They had their own people in plenty, they had their sturdy, tough, weather-beaten women, who labored all day in rain, or snow, or storm, for a pittance, and they had these in larger numbers than their field-work needed. They looked at him askance; this man with the eyes of arctic blue and the grave gestures of a king, who only asked to labor as the lowest among them. He was a stranger to them; he did not speak their tongue with their accent; he looked, with that white beauty and that lofty stature, as though he could crush them in the hollow of his hand.
They would have none of him.
"He brings misfortune!" they said among themselves; and they would have none of him.
He had an evil name with them.
They said at eventide by their wood-fires that strange things had been seen since he had come to the granary by the river.
Once he had painted a study of the wondrous child Zagreus gazing in the fatal mirror, from the pretty face of a stonecutter's little fair son; the child was laughing, happy, healthful at noon, crowned with carnations and river-lilies, and by sunset he was dead—dead like the flowers that were still among his curls.
Once a girl had hired herself as model to him for an Egyptian wanton, half a singer and half a gypsy—handsome, lithe, fantastic, voluptuous: the very night she left the granary she was drowned in crossing a wooden bridge of the river, which gave way under the heavy tramp of a fantoccini player who accompanied her.
Once he had sketched, for the corner of an Oriental study, a rare-plumaged bird of the south, which was the idol of a water-carrier of the district, and the wonder of all the children round: and from that date the bird had sickened, and drooped, and lost its colors, and pined until it died.
The boy's death had been from a sudden seizure of one of the many ills of infancy; the dancing-girl's had come from a common accident due to the rottenness of old worn water-soaked timber; the mocking-bird's had arisen from the cruelty of captivity and the chills of northern winds; all had been the result of simple accident and of natural circumstance. But they had sufficed to fill with horror the minds of a peasantry always bigoted and strongly prejudiced against every stranger; and it became to them a matter of implicit credence that whatsoever living thing should be painted by the artist Arslàn would assuredly never survive to see the rising of the morrow's sun.
In consequence, for leagues around they shunned him; not man, nor woman, nor child would sit to him as models; and now, when he sought the wage of a daily labor among them, he was everywhere repulsed. He had long repulsed human sympathy, and in its turn it repulsed him.