Folle-Farine. Ouida

depth that severed them, and met and blended in the twilight. The close of this day was stormy; the wind blew the river swiftly, and the heavy raw mists were setting in from the sea as the night descended.

      She did not heed these; she liked the wild weather best; she loved the rush of a chill wind among her hair, and the moisture of blown spray upon her face; she loved the manifold fantasies of the clouds, and the melodies of the blast coming over the sands and the rushes. She loved the swirl and rage of the angry water, and the solitude that closed in round her with the darkness.

      The boat passed onward through the now silent town; only in one other place a light glowed through the unshuttered lattices that were ruddy with light and emblematic with the paintings of the Renaissance. It was the window of the gardener's wife.

      At that season there could bloom neither saxifrage nor nasturtium; but some green-leaved winter shrub with rosy-laden berries had replaced them, and made a shining frame all round the painted panes.

      The fair woman was within; her delicate head rose out of the brown shadows round, with a lamp burning above it and a little oval mirror before. Into the mirror she was gazing with a smile, whilst with both hands about her throat she clasped some strings of polished shells brought to her from the sea.

      "How white and how warm and how glad she is!" thought Folle-Farine, looking upward; and she rowed in the gloom through the sluggish water with envy at her heart.

      She was growing harder, wilder, worse, with every day; more and more like some dumb, fierce forest beast, that flees from every step and hates the sound of every voice. Since the night that they had pricked her for a witch, the people had been more cruel to her than ever. They cast bitter names at her as she went by; they hissed and hooted her as she took her mule through their villages, or passed them on the road with her back bent under some load of fagots or of winter wood. Once or twice they stoned her, and chance alone had saved her from injury.

      For it was an article of faith in all the hamlets round that she had killed old Manon Dax. The Flandrins said so, and they were good pious people who would not lie. Every dusky evening when the peasantry, through the doors of their cabins, saw the gleam of her red girdle and the flash of her hawk's eyes, where she plodded on through the mist on her tyrant's errands, they crossed themselves, and told each other for the hundredth time the tale of her iniquities over their pan of smoking chestnuts.

      It had hardened her tenfold; it had made her brood on sullen dreams of a desperate vengeance. Marcellin, too, was gone; his body had been eaten by the quicklime in the common ditch, and there was not even a voice so stern as his to bid her a good-morrow. He had been a harsh man, of dark repute and bitter tongue; but in his way he had loved her; in his way, with the eloquence that had remained to him, and by the strange stories that he had told her of that wondrous time wherein his youth had passed, when men had been as gods and giants, and women horrible as Medea, or sublime as Iphigenia, he had done something to awaken her mind, to arouse her hopes, to lift her up from the torpor of toil, the lusts of hatred, the ruinous apathy of despair. But he was dead, and she was alone, and abandoned utterly to herself.

      She mourned for him with a passionate pain that was all the more despairing, because no sound of it could ever pass her lips to any creature.

      To and fro continually she went by the road on which he had died alone; by the heap of broken stones, by the wooden crucifix, by the high hedge and the cornlands beyond. Every time she went the blood beat in her brain, the tears swelled in her throat. She hated with a hatred that consumed her, and was ready to ripen into any deadly deed, the people who had shunned him in his life, and in his death derided and insulted him, and given him such burial as they gave the rotten carcass of some noxious beast.

      Her heart was ripe for any evil that should have promised her vengeance; a dull, cold sense of utter desolation and isolation was always on her. The injustice of the people began to turn her blood to gall, her courage into cruelty; there began to come upon her the look of those who brood upon a crime.

      It was, in truth, but the despairing desire to live that stirred within her; to know, to feel, to roam, to enjoy, to suffer still, if need be; but to suffer something else than the endless toil of the field-ox and tow-horse—something else than the unavenged blow that pays the ass and the dog for their services.

      The desire to be free grew upon her with all the force and fury inherited from her father's tameless and ever-wandering race; if a crime could have made her free she would have seized it.

      She was in the prison of a narrow and hated fate; and from it she looked out on the desert of an endless hate, which stretched around her without one blossom of love, one well spring of charity, rising in its deathlike waste.

      The dreamy imaginations, the fantastic pictures, that had been so strong in her in her early years, were still there, though distorted by ignorance and inflamed by despair. Though, in her first poignant grief for him, she had envied Marcellin his hard-won rest, his grave in the public ditch of the town, it was not in her to desire to die. She was too young, too strong, too restless, too impatient, and her blood of the desert and the forest was too hot.