All things too were so new and strange to her; all common knowledge was so utterly unknown to her; all other kinds of life were so unintelligible to her; and yet with all her ignorance she had so swift a fancy, so keen an irony, so poetic an instinct, that it seemed to him when he spoke with her that he talked with some creature from another planet than his own.
He liked to make her smile; he liked to make her suffer; he liked to inflame, to wound, to charm, to tame her; he liked all these without passion, rather with curiosity than with interest, much as he had liked in the season of his boyhood to ruffle the plumage of a captured sea-bird; to see its eye sparkle, and then grow dull and flash again with pain, and then at the last turn soft with weary, wistful tenderness, having been taught at once the misery of bondage and the tyranny of a human love.
She was a bronzed, bare-footed, fleet-limbed young outcast, he told himself, with the scowl of an habitual defiance on her straight brows, and the curl of an untamable scorn upon her rich red lips, and a curious sovereignty and savageness in her dauntless carriage; and yet there was a certain nobility and melancholy in her that made her seem like one of a great and fallen race; and in her eyes there was a look repellant yet appealing, and lustrous with sleeping passion, that tempted him to wake what slumbered there.
But in these early springtide days he suffered her to come and go as she listed, without either persuasion or forbiddance on his own part.
The impassioned reverence which she had for the things he had created was only the untutored, unreasoning reverence of the barbarian or of the peasant; but it had a sweetness for him.
He had been alone so long; and so long had passed since any cheek had flushed and any breast had heaved under the influence of any one of those strange fancies and noble stories which he had pictured on the walls of his lonely chamber. He had despaired of and despised himself; despised his continual failure, had despaired of all power to sway the souls and gain the eyes of his fellow-men. It was a little thing—a thing so little that he called himself a fool for taking any count of it; yet, the hot tears that dimmed the sight of this young barbarian who was herself of no more value than the mill-dust that drifted on the breeze, the soft vague breathless awe that stole upon her as she gazed at the colorless shadows in which his genius had spent itself,—these were sweet to him with a sweetness that made him ashamed of his own weakness.
She had given the breath of life back to his body by an act of which he was ignorant; and now she gave back the breath of hope to his mind by a worship which he contemned even whilst he was glad of it.
Meanwhile the foul tongues of her enemies rang with loud glee over this new shame which they could cast at her.
"She has found a lover,—oh-ho!—that brown wicked thing! A lover meet for her;—a man who walks abroad in the moonless nights, and plucks the mandrake, and worships the devil, and paints people in their own likeness, so that as the color dries the life wastes!"—so the women screamed after her often as she went; she nothing understanding or heeding, but lost in the dreams of her own waking imagination.
At times such words as these reached Claudis Flamma, but he turned a deaf ear to them: he had the wisdom of the world in him, though he was only an old miller who had never stirred ten leagues from his home; and whilst the devil served him well, he quarreled not with the devil.