I had no thought of staying there to moralize
upon the theme; but, as I looked, a figure came out of the dusk
ahead, and moved swiftly towards me.
It was Mathilde. She seemed bent on some errand, but the
revellers at the fire caught her attention, and she suddenly
swerved towards them, and came into the dull glow, her great black
eyes shining with bewildered brilliancy and vague keenness, her
long fingers reaching out with a sort of chafing motion. She did
not speak till she was among them. I drew into the shade of a
broken wall, and watched. She looked all round the circle, and
then, without a word, took an iron crucifix which hung upon her
breast, and silently lifted it above their heads for a moment. I
myself felt a kind of thrill go through me, for her wild beauty
was almost tragical. Her madness was not grotesque, but solemn
and dramatic. There was something terribly deliberate in her
strangeness; it was full of awe to the beholder, more searching
and painfully pitiful than melancholy.
Coarse hands fell away from wanton waists; ribaldry hesitated;
hot faces drew apart; and all at once a girl with a crackling
laugh threw a tin cup of liquor into the fire. Even as she did it,
a wretched dwarf sprang into the circle without a word, and,
snatching the cup out of the flames, jumped back again into the
darkness, peering into it with a hollow laugh.
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