And these two pictures were so alike and yet so unlike, so true to all the glory of youth, so true to all the ghastliness of death, that they were terrible; they were terrible even to the man who drew them with so unsparing and unfaltering a hand.
Only to her they were not terrible, because they showed his power, because they were his will and work. She had no share in the shudder, which even he felt, at that visible presentiment of the corruption to which her beauty in its human perfection was destined: since it pleasured him to do it, that was all she cared. She would have given her beauty to the scourge of the populace, or to the fish of the sea, at his bidding.
She had not asked him even what the Red Mouse meant.
She was content that he should deal with her in all things as he would. That such portrayals of her were cruel she never once thought: to her all others had been so brutal that the cruelties of Arslàn seemed sweet as the south wind.
To be for one instant a thing in the least wished for and endeared was to her a miracle so wonderful and so undreamt of, that it made her life sublime to her.
"Is that all the devil has done for you?" cried the gardener's wife from the vine-hung lattice, leaning out while the boat from Yprès went down the water-street beneath.
"It were scarcely worth while to be his offspring if he deals you no better gifts than that. He is as niggard as the saints are—the little mean beasts! Do you know that the man who paints you brings death, they say—sooner or later—to every creature that lives again for him in his art?"
Folle-Farine, beneath in the dense brown shadows cast from the timbers of the leaning houses, raised her eyes; the eyes smiled, and yet they had a look in them that chilled even the mocking, careless, wanton temper of the woman who leaned above among the roses.
"I have heard it," she said, simply, as her oar broke the shadows.
"And you have no fear?"