Before this night she had always taken every blow and stripe patiently, without vengeance, without effort, as she saw the mule and the dog, the horse and the ox, take theirs in their pathetic patience, in their noble fortitude. She had thought that such were her daily portion as much as was the daily bread she broke.
But now, since she had awakened with the smile of the gods upon her, now she felt that sooner than endure again that indignity, that outrage, she would let her tyrant kill her in his hate, if so he chose, and cast her body to the mill-stream, moaning through the trees beneath the moon; the water, at least, would bear her with it, tranquil and undefiled, beneath the old gray walls and past the eyes of Arslàn.
There was that in her look which struck dumb the mouth, and held motionless the arm, of Claudis Flamma.
Caustic, savage, hard as his own ash staff though he was, he was for the moment paralyzed and unmanned. Some vague sense of shame stirred heavily in him; some vague remembrance passed over him, that, whatsoever else she might be, she had been once borne in his daughter's bosom, and kissed by his daughter's lips, and sent to him by a dead woman's will, with a dead woman's wretchedness and loneliness as her sole birth-gifts.
He passed his hands over his eyes with a blinded gesture, staring hard at her in the dusky lamp-light.
He was a strong and bitter old man, made cruel by one great agony, and groping his way savagely through a dark, hungry, superstitious, ignorant life. But in that moment he no more dared to touch her than he would have dared to tear down the leaden Christ from off its crucifix, and trample it under foot, and spit on it.
He turned away, muttering in his throat, and kicking the cat from his path, while he struck out the light with his staff.
"Get to thy den," he said, with a curse. "We are abed too late. To-morrow I will deal with thee."
She went without a word out of the dark kitchen and up the ladder-like stairs, up to her lair in the roof. She said nothing; it was not in her nature to threaten twice, or twice protest; but in her heart she knew that neither the next day, nor any other day, should that which Arslàn had called "beauty," be stripped and struck whilst life was in her to preserve it by death from that indignity.
From the time of her earliest infancy, she had been used to bare her shoulders to the lash, and take the stripes as food and wages; she had no more thought to resist them than the brave hound, who fears no foe on earth, has to resist his master's blows; the dull habits of a soulless bondage had been too strong on her to be lightly broken, and the resignation of the loyal beasts that were her comrades, had been the one virtue that she had seen to follow.