"If one were to drive the nail to the head, she would not feel!" cried the women, in furious despair, and were minded, almost, to put her to that uttermost test.

Suddenly, from the doorway, Flandrin raised an alarm:

"There is our notary close at hand, on the road on his mule! Hist! Come out quickly! You know how strict he is, and how he forbids us ever to try and take the law into our own keeping. Quick--as you love your lives--quick!"

The furies left their prey, and scattered and fled; the notary was a name of awe to them, for he was a severe man but just.

They seized the children, went out with them into the road, closed the hut door behind them, and moved down the hill, the two younger wailing sadly, and the eldest trying to get from them and go back.

The women looked mournful and held their heads down, and comforted the little ones; Flandrin himself went to his cattle in the meadow.

"Is anything amiss?" the old white-haired notary asked, stopping his gray mule at sight of the little cavalcade.

The women, weeping, told him that Manon Dax was dead, and the youngest infant likewise--of cold, in the night, as they supposed. They dared to say no more, for he had many times rebuked them for their lack of charity and their bigoted cruelties and superst.i.tions, and they were quaking with fear lest he should by any chance enter the cottage and see their work.

"Flandrin, going to his cow, saw her first, and he came to us and told us," they added, crossing themselves fervently, and hushing little Bernardou, who wanted to get from them and return; "and we have taken the poor little things to carry them home; we are going to give them food, and warm them awhile by the stove, and then we shall come back and do all that is needful for the beloved dead who are within."

"That is well. That is good and neighborly of you," said the notary, who liked them, having married them all, and registered all their children's births, and who was a good old man, though stern.

He promised them to see for his part that all needed by the law and by the church should be done for their old lost neighbor; and then he urged his mule into a trot, for he had been summoned to a rich man's sick-bed in that early winter morning, and was in haste lest the priest should be beforehand with him there.

"How tender the poor are to the poor! Those people have not bread enough for themselves, and yet they burden their homes with three strange mouths. Their hearts must be true at the core, if their tongues sometimes be foul," he mused, as he rode the mule down through the fog.

The women went on, carrying and dragging the children with them, in a sullen impatience.

"To think we should have had to leave that fiend of Ypres!" they muttered in their teeth. "Well, there is one thing, she will not get over the hurt for days. Her bones will be stiff for many a week. That will teach her to leave honest folk alone."

And they traversed the road slowly, muttering to one another.

"Hold thy noise, thou little pig!" cried Flandrin's wife, pushing Bernardou on before her. "Hold thy noise, I tell you, or I will put you in the black box in a hole in the ground, along with thy great-grandmother."

But Bernardou wept aloud, refusing to be comforted or terrified into silence. He was old enough to know that never more would the old kindly withered brown face bend over him as he woke in the morning, nor the old kindly quavering voice croon him country ballads and cradle songs at twilight by the bright wood fire.

Little by little the women carrying the children crept down the slippery slope, half ice and half mud in the thaw, and entered their own village, and therein were much praised for their charity and courage.

For when they praise, as when they abuse, villages are loud of voice and blind of eye almost as much as are the cities.

Their tongues and those of their neighbors clacked all day long, noisily and bravely, of their good and their great deeds; they had all the sanct.i.ty of martyrdom, and all the glory of victory, in one. True, they have left all their house and field-work half done. "But the Holy Peter will finish it in his own good time, and avenge himself for his outrage," mused the wife of Flandrin, sorrowing over her lost Petrus in the snowdrift, and boxing the ears of little Bernardou to make him cease from his weeping, where he was huddled in her chimney corner.

When they went back with their priest at noon to the hut of old Manon Dax to make her ready for her burial, they trembled inwardly lest they should find their victim there, and lest she should lift up her voice in accusation against them. Their hearts misgave them sorely. Their priest, a cobbler's son, almost as ignorant as themselves, save that he could gabble a few morsels of bad Latin, would be, they knew, on their side; but they were sensible that they had let their fury hurry them into acts that could easily be applauded by their neighbors, but not so easily justified to the law.

"For the law is overgood," said Rose Flandrin, "and takes the part of all sorts of vile creatures. It will protect a rogue, a brigand, a bullock, a dog, a witch, a devil--anything,--except now and then an honest woman."

But their fears were groundless; she was gone; the hut when they entered it had no tenants, except the lifeless famished bodies of the old grandam and the year-old infant.

When Folle-Farine had heard the hut door close, and the steps of her tormentors die away down the hill, she had tried vainly several times to raise herself from the floor, and had failed.

She had been so suddenly attacked and flung down and trampled on, that her brain had been deadened, and her senses had gone, for the first sharp moment of the persecution.

As she lifted herself slowly, and staggered to her feet, and saw the blood trickle where the nail had pierced her breast, she understood what had happened to her; her face grew savage and dark, her eyes fierce and l.u.s.tful, like the eyes of some wild beast rising wounded in his lair.

It was not for the hurt she cared; it was the shame of defeat and outrage that stung her like a whip of asps.

She stood awhile looking at the face of the woman she had aided.

"I tried to help you," she thought. "I was a fool. I might have known how they pay any good done to them."

She was not surprised; her mind had been too deadened by a long course of ill usage to feel any wonder at the treatment she had been repaid with.

She hated them with the mute unyielding hatred of her race, but she hated herself more because she had yielded to the softness of sorrow and pity for any human thing; and more still because she had not been armed and on her guard, and had suffered them to prevail and to escape without her vengeance.

"I will never come out without a knife in my girdle again," she thought--this was the lesson that her charity had brought her as its teaching.

She went out hardening her heart, as she crept through the doorway into the snow and the wind, so that she should not leave one farewell word or token of gentleness with the dead, that lay there so tranquil on the ashes of the hearth.

"She lied even in her last breath," thought Folle-Farine. "She said that her G.o.d was good!"

She could hardly keep on her own homeward way. All her limbs were stiff and full of pain. The wound in her chest was scarcely more than skin deep, yet it smarted sorely and bled still. Her brain was dull, and her ears filled with strange noises from the force with which she had been flung backward on her head.

She had given her sheepskin to the children, as before her Phratos had done; and the peasants had carried the youngest of them away in it. The sharpness of the intense cold froze the blood in her as she crawled through a gap in the poplar hedge, and under the whitened brambles and gra.s.ses beyond, to get backward to the mill by the path that ran through the woods and pastures.

The sun had risen, but was obscured by fog, through which it shed a dull red ray here and there above the woods in the east.

It was a bitter morning, and the wind, though it had abated, was still rough, and drove the snow in clouds of powder hither and thither over the fields. She could only move very slowly; the thorns tearing her, the snow blinding her, the icicles lacerating her bare feet as she moved.

She wondered, dimly, why she lived. It seemed to her that the devil when he had made her, must have made her out of sport and cruelty, and then tossed her into the world to be a scapegoat and a football for any creature that might need one.

That she might end her own life never occurred to her; her intelligence was not awake enough to see that she need not bear its burden one hour more, so long as there was one pool in the woods deep enough to drown her under its green weeds and lily leaves any cool summer night; or that she had but to lie down then and there, where she was, on the snow, beneath the ice-dropping trees, and let the sleep that weighed on her eyelids come, dreamless and painless, and there would be an end of all for her, as for the frozen rabbits and the birds that strewed the upland meadows, starved and stiff.

She did not know;--and had she known, wretched though existence was to her, death would not have allured her. She saw that the dead might be slapped on their cheek, and could not lift their arm to strike again--a change that would not give her vengeance could have had no sweetness and no succor for her. The change she wanted was to live, and not to die.

By tedious and painful efforts, she dragged herself home by the way of the lanes and pastures; hungry, lame, bleeding, cold and miserable, her eyes burning like flame, her hands and her head hot with fever.

She made her way into the mill-yard and tried to commence her first morning's work; the drawing of water from the well for the beasts and for the house, and the sweeping down of the old wide court round which the sheds and storehouses ran.

She never dreamed of asking either for food or pity, either for sympathy or remission of her labors.

She set to work at once, but for the only time since Phratos had brought her thither the strength and vigor of her frame had been beaten.

She was sick and weak; her hand sank off the handle of the windla.s.s; and she dropped stupidly on the stone edge of the well, and sat there leaning her head on her hands.

The mastiff came and licked her face tenderly. The pigeons left the meal flung to them on the snow, and flew merrily about her head in pretty fluttering caresses. The lean cat came and rubbed its cheek softly against her, purring all the while.

The woman Pitchou saw her, and she called out of the window to her master,--

"Flamma! there is thy gad-about, who has not been abed all night."

The old man heard, and came out of his mill to the well in the courtyard.