Part 92 (1/2)

She laughed where she was stretched upon the ground, a laugh that stayed the smile upon his mouth.

He stooped, and the sweetness of his voice was low and soft as the south wind.

”I will save him, if you say that you are tired, Folle-Farine.”

Where she was stretched face downward at his feet she shuddered, as though the folds of a snake curled round her, and stifled, and slew her with a touch.

”I cannot!” she muttered faintly in her throat.

”Then let him die!” he said; and turned away.

Once again he smiled.

The hours pa.s.sed; she did not move; stretched there, she wrestled with her agony as the fate-pursued wrestled with their doom on the steps of the temple, while the dread Eumenides drew round them and waited--waiting in cold patience for the slow sure end.

She arose and went to his side as a dying beast in the public roadway under a blow staggers to its feet to breathe its last.

”Let him die!” she muttered, with lips dry as the lips of the dead. ”Let him die!”

Once more the choice was left to her. So men said: and the G.o.ds were dead.

An old man, with a vulture's eyes and bony fingers, and rags that were plague-stricken with the poisons of filth and of disease, had followed and looked at her in the doorway, and kicked her where she lay.

”He owes me twenty days for the room,” he muttered, while his breath scorched her throat with the fumes of drink. ”A debt is a debt.

To-morrow I will take the canvas; it will do to burn. You s.h.i.+ver?--fool!

If you chose, you could fill this garret with gold this very night. But you love this man, and so you let him perish while you prate of 'shame.'

Oh-ho! that is a woman!”

He went away through the blackness and the stench, muttering, as he struck his staff upon each stair,--

”The picture will feed the stove; the law will give me that.”

She heard and s.h.i.+vered, and looked at the bed of straw, and on the great canvas of the Barabbas.

Before another day had come and gone, he would lie in the common ditch of the poor, and the work of his hand would be withered, as a scroll withers in a flame.

If she tried once more? If she sought human pity, human aid? Some deliverance, some mercy--who could say?--might yet be found, she thought. The G.o.ds were dead; but men,--were they all more wanton than the snake, more cruel than the scorpion?

For the first time in seven days she left his side.

She rose and staggered from the garret, down the stairway, into the lower stories of the wilderness of wood and stone.

She traced her way blindly to the places she had known. They closed their doors in haste, and fled from her in terror.

They had heard that she had gone to tend some madman, plague-stricken with some nameless fever; and those wretched lives to life clung closely, with a frantic lore.

One woman she stayed, and held with timid, eager bands. Of this woman she had taken nothing all the summer long in wage for waking her tired eyes at daybreak.

”Have pity!” she muttered. ”You are poor, indeed, I know; but help me.