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 her; 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.
"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,