Sartorian did not seek to pursue her. He turned and went thoughtfully and slowly back by the grass-grown footpath through the little wood, along by the riverside, to the water-tower. His horses and his people waited near, but it suited him to go thither on this errand on foot and alone.
"The Red Mouse does not dwell in that soul as yet. That sublime unreason—that grand barbaric madness! And yet both will fall to gold, as that fruit falls to the touch," he thought, as he brushed a ripe yellow pear from the shelter of the reddening leaves, and watched it drop, and crushed it gently with his foot, and smiled as he saw that though so golden on the rind, and so white and so fragrant in the flesh, at the core was a rotten speck, in which a little black worm was twisting.
He had shaken it down from idleness; where he left it, crushed in the public pathway, a swarm of ants and flies soon crawled, and flew, and fought, and fastened, and fed on the fallen purity, which the winds had once tossed up to heaven, and the sun had once kissed into bloom.
Through the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had broken.
It was the voice of the old serving-woman, who called on her name from the porch.
In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew herself wearily through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the house.
She had lost all remembrance of Flamma's death, and of the inheritance of his wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a man's genius which she had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, in the sickness of her heart, "Will he forget?—forget quite—when he is free?"
The peasant standing in the porch with arms akimbo, and the lean cat rubbing ravenous sides against her wooden shoes, peered forth from under the rich red leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the doorway.
Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her eyes were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind her was the kitchen, with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its wood-piled hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.