Part 59 (1/2)

”I would never part with them for myself,” she thought; ”I would die of hunger first--were it only myself.”

And still she was resolved to part with them; to sell her single little treasure--the sole gift of the only creature who had ever loved her, even in the very first hour that she had recovered it.

The sequins were worth no more than any baby's woven crown of faded daisies; but to her, as to the old peasant, they seemed, by their golden glitter, a source of wealth incalculable.

At twilight that day, as she stood by Arslan, she spoke to him, timidly,--

”I go to Rioz with the two mules, at daybreak to-morrow, with flour for Flamma. It is a town larger than the one yonder. Is there anything I might do there--for you?”

”Do? What should you do?” he answered her, with inattention and almost impatience; for his heart was sore with the terrible weariness of inaction.

She looked at him very wistfully, and her mouth parted a little as though to speak; but his repulse chilled the words that rose to her lips.

She dared not say her thoughts to him, lest she should displease him.

”If it come to naught he had best not know, perhaps,” she said to herself.

So she kept silence.

On the morrow, before the sun was up, she set out on her way, with the two mules, to Rioz.

It was a town distant some five leagues, lying to the southward. Both the mules were heavily laden with as many sacks as they could carry: she could ride on neither; she walked between them with a bridle held in either hand.

The road was not a familiar one to her; she had only gone thither some twice or thrice, and she did not find the way long, being full of her own meditations and hopes, and taking pleasure in the gleam of new waters and the sight of fresh fields, and the green simple loveliness of a pastoral country in late summer.

She met few people; a market-woman or two on their a.s.ses, a walking peddler, a shepherd, or a swineherd--these were all.

The day was young, and none but the country people were astir. The quiet roads were dim with mists; and the tinkle of a sheep's bell was the only sound in the silence.

It was mid-day when she entered Rioz; a town standing in a dell, surrounded with apple-orchards and fields of corn and colza, with a quaint old square tower of the thirteenth century arising among its roofs, and round about it old moss-green ramparts whereon the bramble and the gorse grew wild.

But as the morning advanced the mists lifted, the sun grew powerful; the roads were straight and without shadow; the mules stumbled, footsore; she herself grew tired and fevered.

She led her fatigued and thirsty beasts through the nearest gateway, where a soldier sat smoking, and a girl in a blue petticoat and a scarlet bodice talked to him, resting her hands on her hips, and her bra.s.s pails on the ground.

She left the sacks of flour at their destination, which was a great bake-house in the center of the town; stalled the mules herself in a shed adjoining the little crazy wineshop where Flamma had bidden her bait them, and with her own hands unharnessed, watered, and foddered them.

The wineshop had for sign a white pigeon; it was tumble-down, dusky, half covered with vines that grew loose and entwined over each other at their own fancy; it had a little court in which grew a great walnut-tree; there was a bench under the tree; the shelter of its boughs was cool and very welcome in the full noon heat. The old woman who kept the place, wrinkled, shriveled, and cheery, bade her rest there, and she would bring her food and drink.

But Folle-Farine, with one wistful glance at the shadowing branches, refused, and asked only the way to the house of the Prince Sartorian.

The woman of the cabaret looked at her sharply, and said, as the market-women had said, ”What does the like of you want with the Prince?”

”I want to know the way to it. If you do not tell it, another will,” she answered, as she moved out of the little courtyard.

The old woman called after her that it was out by the west gate, over the hill through the fields for more than two leagues: if she followed the wind of the water westward, she could not go amiss.

”What is that baggage wanting to do with Sartorian?” she muttered, watching the form of the girl as it pa.s.sed up the steep suns.h.i.+ny street.

”Some evil, no doubt,” answered her a.s.sistant, a stalwart wench, who was skinning a rabbit in the yard. ”You know, she sells bags of wind to founder the s.h.i.+ps, they say, and the wicked herb, _bon plaisir_, and the philters that drive men mad. She is as bad as a _cajote_.”