"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 road 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