"We were horribly poor at last: we slept in barns and haylofts; we ate berries and drank the brook-water. She grew weak, and could hardly walk. Many a time I have been tempted to let her lie and die in the hedgeway or on the plains, and I did not,—one is so foolish sometimes for sake of a woman. She knew she was a burden and curse to me,—I may have said so, perhaps; I do not remember.
"At last I heard of you in the Liebana, from a tribe we fell in with on the other side of the mountains, and so we traveled here on foot. I thought she would have got to the women before her hour arrived. But she fell down there, and could not stir: and so the end came. It is best as it is. She was wretched, and what could I do with a woman like that? who would never hearken to another lover, nor give up her dead God on his cross, nor take so much as a broken crust if it were stolen, nor even show her beauty to a sculptor to be carved in stone—for I tried to make her do that, and she would not. It is best as it is. If she had lived we could have done nothing with her. And yet I see her sometimes as I saw her that night, so white and so calm, in the little green wood, as the sun set——"
His voice ceased, and he took up a horn full of vino clarete; and drained it; and was very still, stretching his limbs to bask in the heat of the fire. The wine had loosened his tongue, and he had spoken from his heart,—truthfully.
Phratos, his only hearer, was silent.
He was thinking of the great blue sightless eyes that he had closed, and of the loose brown hair on which he had flung the wet leaves and the earth-clogged mosses.
"The child lives?" he said at length.
Taric, who was sinking to sleep after the long fatigues of a heavy tramp through mountain-passes, stirred sullenly with an oath.
"Let it go to hell!" he made answer.
And these were the only words of baptism that were spoken over the nameless daughter of Taric the gypsy and of Reine Flamma.
That night Phratos called out to him in the moonlight the woman Zarâ, who came from under her tent, and stood under the glistening leaves, strong and handsome, with shining eyes and snowy teeth.