"I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron instead!" hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit the tongue of a quivering starling.

"They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps," cried a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.

"She is a witch, there is no doubt about that," said again the old woman who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.

"And her mother such a saint!" sighed another old dame who was grouping green herbs together for salads.

And all the while the girl Edmee clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over it.

"If she were only here," swore Edmee's lover, under his breath.

At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.

She had pa.s.sed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.

Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free, firm step, and her l.u.s.trous eyes flashing hard against the sun.

She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added impulse to their rage.

They had talked themselves into a pa.s.sionate belief in her as a thing h.e.l.lborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them.

They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church's door had never opened to her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech and act.

The lover of Edmee loosened his hand from the silver beads about her throat, and caught up instead a stone.

"Let us see if her flesh feels!" he cried, and cast it. It fell short of her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.

"Who lamed my Remy?" screamed the cripple's mother.

"Who broke my grandson's arm?" cackled the old woman that sat knitting.

"Who withered my peach-tree?" the old gardener hooted.

"Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?" yelled the boy with the starling.

"Who flung the tile on the almond?" shouted the flower-girl's lover.

"Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?"

shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.

"Who is a witch?--who dances naked?--who bathes with devils at the full moon?" cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at her as she came.

"It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!" murmured the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no echo.

The old soldier even rebuked her. "A _jettatrice_ should be killed for the good of the people," he mumbled.

Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps into their midst; unfaltering.

The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a thing that was devil-begotten.

"She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!"

cried the cripple's mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly, steadily, with her face set against the light.

Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her--a jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest.

It cut the skin, and the blood started; the children shrieked and danced with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty and their own savage hate.

"Stone her to death! Stone her to death!" they shouted; she only laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once losing their luminous calm scorn.

The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother's back to see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his laughter. "Strike! strike! strike!"

One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then, swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.

Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her invulnerable and possessed.

She moved calmly with a firm tread backward--backward--backward; holding her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps.

They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the rabid cries of the cripple's mother had ceased. On the edge of the great square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth curled in contemptuous laughter.

"Strike _now_!" she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood still.

But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not so much as a word that answered her.

She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy's rejoicing had sunk, and was still.

At that moment, through the golden haze of sunbeams and dust that hung above the crowd, she saw the red gleam of the soldiers of the state; and their heavy tramp echoed on the silence as they hastened to the scene of tumult. She had no faith in any justice which these would deal her; had they not once dragged her before the tribunal of their law because she had forced asunder the iron jaws of that trap in the oak wood to give freedom to the bleeding hawk that was struggling in it whilst its callow birds screamed in hunger in their nest in the branches above?

She had no faith in them; nor in any justice of men; and she turned and went down a twisting lane shaded from the sun, and ran swiftly as a doe through all its turns, and down the steps leading to the water-side.

There her boat was moored; she entered it, and pulled herself slowly down the river, which now at noontide was almost deserted, whilst the shutters of the houses that edged it on either side were all closed to keep out the sun.

A boatman stretched half asleep upon the sacks in his barge; a horse dozing in his harness on the towing-path; a homeless child who had no one to call him in to shelter from the heat, and who sat and dappled his little burning feet in the flowing water; these and their like were all there were here to look on her.

She rowed herself feebly with one oar gradually out of the ways of the town; her left arm was strained, and for the moment, useless; her shoulders throbbed with bruises; and the wound from the stone still bled. She stanched the blood by degrees, and folded the linen over it, and went on; she was so used to pain, and so strong, that this seemed to her to be but little. She had pa.s.sed through similar scenes before, though the people had rarely broken into such open violence towards her, except on that winter's day in the hut of Manon Dax.

The heat was great, though the season was but mid-April.

The sky was cloudless; the air without a breeze. The pink blossoms of peach-trees bloomed between the old brown walls of the wooden houses. In the galleries, between the heads of saints and the faces of fauns, there were tufts of home-bred lilies of the valley and thick flowering bushes of golden genista. The smell of mignonette was sweet upon the languid breeze, and here and there, from out the darkness of some open cas.e.m.e.nt, some stove-forced crimson or purple azalea shrub glowed: for the people's merchandise was flowers, and all the silent water-streets were made lovely and fragrant by their fair abundance.

The tide of the river was flowing in, the stream was swelling over all the black piles, and the broad smooth strips of sand that were visible at low water; it floated her boat inward with it without trouble past the last houses of the town, past the budding orchards and gray stone walls of the outskirts, past the meadows and the cornfields and the poplars of the open country. A certain faintness had stolen on her with the gliding of the vessel and the dizzy movement of the water; pain and the loss of blood filled her limbs with an unfamiliar weakness; she felt giddy and half blind, and almost powerless to guide her course.

When she had reached the old granary where it stood among the waterdocks and rushes, she checked the boat almost unconsciously, and let it drift in amidst the reeds and lie there, and pulled herself feebly up through the shallow pools. Then she went across the stone sill of the cas.e.m.e.nt into the chamber where she had learned to live a life that was utterly apart from the actual existence to which chance had doomed her.

It was the height of noon; at such an hour the creator of these things that she loved was always absent at the toil which brought him his bread; she knew that he never returned until the evening, never painted except at earliest dawn.

The place was her own in the freedom of solitude; all these shapes and shadows in which imagination and tradition had taken visible shape were free to her; she had grown to love them with a great pa.s.sion, to seek them as consolers and as friends. She crept into the room; and its coolness, its calm, its dimmed refreshing light seemed like balm after the noise of the busy market-place and the glare of the cloudless sunshine. A sick sense of fatigue and of feebleness had a.s.sailed her more strongly. She dropped down in the gloom of the place on the broad, cold flags of the floor in the deepest shadow, where the light from without did not reach, and beneath the cartoon of the G.o.ds of Oblivion.

Of all the forms with which he had peopled its loneliness, these had the most profound influence on her in their fair, pa.s.sionless, majestic beauty, in which it seemed to her that the man who had begotten them had repeated his own likeness. For they were all alike, yet unlike; of the same form and feature, yet different even in their strong resemblance; like elder and younger brethren who hold a close companionship. For Hypnos was still but a boy with his blue-veined eyelids closed, and his mouth rosy and parted like that of a slumbering child, and above his golden head a star rose in the purple night. Oneiros, standing next, was a youth whose eyes smiled as though they beheld visions that were welcome to him; in his hand, among the white roses, he held a black wand of sorcery, and around his bended head there hovered a dim silvery nimbus. Thanatos alone was a man fully grown; and on his calm and colorless face there were blended an unutterable sadness, and an unspeakable peace; his eyes were fathomless, far-reaching, heavy laden with thought, as though they had seen at once the heights of heaven and the depths of h.e.l.l; and he, having thus seen, and knowing all things, had learned that there was but one good possible in all the universe,--that one gift which his touch gave, and which men in their blindness shuddered from and cursed. And above him and around him there was a great darkness.

So the G.o.ds stood, and so they spoke, even to her; they seemed to her as brethren, masters, friends--these three immortals who looked down on her in their mute majesty.

They are the G.o.ds of the poor, of the wretched, of the proscribed,--they are the G.o.ds who respect not persons nor palaces,--who stay with the exile and flee from the king,--who leave the tyrant of a world to writhe in torment, and call a smile beautiful as the morning on the face of a beggar child,--who turn from the purple beds where wealth, and l.u.s.t, and brutal power lie, and fill with purest visions the darkest hours of the loneliest nights for genius and youth,--they are the G.o.ds of consolation and of compensation,--the G.o.ds of the orphan, of the outcast, of the poet, of the prophet, of all whose bodies ache with the infinite pangs of famine, and whose hearts ache with the infinite woes of the world, of all who hunger with the body or with the soul.