by Ouida
Folle-Farine worked all that winter, day after day, month after month, with scarcely a word being spoken to her, or scarcely an hour being left her that she could claim as her own.
She looked against the snow as strangely as a scarlet rose blossoming in frost there could have done; but the people that came to and fro, even the young men among them, were too used to that dark vivid silent face of hers, and those lithe brown limbs that had the supple play and the golden glow of the East in them, to notice them as any loveliness: and if they did note them on some rare time, thought of them only as the marks of a vagrant and accursed race.
She was so unlike to themselves that the northern peasantry never dreamed of seeing beauty in her; they turned their heads away when she went by, striding after her mule or bearing her pitcher from the well with the free and vigorous grace of a mountain or desert-born creature.
The sheepskin girt about her loins, the red kerchief knotted to her head, the loose lithe movements of her beautiful limbs, the fire and dreams in her musing eyes — all these were so unlike themselves that they saw nothing in them except what was awful or unlovely.
Half the winter went by without a kind word to her from any one except such as in that time of suffering and scarcity Marcellin spoke to her. So had every winter gone since she had come there — a time so long ago that the memory of Phratos had become so dim to her that she often doubted if he also were not a mere shadow of a dream like all the rest.
Half the winter she fared hardly and ate sparingly, and did the work of the mule and the bullocks — indifferent and knowing no better, and only staring at the stars when they throbbed in the black skies on a frosty night, and wondering if she would ever go to them, or if they would ever come to her — those splendid and familiar unknown things that looked on all the misery of the earth, and shone on tranquilly and did not seem to care.
Time came close on to the new year, and the distress and the cold were together at their height. The weather was terrible; and the poor suffered immeasurably.
A score of times a-day she heard them ask bread at the mill, and a score of times saw them given a stone; she saw them come in the raw fog, pinched and shivering, and sick with ague, and she saw her grandsire deny them with a grating sarcasm or two, or take from them fifty times its value for some niggard grant of food.
“Why should I think of it, why should I care?” she said to herself; and yet she did both, and could not help it.
There was among the sufferers one old and poor, who lived not far from the mill, by name Manon Dax.
She was a little old hardy brown woman, shriveled and bent, yet strong, with bright eyes like a robin’s, and a tough frame, eighty years old.
She had been southern born, and the wife of a stone-cutter; he had been dead fifty years, and she had seen all her sons and daughters and their offspring die too; and had now left on her hand to rear four young great-grandchildren, almost infants, who were always crying to her for food as new-born birds cry in their nests.
She washed a little when she could get any linen to wash, and she span, and she picked up the acorns and the nuts, and she tilled a small plot of ground that belonged to her hut, and she grew cabbages and potatoes and herbs on it, and so kept a roof over her head, and fed her four nestlings, and trotted to and fro in her wooden shoes all day long, and worked in hail and rain, in drought and tempest, and never complained, but said that God was good to her.
She was anxious about the children, knowing she could not live long — that was all. But then she felt sure that the Mother of God would take care of them, and so was cheerful; and did what the day brought her to do, and was content.
Now on Manon Dax, as on thousands of others, the unusual severity of the winter fell like a knife. She was only one among thousands.
Nobody noticed her; still it was hard.
All the springs near her dwelling were frozen for many weeks; there was no well nearer than half a league, and half a league out and half a league back every day over ground sharp and slippery with ice, with two heavy pails to carry, is not a little when one is over eighty, and has only a wisp of woolen serge between the wind and one’s withered limbs.
The acorns and horse-chestnuts had all been disputed with her fiercely by boys rough and swift, who foresaw a hard time coming in which their pigs would be ill fed. The roots in her little garden-plot were all black and killed by the cold. The nettles had been all gathered and stewed and eaten.
The snow drove in through a big hole in her roof. The woods were ransacked for every bramble and broken bough by rievers younger and more agile than herself; she had nothing to eat, nothing to burn.
The children lay in their little beds of hay and cried all day long for food, and she had none to give them.
“If it were only myself!” she thought, stopping her ears not to hear them; if it had been only herself it would have been so easy to creep away into the corner among the dry grass, and to lie still till the cold froze the pains of hunger and made them quiet; and to feel numb and tired, and yet glad that it was all over, and to murmur that God was good, and so to let death come — content.
But it was not only herself.
The poor are seldom so fortunate — they themselves would say so unhappy — as to be alone in their homes.
There were the four small lives left to her by the poor dead foolish things she had loved, — small lives that had been rosy even on so much hunger, and blithe even amidst so much cold; that had been mirthful even at the flooding of the snowdrift, and happy even over a meal of mouldy crusts, or of hips and haws from the hedges. Had been — until now, when even so much as this could not be got, and when their beds of hay were soaked through with snow-water; now — when they were quite silent, except when they sobbed out a cry for bread.
“I am eighty-two years old, and I have never since I was born asked man or woman for help, or owed man or woman a copper coin,” she thought, sitting by her black hearth, across which the howling wind drove, and stopping her ears to shut out the children’s cries.
She had often known severe winters, scanty food, bitter living, — she had scores of times in her long years been as famished as this, and as cold, and her house had been as desolate. Yet she had borne it all and never asked for an alms, being strong and ignorant, and being also in fear of the world, and holding a debt a great shame.
But now she knew that she must do it, or let those children perish; being herself old and past work, and having seen all her sons die out in their strength before her.
The struggle was long and hard with her. She would have to die soon, she knew, and she had striven all her lifetime so to live that she might die saying, “I have asked nothing of any man.”
This perhaps, she thought sadly, had been only a pride after all; a feeling foolish and wicked, that the good God sought now to chasten. Any way she knew that she must yield it up and go and ask for something; or else those four small things, who were like a cluster of red berries on a leafless tree, must suffer and must perish.
“It is bitter, but I must do it,” she thought. “Sure it is strange that the good God cares to take any of us to himself through so sharp a way as hunger. It seems, if I saw His face now, I should say, ‘Not heaven for me, Monseigneur: only bread and a little wood.’”
And she rose up on her bent stiff limbs, and went to the pile of hay on which the children were lying, pale and thin, but trying to smile, all of them, because they saw the tears on her cheeks.
“Be still, my treasures,” she said to them, striving to speak cheerily, and laying her hands on the curls of the eldest born; “I go away for a little while to try and get you food. Be good, Bernardou, and take care of them till I come back.”
Bernardou promised, being four years old himself; and she crept out of the little black door of the hut on to the white road and into the rushing winds.
“I will go to Flamma,” she said to herself.
It was three in the afternoon, nearly dark at this
season of midwinter.
The business of the day was done. The people had come and gone, favored or denied, according to such sureties as they could offer. The great wheel worked on in the seething water; the master of the mill sat against the casement to catch the falling light, adding up the sums in his ledger — crooked little signs such as he had taught himself to understand, though he could form neither numerals nor letters with his pen.
All around him in the storehouses there were corn, wood, wool, stores of every sort of food. All around him, in the room he lived in, there were hung the salt meats, the sweet herbs, and the dried fruits, that he had saved from the profusion of other and healthier years. It pleased him to know that he held all that, and also withheld it. It moved him with a certain saturnine glee to see the hungry wistful eyes of the peasants stare longingly at all those riches, whilst their white lips faltered out an entreaty — which he denied.
It was what he liked; to sit there and count his gains after his fashion, and look at his stores and listen to the howling wind and driving hail, and chuckle to think how lean and cold and sick they were outside — those fools who mocked him because his saint had been a gypsy’s leman.
To be prayed to for bread, and give the stone of a bitter denial; to be implored with tears of supplication, and answer with a grim jest; to see a woman come with children dying for food, and to point out to her the big brass pans full of milk, and say to her “All that makes butter for Paris,” and then see her go away wailing and moaning that her child would die, and tottering feebly through the snow — all this was sweet to him.
Before his daughter had gone from him, he had been, though a hard man, yet honest, and had been, though severe, not cruel; but since he had been aware of the shame of the creature whom he had believed in as an angel, every fiber in him had been embittered and salted sharp with the poignancy of an acrid hate towards all living things. To hurt and to wound, and to see what he thus struck bleed and suffer, was the only pleasure life had left for him. He had all his manhood walked justly, according to his light, and trusted in the God to whom he prayed; and his God and his child had denied and betrayed him, and his heart had turned to gall.
The old woman toiled slowly through the roads which lay between her hut and the water-mill.
They were roads which passed through meadows and along cornfields, beside streamlets, and among little belts of woodland, lanes and paths green and pleasant in the summer, but now a slough of frozen mud, and whistled through by northeast winds. She held on her way steadily, stumbling often, and often slipping and going slowly, for she was very feeble from long lack of food, and the intensity of the cold drove through and through her frame. Still she held on bravely, in the teeth of the rough winds and of the coming darkness, though the weather was so wild that the poplar-trees were bent to the earth, and the little light in the Calvary lamp by the river blew to and fro, and at last died out. Still she held on, a little dark, tottering figure, with a prayer on her lips and a hope in her heart.
The snow was falling, the clouds were driving, the waters were roaring, in the twilight: she was only a little black speck in the vast gray waste of the earth and the sky, and the furious air tossed her at times to and fro like a withered leaf. But she would not let it beat her; she groped her way with infinite difficulty, grasping a bough for strength, or waiting under a tree for breath a moment, and thus at last reached the mill-house.
Such light as there was left showed her the kitchen within, the stores of wood, the strings of food; it looked to her as it had looked to Phratos, a place of comfort and of plenty; a strong safe shelter from the inclement night.
She lifted the latch and crept in, and went straight to Claudis Flamma, who was still busy beneath the window with those rude signs which represented to him his earthly wealth.
She stood before him white from the falling snow, with her brown face working with a strong emotion, her eyes clear and honest, and full of an intense anxiety of appeal.
“Flamma,” she said simply to him, “we have been neighbors fifty years and more — thou and I, and many have borrowed of thee to their hurt and shame, but I never. I am eighty-two, and I never in my days asked anything of man or woman or child. But I come to-night to ask bread of you — bread for the four little children at home. I have heard them cry three days, and have had nothing to give them save a berry or two off the trees. I cannot bear it any more. So I have come to you.”
He shut his ledger, and looked at her. They had been neighbors, as she had said, half a century and more; and had often knelt down before the same altar, side by side.
“What dost want?” he asked simply.
“Food,” she made answer; “food and fuel. They are so cold — the little ones.”
“What canst pay for them?” he asked.
“Nothing — nothing now. There is not a thing in the house except the last hay the children sleep on. But if thou wilt let me have a little — just a little — while the weather is so hard, I will find means to pay when the weather breaks. There is my garden; and I can wash and spin. I will pay faithfully. Thou knowest I never owed a brass coin to any man. But I am so old, and the children so young — —”
Claudis Flamma got up and walked to the other side of the kitchen.
Her eyes followed him with wistful, hungry longing. Where he went there stood pans of new milk, baskets of eggs, rolls of bread, piles of fagots. Her feeble heart beat thickly with eager hope, her dim eyes glowed with pleasure and with thankfulness.
He came back and brought to her a few sharp rods, plucked from a thorn-tree.
“Give these to thy children’s children,” he said, with a dark smile. “For these — and for no more — will they recompense thee when they shall grow to maturity.”
She looked at him startled and disquieted, yet thinking that he meant but a stern jest.
“Good Flamma, you mock me,” she murmured, trembling; “the babies are little, and good. Ah, give me food quickly, for God’s sake! A jest is well in season, but to an empty body and a bitter heart it is like a stripe.”
He smiled, and answered her in his harsh grating voice, —
“I give thee the only thing given without payment in this world — advice. Take it or leave it.”
She reeled a little as if he had struck her a blow with his fist, and her face changed terribly, whilst her eyes stared without light or sense in them.
“You jest, Flamma! You only jest!” she muttered. “The little children starve, I tell you. You will give me bread for them? Just a little bread? I will pay as soon as the weather breaks.”
“I can give nothing. I am poor, very poor,” he answered her, with the habitual lie of the miser; and he opened his ledger again, and went on counting up the dots and crosses by which he kept his books.
His servant Pitchou sat spinning by the hearth: she did not cease her work, nor intercede by a word. The poor can be better to the poor than any princes; but the poor can also be more cruel to the poor than any slave-drivers.
The old woman’s head dropped on her breast, she turned feebly, and felt her way, as though she were blind, out of the house and into the air. It was already dark with the darkness of the descending night.
The snow was falling fast. Her hope was gone; all was cold — cold as death.
She shivered and gasped, and strove to totter on: the children were alone. The winds blew and drove the snowflakes in a white cloud against her face; the bending trees creaked and groaned as though in pain; the roar of the mill-water filled the air.
There was now no light: the day was gone, and the moon was hidden; beneath her feet the frozen earth cracked and slipped and gave way. She fell down; being so old and so weakly she could not rise again, but lay still with one limb broken under her, and the winds and the snowstorm beating together upon her.
“The children! the children!” she moaned feebly, and then was still; she was so cold, and the snow fell so fast; she could not lift herself nor see what was around h
er; she thought that she was in her bed at home, and felt as though she would soon sleep.
Through the dense gloom around her there came a swiftly-moving shape, that flew as silently and as quickly as a night-bird, and paused as though on wings beside her.
A voice that was at once timid and fierce, tender and savage, spoke to her through the clouds of driven snow-spray.
“Hush, it is I! I — Folle-Farine. I have brought you my food. It is not much — they never give me much. Still it will help a little. I heard what you said — I was in the loft. Flamma must not know; he might make you pay. But it is all mine, truly mine; take it.”
“Food — for the children!”
The blessed word aroused her from her lethargy; she raised herself a little on one arm, and tried to see whence the voice came that spoke to her.
But the effort exhausted her; she fell again to the ground with a groan — her limb was broken.
Folle-Farine stood above her; her dark eyes gleaming like a hawk’s through the gloom, and full of a curious, startled pity.
“You cannot get up; you are old,” she said abruptly. “See — let me carry you home. The children! yes, the children can have it. It is not much; but it will serve.”
She spoke hastily and roughly; she was ashamed of her own compassion. What was it to her whether any of these people lived or died? They had always mocked and hated her.
“If I did right, I should let them rot, and spit on their corpses,” she thought, with the ferocity of vengeance that ran in her Oriental blood.
Yet she had come out in the storm, and had brought away her food for strangers, though she had been at work all day long, and was chilled to the bone, and was devoured with ravenous hunger.
Why did she do it?
She did not know. She scorned herself. But she was sorry for this woman, so poor and so brave, with her eighty-two years, and so bitterly denied in her extremity.
Manon Dax dimly caught the muttered words, and feebly strove to answer them, whilst the winds roared and the snow beat upon her fallen body.