That night, when the night without was quite dark, she knelt down before the study of the poppies, and kissed it softly, and prayed to the unknown G.o.d, of whom none had taught her in anywise, yet whose light she still had found, and followed in a dim, wondering, imperfect fashion, as a little child lost in the twilight of some pathless wood, pursues in trembling the gleam of some great, still planet looming far above her through the leaves.

When she arose from her supplication, her choice was already made.

And the Red Mouse had no power on her, because of her great love.

CHAPTER X.

AT sunrise a great peac.o.c.k trailing his imperial purple on the edge of a smooth lawn, pecked angrily at a torn fragment of a scarlet scarf; a scarf that had been woven in his own Eastern lands, but which incensed his sight, fluttering there so idly, as it seemed, on the feathery sprays of a little low almond-tree that grew by the water's edge.

The water was broad, and full of lily-leaves and of rare reeds and rushes; it had been so stemmed and turned by art that it washed the bas.e.m.e.nt walls and mirrored the graceful galleries and arches of the garden palace, where the bird of Here dwelt.

Twenty feet above the level of the gardens, where the peac.o.c.k swept in the light, there was an open cas.e.m.e.nt, a narrow balcony of stone; a group of pale human faces looking out awe-stricken. A leap in the night--the night wet and moonless,--waters a fathom deep,--a bed of sand treacherous and shifting as the ways of love. What could all these be save certain death? Of death they were afraid; but they were more afraid yet of the vengeance of their flute-voiced lord.

On the wall the Red Mouse sat among the flowers of sleep; he could have told; he who for once had heard another prayer than the blasphemies of the Brocken.

But the Red Mouse never tells any secret to men; he has lived too long in the breast of the women whom men love.

The Sun came from the east, and pa.s.sed through the pale stricken faces that watched from the cas.e.m.e.nt, and came straight to where the Red Mouse sat amidst the poppies.

"Have you let a female soul escape you?" said the Sun.

The Red Mouse answered:

"Love is stronger than I. When he keeps his hands pure, where he guards the door of the soul, I enter not. I sit outside and watch, and watch, and watch. But it is time lost. Love is strong; the door is barred to me."

Said the Sun:

"That is strange to hear. My sister, the Moon, has told me oftentimes that Eros is your pander--always."

"Anteros only," said the Red Mouse.

The Sun, wondering, said again:

"And yet I have heard that it is your boast that into every female soul you enter at birth, and dwell there unto death. Is it, then, not so?"

The Red Mouse answered:

"The boast is not mine; it is man's."

CHAPTER XI.

In the dark of the night she had leapt to what, as she thought, would prove her grave; but the waters, with human-like caprice, had cast her back upon the land with scarce an effort of her own. Given back thus to life, whether she would or no, she by sheer instinct stumbled to her feet and fled as fast as she could in the wet, gloomy night through the gra.s.sy stretches of the unknown gardens and lands in which she found herself.

She was weighted with her soaked clothes as with lead, but she was made swift by terror and hatred, as though Hermes for once had had pity for anything human, and had fastened to her feet his own winged sandals.

She ran on and on, not knowing whither; only knowing that she ran from the man who had tempted her by the strength of the rod of wealth.

The rains were ceaseless, the skies had no stars, in the dense mist no lights far or near, of the city or planets, of palace or house were seen. She did not know where she went; she only ran on away and away, anywhere, from the Red Mouse and its master.

When the daybreak grew gray in the heavens, she paused, and trembling crept into a cattle-shed to rest and take breath a little. She shrank from every habitation, she quivered at every human voice; she was afraid--horribly afraid--in those clinging vapors, those damp deathly smells, those ghostly shadows of the dawn, those indistinct and unfamiliar creatures of a country strange to her.

That old man with the elf's eyes, who had tempted her, was he a G.o.d too, she wondered, since he had the rod that metes power and wealth? He might stretch his hand anywhere, she supposed, and take her.

The gentle cattle in their wooden home made way for her, and humbly welcomed her. She hid herself among their beds of hay, and in the warmth of their breath and their bodies. She was wet and wretched, like any half-drowned dog; but the habits of her hardy life made cold, and hunger, and exposure almost powerless to harm her. She slept from sheer exhaustion of mind and body. The cattle could have trodden her to death, or tossed her through the open s.p.a.ces of their byres, but they seemed to know, they seemed to pity; and they stirred so that they did not brush a limb of her, nor shorten a moment of her slumbers.

When she awoke the sun was high.

A herdswoman, entering with the loud, harsh clash of brazen pails, kicked her in the loins, and rated her furiously for daring to rest there. She arose at the kick, and went out from the place pa.s.sively, not well knowing what she did.

The morning was warm and radiant; the earth and the trees were dripping with the rains of the night; the air was full of sweet odors, and of a delicious coldness. As far as she saw there was no token far or near of the gleaming cloud of the city of her dreams. She ventured to ask at a wayside cabin if she were near to or far from Paris.

The woman of the cottage looked up searchingly from the seat before the porch, and for answer cried to her: "Paris! pouf--f--f! get out, you drowned rat."

She had lost for the time the mental force, and even the physical force to resent or to persevere; she was weak with hunger and bewildered with her misery. She had only sense enough left to remember--and be thankful--that in the night that was past she had been strong.

The sun beat on her head, the road was hard, and sharp-set with flint; she was full of pain, her brain throbbed with fever and reeled with weakness; a sudden horror seized her lest she might die before she had looked again on the face of Arslan.

She saw the dusky shade of a green wood; by sheer instinct she crept into it as a stricken deer into its sanctuary.

She sat in the darkness of the trees in the coolness of the wood, and rested her head on her hands, and let the big salt tears drop one by one, as the death tears of the llama fall.

This was the young year round her; that she knew.

The winter had gone by; its many months had pa.s.sed over her head whilst she was senseless to any flight of night or day; death might have taken the prey which it had once been robbed of by her; in all this weary season, which to her was as a blank, his old foes of failure and famine might have struggled for and vanquished him, she not being by; his body might lie in any plague-ditch of the nameless poor, his hand might rot fleshless and nerveless in any pit where the world cast its useless and dishonored dead; the mould of his brain might make a feast for eyeless worms, not more stone blind than was the human race he had essayed to serve; the beauty of his face might be a thing of loathsomeness from which a toad would turn. Oh, G.o.d! would death never take her likewise?

Was she an outcast even from that one tribeless and uncounted nation of the dead?

That G.o.d whom she had loved, whom she had chosen, whose eyes had been so full of pity, whose voice had murmured: "Nay, the wise know me as man's only friend":--even he, Thanatos, had turned against her and abandoned her.

Vague memories of things which she had heard in fable and tradition, of bodies accursed and condemned to wander forever unresting and wailing; of spirits, which for their curse were imprisoned in a living flesh that they could neither lose nor cast away so long as the world itself endured; creatures that the very elements had denied, and that were too vile for fire to burn, or water to drown, or steel to slay, or old age to whither, or death to touch and take in any wise. All these memories returned to her, and in her loneliness she wondered if she were such a one as these.

She did not know, indeed, that she had done any great sin; she had done none willingly, and yet all people called her vile, and they must know.

Even the old man, mocking her, had said:

"Never wrestle with Fate. He throws the strongest, soon or late. And your fate is shame; it was your birth-gift, it will be your burial-cloth. Can you cast it off? No. But you can make it potent as gold, and sweet as honey if you choose, Folle-Farine."

And she had not chosen; yet of any n.o.bility in the resistance she did not dream. She had shut her heart to it by the unconscious instinct of strength, as she had shut her lips under torture, and shut her hands against life.

She sat there in the wood, roofless, penniless, friendless, and every human creature was against her. Her tempter had spoken only the bare and bleak truth. A dog stoned and chased and mad could be the only living thing on the face of the earth more wretched and more desolate than herself.

The sun of noon was bright above-head in a cloudless sky, but in the little wood it was cool and shady, and had the moisture of a heavy morning dew. Millions of young leaves had uncurled themselves in the warmth. Little b.u.t.terflies, some azure, some yellow, some white, danced in the light. Brown rills of water murmured under the gra.s.ses, the thrushes sang to one another through the boughs, and the lizard darted hither and thither, green as the arrowy leaves that made its shelter.