‘Thou lazy dreamer!’ she said, pulling him to his feet by the collar of his blue cotton blouse, and giving him a push in the direction of the pig-sty, ‘there is all thy work to do, and instead of doing it thou liest and sleepest as if thou wert the son of a lord. Make haste now, and feed the cow and the chickens, and take the cow to the pasture over by the bog-side yonder. See, if thou lingerest I shall take the stick, as I took it yesterday.’
Apparently the threat was no idle one, for the little boy went off hurriedly. He entered the cottage, and in a few minutes he returned dragging a pail which was evidently too heavy for him, and with much exertion managed at last to empty its contents into a great stone trough. Then he let down some low wooden bars, and from a rough enclosure two or three long-legged, bony pigs rushed out, jostling one another, and almost knocking the little fellow over in their haste to get at their food.
He stood watching them dully, leaning against the gate almost as if he had not energy to go on to his next task.
Perhaps the woman noticed this, and perhaps the thought rose in her mind that it would not pay to work the little foreigner—whom her son Jacques had brought from Paris one cold January day, bidding her at all costs to keep him safely, and guard against any possibility of his escape—too hard. For he had already been ill once, and he might fall ill again; and if anything happened to him then the three francs which Jacques sent her regularly for his board would cease to arrive, and the little hoard of silver which she was gathering in the old cracked coffee-pot which stood on the shelf above her bed would grow no bigger, and that would be a thousand pities, for she cared more for silver francs than for children.
‘See here, Pierre,’ she said, going into the cottage and returning with two thick slices of rye-bread, between which she had placed a morsel of meat and a sliced shalot, ‘it is fine and warm in the sun, so thou and Nanette shall have a little fête. Here is thy dinner; thou canst carry it with thee, and lie out in the sun all day on the hillside, while Nanette grazes to her heart’s content. See, thou canst go at once. I can attend to the poultry.’
The boy took the sandwich, which the old woman wrapped up in a piece of greasy paper, and put it carefully away in a little wallet which he wore slung over his shoulder.
‘Shall I tether Nanette, madame, or shall I let her go free?’ he asked. He spoke in the same patois in which the woman had spoken, but his accent was strangely foreign.
‘Thou canst lead her with the rope until thou reachest the other side, and then thou canst let her graze where she will,’ replied the woman; ‘only thou must keep in sight of the cottage, and be home ere the sun goes down.’
She turned away, and the boy took down a length of rope from the wall, and deftly slipped it over the horns of a gentle-looking little dun cow which had come forward, and was licking the sides of the trough where the pigs had fed, in the vain hope that she might find some of their food still sticking to the edges.