She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she knew not why, into the deepest shadow.
Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself atonement for her fault—the fault through which those tender little bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the year.
She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had taken.
Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute; she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.
So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses—a spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the past winter.
It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire, that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.
The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds'-nests, knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all together in competition but in amity.
Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom amidst tufts of thyme.