by Ouida
“I cannot rise,” she murmured; “my leg is broken, I think. But it is no matter. Go you to the little ones; whoever you are, you are good, and have pity. Go to them, go. It is no matter for me. I have lived my life — anyway. It will soon be over. I am not in pain — indeed.”
Folle-Farine stood in silence a minute, then she stooped and lifted the old creature in her strong young arms, and with that heavy burden set out on her way in the teeth of the storm.
She had long known the woman, and the grandchildren, by sight and name.
Once or twice when she had passed by them, the grandam, tender of heart, but narrow of brain, and believing all the tales of her neighbors, had drawn the little ones closer to her, under the wing of her serge cloak, lest the evil eye that had bewitched the tanner’s youngest born, should fall on them, and harm them in like manner.
Nevertheless the evil eyes gleamed on her with a wistful sorrow, as Folle-Farine bore her with easy strength and a sure step, through the frozen woodland ways, as she would have borne the load of wood, or the sacks of corn, that she was so well used to carry to and fro like a packhorse.
Manon Dax did not stir nor struggle, she did not even strive to speak again; she was vaguely sensible of a slow, buoyant, painless movement, of a close, soft pressure that sheltered her from the force of the winds, of a subtle warmth that stole through her emaciated aching frame, and made her drowsy and forgetful, and content to be still.
She could do no more. Her day for struggle and for work was done.
Once she moved a little. Her bearer paused and stopped and listened.
“Did you speak?” she whispered.
Manon Dax gave a soft troubled sigh.
“God is good,” she muttered, like one speaking in a dream.
Folle-Farine held on her way; fiercely blown, blinded by the snow, pierced by the blasts of the hurricane, but sure of foot on the ice as a reindeer, and sure of eye in the dark as a night-hawk.
“Are you in pain?” she asked once of the burden she carried.
There was no answer. Old Manon seemed to sleep.
The distance of the road was nothing to her, fleet and firm of step, and inured to all hardships of the weather; yet short as it was, it cost her an hour to travel it, heavily weighted as she was, soaked with snow-water, blown back continually by the opposing winds, and forced to stagger and to pause by the fury of the storm.
At last she reached the hut.
The wind had driven open the door. The wailing cries of the children echoed sorrowfully on the stillness, answered by the bleating of sheep, cold and hungry in their distant folds. The snow had drifted in unchecked; all was quite dark.
She felt her way within, and being used by long custom to see in the gloom, as the night-haunting beasts and birds can see, she found the bed of hay, and laid her burden gently down on it.
The children ceased their wailing, and the two eldest ones crept up close to their grandmother, and pressed their cheeks to hers, and whispered to her eagerly, with their little famished lips, “Where is the food, where is the food?”
But there was still no answer.
The clouds drifted a little from the moon that had been so long obscured; it shone for a moment through the vapor of the heavy sky; the whitened ground threw back the rays increased tenfold; the pale gleam reached the old still face of Manon Dax.
There was a feeble smile upon it — the smile with which her last words had been spoken in the darkness; “God is good!”
She was quite dead.
CHAPTER VI.
All that night Folle-Farine tarried with the children.
The youngest had been suffocated whilst they had been alone, by the snow which had fallen through the roof, and from which its elders had been too small and weakly to be able to drag it out, unaided.
She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors and plains; it is a common fate.
She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter, tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.
“They die of famine — and they die saying their ‘God is good,’” she thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel, and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a nest.
She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying “God is good.” She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.
She forgave — because she forgot — that in other winters this door had been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had mocked her in their first imperfect speech.
The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter’s day came; the storm had lulled, but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.
She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.
Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.
At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.
She rose and called to him.
He stared and stood still.
She went to the doorway and signed to him.
“Old Manon Dax is dead. Will you tell the people? The children are here, alone, and they starve.”
“Manon Dax dead?” he echoed stupidly: he was her nearest neighbor; he had helped her fetch her washing-water sometimes from the well half a league away; when his wife had been down with fever and ague, the old woman had nursed her carefully and well through many a tedious month.
“Yes, I found her on the road, in the snow, last night. She had broken her leg, and she was dead before I got here. Go and send some one. The little children are all alone, and one of them is dead too.”
It was so dark still, that he had not seen at first who it was that addressed him; but slowly, as he stared and stared, and drew nearer to her, he recognized the scarlet girdle, the brown limbs, the straight brow, the fathomless eyes. And he feared her, with a great fear rising there suddenly, before him, out of that still white world of dawn and shadow.
He dropped the handles of his cart and fled; a turn in the road, and the darkness of the morning, soon hid him from sight. She thought that he ha
d gone to summon his people, and she went back and sat again by the sleeping children, and watched the sad still faces of the dead.
The peasant flew home as swiftly as his heavy shoes and the broken ice of the roads would allow.
His cabin was at some distance, at a place where, amidst the fields, a few huts, a stone crucifix, some barns and stacks, and a single wineshop made up a little village, celebrated in the district for its wide-spreading orchards and their excellence of fruits.
Even so early the little hamlet was awake; the shutters were opened; the people were astir; men were brushing the snow from their thresholds; women were going out to their field-work; behind the narrow lattices the sleepy-eyes and curly heads of children peered, while their fingers played with the fanciful incrustations of the frost.
The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins flew to and fro songless.
His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.
“Manon Dax is dead!” he shouted.
“What of that?” said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.
“This of that,” said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of his own terrors. “The young devil of Yprès has killed her, that I am sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that.”
“Is it possible?” his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe; while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse had fared with the swelling in the throat.
They were very dull there from year’s end to year’s end; once a month, maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from the outer world; — beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing, and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.
This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.
Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be accredited of the begotten of the fiend: — a fiend, whom all the grown men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come to ruin poor Reine Flamma’s body and soul, with his eyes like jewels, and his strength passing the strength of all men.
The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.
A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.
“Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We — good Christians and true — should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the young ones hither.”
Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.
“That is as it should be,” assented the other women. “Go, Flandrin, and we — we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to the public charity; better cannot be done. Go.”
“But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply,” cried his wife.
“If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee,” said another.
“Not she,” grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. “One day my blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said ‘By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you are to be blest in another; I know!’ and so laughed and went on. What are you to do with a witch like that, — eh?”
“Go, Flandrin,” shrieked the women in chorus. “Go! Every minute you waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!”
“Come yourselves with me, then,” said Flandrin, sullenly. “I will not go after those infants, it is not a man’s work.”
In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him, of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black, fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused, that Manon Dax’s grandchildren should be the devil’s prey, than those, his choicest, swine.
The women jeered him, menaced him, flouted him, besought him. But vainly — he would not move alone. He had become possessed with the terrors that his own fancy had created; and he would not stir a step for all their imprecations.
“Let us go ourselves, then!” screamed his wife at length, flourishing above her head the broom with which she had swept the snow. “Men are forever cowards. It shall never be said of me, that I left those babes to the fiend while I gave my own children their porridge by the fire!”
There was a sentiment in this that stirred all her companions to emulation. They rushed into their homes, snatched a shovel, a staff, a broom, a pegstick, each whatever came uppermost, and, dragging Flandrin in the midst, went down the sloping frozen road between its fringe of poplars. They were not very sure in their own minds why they went, nor for what they went; but they had a vague idea of doing what was wise and pious, and they had a great hate in their hearts against her.
They sped as fast as the slippery road would let them, and their tongues flew still faster than their feet; the cold of the daybreak made them sharp and keen on their prey; they screamed themselves hoarse, their voices rising shrilly above the whistling of the winds, and the creaking of the trees; and they inflamed each other with ferocious belief in the sorcery they were to punish.
They were in their way virtuous; they were content on very little, they toiled hard from their birth to their grave, they were most of them chaste wives and devoted mothers, they bore privation steadily, and they slaved in fair weather and foul without a complaint. But they were narrow of soul, greedy of temper, bigoted and uncharitable, and, where they thought themselves or their offspring menaced, implacable. They were of the stuff that would be burned for a creed, and burn others for another creed. It is the creed of the vast majority of every nation; the priests and lawgivers of every nation have always told their people that it is a creed holy and honorable — how can the people know that it is at once idiotic and hellish?
Folle-Farine sat within on the damp hay under the broken roof, and watched the open door.
The children were still asleep. The eldest one in his sleep had turned and caught her hand, and held it.
She did not care for them. They had screamed, and run behind the woodstack, or their grandam’s skirts, a hundred times when they had seen her on the r
oad or in the orchard. But she was sorry for them; almost as sorry as she was for the little naked woodpigeons when their nests were scattered on the ground in a tempest, or for the little starveling rabbits when they screamed in their holes for the soft, white mother that was lying, tortured and twisted, in the jaws of a steel trap.
She was sorry for them — half roughly, half tenderly — with some shame at her own weakness, and yet too sincerely sorry to be able to persuade herself to leave them to their fate there, all alone with their dead.
For in the savage heart of Taric’s daughter there was an innermost corner wherein her mother’s nature slept.
She sat there quite still, watching the open porch and listening for footsteps.
The snow was driven in circling clouds by the winds; the dense fog of the dawn lifted itself off the surrounding fields; the branches of the trees were beautiful with hanging icicles; from the meadow hard by there wailed unceasingly the mournful moaning of Flandrin’s cattle, deserted of their master and hungry in their wooden sheds.
She heard a distant convent clock strike six: no one came. Yet, she had resolved not to leave the children all alone; though Flamma should come and find her there, and thrash her for her absence from his tasks. So she sat still and waited.
After a little she heard the crisp cracking of many feet on the frozen snow and ice-filled ruts of the narrow road; she heard a confused clatter of angry voices breaking harshly on the stillness of the winter morning.
The light was stronger now, and through the doorway she saw the little passionate crowd of angry faces as the women pressed onward down the hill with Flandrin in their midst.
She rose and looked out at them quietly.
For a minute they paused — irresolute, silent, perplexed: at the sight of her they were half daunted; they felt the vagueness of the crime they came to bring against her.
The wife of Flandrin recovered speech first, and dared them to the onslaught.