There, on that wall, he had written, with all the might there was in him, his warning to the age in which he lived, his message to future generations, his claims to men's remembrance after death: and there were none to see, none to read, none to believe. Great things, beautiful things, things of wisdom, things of grace, things terrible in their scorn and divine in their majesty, rose up about him, incarnated by his mind and his hand—and their doom was to fade and wither without leaving one human mind the richer for their story, one human soul the nobler for their meaning.
To the humanity around him they had no value save such value of a few coins as might lie in them to liquidate some miserable scare at the bakehouse or the oilshop in the streets of the town.
A year of labor, and the cartoon could be transferred to the permanent life of the canvas; and he was a master of color, and loved to wrestle with its intricacies as the mariner struggles with the storm.
"But what were the use?" he pondered as he stood there. "What the use to be at pains to give it its full life on canvas? No man will ever look on it."
All labors of his art were dear to him, and none wearisome: yet he doubted what it would avail to commence the perpetuation of this work on canvas.
If the world were never to know that it existed, it would be as well to leave it there on its gray sea of paper, to be moved to and fro with each wind that blew through the broken rafters, and to be brushed by the wing of the owl and the flittermouse.
The door softly unclosed; he did not hear it.
Across the chamber Folle-Farine stole noiselessly.
She had come and gone thus a score of times through those six nights of his vigil; and he had seldom seen her, never spoken to her; now and then she had touched him, and placed before him some simple meal of herbs and bread, and he had taken it half unconsciously, and drunk great draughts of water, and turned back again to his work, not noticing that she had brought to him what he sorely needed, and yet would not of himself have remembered.
She came to him without haste and without sound, and stood before him and looked;—looked with all her soul in her awed eyes.