He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,--it was wearying to him; all he desired was power among men.

"I have been cruel to you," he said, suddenly. "I have stung and wounded you often. I have dealt with your beauty as with this flower under my foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive me ere I go?"

"You have no sins to me," she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor did the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh metallic sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.

He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were pained and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been pitiless to her--with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is born of the fierceness of pa.s.sion and the idolatrous desires of the senses. Man would have held him blameless here, because he had forborne to pluck for his own delight this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he himself knew well that, nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and so bruised it, as he went, that never would any wind of heaven breathe music through its shattered grace again.

"When do you go?" she asked.

Her voice had still the same harsh, broken sound in it. She did not lift the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her breast;--all the ruins of the trampled poppy-blossom were about her, blood-red as a field where men have fought and died.

He answered her, "At dawn."

"And where?"

"To Paris. I will find fame--or a grave."

A long silence fell between them. The church chimes, far away in the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood pa.s.sive, colorless as the poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull beating of her heart. The purple shadow and the white stars swam around her. Her heart was broken; but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to the last in silence.

He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.

He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the dew-laden weight of her hair, and the curling, meek form, while all warmth had died, and the pa.s.sionate loveliness, which was cast to him, to be folded in his bosom or thrust away by his foot--as he chose.

"Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me," he murmured. "I have been base to you,--brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;--yet I would have loved you, if I could. Love would have been youth, folly, oblivion; all the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on earth. But love is dead in me, I think, otherwise----"

She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain reeled; her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under the sharpest throes of Flamma's scourge. Suddenly she cast her arms about his throat and clung to him, and kissed him in answer with that strange, mute, terrible pa.s.sion with which the lips of the dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they know they never again will rest.

Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields, and fled from him like a stag that bears its death-shot in it, and knows it, and seeks to hide itself and die unseen.

He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was tender. He had no love for her; and yet--now that he had thrown her from him forever--he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in their terrible eloquence upon his own.

But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.

He went back to his home alone.

"It is best so," he said to himself.

For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a female thing--a reed of the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.

He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the creations that alone he loved.

"They shall live--or I will die," he said to his own heart. With the war to which he went what had any amorous toy to do?

That night Hermes had no voice for him.

Else might the wise G.o.d have said, "Many reeds grow together by the river, and men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one reed of a million song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that reed in twain, he may miss its music often and long,--yea, all the years of his life."

But Hermes that night spake not.

And he brake his reed, and cast it behind him.

CHAPTER V.

When the dawn came, it found her lying face downward among the rushes by the river. She had run on, and on, and on blindly, not knowing whither she fled, with the strange force that despair lends; then suddenly had dropped, as a young bull drops in the circus with the steel sheathed in its brain. There she had remained insensible, the blood flowing a little from her mouth.

It was quite lonely by the waterside. A crane among the sedges, an owl on the wind, a water-lizard under the stones, such were the only moving things. It was in a solitary bend of the stream; its banks were green and quiet; there were no dwellings near; and there was no light anywhere, except the dull glow of the lamp above the Calvary.

No one found her. A young fox came and smelt at her, and stole frightened away. That was all. A sharp wind rising with the reddening of the east blew on her, and recalled her to consciousness after many hours. When her eyes at length opened, with a blank stare upon the grayness of the shadows, she lifted herself a little and sat still, and wondered what had chanced to her.

The first rays of the sun rose over the dim blue haze of the horizon.

She looked at it and tried to remember, but failed. Her brain was sick and dull.

A little beetle, green and bronze, climbed in and out among the sand of the river-sh.o.r.e; her eyes vacantly followed the insect's aimless circles. She tried to think, and could not; her thoughts went feebly and madly round and round, round and round, as the beetle went in his maze of sand. It was all so gray, so still, so chill, she was afraid of it. Her limbs were stiffened by the exposure and dews of the night. She shivered and was cold.

The sun rose--a globe of flame above the edge of the world.

Memory flashed on her with its light.

She rose a little, staggering and blind, and weakened by the loss of blood; she crept feebly to the edge of the stream, and washed the stains from her lips, and let her face rest a little in the sweet, silent, flowing water.

Then she sat still amidst the long rushlike gra.s.s, and thought, and thought, and wondered why life was so tough and merciless a thing, that it would ache on, and burn on, and keep misery awake to know itself even when its death-blow had been dealt, and the steel was in its side.

She was still only half sensible of her wretchedness. She was numbed by weakness, and her brain seemed deadened by a hot pain, that shot through it as with tongues of flame.

The little beetle at her feet was busied in a yellower soil than sand.

He moved round and round in a little dazzling heap of coins and trembling paper thin as gauze. She saw it without seeing for awhile; then, all at once, a horror flashed on her. She saw that the money had fallen from her tunic. She guessed the truth--that in his last embrace he had slid into her bosom, in notes and in coin, half that sum whereof he had spoken as the ransom which had set him free.

Her bloodless face grew scarlet with an immeasurable shame. She would have suffered far less if he had killed her.

He who denied her love to give her gold! Better that, when he had kissed her, he had covered her eyes softly with one hand, and with the other driven his knife straight through the white warmth of her breast.

The sight of the gold stung her like a snake.

Gold!--such wage as men flung to the painted harlots gibing at the corners of the streets!

The horror of the humiliation filled her with loathing of herself.

Unless she had become shameful in his sight, she thought, he could not have cast this shame upon her.

She gathered herself slowly up, and stood and looked with blind, aching eyes at the splendor of the sunrise.

Her heart was breaking.

Her one brief dream of gladness was severed sharply, as with a sword, and killed forever.