"Folle-Farine,--I go on your errand. If you repent, there is time yet to stay me. Say--do you bid me still set your Norse-G.o.d free from the Cave of the Snakes?"

She, startled, looked up into the roofing of the thick foliage; she saw shining on her with a quiet smile the eyes which she had likened to the eyes of the Red Mouse. They scanned her gravely and curiously: they noted the change in her since the last sun had set.

"What did he say to you for your gold?" the old man asked.

She was silent; the blood of an intolerable shame burned in her face; she had not thought that she had betrayed her motive in seeking a price for her chain of coins.

He laughed a little softly.

"Ah! You fancied I did not know your design when you came so bravely to sell your Moorish dancing-gear. Oh, Folle-Farine!--female things, with eyes like yours, must never hope to keep a secret!"

She never answered; she had risen and stood rooted to the ground, her head hung down, her breast heaving, the blood coming and going in her intolerable pain, as though she flushed and froze under a surgeon's probe.

"What did he say to you?" pursued her questioner. "There should be but one language possible from a man of his years to a woman of yours."

She lifted her eyes and spoke at last:

"He said that I did him a foul shame: the gold lies in the sands of the river."

She was strong to speak the truth, inflexibly, to the full; for its degradation to herself she knew was honor to the absent. It showed him strong and cold and untempted, preferring famine and neglect and misery to any debt or burden of a service done.

The old man, leaning on the wooden bar of the gate among the leaves, looked at her long and thoughtfully.

"He would not take your poor little pieces? You mean that?"

She gave a sign of a.s.sent.

"That was a poor reward to you, Folle-Farine!" Her lips grew white and shut together.

"Mine was the fault, the folly. He was right, no doubt."

"You are very royal. I think your northern G.o.d was only thus cold because your gift was such a little one, Folle-Farine."

A strong light flashed on him from her eyes.

"It would have been the same if I had offered him an empire."

"You are so sure? Does he hate you, then--this G.o.d of yours?"

She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her faith would not be turned.

"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth; "because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."

"You are very truthful."

She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.

The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which made his pa.s.sions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young desert mare.

"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is Arslan blind, or is he only tired?"

But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight of the curled la.s.so.

"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons?

It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will bleed many a day."

She lifted her head.

"Have I complained?--have I asked your pity, or any man's?"

"Oh, no, you are very strong! So is a lioness; but she dies of a man's wound sometimes. He has been very base to you."

"He has done as he thought it right to do. Who shall lay blame on him for that?"

"Your loyalty says so; you are very brave, no doubt. But tell me, do you still wish this man, who wounds you so cruelly, set free?"

"Yes."

"What, still?"

"Why not?"

"Why not? Only this: that once he is let loose your very memory will be shaken from his thoughts as the dust of the summer, to which you liken yourself, is shaken from his feet!"

"No doubt."

She thought she did not let him see the agony he dealt her; she stood unflinching, her hands crossed upon her breast, her head drooped, her eyes looking far from him to where the fading sunlight gleamed still upon the reaches of the river.

"No doubt," he echoed. "And yet I think you hardly understand. This man is a great artist. He has a great destiny, if he once can gain the eye and the ear of the world. The world will fear him, and curse him always; he is very merciless to it; but if he once conquer fame, that fame will be one to last as long as the earth lasts. That I believe. Well, give this man what he longs for and strives for, a life in his fame which shall not die so long as men have breath to speak of art. What will you be in that great drunken dream of his, if once we make it true for him?

Not even a remembrance, Folle-Farine. For though you have fancied that you, by your beauty, would at least abide upon his canvas, and so go on to immortality with his works and name, you seem not to know that so much also will do any mime who lets herself for hire on a tavern stage, or any starveling who makes her daily bread by giving her face and form to a painter's gaze. Child! what you have thought n.o.ble, men and women have decreed one of the vilest means by which a creature traffics in her charms. The first lithe-limbed model that he finds in the cities will displace you on his canvas and in his memory. Shall he go free--to forget you?"

She listened dumbly; her att.i.tude unchanging, as she had stood in other days, under the shadow of the boughs, to receive the stripes of her master.

"He shall be free--to forget me."

The words were barely audible, but they were inflexible, as they were echoed through her locked teeth.

The eyes of her tormentor watched her with a wondering admiration; yet he could not resist the pleasure of an added cruelty, as the men of the torture-chambers of old strained once more the fair fettered form of a female captive, that they might see a little longer those bright limbs quiver, and those bare nerves heave.

"Well; be it so if you will it. Only think long enough. For strong though you are, you are also weak; for you are of your mother's s.e.x, Folle-Farine. You may repent. Think well. You are no more to him than your eponym, the mill-dust. You have said so to yourself. But you are beautiful in your barbarism; and here you are always near him; and with a man who has no gold to give, a woman need have few rivals to fear. If his heart eat itself out here in solitude, soon or late he will be yours, Folle-Farine. A man, be he what he will, cannot live long without some love, more or less, for some woman. A little while, and your Norse-G.o.d alone here, disappointed, embittered, friendless, galled by poverty, and powerless to escape, will turn to you, and find a sweetness on your lips, a balm in your embrace, an opium draught for an hour, at least, in that wonderful beauty of yours. A woman who is beautiful, and who has youth, and who has pa.s.sion, need never fail to make a love-light beam in the eyes of a man, if only she know how to wait, if only she be the sole blossom that grows in his pathway, the sole fruit within reach of his hands. Keep him here, and soon or late, out of sheer despair of any other paradise, he will make his paradise in your breast. Do you doubt? Child, I have known the world many years, but this one thing I have ever known to be stronger than any strength a man can bring against it to withstand it--this one thing which fate has given you, the bodily beauty of a woman."

His voice ceased softly in the twilight--this voice of Mephistopheles--which tempted her but for the sheer sole pleasure of straining this strength to see if it should break--of deriding this faith to see if it would bend--of alluring this soul to see if it would fall.

She stood abased in a piteous shame--the shame that any man should thus read her heart, which seemed to burn and wither up all liberty, all innocence, all pride in her, and leave her a thing too utterly debased to bear the gaze of any human eyes,--to bear the light of any noonday sun.

And yet the terrible sweetness of the words tempted her with such subtle force: the pa.s.sions of a fierce, amorous race ran in her blood--the ardor and the liberty of an outlawed and sensual people were bred with her flesh and blood: to have been the pa.s.sion-toy of the man she loved for one single day,--to have felt for one brief summer hour his arms hold her and his kisses answer hers, she would have consented to die a hundred deaths in uttermost tortures when the morrow should have dawned, and would have died rejoicing, crying to the last breath,--

"I have lived: it is enough!"