"They have left it all to me!" she thought, with a strange sweet yearning in her heart over this life that she had bought with her own.
She first flung the fagots and brushwood on the hearth, and set them on fire to burn, fanned by the breath of the wind. Then she poured out a little of the wine, and kneeled down by him, and forced it drop by drop through his colorless lips, raising his head upon her as she kneeled.
The wine was pure and old; it suffused his attenuated frame as with a rush of new blood; under her hand his heart beat with firmer and quicker movement. She broke bread in the wine, and put the soaked morsels to his mouth, as softly as she would have fed some little shivering bird made nestless by the hurricane.
He was not conscious yet, but he swallowed what she held to him, without knowing what he did; a slight warmth gradually spread over his limbs; a strong shudder shook him.
His eyes looked dully at her through a film of exhaustion and of sleep.
"J'avais quelque chose là!" he muttered, incoherently, his voice rattling in his hollow chest, as he raised himself a little on one arm.
"J'avais quelque chose là!" and with a sigh he fell back once more—his head tossing in uneasiness from side to side.
Amidst the heat and mists of his aching brain, one thought remained with him—that he had created things greater than himself, and that he died like a dog, powerless to save them.
The saddest dying words that the air ever bare on its breath—the one bitter vain regret of every genius that the common herds of men stamp out as they slay their mad cattle or their drunken mobs—stayed on the blurred remembrance of his brain, which, in its stupor and its helplessness, still knew that once it had been strong to create—that once it had been clear to record—that once it had dreamed the dreams which save men from the life of the swine—that once it had told to the world the truth divested of lies,—and that none had seen, none had listened, none had believed.
There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that all these have passed away like a tale that is told; like a year that is spent; like an arrow that is shot to the stars, and flies aloft, and falls in a swamp; like a fruit that is too well loved of the sun, and so, oversoon ripe, is dropped from the tree and forgot on the grasses, dead to all joys of the dawn and the noon and the summer, but alive to the sting of the wasp, to the fret of the aphis, to the burn of the drought, to the theft of the parasite.