Her brain was on fire, and her heart seemed frozen; her lips moved without sound, and unconsciously shaped the words which night and day pursued her, "A little gold,—a little gold!"
So slight a thing, they said, and yet high above reach as Aldebaran, when it glistened through the storm-wrack of the rain.
Why could he have not been content—she had been—with the rush of the winds over the plains, the strife of the flood and the hurricane, the smell of the fruit-hung ways at night, the cool, green shadows of the summer woods, the courses of the clouds, the rapture of the keen air blowing from the sea, the flight of a bird over the tossing poppies, the day-song of the lark? All these were life enough for her; were freedom, loveliness, companionship, and solace. Ah, God! she thought, if only these had made the world of his desires likewise. And even in her ghastlier grief her heart sickened for them in vain anguish as she went,—these the pure joys of earth and air which were her only heritage.
She went out into the streets.
It was a night of wind and rain.
The lamps flickered through the watery darkness. Beggars, and thieves, and harlots jostled her in the narrow ways.
"It must be hell,—the hell of the Christians," she muttered, as she stood alone on the flints of the roads, in the rancid smell, in the hideous riot, in the ghastly mirth, in the choking stench, in the thick steam of the darkness, whose few dull gleams of yellow light served to show the false red on a harlot's cheek, or the bleeding wound on a crippled horse, or the reeling dance of a drunkard.
It was the hell of the Christians: in it there was no hope for her.
She moved on with slow unconscious movement of her limbs; her hair blew back, her eyes had a pitiless wonder in their vacant stare; her bloodless face had the horror in it that Greek sculptors gave to the face of those whom a relentless destiny pursued and hunted down; ever and again she looked back as she went, as though some nameless, shapeless, unutterable horror were behind her in her steps.
The people called her mad, and laughed and hooted her; when they had any space to think of her at all.