"Sure enough she's dead; better so, than to live at the expense of others."
They all stood motionless and aghast. Could anybody venture to touch her, without summoning the mayor? At first they spoke in whispers; then they began to shout again, to make themselves heard.
"I'll go and fetch my ladder from over yonder against the stack," said Delhomme eventually. "It'll serve as a stretcher. It's a bad thing to leave a corpse on the ground."
When he came back with the ladder, and they wanted to take some sheaves to make a bed for the body, Buteau grumbled.
"You shall have your corn back," they said.
"I should just hope so, indeed!" he answered.
Lise, a little ashamed of this meanness, added two bundles as a pillow, and Palmyre was laid upon the ladder, while Françoise, in a sort of dream, bewildered by this death, which had occurred so soon after her own adventure, could not take her eyes off the corpse. At sight of it she felt saddened, and, above all, she was astonished that that thing could ever have been a woman. She remained on guard with Fouan, pending the removal; and the old man said nothing either, though he seemed to think that those who died were very fortunate.
At sunset, when they all went home, two men came and took the stretcher away. The burden was not a heavy one, and there was hardly need of a relay. However, some others were in attendance, and quite a procession was formed. They cut across the field, to avoid a bend in the road. The corpse was stiffening on the sheaves, and some ears fell down behind the head, and swayed to and fro at each jolt of the bearers' measured tread.
In the sky above there now only remained the heat that had accumulated during the day, a ruddy heat that weighed heavily in the blue air. On the horizon, on the other side of the Loir valley, the sun, steeped in vapour, now cast over La Beauce a sheet of yellow rays on a level with the ground. Everything seemed tinged with the fine golden glow of the fair harvest evening. Such corn as was still standing displayed egrets of rosy flame, the stubble ends bristled with a ruddy gleam, and afar, projecting in all directions above the level, tawny sea, the stacks rose up one behind the other, apparently growing preposterously large. On the one side they seemed to be in flames, while on the other they were already black, casting shadows that stretched from end to end of the vast plain.
A solemn stillness fell, broken only by the song of a lark far aloft. None of the worn-out toilers spoke; they followed the corpse with bent heads, as resignedly as a flock of sheep. And there was no sound save a slight creaking of the ladder as the dead woman rocked to and fro on the way back through the ripe corn.