With the poor wage that he earned by labor he bought by degrees the tools and pigments lacking to him, and lived on the scantiest and simplest food, that he might have wherewith to render into shape and color the imaginations of his brain.
And it was on these that the passionate, wondering, half-blinded eyes of Folle-Farine looked with awe and adoration in those lonely hours when she stole, in his absence, into his chamber, and touching nothing, scarcely daring to breathe aloud, crouched on the bare pavement mute and motionless, and afraid with a fear that was the sweetest happiness her brief youth had ever known.
Though her own kind had neglected and proscribed her, with one accord, there had been enough in the little world surrounding her to feed the imaginative senses latent in her,—enough of the old mediæval fancy, of the old ecclesiastical beauty, of the old monastic spirit, to give her a consciousness, though a dumb one, of the existence of art.
Untaught though she was, and harnessed to the dreary mill-wheel round of a hard physical toil, she yet had felt dimly the charm of the place in which she dwelt.
Where the fretted pinnacles rose in hundreds against the sky,—where the common dwellings of the poor were paneled and parquetted and carved in a thousand fashions,—where the graceful and the grotesque and the terrible were mingled in an inextricable, and yet exquisite, confusion,—where the gray squat jug that went to the well, and the jutting beam to which the clothes' line was fastened, and the creaking sign that swung above the smallest wineshop, and the wooden gallery on which the poorest troll hung out her many-colored rags, had all some trace of a dead art, some fashioning by a dead hand,—where all these were it was not possible for any creature dowered by nature with any poetic instinct to remain utterly unmoved and unawakened in their midst.
Of the science and the execution of art she was still absolutely ignorant; the powers by which it was created still seemed a magic incomprehensible, and not human; but its meaning she felt with that intensity, which is the truest homage of all homage to its influence.
Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude, lying waste, bearing no harvest.
Of these visits Arslàn himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.
She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals, which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.
And this secret—in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face and frame—changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless, passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into desires.