"I have no fear."
The gardener's wife laughed aloud, the silver pins shaking in her yellow tresses.
"Well—the devil gives strength, no doubt. But I will not say much for the devil's wage. A fine office he sets you—his daughter—to lend yourself to a painter's eyes like any wanton that he could hire in the market-place for a drink of wine. If the devil do no better than that for you—his own-begotten—I will cleave close to the saints and the angels henceforth, though they do take all the gems and the gold and the lace for their altars, and bestow so little in answer."
The boat had passed on with slow and even measure; no words of derision which they could cast at her had power to move her any more than the fret of the ruffling rooks had power to move the cathedral spires around which they beat with their wings the empty air.
The old dull gray routine of perpetual toil was illumined and enriched. If any reviled, she heard not. If any flung a stone at her, she caught it and dropped it safely on the grass, and went on with a glance of pardon. When the children ran after her footsteps bawling and mouthing, she turned and looked at them with a sweet dreaming tenderness in her eyes that rebuked them and held them silenced and afraid.
Now, she hated none; nor could she envy any.
The women were welcome to their little joys of hearth and home; they were welcome to look for their lovers across the fields with smiling eyes shaded from the sun, or to beckon their infants from the dusky orchards to murmur fond foolish words and stroke the curls of flaxen down,—she begrudged them nothing: she, too, had her portion and her treasure; she, too, knew the unutterable and mystical sweetness of a human joy.
Base usage cannot make base a creature that gives itself nobly, purely, with unutterable and exhaustless love; and whilst the people in the country round muttered at her for her vileness and disgrace, she, all unwitting and raised high above the reach of taunt and censure by a deep speechless joy that rendered hunger, and labor, and pain, and brutal tasks, and jibing glances indifferent to her—nay, unfelt—went on her daily ways with a light richer than the light of the sun in her eyes, and in her step the noble freedom of one who has broken from bondage and entered into a heritage of grace.
She was proud as with the pride of one selected for some great dignity; proud with the pride that a supreme devotion and a supreme ignorance made possible to her. He was as a god to her; and she had found favor in his sight. Although by all others despised, to him she was beautiful; a thing to be desired, not abhorred; to be caressed, not cursed. It seemed to her so wonderful that, night and day, in her heart she praised God for it—that dim unknown God of whom no man had taught her, but yet whom she had vaguely grown to dream of and to honor, and to behold in the setting of the sun, and in the flush of the clouds, and in the mysteries of the starlit skies.
Of shame to her in it she had no thought: a passion strong as fire in its force, pure as crystal in its unselfishness, possessed her for him, and laid her at his feet to be done with as he would. She would have crouched to him like a dog; she would have worked for him like a slave; she would have killed herself if he had bidden her without a word of resistance or a moan of regret. To be caressed by him one moment as his hand in passing caressed a flower, even though with the next to be broken like the flower and cast aside in a ditch to die, was to her the greatest glory life could know. To be a pleasure to him for one hour, to see his eyes tell her once, however carelessly or coldly, that she had any beauty for him, was to her the sweetest and noblest fate that could befall her. To him she was no more than the cluster of grapes to the wayfarer, who brushes their bloom off and steals their sweetness, then casts them down to be trampled on by whosoever the next comer be. But to this creature, who had no guide except her instincts of passion and sacrifice, who had no guard except the pure scorn that had kept her from the meanness and coarseness of the vices around her, this was unintelligible, unsuspected; and if she had understood it, she would have accepted it mutely, in that abject humility which had bent the fierce and dauntless temper in her to his will.