She knew by heart the old familiar way; and the water was as safe to her as the broadest and straightest road at noonday.
She loved it best thus; dusky; half seen; muttering on through the silence; full of the shadows of the clouds and of the boughs; black as a fresh-dug grave where some ruined wall leaned over it; broken into little silvery gleams where it caught the light from a saint's shrine or a smith's forge.
By day a river is but the highway of men; it is but a public bridge betwixt the country and the town; but at night it grows mystical, silent, solitary, unreal, with the sound of the sea in its murmurings and the peace of death in its calm; at night, through its ceaseless whisperings, there always seem to come echoes from all the voices of the multitudes of the ocean whence it comes, and from all the voices of the multitudes of the city whither it goes.
It was quite dark when she reached the landing steps; the moon was just rising above the sharp gables of the mill-house, and a lantern was moving up and down behind the budded boughs as Claudis Flamma went to and fro in his wood-yard.
At the jar of the boat against the steps he peered through the branches, and greeted her with a malignant reprimand. He timed her services to the minute; and here had been a full half day of the spring weather wasted, and lost to him. He drove her indoors with sharp railing and loud reproaches; not waiting for an answer, but heaping on her the bitterest terms of reviling that his tongue could gather.
In the kitchen a little low burning lamp lit dully the poverty and dreariness of the place, and shed its orange rays on the ill-tempered, puckered, gloomy face of the old woman Pitchou sitting at her spindle; there was a curious odor of sun-dried herbs and smoke-dried fish that made the air heavy and pungent; the great chimney yawned black and fireless; a starveling cat mewed dolorously above an empty platter; under a tawdry-colored print of the Flight into Egypt, there hung on a nail three dead blackbirds, shot as they sang the praises of the spring; on a dresser, beside a little white basin of holy water, there lay a gray rabbit, dead likewise, with limbs broken and bleeding from the trap in which it had writhed helpless all through the previous night.
The penury, dullness, and cruelty, the hardness, and barrenness, and unloveliness of this life in which she abode, had never struck her with a sense so sharp as that which now fell on her; crossing the threshold of this dreary place after the shadows of the night, the beauty of the gods, the voice of praise, the eyes of Arslàn.
She came into the room, bringing with her the cool fragrance of damp earth, wet leaves, and wild flowers; the moisture of the evening was on her clothes and hair; her bare feet sparkled with the silvery spray of dew; her eyes had the look of blindness yet of luster that the night air lends; and on her face there was a mingling of puzzled pain and of rapturous dreaming wonder, which new thought and fresh feeling had brought there to break up its rich darkness into light.
The old woman, twirling a flaxen thread upon her wheel, looked askance at her, and mumbled, "Like mother, like child." The old man, catching up the lamp, held it against her face, and peered at her under his gray bent brows.
"A whole day wasted!" he swore for the twentieth time, in his teeth. "Beast! What hast thou to say for thyself?"