And his heart was hard against them. They had stolen his only birthright—freedom.
Had he craved life so much as to desire to live by shame he would soon have gone out into the dusky night and have snatched food enough for his wants from some rich husbandman's granaries, or have stabbed some miser at prayers, for a bag of gold—rather crime than the debt of a beggar.
So he reasoned; stung and made savage by the scourge of enforced humiliation. Hating himself because, in obedience to mere animal craving, he had taken and eaten, not asking whether what he took was his own.
He had closed his mouth, living, and had been ready to die mute, glad only that none had pitied him; his heart hardened itself utterly against this unknown hand which had snatched him from death's dreamless ease and ungrudged rest, to awaken him to a humiliation that would be as ashes in his teeth so long as his life should last.
He arose slowly and staggered to the casement.
He fancied he was delirious, and had distempered visions of the food so long desired. He knew that he had been starving long—how long? Long enough for his brain to be weak and visited with phantoms. Instinctively he touched the long round rolls of bread, the shape of the wine cask, the wicker of the basket: they were the palpable things of common life; they seemed to tell him that he had not dreamed.
Then it was charity? His lips moved with a curse.
That was his only thanksgiving.
The windows were unshuttered; through them he looked straight out upon the rising day—a day rainless and pale, and full of cool softness, after the deluge of the rains.
The faint sunlight of a spring that was still chilled by winter was shed over the flooded fields and swollen streams; snow-white mists floated before the languid passage of the wind; and the moist land gave back, as in a mirror, the leafless trees, the wooden bridges, the belfries, and the steeples, and the strange sad bleeding Christs.