The keeper of the tavern was unbarring his house door; a girl broke the ice in a pool for her ducks to get at the water; a few famished robins flew to and fro songless.
His own wife was on her doorstep; to her he darted.
"Manon Dax is dead!" he shouted.
"What of that?" said his wife shouldering her broom; a great many had died that winter, and they were so poor and sharp-set with famine themselves, that they had neither bread nor pity to spare.
"This of that," said the man, doggedly, and full of the excitement of his own terrors. "The young devil of Yprès has killed her, that I am sure. She is there in the hut, in the dark, with her eyes glaring like coals. And for what should she be there if not for evil? Tell me that."
"Is it possible?" his wife cried, incredulous, yet willing to believe; while the girl left her ducks, and the wineshop-keeper his door, and the women their cabins, and came and stood round the bearer of such strange news. It was very welcome news in a raw frost-bitten dawn, when a day was beginning that would otherwise have had nothing more wonderful in it than tidings of how a litter of black pigs throve, and how a brown horse had fared with the swelling in the throat.
They were very dull there from year's end to year's end; once a month, maybe, a letter would come in from some soldier-son or brother, or a peddler coming to buy eggs would bring likewise some stray rumor from the outer world;—beyond this there was no change. They heard nothing, and saw nothing, seldom moving a league away from that gray stone crucifix, round which their little homes were clustered.
This man had nothing truly to tell; he had fled horrified to be challenged in the twilight, and the snow, by a creature of such evil omen as Folle-Farine. But when he had got an audience, he was too true an orator and not such a fool as to lose it for such a little beggarly matter as truth; and his tongue clacked quickly of all which his fears and fancies had conceived, until he had talked himself and his listeners into the full belief that Manon Dax being belated had encountered the evil glance of the daughter of all evil, and had been slain thereby in most cruel sorcery.
Now, in the whole neighborhood there was nothing too foul to be accredited of the begotten of the fiend:—a fiend, whom all the grown men and women remembered so well in his earthly form, when he had come to ruin poor Reine Flamma's body and soul, with his eyes like jewels, and his strength passing the strength of all men.
The people listened, gaping, and wonder-struck, and forgetting the bitterness of the cold, being warmed with those unfailing human cordials of foul suspicion and of gratified hatred. Some went off to their daily labor, being unable to spare time for more gossip; but divers women, who had nothing to occupy them, remained about Flandrin.