They hissed, they screamed, they hurled their rage at her; they accused her of a thousand crimes; they filled the hut with clamor as of a thousand tongues; they foamed, they spat, they struck at her with their sticks; and she stood quiet, looking at them, and the old dead face of Manon Dax lay upward in the dim light.
The eldest boy struggled in the grasp of the peasant woman who had seized him, and stretched his arms, instead, to the one who had fed him and whose hand he had held all through his restless slumber in that long and dreary night.
The woman covered his eyes with a scream.
"Ah—h!" she moaned, "see how the innocent child is bewitched! It is horrible!"
"Look on that;—oh, infernal thing!" cried Flandrin's wife, lifting up her treasured figure of Peter. "You dare not face that blessed image. See—see all of you—how she winces, and turns white!"
Folle-Farine had shrunk a little as the child had called her. Its gesture of affection was the first that she had ever seen towards her in any human thing.
She laughed aloud as the image of Peter was thrust in her face. She saw it was some emblem and idol of their faith, devoutly cherished. She stretched her hand out, wrenched it away, trampled on it, and tossed it through the doorway into the snow, where it sank and disappeared. Then she folded her arms, and waited for them.
There was a shriek at the blasphemy of the impious act; then they rushed on her.
They came inflamed with all the fury which abject fear and bigoted hatred can beget in minds of the lowest and most brutal type. They were strong, rude, ignorant, fanatical peasants, and they abhorred her, and they believed no child of theirs to be safe in its bed while she walked alive abroad. Beside such women, when in wrath and riot, the tiger and the hyena are as the lamb and the dove.
They set on her with furious force; they flung her, they trod on her, they beat her, they kicked her with their wood-shod feet, with all the malignant fury of the female animal that fights for its offspring's and its own security.