“It is winter—that same cruelly severe winter which laid the seeds of the good Count’s fatal illness. Heavy snow is on the ground, and the air is bitter and cutting. The village of Sarinet seems asleep; there is hardly any one moving about. It is so cold—so cold that the poor inhabitants, such as are not obliged to be away at their daily work, are trying to keep some little warmth in them by staying indoors. And yet indoors it is scarcely warmer; in many of the cottages there is no fire to be seen, in some but a few wretched embers on the great open chimney, down which blows the wintry wind as if angry that any one should attempt to get warm. The well, or fountain, as they call it, whence they all draw water, has been frozen for some days; when the men come home at night they have to break the ice away with hatchets. There are few children to be seen—one is almost glad to think so—and yet the absence of the little creatures has brought sad sorrow to many hearts. For not many months ago the village and some others in the neighbourhood had been visited by a wasting fever, the result of bad food, overwork, and general wretchedness, and scarcely a family but had lost some of its members—above all, among the children.
“At the door of one of the miserable cottages stands a young girl of about fifteen, crying bitterly. Cold though it is, she scarcely seems to feel it. She looks up and down the road as if watching for some one, then she re-enters the cottage, which is bare and miserable beyond description, and tries to coax into flame a little heap of twigs and withered leaves which are all the fuel she possesses. Her clothing is desperately poor—one could scarcely see that it had ever had any colour or shape—and yet there is an attempt at neatness about her, and she is or rather she would have been had she had a fair amount of food and decent clothing, a pretty, sweet-looking girl.
“As she stands again in her restless misery at the door of the cottage, an old woman comes out from the next door.
”‘What is the matter, Marguerite?’ she says; ‘is your brother ill again?’
”‘Oh, Madelon,’ she exclaims, ‘I think it would be better if he were dead! My poor boy!’ and she burst out sobbing again.
”‘What is it? Anything new? Come in here and tell me,’ said the woman, and she drew Marguerite inside her own dwelling, which was, perhaps, a shade less wretched than its neighbour, though in one corner, on a pallet bed hardly worth calling such—it was in reality but a bag of coarse sacking filled with straw—a man, looking more like a corpse than a human being, was lying, apparently in a state of half-unconsciousness.
”‘He is getting better, they say,’ observed the woman nodding her head in his direction. ‘The doctor looked in yesterday—he had been up at the Château to see the little lord. Yes, he says Jean is getting better, and with good food he might be fit for something again,’ she added in a hard, indifferent tone, as if she did not much care.
”‘And will they not send some to him—they—up at the Château?’ said Marguerite, indignantly. ‘They know how the accident happened; it was in saving my lord’s haystacks; but for him every one says they would all have been burnt.’
“The woman gave a short, bitter laugh.
”‘On the other hand, as the bailiff says,’ she replied, ‘we should be overwhelmed with gratitude that Jean has not been accused of setting fire to them. You know what that would have meant,’ and she passed her hand round her neck with an expressive gesture, for in those days a much smaller crime than that of incendiarism—or even, alas! in most cases, the suspicion of such a crime—was too surely punished by hanging, and hanging sometimes preceded by tortures too frightful to tell you of, and followed by hideous insult to the poor, dead body, adding untold horror to the misery of the victim’s friends, even after he could no longer suffer. ‘There is one cause for thankfulness,’ Jean’s wife went on,—I have called her an old woman, but she was, in reality, barely forty, though you would have taken her for fully twenty years more—‘and that is that he and I are now alone to bear it. The fever has been our best friend after all.’