On her ear there seemed to steal a voice from the darkness, saying:

"One life alone can ransom another. Live immortal with us; or for that dead man--perish."

She bowed her head where she knelt in the darkness; the force of an irresistible fate seemed upon her; that sacrifice which is at once the delirium and divinity of her s.e.x had entered into her.

She was so lowly a thing; a creature so loveless and cursed; the G.o.ds, if they took her in pity, would soon scorn her as men had scorned; whilst he who lay dead--though so still and so white, and so mute and so powerless,--he looked a king among men, though the G.o.ds for his daring had killed him.

"Let him live!" she murmured. "It's for me,--I am nothing--nothing. Let me die as the Dust dies--what matter?"

The wind blew the flame of the lamp into darkness; the moon still shone through the storm on to the face of Thanatos.

He alone heard. He--the only friend who fails no living thing. He alone remained, and waited for her: he, whom alone of all the G.o.ds--for this man's sake--she chose.

CHAPTER III.

When the trance of her delirious imaginations pa.s.sed, they left her tranquil, but with the cold of death seeming to pa.s.s already from the form she looked on into hers. She was still crouching by his body on the hearth; and knew what she had chosen, and did not repent.

He was dead still;--or so she thought;--she watched him with dim dreaming eyes, watched him as women do who love.

She drew the fair glistening hair through her hands; she touched the closed and blue veined eyelids tenderly; she laid her ear against his heart to hearken for the first returning pulses of the life she had brought back to him.

It was no more to her the dead body of a man, unknown, unheeded, a stranger, and because a mortal, of necessity to her a foe. It was a nameless, wondrous, mystic force and splendor to which she had given back the pulse of existence, the light of day; which was no more the G.o.ds', nor any man's, no more the prey of death, nor the delight of love; but hers--hers--shared only with the greatness she had bought for him.

Even as she looked on him she felt the first faint flutter in his heart; she heard the first faint breath upon his lips.

His eyes unclosed and looked straight at hers, without reason or l.u.s.ter in them, clouded with a heavy and delirious pain.

"To die--of hunger--like a rat in a trap!" he muttered in his throat, and strove to rise; he fell back, senseless, striking his head upon the stones.

She started; her hands ceased to wander through his hair, and touch his cold lips as she would touch the cup of a flower; she rose slowly to her feet.

She had heard; and the words, so homely and so familiar in the lives of all the poor, pierced the wild faiths and visions of her heated brain, as a ray of the clear daybreak pierces through the purple smoke from altar fires of sacrifice.

The words were so terrible, and yet so trite; they cleft the mists of her dreams as tempered steel cleaves folds of gossamer.

"To die--of hunger!"

She muttered the phrase after him--shaken from her stupor by its gaunt and common truth.

It roused her to the consciousness of all his actual needs. Her heart rebelled even against the newly-found immortal masters, since being in wrath they could not strike him swiftly with their vengeance, but had killed him thus with these lingering and most bitter pangs, and had gathered there as to a festival to see him die.

As she stooped above him, she could discern the faint earthy cavernous odor, which comes from the languid lungs and empty chest of one who has long fasted, almost unto death.

She had known that famine odor many a time ere then; in the hut of Manon Dax, and by the hedge-rows and in the ditches, that made the sick-beds of many another, as old, as wretched, and as n.o.bly stubborn against alms; in times of drought or in inclement winters, the people in all that country-side suffered continually from the hunger torment; she had often pa.s.sed by men and women, and children, crouching in black and wretched cabins, or lying fever-stricken on the cold stony fields, glad to gnaw a shred of sheepskin, or suck a th.o.r.n.y bramble of the fields to quiet the gnawing of their entrails.

She stood still beside him, and thought.

All light had died; the night was black with storm; the shadowy shapes were gone; there were the roar of the rushing river, and the tumult of the winds and rains upon the silence; all she saw was this golden head; this colorless face; this lean and nerveless hand that rested on the feebly beating heart;--these she saw as she would have seen the white outlines of a statue in the dark.

He moved a little with a hollow sigh.

"Bread--bread--bread!" he muttered. "To die for bread!"

At the words, all the quick resource and self-reliance which the hard life she led had sharpened and strengthened in her, awoke amidst all the dreams and pa.s.sions, and meditations of her mystical faiths, and her poetic ignorance.

The boldness and the independence of her nature roused themselves; she had prayed for him to the G.o.ds, and to the G.o.ds given herself for him--that was well--if they kept their faith. But if they forsook it?

The blood rushed back to her heart with its old proud current; alone, she swore to herself to save him. To save him in the G.o.ds' despite.

In the street that day, she had found the half of a roll of black bread.

It had lain in the mud, none claiming it; a sulky lad pa.s.sed it in scorn, a beggar with gold in his wallet kicked it aside with his crutch; she took it and put it by for her supper; so often some stripe or some jibe replaced a begrudged meal for her at Flamma's board.

That was all she had. A crust dry as a bone, which could do nothing towards saving him, which could be of no more use to pa.s.s those clinched teeth, and warm those frozen veins, than so much of the wet sand gathered up from the river-sh.o.r.e. Neither could there be any wood, which, if brought in and lit, would burn. All the timber was green and full of sap, and all, for a score square leagues around, was at that hour drenched with water.

She knew that the warmth of fire to dry the deadly dampness in the air, the warmth of wine to quicken the chillness and the torpor of the reviving life, were what were wanted beyond all other things. She had seen famine in all its stages, and she knew the needs and dangers of that fell disease.

There was not a creature in all the world who would have given her so much as a loaf or a f.a.got; even if the thought of human aid had ever dawned on her. As it was, she never even dreamed of it; every human hand--to the rosy fist of the smallest and fairest child--was always clinched against her; she would have sooner asked for honey from a knot of snakes, or sought a bed of roses in a swarm of wasps, as have begged mercy or aid at any human hearth.

She knew nothing, either, of any social laws that might have made such need as this a public care on public alms. She was used to see men, women, and children perishing of want; she had heard people curse the land that bore, and would not nourish, them. She was habituated to work hard for every bit or drop that pa.s.sed her lips; she lived amidst mult.i.tudes who did the same; she knew nothing of any public succor to which appeal could in such straits be made.

If bread were not forthcoming, a man or a woman had to die for lack of it, as Manon Dax and Marcellin had done; that seemed to her a rule of fate, against which there was no good in either resistance or appeal.

What could she do? she pondered.

Whatever she would do, she knew that she had to do quickly. Yet she stood irresolute.

To do anything she had to stoop herself again down to that sort of theft to which no suffering or privation of her own had ever tempted her.

In a vague fierce fashion, unholpen and untaught, she hated all sin.

All quoted it as her only birthright; all told her that she was imbued with it body and soul; all saw it in her slightest acts, in her most harmless words; and she abhorred this, the one gift which men cast to her as her only heirloom, with a strong scornful loathing which stood her in the stead of virtue. With an instinctive cynicism which moved her continually, yet to which she could have given no name, she had loved to see the children and the maidens--those who held her accursed, and were themselves held so innocent and just--steal the ripe cherries from the stalk, pluck the forbidden flowers that nodded over the convent walls, pierce through the boundary fence to reach another's pear, speak a lie softly to the old grayheaded priest, and lend their ripe lips to a soldier's rough salute, while she, the daughter of h.e.l.l, pointed at, despised, shunned as a leper, hunted as a witch, kept her hands soilless and her lips untouched.

It was a pride to her to say in her teeth, "I am stronger than they,"

when she saw the stolen peach in their hand, and heard the lying word on their tongue. It had a savage sweetness for her, the will with which she denied herself the luxurious fruit that, unseen, she could have reached a thousand times from the walls when her throat was parched and her body empty; with which she uttered the truth, and the truth alone, though it brought the blows of the cudgel down on her shoulders; with which she struck aside in disdain the insolent eyes and mocking mouths of the youths, who would fain have taught her that, if beggared of all other things, she was at least rich in form and hue. She hated sin, for sin seemed to her only a human word for utter feebleness; she had never sinned for herself, as far as she knew; yet to serve this man, on whose face she had never looked before that night, she was ready to stoop to the thing which she abhorred.

She had been so proud of her freedom from all those frailties of pa.s.sion, and greed, and self-pity, with which the souls of the maidens around her were haunted;--so proud, with the fierce, chaste, tameless arrogance of the women of her race, that was bred in their blood, and taught them as their first duty, by the Oriental and jealous laws of their vengeful and indolent masters.

She had been so proud!--and this cleanliness of hand and heart, this immunity from her enemies' weakness, this independence which she had worn as a buckler of proof against all blows, and had girded about her as a zone of purity, more precious than gold, this, the sole treasure she had, she was about to surrender for the sake of a stranger.

It was a greater gift, and one harder to give, than the life which she had offered for his to the G.o.ds.

She kneeled on one knee on the stone floor beside him, her heart torn with a mute and violent struggle; her bent face dark and rigid, her straight haughty brows knit together in sadness and conflict. In the darkness he moved a little; he was unconscious, yet ever, in that burning stupor, one remembrance, one regret, remained with him.

"That the mind of a man can be killed for the want of the food thrown to swine!" he muttered drearily, in the one gleam of reason that abode in the delirium of his brain.