"Keep still!" replied Mazurec with the mien of a tiger that rendered his face still more frightful; "Keep still, or I may believe you are proud of having a child of your seigneur."
Aveline answered with a hysterical sob, while Alison cried indignantly: "Wretch, you will yet be the cause of your wife's death!"
"I had as lief she was dead as alive ... as to the child she now carries ... he shall not live ... I shall smother the noble whelp."
"Well, then, why don't you kill both mother and child. That would be less cruel than to kill Aveline by little and little as you are doing!" And looking at Mazurec with eyes of angry reproach, Alison added: "Oh, Mazurec the Lambkin, the unfortunate girl whose death you now wish, once made your heart bound with joy when you passed the door at which she used to spin!"
At these words which recalled to Mazurec the spring-tide of his love, days that were sweet even to the wretched serf, the young man broke down in tears, threw the fork aside, and closely embracing his wife, whose pale face he covered with kisses, he said: "Pardon me, my poor Aveline!... Oh, my blood has turned to gall ... I have suffered so much.... I still suffer so much.... Pardon me, my dear wife!"
Mazurec was uttering these words when suddenly the species of air-hole above the well was almost wholly obstructed with large stones that were being rolled about by the men of the bailiff of Nointel, and the bailiff himself, applying his mouth as closely as he could to the little opening that was left, shouted down into the cavity: "All of you, vassals of the parish of Cramoisy and neighboring villages, you are taxed, as your quota of the ransom of our very noble, very high, very dear and very powerful seigneur, the sum of one thousand florins; the other parishes of the seigniory shall be similarly taxed. Rummage around your purses quickly so that you meet the sum demanded. You have hiding places where you bury your valuables. Choose quickly between death and your money. If within the time it shall take me to utter a 'pater'[5] and an 'ave,'[6] one of you does not come out with the money, you will all be smoked to death like so many foxes in their burrow, after which the corpses will be rifled."
The bailiff stopped; the air-hole was tightly closed with clods of earth; and the cavern was plunged into utter darkness.
"Oh, my God! What's going to happen? Leave me not Mazurec," cried Aveline in a tremor and throwing her arms around her husband who jumped up the better to hear the announcement made by the bailiff, and which, repeated from mouth to mouth by the vassals, left them steeped in gloomy silence. The unhappy serfs clung all the more tightly to their little coin, their last resource, the only fruits left to them of their crushing labors and homicidal privations, seeing that they had succeeded in saving it from the rapacity of their seigneurs only by dint of untold privations and nameless devices, often struggling against the torture itself that was frequently inflicted upon them in the hope of wringing from them the disclosure of the hiding places where they kept their little treasure buried. The first shock being over, cries of indignation and revolt resounded in the cavern. The noise increased more and more.
"We leave our homes to live in holes like wild beasts, and we are hunted down even here!"
"To be pillaged by the English, and be forced besides to pay for the ransom of our seigneurs!"