LITMIR.BIZ

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      "You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you fancy."

      And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky fir-needles.

      "It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien creature to her bosom.

      "It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the sleeping face of her own son.

      Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the only payment in his power.

      Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half touched, half angered.

      "Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.

      For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours' span was rejected as unworthy and despised.

      Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and nevertheless, the child grew and throve.

      The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy peaks of the Europa.

      He did not abide with them; he quarreled with them violently concerning some division of a capture of wine-skins, and went on his own way to distant provinces and cities; to the gambling and roystering, the woman-fooling and the bull-fighting, that this soul lusted after always.

      His daughter he left to dwell in the tent of Zarâ, and under the defense of Phratos.

      Once or twice, in sojourns of a night or two among his own people, as the young creature grew in stature and strength, Taric had glanced at her, and called her to him, and felt the litheness of her limbs and the weight of her hair, and laughed as he thrust her from him, thinking, in time to come, she—who would know nothing of her mother's dead God on the cross, and of her mother's idle, weak scruples—might bring him a fair provision in his years of age, when his hand should have lost its weight against men and his form its goodliness in the sight of women.

      Once or twice he had given her a kick of his foot, or blow with his leathern whip, when she crawled in the grass too near his path, or lay asleep in the sun as he chanced to pass by her.

      Otherwise he had naught to do with her, absent or present; otherwise he left her to chance and the devil, who were, as he said, according to the Christians, the natural patrons and sponsors of all love-children. Chance and the Devil, however, had not wholly their way in the Liebana; for besides them there was Phratos.

      Phratos never abandoned her.

      Under the wolfskin and pineboughs of Zarâ's tent there was misery very often.

      Zarâ had a fresh son born to her with each succeeding year; and having a besotted love for her own offspring, had little but indifference and blows for the stranger who shared their bed and food. Her children, brown and curly, naked and strong, fought one another like panther cubs, and rode in a cluster like red mountain-ash berries in the sheepskin round her waist, and drank by turns out of the pitcher of broth, and slept all together on dry ferns and mosses, rolled in warm balls one in another like young bears.

      But the child who had no affinity with them, who was not even wholly of their tribe, but had in her what they deemed the taint of gentile blood, was not allowed to gnaw her bare bone or her ripe fig in peace if they wished for it; was never carried with them in the sheepskin nest, but left to totter after in the dust or mud as best she might; was forced to wait for the leavings in the pitcher, or go without if leavings there were none; and was kicked away by the sturdy limbs of these young males when she tried to creep for warmth's sake in among them on their fern bed. But she minded all this little; since in the Liebana there was Phratos.

      Phratos was always good to her. The prayer which those piteous dead eyes had made he always answered. He had always pity for the child.

      Many a time, but for his remembrance, she would have starved outright or died of cold in those wild winters when the tribe huddled together in the caverns of the limestone, and the snow-drifts were driven up by the northern winds and blocked them there for many days. Many a time but for his aid she would have dropped on their march and been left to perish as she might on the long sunburnt roads, in the arid midsummers, when the gypsies plodded on their dusty way through the sinuous windings of hillside paths and along the rough stones of dried-up water-courses, in gorges and passages known alone to them and the wild deer.

      When her throat was parched with the torment of long thirst, it was he who raised her to drink from the rill in the rock, high above, to which the mothers lifted their eager children, leaving her to gasp and gaze unpitied. When she was driven away from the noonday meal by the hungry and clamorous youngsters, who would admit no share of their partridge broth and stewed lentils, it was he who bruised the maize between stones for her eating, and gathered for her the wild fruit of the quince and the mulberry.

      When the sons of Zarâ had kicked and bruised and spurned her from the tent, he would lead her away to some shadowy place where the leaves grew thickly, and play to her such glad and buoyant tunes that the laughter seemed to bubble from the listening brooks and ripple among the swinging boughs, and make the wild hare skip with joy, and draw the timid lizard from his hole to frolic. And when the way was long, and the stony paths cruel to her little bare feet, he would carry her aloft on his misshapen shoulders, where his old viol always traveled; and would beguile the steep way with a thousand quaint, soft, grotesque conceits of all the flowers and leaves and birds and animals: talking rather to himself than her, yet talking with a tender fancifulness, half humor and half pathos, that soothed her tired senses like a lullaby. Hence it came to pass that the sole creature whom she loved and who had pity for her was the uncouth, crippled, gay, sad, gentle, dauntless creature whom his tribe had always held half wittol and half seer.

      Thus the life in the hills of the Liebana went on till the child of Taric had entered her sixth year.

      She had both beauty and grace; she had the old Moresco loveliness in its higher type; she was fleet as the roe, strong as the young izard, wild as the wood-partridge on the wing; she had grace of limb from the postures and dances with which she taught herself to keep time to the fantastic music of the viol; she was shy and sullen, fierce and savage, to all save himself, for the hand of every other was against her; but to him, she was docile as the dove to the hand that feeds it. He had given her a string of bright sequins to hang on her hair, and when the peasants of the mountains and valleys saw her by the edge of some green woodland pool, whirling by moonlight to the sound of his melodies, they took her to be some unearthly spirit, and told wonderful things over their garlic of the elf crowned with stars they had seen dancing on a round lotos-leaf in the hush of the night.

      In the Liebana she was beaten often, hungry almost always, cursed fiercely, driven away by the mothers, mocked and flouted by the children; and this taught her silence and ferocity. Yet in the Liebana she was happy, for one creature loved her, and she was free—free to lie in the long grass, to bathe in the still pools, to watch the wild things of the woods, to wander ankle-deep in forest blossoms, to sleep under the rocking of pines, to run against the sweet force of the wind, to climb the trees and swing cradled in leaves, and to look far away at the snow on the mountains, and to dream, and to love, and to be content in dreaming and loving, their mystical glory that awoke with the sun.

      One day in the red autumn, Taric came; he had been wholly absent more than two years.

      He was superb to the sight still, with matchless splendor of face and form, but his carriage was more reckless and disordered than ever, and in his gemlike and night-black eyes, there was a look of cunning and of subtle ferocity new to them.

      His life had gone hardly with him, and to the indolence,

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