CHAPTER XII.
That night they halted in a little bright village of the leafy and fruitful zone of the city—one of the fragrant and joyous pleasure-places among the woods where the students and the young girls came for draughts of milk and plunder of primroses, and dances by the light of the spring moon, and love-words murmured as they fastened violets in each other's breasts.
The next day she entered Paris with them as one of their own people.
"You may be great here, if you choose," they said to her, and laughed.
She scarcely heard. She only knew that here it was that Arslàn had declared that fame—or death—should come to him.
The golden cloud dissolved as she drew near to it.
A great city might be beautiful to others: to her it was only as its gilded cage is to a mountain bird. The wilderness of roofs, the labyrinth of streets, the endless walls of stone, the ceaseless noises of the living multitude, these were horrible to the free-born blood of her; she felt blinded, caged, pent, deafened. Its magnificence failed to daunt, its color to charm, its pageantry to beguile her. Through the glad and gorgeous ways she went, wearily and sick of heart, for the rush of free winds and the width of free skies, as a desert-born captive, with limbs of bronze and the eyes of the lion, went fettered past the palaces of Rome in the triumphal train of Africanus or Pompeius.
The little band with which she traveled wondered what her eyes so incessantly looked for, in that perpetual intentness with which they searched every knot of faces that was gathered together as a swarm of bees clusters in the sunshine. They could not tell; they only saw that her eyes never lost that look.
"Is it the Past or the Future that you search for always?" the shrewdest of them asked her.
She shuddered a little, and made him no answer. How could she tell which it was?—whether it would be a public fame or a nameless grave that she would light on at the last?