"If I had a G.o.d," she said, suddenly, "if a G.o.d cared to claim me--I would be proud of his worship everywhere."

Arslan smiled.

"All women have a G.o.d; that is why they are at once so much weaker and so much happier than men."

"Who are their G.o.ds?"

"Their name is legion. Innocent women make G.o.ds of their offspring, of their homes, of their housework, of their duties; and are as cruel as tigresses meanwhile to all outside the pale of their temples.

Others--less innocent--make G.o.ds of their own forms and faces; of bright stones dug from the earth, of vessels of gold and silver, of purple and fine linen, of pa.s.sions, and vanities, and desires; G.o.ds that they consume themselves for in their youth, and that they curse, and beat, and upbraid in the days of their age. Which of these G.o.ds will be yours?"

She thought awhile.

"None of them," she said at last.

"None? What will you put in their stead, then?"

She thought gravely some moments again. Although a certain terse and even poetic utterance was the shape which her spoken imaginations naturally took at all times, ignorance and solitude had made it hard for her aptly to marry her thoughts to words.

"I do not know," she said, wearily. "Marcellin says that G.o.d is deaf. He must be deaf--or very cruel. Look; everything lives in pain; and yet no G.o.d pities and makes an end of the earth. I would--if I were He.

Look--at dawn, the other day, I was out in the wood. I came upon a little rabbit in a trap; a little, pretty, soft black-and-white thing, quite young. It was screaming in its horrible misery; it had been screaming all night. Its thighs were broken in the iron teeth; the trap held it tight; it could not escape, it could only scream--scream--scream. All in vain. Its G.o.d never heard. When I got it free it was mangled as if a wolf had gnawed it; the iron teeth had bitten through the fur, and the flesh, and the bone; it had lost so much blood, and it was in so much pain, that it could not live. I laid it down in the bracken, and put water to its mouth, and did what I could; but it was of no use. It had been too much hurt. It died as the sun rose; a little, harmless, shy, happy thing, you know, that never killed any creature, and only asked to nibble a leaf or two, or sleep in a little round hole, and run about merry and free. How can one care for a G.o.d since all G.o.ds let these things be?"

Arslan smiled as he heard.

"Child,--men care for a G.o.d only as a G.o.d means a good to them. Men are heirs of heaven, they say; and, in right of their heritage, they make life h.e.l.l to every living thing that dares dispute the world with them.

You do not understand that,--tut! You are not human, then. If you were human, you would begrudge a blade of gra.s.s to a rabbit, and arrogate to yourself a lease of immortality."

She did not understand him; but she felt that she was honored by him, and not scorned as others scorned her, for being thus unlike humanity.

It was a bitter perplexity to her, this earth on which she had been flung amidst an alien people; that she should suffer herself seemed little to her, it had become as a second nature; but the sufferings of all the innumerable tribes of creation, things of the woods, and the field, and the waters, and the sky, that toiled and sweated and were hunted, and persecuted and wrenched in torment, and finally perished to gratify the appet.i.tes or the avarice of humanity--these sufferings were horrible to her always: inexplicable, hideous, unpardonable,--a crime for which she hated G.o.d and Man.

"There is no G.o.d pitiful, then?" she said, at length; "no G.o.d--not one?"

"Only those Three," he answered her as he motioned towards the three brethren that watched above her.

"Are they your G.o.ds?"

A smile that moved her to a certain fear of him pa.s.sed a moment over his mouth.

"My G.o.ds?--No. They are the G.o.ds of youth and of age--not of manhood."

"What is yours, then?"

"Mine?--a Moloch who consumes my offspring, yet in whose burning brazen hands I have put them and myself--forever."

She looked at him in awe and in reverence. She imagined him the priest of some dark and terrible religion, for whose sake he pa.s.sed his years in solitude and deprivation, and by whose powers he created the wondrous shapes that rose and bloomed around him.

"Those are gentler G.o.ds?" she said, timidly, raising her eyes to the brethren above her. "Do you never--will you never--worship them?"

"I have ceased to worship them. In time--when the world has utterly beaten me--no doubt I shall pray to one at least of them. To that one, see, the eldest of the brethren, who holds his torch turned downward."

"And that G.o.d is----"

"Death!"

She was silent.

Was this G.o.d not her G.o.d also? Had she not chosen him from all the rest and cast her life down at his feet for this man's sake?

"He must never know, he must never know," she said again in her heart.

And Thanatos she knew would not betray her; for Thanatos keeps all the secrets of men,--he who alone of all the G.o.ds reads the truths of men's souls, and smiles and shuts them in the hollow of his hand, and lets the braggart Time fly on with careless feet above a million graves, telling what lies he will to please the world a little s.p.a.ce. Thanatos holds silence, and can wait; for him must all things ripen and to him must all things fall at last.

CHAPTER V.

When she left him that night, and went homeward, he trimmed his lamp and returned to his labors of casting and modeling from the body of the ragpicker's daughter. The work soon absorbed him too entirely to leave any memory with him of the living woman. He did not know--and had he known would not have heeded--that instead of going on her straight path back to Ypres she turned again, and, hidden among the rushes upon the bank, crouched, half sitting and half kneeling, to watch him from the riverside.

It was all dark and still without; nothing came near, except now and then some hobbled mule turned out to forage for his evening meal or some night-browsing cattle straying out of bounds. Once or twice a barge went slowly and sullenly by, its single light twinkling across the breadth of the stream, and the voices of its steersman calling huskily through the fog. A drunken peasant staggered across the fields singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of a republican march that broke roughly on the silence of the night. The young lambs bleated to their mothers in the meadows, and the bells of the old clock towers in the town chimed the quarters with a Laus Deo in which all their metal tongues joined musically.

She remained there undisturbed among the long gra.s.ses and the tufts of the reeds, gazing always into the dimly-lighted interior where the pale rays of the oil flame lit up the white forms of the G.o.ds, the black shadows of the columns, the shapes of the wrestling lion and the strangled gladiator, the gray stiff frame and hanging hair of the dead body, and the bending figure of Arslan as he stooped above the corpse and pursued the secret powers of his art into the hidden things of death.

To her there seemed nothing terrible in a night thus spent, in a vigil thus ghastly; it seemed to her only a part of his strength thus to make death--men's conqueror--his servant and his slave; she only begrudged every pa.s.sionless touch that his grasp gave to those frozen and rigid limbs which he moved to and fro like so much clay; she only envied with a jealous thirst every cold caress that his hand lent to that loose and lifeless hair which he swept aside like so much flax.

He did not see; he did not know. To him she was no more than any bronze-winged, golden-eyed insect that should have floated in on a night breeze and been painted by him and been cast out again upon the darkness.

He worked more than half the night--worked until the small store of oil he possessed burned itself out, and left the hall to the feeble light of a young moon shining through dense vapors. He dropped his tools, and rose and walked to and fro on the width of the great stone floor. His hands felt chilled to the bone with the contact of the dead flesh; his breathing felt oppressed with the heavy humid air that lay like ice upon his lungs.

The dead woman was nothing to him. He had not once thought of the youth that had perished in her; of the laughter that hunger had hushed forever on the colorless lips; of the pa.s.sion blushes that had died out forever on the ashen cheeks; of the caressing hands of mother and of lover that must have wandered among that curling hair; of the children that should have slept on that white breast so smooth and cold beneath his hand. For these he cared nothing, and thought as little. The dead girl for him had neither s.e.x nor story; and he had studied all phases and forms of death too long to be otherwise than familiar with them all. Yet a certain glacial despair froze his heart as he left her body lying there in the flicker of the struggling moonbeams, and, himself, pacing to and fro in his solitude, suffered a greater bitterness than death in his doom of poverty and of obscurity.

The years of his youth had gone in fruitless labor, and the years of his manhood were gliding after them, and yet he had failed so utterly to make his mark upon his generation that he could only maintain his life by the common toil of the common hand-laborer, and, if he died on the morrow, there would not be one hand stretched out to save any one work of his creation from the housewife's fires or the lime-burner's furnace.

Cold to himself as to all others, he said bitterly in his soul, "What is Failure except Feebleness? And what is it to miss one's mark except to aim wildly and weakly?"

He told himself that harsh and inexorable truth a score of times, again and again, as he walked backward and forward in the solitude which only that one dead woman shared.

He told himself that he was a madman, a fool, who spent his lifetime in search and worship of a vain eidolon. He told himself that there must be in him some radical weakness, some inalienable fault, that he could not in all these years find strength enough to compel the world of men to honor him. Agony overcame him as he thought and thought and thought, until he scorned himself; the supreme agony of a strong nature that for once mistrusts itself as feebleness, of a great genius that for once despairs of itself as self-deception.

Had he been the fool of his vanities all his youth upward; and had his fellow-men been only wise and clear of sight when they had denied him and refused to see excellence in any work of his hand? Almost, he told himself, it must be so.

He paused by the open cas.e.m.e.nt, and looked outward, scarcely knowing what he did. The mists were heavy; the air was loaded with damp exhalations; the country was profoundly still; above-head only a few stars glimmered here and there through the haze. The peace, the silence, the obscurity were abhorrent to him; they seemed to close upon him, and imprison him; far away were the lands and the cities of men that he had known, far away were all the color and the strength and the strain and the glory of living; it seemed to him as though he were dead also, like the woman on the trestle yonder; dead in some deep sea-grave where the weight of the waters kept him down and held his hands powerless, and shut his eyelids from all sight, while the living voices and the living footsteps of men came dimly on his ear from the world above: voices, not one of which uttered his name; footsteps, not one of which paused by his tomb.

It grew horrible to him--this death in life, to which in the freshness of manhood he found himself condemned.

"Oh, G.o.d!" he, who believed in no G.o.d, muttered half aloud, "let me be without love, wealth, peace, health, gladness, all my life long--let me be crippled, childless, beggared, hated to the latest end of my days.

Give me only to be honored in my works; give me only a name that men cannot, if they wish, let die."

Whether any hearer greater than man heard the prayer, who shall say?