Part 22 (1/2)

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; ”G.o.d 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 'G.o.d 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 ”G.o.d 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 t.i.tle to a common humanity with them they disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.

At daybreak there pa.s.sed by the open door in the mist a peasant going to his cattle in the fields beyond, pus.h.i.+ng 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 was.h.i.+ng-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 had 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.