The imagined danger to them which the peasants had believed to exist in her had been as a strong buckler between the true danger to her from the defilement of their companionship and example. They had cursed her as they had passed, and their curses had been her blessing. Blinded and imprisoned instincts had always moved in her to the great and the good things of which no man had taught her in anywise.
Left to herself, and uncontaminated by humanity, because proscribed by it, she had known no teachers of any sort save the winds and the waters, the sun and the moon, the daybreak and the night, and these had breathed into her an unconscious heroism, a changeless patience, a fearless freedom, a strange tenderness and callousness united. Ignorant though she was, and abandoned to the darkness of all the superstitions and the sullen stupor amidst which her lot was cast, there was yet that in her which led her to veneration of the purpose of his life.
He desired not happiness nor tenderness, nor bodily ease, nor sensual delight, but only this one thing—a name that should not perish from among the memories of men.
And this desire seemed to her sublime, divine; not comprehending it she yet revered it. She, who had seen the souls of the men around her set on a handful of copper coin, a fleece of wool, a load of fruit, a petty pilfering, a small gain in commerce, saw the greatness of a hero's sacrifice in this supreme self-negation which was willing to part with every personal joy and every physical pleasure, so that only the works of his hand might live, and his thoughts be uttered in them when his body should be destroyed.
It is true that the great artist is as a fallen god who remembers a time when worlds arose at his breath, and at his bidding the barren lands blossomed into fruitfulness; the sorcery of the thyrsus is still his, though weakened.
The powers of lost dominions haunt his memory; the remembered glory of an eternal sun is in his eyes, and makes the light of common day seem darkness; the heart-sickness of a long exile weighs on him; incessantly he labors to overtake the mirage of a loveliness which fades as he pursues it. In the poetic creation by which the bondage of his material life is redeemed, he finds at once ecstasy and disgust, because he feels at once his strength and weakness. For him all things of earth and air, and sea and cloud, have beauty; and to his ear all voices of the forest-land and water-world are audible.
He is as a god, since he can call into palpable shape dreams born of impalpable thought; as a god, since he has known the truth divested of lies, and has stood face to face with it, and been not afraid; a god thus. But a cripple inasmuch as his hand can never fashion the shapes which his vision beholds; and alien because he has lost what he never will find upon earth; a beast, since ever and again his passions will drag him to wallow in the filth of sensual indulgence; a slave, since oftentimes the divinity that is in him breaks and bends under the devilry that also is in him, and he obeys the instincts of vileness, and when he would fain bless the nations he curses them.
Some vague perception of this dawned on her; the sense was in her to feel the beauty of art, and to be awed by it though she could not have told what it was, nor why she cared for it. And the man who ministered to it, who ruled it, and yet obeyed it, seemed to her ennobled with a greatness that was the grandest thing her blank and bitter life had known. This was all wonderful, dreamful, awful to her, and yet in a half-savage, half-poetic way, she comprehended the one object of his life, and honored it without doubt or question.
No day from that time passed by without her spending the evening hours under the roof of the haunted corn-tower.
She toiled all the other hours through, from the earliest time that the first flush of day lightened the starlit skies; did not he toil too? But when the sun set she claimed her freedom; and her taskmaster did not dare to say her nay.