She laid it, stiff already in the cold of the night, beside the body of its old grandam, who had perished in endeavoring to save it; they lay together, the year-old child and the aged woman, the broken bud and the leafless bough. They had died of hunger, as the birds die on the moors and plains; it is a common fate.
She stayed beside the children, who were frightened and bewildered and quite mute. She divided such food as she had brought between them, not taking any herself. She took off the sheepskin which she wore in winter, tied round her loins as her outdoor garment, and made a little nest of it for the three, and covered them with it. She could not close the door, from the height of the drifted snow, and the wind poured in all night long, though in an hour the snow ceased to fall. Now and then the clouds parting a little, let a ray of the moon stray in; and then she could see the quiet faces of the old dead woman and the child.
"They die of famine—and they die saying their 'God is good,'" she thought and she pondered on it deeply, and with the bitter and melancholy irony which life had already taught her, while the hours of the night dragged slowly on; the winds howled above the trembling hovel, and the children sobbed themselves to sleep at last, lulled by the warmth of the skin, into which they crept together like young birds in a nest.
She sat there patiently; frozen and ravenous; yet not drawing a corner of the sheepskin to her own use, nor regretting a crumb of the bread she had surrendered. She hated the human race, whose hand was always against her. She had no single good deed to thank them for, nor any single gentle word. Yet she was sorry for that old creature, who had been so bitterly dealt with all her years through, and who had died saying "God is good." She was sorry for those little helpless, unconscious starving animals, who had lost the only life that could labor for them.
She forgave—because she forgot—that in other winters this door had been shut against her, as against an accursed thing, and these babes had mocked her in their first imperfect speech.
The dawn broke; the sharp gray winter's day came; the storm had lulled, but the whole earth was frost-bound and white with snow, and the air was piercing, and the sky dark and overcast.
She had to leave them; she was bound to her daily labor at the mill, she knew that if when the sun rose she should be found absent, she and they too would surely suffer. What to do for them she could not tell. She had no friend save Marcellin, who himself was as poor as these. She never spoke to any living thing, except a sheep-dog, or a calf bleating for its mother, or a toil-worn bullock staggering over the plowed clods.
Between her and all those around her there were perpetual enmity and mistrust, and scarcely so much of a common bond as lies in a common humanity. For in her title to a common humanity with them they disbelieved; while she in her scorn rejected claim to it.
At daybreak there passed by the open door in the mist a peasant going to his cattle in the fields beyond, pushing through the snow a rude hand-cart full of turnips, and other winter food.
She rose and called to him.