"To the castle!" roared the serf, continuing his agitated walk, his arms crossed over his chest. Trembling from head to foot, Joan clasped her hands, and tried to speak. In her terror, she could not at first utter a word; her teeth chattered. At last she said in a faint voice: "Fergan—you must have lost your wits when you say you will go to the castle."
"I shall go after the moon has set."
"Oh! I have lost my poor child," rejoined Joan moaning, "I am going to lose my husband also." She moaned again. The imprecations and the foot-falls of the serf alone interrupted the silence of the night. The fire went out in the fire-place, but the moon, just risen, threw her pale rays into the interior of the hut through the open spaces left by the pole and bunches of brush that took the place of the burnt-out roof. The silence lasted long. Joan the Hunchback taking courage anew, resumed in an accent that was almost confident: "You propose to go to-night—to the castle—fortunately that's impossible." And seeing that the serf did not intermit his silent walk, Joan took his hand as he moved toward her: "Why do you not answer? That frightens me." He roughly withdrew his hand, and thrusting his wife back, exclaimed in an irritated voice: "Leave me alone, woman, leave me alone."
The feeble creature fell down a few steps beyond among some rubbish, and her head having struck against a piece of wood, she could not hold back a cry of pain. Fergan walked back, and by the light of the moon he saw Joan rising painfully. He ran to her, helped her to sit down on one of the stones of the fire-place, and asked anxiously: "Did you hurt yourself falling?"
"No, no, my dear husband."
"My poor Joan!" exclaimed the serf alarmed, having placed one of his hands on the forehead of his wife, "you bleed!"
"I have been weeping," she replied sweetly, staunching her wound with a lock of her long disheveled hair.
"You suffer? Answer me, dear wife!"
"No, no, I fell because I am feeble," answered Joan with her angelic mildness; "let's not think about that," and she added, smiling sadly and alluding to her deformity, "I need not fear being made ugly by a scar."
Fergan imagined that Joan the Hunchback meant he would have treated her with less rudeness if she had been handsome, and he felt deeply grieved. In a tone of kind reproach he replied: "Apart from the hastiness of my temper, have I not always treated you as the best of wives?"