Folle-Farine. Ouida

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ purple; around her stretched the solitary level of the fields burnt yellow as gold by the long months of heat. There were stripes on her shoulders, blue and black from the marks of a thong.

      He looked at her, and stopped her, why he hardly knew, except that a look about her, beaten but yet unsubdued, attracted him. He had seen the same look in the years of his youth, on the faces of the nobles he hated.

      "Have you been hurt?" he asked her in his harsh strong voice. She put her heavy load of fagots down and stared at him.

      "Hurt?" She echoed the word stupidly. No one ever thought she could be hurt; what was done to her was punishment and justice.

      "Yes. Those stripes—they must be painful?"

      She gave a gesture of assent with her head, but she did not answer.

      "Who beat you?" he pursued.

      A cloud of passion swept over her bent face.

      "Flamma."

      "You were wicked?"

      "They said so."

      "And what do you do when you are beaten?"

      "I shut my mouth."

      "For what?"

      "For fear they should know it hurt me—and be glad."

      Marcellin leaned on his elm stick, and fastened on her his keen, passionless eyes with a look that, for him who was shamed and was shunned by all his kind, was almost sympathy.

      "Come to my hut," he said to her. "I know a herb that will take the fret and the ache out of your bruises."

      The child followed him passively, half stupidly; he was the first creature that had ever bidden her go with him, and this rough pity of his was sweet to her, with an amazing incredible balm in it that only those can know who see raised against them every man's hand, and hear on their ears the mockery of all the voices of their world. Under reviling and contempt and constant rejection, she had become savage as a trapped hawk, wild as an escaped panther; but to him she was obedient and passive, because he had spoken to her without a taunt and without a curse, which until now had been the sole two forms of human speech she had heard. His little hut was in the midst of those spreading cornfields, set where two pathways crossed each other, and stretched down the gentle slope of the cultured lands to join the great highway—a hut of stones and plaited rushes, with a roof of thatch, where the old republican, hardy of frame and born of a toiling race, dwelt in solitude, and broke his scanty bitter bread without lament, if without content.

      He took some leaves of a simple herb that he knew, soaked them with water, and bound them on her shoulders, not ungainly, though his hand was so rough with labor, and, as men said, had been so often red with carnage. Then he gave her a draught of goat's milk, sweet and fresh, from a wooden bowl; shared with her the dry black crusts that formed his only evening meal; bestowed on her a gift of a rare old scarlet scarf of woven wools and Eastern broideries, one of the few relics of his buried life; lifted the fagots on her back, so that she could carry them with greater ease; and set her on her homeward way.

      "Come to me again," he said, briefly, as she went across the threshold. The child bent her head in silence, and kissed his hand quickly and timidly, like a grateful dog that is amazed to have a caress, and not a blow.

      "After a forty years' vow I have broken it; I have pitied a human thing," the old man muttered as he stood in his doorway looking after her shadow as it passed small and dark across the scarlet light of the poppies.

      "They call him vile, and they say that he slew men," thought the child, who had long known his face, though he never had noted hers; and it seemed to her that all mercy lay in her father's kingdom—which they called the kingdom of evil. The cool moist herbs soaked on her bruises; and the draught of milk had slaked the thirst of her throat.

      "Is evil good?" she asked in her heart as she went through the tall red poppies.

      And from that evening thenceforward Folle-Farine and Marcellin cleaved to one another, being outcasts from all others.

      CHAPTER III

      As the religious gathering broke up and split in divers streams to wander divers ways, the little town returned to its accustomed stillness—a stillness that seemed to have in it the calm of a thousand sleeping years, and the legends and the dreams of half a score of old dead centuries.

      On market-days and saint-days, days of high feast or of perpetual chaffering, the town was full of color, movement, noise, and population. The country people crowded in, filling it with the jingling of mule-bells; the fisher people came, bringing in with them the crisp salt smell of the sea and the blue of the sea on their garments; its own tanners and ivory carvers, and fruiterers, and lacemakers turned out by the hundred in all the quaint variety of costumes that their forefathers had bequeathed to them, and to which they were still wise enough to adhere.

      But at other times, when the fishers were in their hamlets, and the peasantry on their lands and in their orchards, and the townsfolk at their labors in the old rich renaissance mansions which they had turned into tanneries, and granaries, and wool-sheds, and workshops, the place was profoundly still; scarcely a child at play in the streets, scarcely a dog asleep in the sun.

      When the crowds had gone, the priests laid aside their vestments, and donned the black serge of their daily habit, and went to their daily avocations in their humble dwellings. The crosses and the censers were put back upon their altars, and hung up upon their pillars. The boy choristers and the little children put their white linen and their scarlet robes back in cupboards and presses, with heads of lavender and sprigs of rosemary to keep the moth and the devil away, and went to their fields, to their homes, to their herds, to their paper kites, to their daisy chains, to the poor rabbits they pent in a hutch, to the poor flies they killed in the sun.

      The streets became quite still, the market-place quite empty; the drowsy silence of a burning, cloudless afternoon was over all the quiet places about the cathedral walls, where of old the bishops and the canons dwelt; gray shady courts; dim open cloisters; houses covered with oaken carvings, and shadowed with the spreading branches of chestnuts and of lime-trees that were as aged as themselves.

      Under the shelter of one of the lindens, after the populace had gone, there was seated on a broad stone bench the girl who had stood by the wayside erect and unbending as the procession had moved before her.

      She had flung herself down in dreamy restfulness. She had delivered her burden of vegetables and fruit at a shop near by, whose awning stretched out into the street like a toadstool yellow with the sun.

      The heat was intense; she had been on foot all day; she sat to rest a moment, and put her burning hands under a little rill of water that spouted into a basin in a niche in the wall—an ancient well, with a stone image sculptured above, and a wreath of vine-leaves in stone running around, in the lavish ornamentation of an age when men loved loveliness for its own sake, and begrudged neither time nor labor in its service.

      She leaned over the fountain, kept cool by the roofing of the thick green leaves; there was a metal cup attached to the basin by a chain, she filled it at the running thread of water, and stooped her lips to it again and again thirstily.

      The day was sultry; the ways were long and white with powdered limestone; her throat was still parched with the dust raised by the many feet of the multitude; and although she had borne in the great basket which now stood empty at her side, cherries, peaches, mulberries, melons, full of juice and lusciousness, this daughter of the devil had not taken even one to freshen СКАЧАТЬ