Herself, she was so utterly nothing in her own sight, and he was so utterly all in all; her life was a thing so undesired and so valueless, and his a thing so great and so measureless in majesty, that it seemed to her she might have erred in thrusting away infamy, since infamy would have brought with it gold to serve him.
Dignity, innocence, strength, pride—what right had she to these, what title had she to claim them—she who had been less than the dust from her birth upward?
To perish for him anyhow—that was all that she had craved in prayer of the gods. And she watched him now all through the bitter day; watched him dying of hunger, of fever, of endless desire, of continual failure,—and was helpless. More helpless even than she had been when first she had claimed back his life from Thanatos.
Seven days she watched thus by him amidst the metal clangor of the bells, amidst the wailing of the autumn winds between the roofs.
She moistened his lips with a little water; it was all he took. A few times she left him and stole down amidst the people whom she had served, and was met by a curse from most of them; for they thought that she tended some unknown fever which she might bring amidst them, so they drove her back, and would hear naught of her. A few, more pitiful than the rest, flung her twice or thrice a little broken bread; she took it eagerly, and fed on it, knowing that she must keep life in her by some food, or leave him utterly alone. For him she had laid down all pride; for him she would have kissed the feet of the basest or sued to the lowest for alms.
And when the people—whose debts to her she had often forgiven, and whom she had once fancied had borne her a little love—drove her from them with harshest reviling, she answered nothing, but dropped her head and turned and crept again up the winding stairs to kneel beside his couch of straw, and wonder, in the bewildered anguish of her aching brain, if indeed evil were good,—since evil alone could save him.
Seven days went by; the chimes of the bells blown on the wild autumn winds in strange bursts of jangled sound; the ceaseless murmur of the city's crowd surging ever on the silence from the far depths below; sunrise and moonrise following one another with no change in the perishing life that she alone guarded, whilst every day the light that freshly rose upon the world found the picture of the Barabbas, and shone on the god rejected and the thief adored.
Every night during those seven days the flutelike voice of her tempter made its hated music on her ear. It asked always,—
"Are you tired, Folle-Farine?"
Her ears were always deaf; her lips were always dumb.