To be of use to him,—to be held of any worth to him,—to have his eyes find any loveliness to study in her,—to be to him only as a flower that he broke off its stem to copy its bloom on his canvas and then cast out on the land to wither as it would,—this, even this, seemed to her the noblest and highest fate to which she could have had election.
That he only borrowed the color of her cheek and the outline of her limbs as he had borrowed a thousand times ere then the venal charms of the dancing-women of taverns and play-houses, and the luring graces of the wanton that strayed in the public ways, was a knowledge that never touched her with its indignity. To her his art was a religion, supreme, passionless, eternal, whose sacrificial fires ennobled and consecrated all that they consumed.
"Though I shall die as the leaf dies in my body, yet I shall live forever embalmed amidst the beauty of his thoughts," she told herself perpetually, and all her life became transfigured.
CHAPTER IX.
One evening he met her in the fields on the same spot where Marcellin first had seen her as a child among the scarlet blaze of the poppies.
The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn; she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about her waist as she moved; the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a sky of Spain.
He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.
She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for his art:—a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in color, is always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable passion.
Art is so vast; and human life is so little.