In these secluded cloisters, and in the high noontide, when all were sleeping or eating in the cool shelter of their darkened houses, the old woman's voice remained unheard.
The saints heard, no doubt, but they were too lazy to stir from their niches in that sultry noontide, and, except the baying of a chained dog aroused, there was no answer to the outcry: and Folle-Farine passed out into the market-place unarrested, and not meeting another living creature. As she turned into one of the squares leading to the open country, she saw in the distance one of the guardians of the peace of the town, moving quickly towards the cloisters, with his glittering lace shining in the sun and his long scabbard clattering upon the stones.
She laughed a little as she saw.
"They will not come after me," she said to herself. "They are too afraid of the devil."
She judged rightly; they did not come.
She crossed all the wide scorching square, whose white stones blazed in the glare of the sun. There was nothing in sight except a stray cat prowling in a corner, and three sparrows quarreling over a foul-smelling heap of refuse.
The quaint old houses round seemed all asleep, with the shutters closed like eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of windows.
The gilded vanes on their twisted chimneys and carved parapets pointed motionless to the warm south. There was not a sound, except the cawing of some rooks that built their nests high aloft in the fretted pinnacles of the cathedral.
Undisturbed she crossed the square and took her way down the crooked streets that led her homeward to the outlying country. It was an old, twisted, dusky place, with the water flowing through its center as its only roadway; and in it there were the oldest houses of the town, all of timber, black with age, and carved with the wonderful florid fancies and grotesque conceits of the years when a house was to its master a thing beloved and beautiful, a bulwark, an altar, a heritage, an heirloom, to be dwelt in all the days of a long life, and bequeathed in all honor and honesty to a noble offspring.
The street was very silent, the ripple of the water was the chief sound that filled it. Its tenants were very poor, and in many of its antique mansions the beggars shared shelter with the rats and the owls.
In one of these dwellings, however, there were still some warmth and color.
The orange and scarlet flowers of a nasturtium curled up its twisted pilasters; the big, fair clusters of hydrangea filled up its narrow casements; a breadth of many-colored saxafrage, with leaves of green and rose, and blossoms of purple and white, hung over the balcony rail, which five centuries earlier had been draped with cloth of gold; and a little yellow song-bird made music in the empty niche from which the sculptured flower-de-luce had been so long torn down.
From that window a woman looked down, leaning with folded arms above the rose-tipped saxafrage, and beneath the green-leaved vine.
She was a fair woman, white as the lilies, she had silver pins in her amber hair, and a mouth that laughed sweetly. She called to Folle-Farine,—
"You brown thing; why do you stare at me?"
Folle-Farine started and withdrew the fixed gaze of her lustrous eyes.
"Because you are beautiful," she answered curtly. All beautiful things had a fascination for her.
This woman above was very fair to see, and the girl looked at her as she looked at the purple butterflies in the sun; at the stars shining down through the leaves; at the vast, dim, gorgeous figures in the cathedral windows; at the happy children running to their mothers with their hands full of primroses, as she saw them in the woods at springtime; at the laughing groups round the wood-fires in the new year time when she passed a lattice pane that the snowdrift had not blocked; at all the things that were so often in her sight, and yet with which her life had no part or likeness.
She stood there on the rough flints, in the darkness cast from the jutting beams of the house; and the other happier creature leaned above in the light, white and rose-hued, and with the silver bells of the pins shaking in her yellow tresses.
"You are old Flamma's granddaughter," cried the other, from her leafy nest above. "You work for him all day long at the mill?"
"Yes."
"And your feet are bare, and your clothes are rags, and you go to and fro like a packhorse, and the people hate you? You must be a fool. Your father was the devil, they say: why do you not make him give you good things?"
"He will not hear," the child muttered wearily. Had she not besought him endlessly with breathless prayer?
"Will he not? Wait a year—wait a year."
"What then?" asked Folle-Farine, with a quick startled breath.
"In a year you will be a woman, and he always hears women, they say."
"He hears you."
The fair woman above laughed:
"Perhaps; in his fashion. But he pays me ill as yet."
And she plucked one of the silver pins from her hair, and stabbed the rosy foam of the saxafrage through and through with it; for she was but a gardener's wife, and was restless and full of discontent.
"Get you gone," she added quickly, "or I will throw a stone at you, you witch; you have the evil eye, they say, and you may strike me blind if you stare so."
Folle-Farine went on her way over the sharp stones with a heavy heart. That picture in the casement had made that passage bright to her many a time; and when at last the picture had moved and spoken, it had only mocked her and reviled her as the rest did.
The street was dark for her like all the others now.
The gardener's wife, leaning there, with the green and gold of the vineleaves brushing her hair, looked after her down the crooked way.
"That young wretch will be more beautiful than I," she thought; and the thought was bitter to her, as such a one is to a fair woman.
Folle-Farine went slowly and sadly through the street, with her head dropped, and the large osier basket trailing behind her over the stones.
She was well used to be pelted with words hard as hailstones, and usually heeded them little, or gave them back with sullen defiance. But from this woman they had wounded her; from that bright bower of golden leaves and scarlet flowers she had faintly fancied some stray beam of light might wander even to her.
She was soon outside the gates of the town, and beyond the old walls, where the bramble and the lichen grew over the huge stones of ramparts and fortifications, useless and decayed from age.
The country roads and lanes, the silver streams and the wooden bridges, the lanes through which the market mules picked their careful way, the fields in which the white-capped peasant women, and the brindled oxen were at work, stretched all before her in a radiant air, sweet with the scent of ripening fruits from many orchards.
Here and there a wayside Calvary rose dark against the sun; here and there a chapel bell sounded from under some little peaked red roof. The cattle dozed beside meadow ditches that were choked with wild flowers; the dogs lay down beside their sheep and slept.
At the first cottage which she passed, the housewife sat out under a spreading chestnut-tree, weaving lace upon her knee.
Folle-Farine looked wistfully at the woman, who was young and pretty, and who darted her swift skilled hand in and out and around the bobbins, keeping time meanwhile with a mirthful burden that she sang.
The woman looked up and frowned as the girl passed by her.
A little way farther on there was a winehouse by the roadside, built of wood, vine-wreathed, and half hidden in the tall flowering briers of its garden.
Out of the lattice there was leaning a maiden with the silver cross on her bosom shining in the sun, and her meek blue eyes smiling down from under the tower of her high