that were the rain-makers."

The procession pa.s.sed away out of sight, going along the highway and winding by the course of the river, calling to the bright blue heavens for rain; whilst the little bells rang and the incense curled and the priests prayed themselves hoa.r.s.e, and the peasants toiled footsore, and the eager steps of the choral children trod the tiny gnat dead in the gra.s.ses and the bright b.u.t.terfly dead in the dust.

The priests had cast a severer look from out their down-dropped eyelids; the children had huddled together, with their voices faltering a little; and the boy choristers had shot out their lips in gestures of defiance and opprobrium as they had pa.s.sed these twain beneath the wayside trees. For the two were both outcasts.

"Didst thou see the man that killed the king?" whispered to another one fair and curly-headed baby, who was holding in the sun her little, white, silver-fringed banner, and catching the rise and fall of the sonorous chant as well as she could with her little lisping tones.

"Didst thou see the daughter of the devil?" muttered to another a handsome golden-brown boy, who had left his herd untended in the meadow to don his scarlet robes and to swing about the censer of his village chapel.

And they all sang louder, and tossed more incense on high, and marched more closely together under the rays of the gleaming crucifix as they went; feeling that they had been beneath the shadow of the powers of darkness, and that they were purer and holier, and more exalted, because they had thus pa.s.sed by in scorn what was accursed with psalms on their lips, with the cross as their symbol.

So they went their way through the peaceful country with a glory of sunbeams about them--through the corn, past the orchards, by the river, into the heart of the old brown quiet town, and about the foot of the great cathedral, where they kneeled down in the dust and prayed, then rose and sang the "Angelus."

Then the tall dark-visaged priest, who had led them all thither under the standard of the golden crucifix, lifted his voice alone and implored G.o.d, and exhorted man; implored for rain and all the blessings of harvest, exhorted to patience and the imitation of G.o.d.

The people were moved and saddened, and listened, smiting their b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and after awhile rising from their knees, many of them in tears, dispersed and went their ways: muttering to one another:--"We have had no such harvests as those of old since the man that slew a saint came to dwell here;" and answering to one another:--"We had never such droughts as these in the sweet cool weather of old, before the offspring of h.e.l.l was among us."

For the priests had not said to them, "Lo, your mercy is parched as the earth, and your hearts as the heavens are brazen."

CHAPTER II.

In the days of his youngest youth, in the old drunken days that were dead, this stone-breaker Marcellin had known such life as it is given to few men to know--a life of the soul and the senses; a life of storm and delight; a life mad with blood and with wine; a life of divinest dreams; a life when women kissed them, and bid them slay; a life when mothers blessed them and bade them die; a life, strong, awful, splendid, unutterable; a life seized at its fullest and fiercest and fairest, out of an air that was death, off an earth that was h.e.l.l.

When his cheeks had had a boy's bloom and his curls a boy's gold, he had seen a nation in delirium; he had been one of the elect of a people; he had uttered the words that burn, and wrought the acts that live; he had been of the Thousand of Marsala; and he had been of the avengers of Thermidor; he had raised his flutelike voice from the tribune, and he had cast in his vote for the death of a king; pa.s.sions had been his playthings, and he had toyed with life as a child with a match; he had beheld the despised enthroned in power, and desolation left within king's palaces; he, too, had been fierce, and glad, and cruel, and gay, and drunken, and proud, as the whole land was; he had seen the white beauty of princely women bare in the hands of the mob, and the throats that princes had caressed kissed by the broad steel knife; he had had his youth in a wondrous time, when all men had been G.o.ds or devils, and all women martyrs or furies.

And now,--he broke stones to get daily bread, and those who pa.s.sed him by cursed him, saying,--

"This man slew a king."

For he had outlived his time, and the life that had been golden and red at its dawn was now gray and pale as the ashes of a fire grown cold; for in all the list of the world's weary errors there is no mistake so deadly as age.

Years before, in such hot summer weather as this against which the Church had prayed, the old man, going homewards to his cabin amidst the fields, had met a little child coming straight towards him in the full crimson glow of the setting sun, and with the flame of the poppies all around her. He hardly knew why he looked at her; but when he had once looked his eyes rested there.

She had the hues of his youth about her; in that blood-red light, among the blood-red flowers, she made him think of women's forms that he had seen in all their grace and their voluptuous loveliness clothed in the red garment of death, and standing on the dusky red of the scaffold, as the burning mornings of the summers of slaughter had risen over the land.

The child was all alone before him in that intense glow as of fire; above her there was a tawny sky, flushed here and there with purple; around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders, blue and black from the marks of a thong.

He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the n.o.bles he hated.

"Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put her heavy load of f.a.gots down and stared at him.

"Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.

"Yes. Those stripes--they must be painful?"

She gave a gesture of a.s.sent with her head, but she did not answer.

"Who beat you?" he pursued.

A cloud of pa.s.sion swept over her bent face.

"Flamma."

"You were wicked?"

"They said so."

"And what do you do when you are beaten?"

"I shut my mouth."

"For what?"

"For fear they should know it hurt me--and be glad."