It is the sort of comfort that is always offered to the homeless, and they are always thought ungrateful if they will not be consoled by it.
"I wish I could take you, Bernardou!" she murmured, with a momentary softness that was exquisitely tender in its contrast to her haughty and fierce temper. "I wish I could."
For one wild instant the thought came to her to break from her bonds, and take this creature who was as lonely as herself, and to wander away and away into that unknown land which stretched around her, and of which she knew no more than one of the dark leaves knew that grew in the snow-filled ditch. But the thought passed unuttered: she knew neither where to go nor what to do. Her few early years in the Liebana were too dreamlike and too vaguely remembered to be any guide to her; and the world seemed only to her in her fancies as a vast plain, dreary and dismal, in which every hand would be against her, and every living thing be hostile to her.
Besides, the long habitude of slavery was on her, and it is a yoke that eats into the flesh too deeply to be wrenched off without an effort.
As she stood thinking, with the child's eager hands clasping her skirts, a shrill voice called from the wood-stack and dung-heap outside Flandrin's house,—
"Bernardou! Bernardou! thou little plague. Come within. What dost do out there in the dark? Mischief, I will warrant."
The speaker strode out, and snatched and bore and clutched him away; she was the sister of Rose Flandrin, who lived with them, and kept the place and the children in order.
"Thou little beast!" she muttered, in fury. "Dost dare talk to the witch that killed thy grandmother? Thou shalt hie to bed, and sup on a fine whipping. Thank God, thou goest to the hospital to-morrow! Thou wouldst bring a dire curse on the house in reward for our alms to thee."
She dragged him in and slammed-to the door, and his cries echoed above the busy shouts and laughter of the Flandrin family, gathered about the tinseled Punch and the sugared Jesus, and the soup-pot, that stewed them a fat farm-yard goose for their supper.
Folle-Farine listened awhile, with her hand clinched on her knife; then she toiled onward through the village, and left it and its carols and carouses behind her in the red glow of the sinking sun.