"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only thing worth a rush in the house."

She went on through the long wet rank gra.s.s, not hearing his threats against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she went, "A little gold! a little gold!"

"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant, shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say the devil-begotten never bleed."

The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any should blame the slayer.

The sense of some great guilt was on her, as she stole through the rosy warmth of the early morning.

She had thought to take him liberty, honor, strength, and dominion among his fellows--and he had told her that she had dealt him the foulest shame that his life had ever known.

"What right have you to burden me with debt unasked?" he had cried out against her in the bitterness of his soul. And she knew that, unasked, she had laid on him the debt of life.

If ever he should know----

She had wandered on and on, aimlessly, not knowing what she did all the night through, hearing no other sound but the fierce hard scathing scorn of his reproaches.

He had told her she was in act so criminal, and yet she knew herself in intent so blameless; she felt like those of whom she had heard in the old h.e.l.lenic stories, who had been doomed by fate, guiltless themselves, to work some direful guilt which had to be wrought out to its bitter end, the innocent yet the accursed instrument of destiny, even as Adrastus upon Atys.

On and on, through the watery moonlight she had fled, when she left the water-tower that night; down the slope of the fields; the late blossoms of the poppies, and the feathery haze of the ripened gra.s.ses tossed in waves from right to left; the long shadows of the clouds upon the earth, chasing her like the specter hosts of the Aaskarreya of his Scandinavian skies.

She had dropped at last like a dying thing, broken and breathless, on the ground. There she crouched, and hid her face upon her hands; the scorch of an intolerable shame burned on it.

She did not know what ailed her; what consumed her with abhorrence of herself. She longed for the earth to yawn and cover her; for the lilies asleep in the pool, to unclose and take her amidst them. Every shiver of a leaf, under a night-bird's pa.s.sage, every motion of the water, as the willow branches swept it, made her start and shiver as though some great guilt was on her soul.

Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a sound disturbed the serenity of the early night; she heard no voice but the plaintive cry of the cushat.

She saw "no snakes but the keen stars," which looked on her cold and luminous, and indifferent to human woes as the eyes of Arslan.

Yet she was afraid; afraid with a trembling horror of herself; she who had once never known one pulse of fear, and who had smiled in the eyes of death as children in their mother's.

The thrill of a new-born, inexplicable, cruel consciousness stole like fire through her. She knew now that she loved him with that strange mystery of human love which had been forever to her until now a thing apart from her, denied to her, half scorned, half yearned for; viewed from afar with derision, yet with desire, as a thing at once beneath her and beyond her.

All the light died; the moon rose; the white lilies shivered in its pallid rays; the night-birds went by on the wind. She never stirred; the pa.s.sionate warmth of her frame changed to a deadly cold; her face was buried in her hands; ever and again she shivered, and glanced round, as the sound of a hare's step, or the rustle of a bough by a squirrel, broke the silence.

The calm night-world around her, the silvery seas of reeds, the dusky woods, the moon in its ring of golden vapor, the flickering foliage, the gleam of the glowworm in the dew, all the familiar things amidst which her feet had wandered for twelve summers in the daily measure of those beaten tracks; all these seemed suddenly strange to her--mysterious, unreal.

She longed for the day to dawn again, though day was but an hour dead.

And yet she felt that at the first break of light she must flee and hide from his and every eye.

She had meant to give him honor and he had upbraided her gift as shame.

The bitterness, the cruelty, the pa.s.sion of his reproaches stung her with their poison, as, in her vision of the reed, she had seen the barbed tongues of a thousand snakes striking through and through the frail, despised, blossomless slave of the wind.

She had thought that as the G.o.d to the reed, so might he to her say hereafter, "You are the lowliest and least of all the chance-born things of the sands and the air, and yet through you has an immortal music arisen,"--and for the insanity of her thought he had cursed her.

Towards dawn, where she had sunk down in the moss, and in the thickets of elder and thorn--where she had made her bed in her childhood many a summer night, when she had been turned out from the doors of the mill-house;--there for a little while a fitful exhausted sleep came to her; the intense exhaustion of bodily fatigue overcoming and drugging to slumber the fever and the wakefulness of the mind. The thrush came out of the thorn, while it was still quite dark, and the morning stars throbbed in the skies, and sang his day-song close about her head.

In her sleep she smiled. For Oneirus was merciful; and she dreamed that she slept folded close in the arms of Arslan, and in her dreams she felt the kisses of his lips rain fast on hers.

Then the old peasant trudging to his labor in the obscurity of the early day saw her, and struck at her with his foot and woke her roughly, and muttered, "Get thee up; is it such beggars as thee that should be abed when the sun breaks?"

She opened her eyes, and smiled on him unconsciously, as she had smiled in her brief oblivion. The pa.s.sion of her dreams was still about her; her mouth burned, her limbs trembled; the air seemed to her filled with music, like the sound of the mavis singing in the thorn.

Then she remembered; and shuddered; and arose, knowing the sweet mad dream, which had cheated her, a lie. For she awoke alone.

She did not heed the old man's words, she did not feel his hurt; yet she obeyed him, and left the place, and dragged herself feebly towards Ypres by the sheer unconscious working of that instinct born of habit which takes the ox or the a.s.s back undriven through the old accustomed ways to stand beside their plowshare or their harness faithfully and unbidden.

Where the stream ran by the old mill-steps the river-reeds were blowing in the wind, with the sunrays playing in their midst, and the silver wings of the swallows brushing them with a sweet caress.

"I thought to be the reed chosen by the G.o.ds!" she said bitterly in her heart, "but I am not worthy--even to die."

For she would have asked of fate no n.o.bler thing than this--to be cut down as the reed by the reaper, if so be that through her the world might be brought to hearken to the music of the lips that she loved.

She drew her aching weary limbs feebly through the leafy ways of the old mill-garden. The first leaves of autumn fluttered down upon her head; the last scarlet of the roses flashed in her path as she went; the wine-like odors of the fruits were all about her on the air. It was then fully day. The sun was up; the bells rang the sixth hour far away from the high towers and spires of the town.

At the mill-house, and in the mill-yard, where usually every one had arisen and were hard at labor whilst the dawn was dark, everything was still. There was no sign of work. The light blazed on the panes of the cas.e.m.e.nts under the eaves, but its summons failed to arouse the sleepers under the roof.

The bees hummed around their houses of straw; the pigeons flew to and fro between the timbers of the walls, and the boughs of the fruit trees.

The mule leaned his head over the bar of the gate, and watched with wistful eyes. The cow in her shed lowed, impatient for some human hands to unbar her door, and lead her forth to her green-clovered pasture. A dumb boy, who aided in the working of the mill, sat astride of a log of timber, kicking his feet among the long gra.s.ses, and blowing thistle down above his head upon the breeze.

The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as though it were still night.

She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.

"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"

The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned, and answered on his hands, "Flamma is _almost_ dead, they say."

And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of laughter.

She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant in unison.

He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her--and to the country round--that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even by age or death?--it seemed to her impossible.

All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.

She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered with a scared face out from her master's chamber.

"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy grandsire lies a-dying."

"Dying?"

"Ay," muttered the old peasant. "He had a stroke yester-night as he came from the corn-fair. They brought him home in the cart. He is as good as dead. You are glad."

"Hush!" muttered the girl fiercely; and she dropped down on the topmost step, and rested her head on her hands. She had nothing to grieve for; and yet there was that in the coa.r.s.e congratulation which jarred on her and hurt her.

She thought of Manon Dax dead in the snow; she thought of the song-birds dead in the traps; she thought of the poor coming--coming--coming--through so many winters to beg bread, and going away with empty hands and burdened hearts, cursing G.o.d. Was this death-bed all their vengeance? It was but poor justice, and came late.