She shook like a leaf where she stood, with the yellow and lustrous moonlight about her. She saw—she saw now!
And she had been mad enough to dream that if she lived in honesty, and, by labor that she loathed won back, with hands clean of crime as of alms, the gold which he had left in her trust as the wage of her beauty, and found him and gave it to him without a word, he would at least believe—believe so much as this, that her hunger had been famine, and her need misery, and her homelessness that of the stray dog which is kicked from even a ditch, and hunted from even a graveyard: but that through it all she had never touched one coin of that cruel and merciless gift.
"You see?" pursued the low, flutelike moaning mockery of her tormentor's voice. "You see? You have all the shame: it is your birthright; and you have nothing of the sweetness which may go with shame for a woman who has beauty. Now, look yonder. There lies the world, which when I saw you last was to you only an empty name. Now you know it—know it, at least, enough to be aware of all you have not, all you might have in it, if you took my golden pear. You must be tired, Folle-Farine,—to stand homeless under the gilded balconies; to be footsore in the summer dust among the rolling carriages; to stand outcast and famished before the palace gates; to see the smiles upon a million mouths, and on them all not one smile upon you; to show yourself hourly among a mob, that you may buy a little bread to eat, a little straw to rest on! You must be tired, Folle-Farine!"
She was silent where she stood in the moonlight, with the clouds seeming to lean and touch her, and far beneath the blaze of the myriad of lights shining through the soft darkness of the summer night.
Tired!—ah, God!—tired, indeed. But not for any cause of which he spake.
"You must be tired. Now, eat of my golden pear; and there, where the world lies yonder at our feet, no name shall be on the mouths of men as your name shall be in a day. Through the crowds you shall be borne by horses fleet as the winds; or you shall lean above them from a gilded gallery, and mock them at your fancy there on high in a cloud of flowers. Great jewels shall beam on you like planets; and the only chains that you shall wear shall be links of gold, like the chains of a priestess of old. Your mere wish shall be as a sorcerer's wand, to bring you the thing of your idlest desire. You have been despised!—what vengeance sweeter than to see men grovel to win your glance, as the swine at the feet of Circe? You have been scorned and accursed!—what retribution fuller than for women to behold in you the sweetness and magnificence of shame, and through you, envy, and fall, and worship the Evil which begot you? Has humanity been so fair a friend to you that you can hesitate to strike at its heart with such a vengeance—so symmetrical in justice, so cynical in irony? Humanity cast you out to wither at your birth,—a thing rootless, nameless, only meet for the snake and the worm. If you bear poison in your fruit, is that your fault, or the fault of the human hands that cast the chance-sown weed out on the dunghill to perish? I do not speak of passion. I use no anomalous phrase. I am old and ill-favored; and I know that, any way, you will forever hate me. But the rage of the desert-beast is more beautiful than the meek submission of the animal timid and tame. It is the lioness in you that I care to chain; but your chain shall be of gold, Folle-Farine; and all women will envy. Name your price, set it high as you will; there is nothing that I will refuse. Nay, even I will find your lover, who loves not you; and I will let you have your fullest vengeance on him. A noble vengeance, for no other would be worthy of your strength. Living or dead, his genius shall be made known to men; and, before another summer comes, all the world shall toss aloft in triumph the name that is now nothing as the dust is;—nothing as you are, Folle-Farine!"
She heard in silence to the end.
On the height of the roof-tops all was still; the stars seemed to beam close against her sight; below was the infinite space of the darkness, in which lines of light glittered where the haunts of pleasure lay; all creatures near her slept; the wind-sown plants blew to and fro, rooted in the spaces of the stones.
As the last words died softly on the quiet of the air, in answer she reached her hand upward, and broke off a tuft of the yellow wall-blossom, and cast it out with one turn of her wrist down into the void of the darkness.
"What do I say?" she said, slowly. "What? Well, this: I could seize you, and cast you down into the dark below there, as easily as I cast that tuft of weed. And why I hold my hand I cannot tell; it would be just."