As the night fell, Folle-Farine, alone, steered herself down the water through the heart of the town, where the buildings were oldest, and where on either side there loomed, through the dusk, carved on the black timbers, strange masks of satyr and of faun, of dragon and of griffin, of fiend and of martyr.

She sat in the clumsy empty market-boat, guiding the tiller-rope with her foot.

The sea flowing in stormily upon the coast sent the tide of the river inland with a swift impetuous current, to which its sluggish depths were seldom stirred. The oars rested unused in the bottom of the boat; she glided down the stream without exertion of her own, quietly, easily, dreamily.

She had come from a long day's work, lading and unlading timber and grain for her taskmaster and his fellow-farmers, at the river wharf at the back of the town, where the little sea-trawlers and traders, with their fresh salt smell and their brown sails crisp from fierce sea-winds, gathered for traffic with the corn-barges and the egg-boats of the land.

Her day's labor was done, and she was repaid for it by the free effortless backward pa.s.sage home through the shadows of the water-streets; where in the overhanging buildings, ever and anon, some lantern swinging on a cord from side to side, or some open cas.e.m.e.nt arched above a gallery, showed the dark sad wistful face of some old creature kneeling in prayer before a crucifix, or the gold ear-rings of some laughing girl leaning down with the first frail violets of the year fragrant in her boddice.

The cold night had brought the glow of wood-fires in many of the dwellings of that poor and picturesque quarter; and showed many a homely interior through the panes of the oriel and lancet windows, over which brooded sculptured figures seraph-winged, or carven forms helmeted and leaning on their swords.

In one of them there was a group of young men and maidens gathered round the wood at nut-burning, the lovers seeking each other's kiss as the kernels broke the sh.e.l.ls; in another, some rosy curly children played at soldiers with the cuira.s.s and saber which their grandsire had worn in the army of the empire; in another, before a quaint oval old-fashioned gla.s.s, a young girl all alone made trial of her wedding-wreath upon her fair forehead, and smiled back on her own image with a little joyous laugh that ended in a sob; in another, a young bearded workman carved ivory beside his hearth, whilst his old mother sat knitting in a high oak chair; in another, a Sister of Charity, with a fair Madonna's face, bent above a little pot of home-bred snowdrops, with her tears dropping on the white heads of the flowers, whilst the sick man, whom she had charge of, slept and left her a brief s.p.a.ce for her own memories, her own pangs, her own sickness, which was only of the heart,--only--and therefore hopeless.

All these Folle-Farine saw, going onward in the boat on the gloom of the water below.

She did not envy them; she rather, with her hatred of them, scorned them. She had been freeborn, though now she was a slave; the pleasures of the home and hearth she envied no more than she envied the imprisoned bird its seed and water, its mate and song, within the close cage bars.

Yet they had a sort of fascination for her. She wondered how they felt, these people who smiled and span, and ate and drank, and sorrowed and enjoyed, and were in health and disease, at feast and at funeral, always together, always bound in one bond of a common humanity; these people, whose G.o.d on the cross never answered them; who were poor, she knew; who toiled early and late; who were heavily taxed; who fared hardly and scantily, yet who for the main part contrived to be mirthful and content, and to find some sunshine in their darkened hours, and to cling to one another, and in a way be glad.

Just above her was the corner window of a very ancient house, crusted with blazonries and carvings. It had been a prince bishop's palace; it was now the shared shelter of half a score of lace-weavers and of ivory-workers, each family in their chamber, like a bee in its cell.

As the boat floated under one of the cas.e.m.e.nts, she saw that it stood open; there was a china cup filled with house-born primroses on the broad sill; there was an antique illuminated Book of Hours lying open beside the flowers; there was a strong fire-light shining from within; there was an old woman asleep and smiling in her dreams beside the hearth; by the open book was a girl, leaning out into the chill damp night, and looking down the street as though in search for some expected and thrice-welcome guest.

She was fair to look at, with dark hair twisted under her towering white cap, and a peachlike cheek and throat, and her arms folded against her blue kerchief crossed upon her chest. Into the chamber, unseen by her, a young man came and stole across the shadows, and came unheard behind her and bent his head to hers and kissed her ere she knew that he was there. She started with a little happy cry and pushed him away with pretty provocation; he drew her into his arms and into the chamber, and shut to the lattice, and left only a dusky reflection from within shining through the panes made dark by age and dust.

Folle-Farine had watched them; as the window closed her head dropped, she was stirred with a vague, pa.s.sionate, contemptuous wonder: what was this love that was about her everywhere, and yet with which she had no share? She only thought of it with haughtiest scorn; and yet----

There had come a great darkness on the river, a fierce roughness in the wind; the shutters were now closed in many of the houses of the water-street, and their long black shadows fell across the depth that severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists were setting in from the sea as the night descended.

She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in round her with the darkness.

The boat pa.s.sed onward through the now silent town; only in one other place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was the window of the gardener's wife.

At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.

The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished sh.e.l.ls brought to her from the sea.

"How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine, looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water with envy at her heart.

She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had p.r.i.c.ked her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as she took her mule through their villages, or pa.s.sed them on the road with her back bent under some load of f.a.gots or of winter wood. Once or twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.

For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry, through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking chestnuts.

It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way, with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had pa.s.sed, when men had been as G.o.ds and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the l.u.s.ts of hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.

She mourned for him with a pa.s.sionate pain that was all the more despairing, because no sound of it could ever pa.s.s her lips to any creature.

To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone; by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carca.s.s of some noxious beast.

Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance; a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her.

The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood upon a crime.

It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be; but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and tow-horse,--something else than the unavenged blow that pays the a.s.s and the dog for their services.

The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime could have made her free she would have seized it.

She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike waste.

The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the desert and the forest was too hot.

What she wanted was to live. Live as the great moor-bird did that she had seen float one day over these pale, pure, blue skies, with its mighty wings outstretched in the calm gray weather; which came none knew whence, and which went none knew whither; which poised silent and stirless against the clouds; then called with a sweet wild love-note to its mate, and waited for him as he sailed in from the misty shadows where the sea lay; and then with him rose yet higher and higher in the air; and pa.s.sed westward, cleaving the fields of light, and so vanished;--a queen of the wind, a daughter of the sun; a creature of freedom, of victory, of tireless movement, and of boundless s.p.a.ce, a thing of heaven and of liberty.

The evening became night; a night rough and cold almost as winter.

There was no boat but hers upon the river, which ran high and strong.

She left the lights of the town behind her, and came into the darkness of the country. Now and then the moon shone a moment through the storm-wrack, here and there a torch glimmered, borne by some wayfarer over a bridge.

There was no other light.

The bells of the cathedral chiming a miserere, sounded full of woe behind her in the still sad air.

There stood but one building between her and her home, a square strong tower built upon the edge of the stream, of which the peasants told many tales of horror. It was of ancient date, and s.p.a.cious, and very strong.

Its upper chambers were used as a granary by the farm-people who owned it; the vaulted hall was left unused by them, partly because the river had been known to rise high enough to flood the floor; partly because legend had bequeathed to it a ghastly repute of spirits of murdered men who haunted it.

No man or woman in all the country round dared venture to it after nightfall; it was all that the stoutest would do to fetch and carry grain there at broad day; and the peasant who, being belated, rowed his market-boat past it when the moon was high, moved his oar with one trembling hand, and with the other crossed himself unceasingly.

To Folle-Farine it bore no such terror.

The unconscious pantheism breathed into her with her earliest thoughts, with the teachings of Phratos, made her see a nameless mystical and always wondrous beauty in every blade of gra.s.s that fed on the dew, and with the light rejoiced; in every bare brown stone that flashed to gold in bright brook waters, under a tuft of weed; in every hillside stream that leaping and laughing sparkled in the sun; in every wind that wailing went over the sickness of the weary world.

For such a temper, no shape of the day or the night, no miracle of life or of death can have terror; it can dread nothing, because every created thing has in it a divine origin and an eternal mystery.

As she and the boat pa.s.sed out into the loneliness of the country, with fitful moon gleams to light its pa.s.sage, the weather and the stream grew wilder yet.

There were on both sides strips of the silvery inland sands, beds of tall reeds, and the straight stems of poplars, ghostlike in the gloom.

The tide rushed faster; the winds blew more strongly from the north; the boat rocked, and now and then was washed with water, till its edges were submerged.

She stood up in it, and gave her strength to its guidance; it was all that she could do to keep its course straight, and steer it so that it should not grate upon the sand, nor be blown into the tangles of the river reeds.

For herself she had no care, she could swim like any cygnet; and for her own sport had spent hours in water at all seasons. But she knew that to Claudis Flamma the boat was an honored treasure, since to replace it would have cost him many a hard-earned and well-loved piece of money.

As she stood thus upright in the little tossing vessel against the darkness and the winds, she pa.s.sed the solitary building; it had been placed so low down against the sh.o.r.e, that its front walls, strong of hewn stone, and deep bedded in the soil, were half submerged in the dense growth of the reeds and of the willowy osiers which grew up and brushed the great arched windows of its haunted hall. The lower half of one of the seven windows had been blown wide open; a broad square cas.e.m.e.nt, braced with iron bars, looking out upon the river, and lighted by a sickly glimmer of the moon.

Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the land, and use her force to push it off into the current.

She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the sand, and stood to her waist in the water.

But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.