Folle-Farine. Ouida
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 windlass; 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.
"Where hast been?" he asked sharply of her. "Pitchou says thou hast not lain in thy bed all night long. Is it so?"
Folle-Farine lifted her head slowly, with a dazed stupid pain in her eyes.
"Yes, it is true," she answered, doggedly.
"And where hast been, then?" he asked, through his clinched teeth; enraged that his servant had been quicker of eye and of ear than himself.
A little of her old dauntless defiance gleamed in her face through its stupor and languor, as she replied to him with effort in brief phrases—
"I went after old Manon Dax, to give her my supper. She died in the road, and I carried her home. The youngest child was dead too. I stayed there because the children were alone; I called to Flandrin and told him; he came with his wife and other women, and they said I had killed old Dax; they set on me, and beat me, and pricked me for a witch. It is no matter. But it made me late."
In her glance upward, even in the curtness of her words, there was an unconscious glimmer of appeal—a vague fancy that for once she might, perhaps, meet with approval and sympathy, instead of punishment and contempt. She had never heard a kind word from him, nor one of any compassion, and yet a dim, unuttered hope was in her heart that for once he might condemn her persecutors and pardon her.
But the hope was a vain one, like all which she had cherished since first the door of the mill-house had opened to admit her.
Flamma only set his teeth tighter. In his own soul he had been almost ashamed of his denial to his old neighbor, and had almost feared that it would lose him the good will of that good heaven which had sent him so mercifully such a sharp year of famine to enrich him. Therefore, it infuriated him to think that this offspring of a foul sin should have had pity and charity where he had lacked them.
He looked at her and saw, with grim glee, that she was black and blue with bruises, and that the linen which she held together across her bosom had been stained with blood.
"Flandrin and his wife are honest people, and pious," he said, in answer to her. "When they find a wench out of her bed at night, they deal rightly with her, and do not hearken to any lies that she may tell them of feigned almsgiving to cover her vices from their sight. I thank them that they did so much of my work for me. They might well prick thee for a witch; but they will never cut so deep into thy breast as to be able to dig the mark of the devil out of it. Now, up and work, or it will be the worse for thee."
She obeyed him.
There, during the dark winter's day, the pain which she endured, with her hunger and the cold of the weather, made her fall thrice like a dead thing on the snow of the court and the floors of the sheds.
But she lay insensible till the youth in her brought back consciousness, without aid. In those moments of faintness, no one noticed her save the dog, who came and crept to her to give her warmth, and strove to wake her with the kisses of his rough tongue.
She did her work as best she might; neither Flamma nor his servant once spoke to her.
"My women dealt somewhat roughly with thy wench at break of day, good Flamma," said the man Flandrin, meeting him in the lane that afternoon, and fearful of offending the shrewd old man, who had so many of his neighbors in his grip. "I hope thou wilt not take it amiss? The girl maddened my dame—spitting on her Peter, and throwing the blessed image away in a ditch."
"The woman did well," said Flamma, coldly, driving his gray mare onward through the fog; and Flandrin could not tell whether he were content, or were displeased.
Claudis Flamma himself hardly knew which he was. He held her as the very spawn of hell; and yet it was loathsome to him that his neighbors should also know and say that a devil had been the only fruit of that fair offspring of his own, whom he and they had so long held as a saint.
The next day, and the next, and the next again after that, she was too ill to stir; they beat her and called her names, but it was of no use; they could not get work out of her; she was past it, and beyond all rousing of their sticks, or of their words.
They were obliged to let her be. She lay for nearly four days in the hay in her loft, devoured with fever, and with every bone and muscle in pain. She had a pitcher of water by her, and drank continually, thirstily, like a sick dog. With rest and no medicine but the cold spring water, she recovered: she had been delirious in a few of the hours, and had dreamed of nothing but of the old life in the Liebana, and of the old sweet music of Phratos. She remained there untended, shivering, and fever-stricken, until the strength of her youth returned to her. She rose on the fifth day recovered, weaker, but otherwise little the worse, with the soft sad songs of her old friend the viol ringing always through her brain.
The fifth day from the death of Manon Dax, was the day of the new year.
There was no work being done at the mill; the wheel stood still, locked fast, for the deep stream was close bound in ice; frost had returned, and the country was white with snow two feet deep, and bleak and bare, and rioted over by furious cross winds.
Flamma and Pitchou were in the kitchen when she entered it; they looked up, but neither spoke to her. In being ill—for the first time since they had had to do with her—she had committed, for the millionth time, a crime.
There was no welcome for her in that cheerless place, where scarcely a spark of fire was allowed to brighten the hearth, where the hens straying in from without, sat with ruffled feathers, chilled and moping, and where the old Black Forest clock in the corner, had stopped from the intense cold, and grimly pointed midnight, at high noon.
There was no welcome for her: she went out into the air, thinking the woods, even at midwinter, could not be so lonesome as was that cheerless house.
The sun was shining through a rift in the stormy clouds, and the white roofs, and the ice-crusted waters, and the frosted trees were glittering in its light.