At last he turned and retraced his steps, baffled and wearied; his early habits had made him familiar with all manner of agricultural toil; he would have done the task of the sower, the herdsman, the hewer of wood, or the charcoal-burner; but they would none of them believe this of one with his glance and his aspect; and solicitation was new to his lips and bitter there as gall.
He took his way back along the line of the river; the beauty of the dawn had gone, the day was only now chilly, heavy with a rank moisture from the steaming soil. Broken boughs and uprooted bushes were floating on the turgid water, and over all the land there hung a sullen fog.
The pressure of the air, the humidity, the colorless stillness that reigned throughout, weighed on lungs which for a score of years had only breathed the pure, strong, rarefied air of the north; he longed with a sudden passion to be once more amidst his native mountains under the clear steel-like skies, and beside the rush of the vast wild seas. Were it only to die as he looked on them, it were better to die there than here.
He longed, as men in deserts thirst for drink, for one breath of the strong salt air of the north, one sight of the bright keen sea-born sun as it leapt at dawn from the waters.
The crisp cold nights, the heavens which shone as steel, the forests filled with the cry of the wolves, the mountains which the ocean ceaselessly assailed, the mighty waves which marched erect like armies, the bitter arctic wind which like a saber cleft the darkness; all these came back to him beloved and beautiful in all their cruelty; desired by him, with a sick longing for their freshness, for their fierceness, for their freedom.
As he dragged his tired limbs through the grasses and looked out upon the sullen stream that flowed beside him, an oar struck the water, a flat black boat drifted beneath the bank, a wild swan disturbed rose with a hiss from the sedges.
The boat was laden with grain; there was only one rower in it, who steered by a string wound round her foot.
She did not lift her face as she went by him; but her bent brow and her bosom grew red, and she cut the water with a swifter, sharper stroke; her features were turned from him by that movement of her head, but he saw the Eastern outline of the cheek and chin, the embrowned velvet of the skin, the half-bare beauty of the heaving chest and supple spine bent back in the action of the oars, the long, slender, arched shape of the naked foot, round which the cord was twined: their contour and their color struck him with a sudden surprise.
He had seen such oftentimes, eastwards, on the banks of golden rivers, treading, with such feet as these, the sands that were the dust of countless nations; bearing, on such shoulders as these, earthen water-vases that might have served the feasts of Pharaohs; showing such limbs as these against the curled palm branches, and the deep blue sky, upon the desert's edge. But here!—a face of Asia among the cornlands of Northern France? It seemed to him strange; he looked after her with wonder.
The boat went on down the stream without any pause; the sculls cleaving the heavy tide with regular and resolute monotony; the amber piles of the grain and the brown form of the bending figure soon hidden in the clouds of river-mist.