A shriveled dame, who owned the greatest number of brood-hens in the village, who had only one son, a priest, and who was much respected and deferred to by her neighbors, spoke first when Flandrin had ended his tale for the seventh time, it being a little matter to him that his two hungry cows would be lowing all the while vainly for their morning meal.
"Flandrin, you have said well, beyond a doubt; the good soul has been struck dead by sorcery. But, you have forgot one thing, the children are there, and that devil of Yprès is with them. We—good Christians and true—should not let such things be. Go, and drive her out and bring the young ones hither."
Flandrin stood silent. It was very well to say that the devil should be driven out, but it was not so well to be the driver.
"That is as it should be," assented the other women. "Go, Flandrin, and we—we will take the little souls in for this day, and then give them to the public charity; better cannot be done. Go."
"But mind that thou dost strike that beast, Folle-Farine, sharply," cried his wife.
"If thou showest her the cross, she will have to grovel and flee," said another.
"Not she," grumbled the old dame, whose son was a priest. "One day my blessed son, who is nearly a saint, Heaven knows, menaced her with his cross, and she stood straight, and fearless, and looked at it, and said 'By that sign you do all manner of vileness in this world, and say you are to be blest in another; I know!' and so laughed and went on. What are you to do with a witch like that,—eh?"
"Go, Flandrin," shrieked the women in chorus. "Go! Every minute you waste, the little angels are nearer to hell!"
"Come yourselves with me, then," said Flandrin, sullenly. "I will not go after those infants, it is not a man's work."
In his own mind he was musing on a story his priests had often told him, of swine into which exorcised devils had entered, and dispatched swiftly down a slope to a miserable end; and he thought of his own pigs, black, fat, and happy, worth so much to him in the market. Better, he mused, that Manon Dax's grandchildren should be the devil's prey, than those, his choicest, swine.