The day broke tranquilly. There was a rosy light over all the earth. In the cornlands a few belated sheaves stood alone on the reaping ground, while children sought stray ears that might still be left among the wild flowers and the stubble. The smell of millions of ripening autumn fruits filled the air from the orchards. The women going to their labor in the fields, gave each other a quiet good-day; whilst their infants pulled down the blackberry branches in the lanes or bowled the early apples down the roads. Great clusters of black grapes were ready mellowed on the vines that clambered over cabin roof and farmhouse chimney. The chimes of the Angelus sounded softly from many a little steeple bosomed in the rolling woods.
An old man going to his work, passed by a girl lying asleep in a hollow of the ground, beneath a great tree of elder, black with berries. She was lying with her face turned upward; her arms above her head; her eyelids were wet; her mouth smiled with a dreamy tenderness; her lips murmured a little inaudibly; her bosom heaved with fast uneven palpitating breaths.
It was sunrise. In the elder thicket little chaffinches were singing, and a missel-thrush gave late in the year a song of the April weather. The east was radiant with the promise of a fair day, in which summer and autumn should be wedded with gorgeous pomp of color, and joyous chorus of the birds. The old man roughly thrust against her breast the heavy wooden shoe on his right foot.
"Get up!" he muttered. "Is it for the like of you to lie and sleep at day-dawn? Get up, or your breath will poison the grasses that the cattle feed on, and they will die of an elf-shot, surely."
She raised her head from where it rested on her outstretched arms, and looked him in the eyes and smiled unconsciously; then glanced around and rose and dragged her steps away, in the passive mechanical obedience begotten by long slavery.
There was a shiver in her limbs; a hunted terror in her eyes; she had wandered sleepless all night long.
"Beast," muttered the old man, trudging on with a backward glance at her. "You have been at a witches' sabbath, I dare be bound. We shall have fine sickness in the styes and byres. I wonder would a silver bullet hurt you, as the fables say? If I were sure it would, I would not mind having my old silver flagon melted down, though it is the only thing worth a rush in the house."
She went on through the long wet rank grass, not hearing his threats against her. She drew her steps slowly and lifelessly through the heavy dews; her head was sunk; her lips moved audibly, and murmured as she went, "A little gold! a little gold!"
"Maybe some one has shot her this very day-dawn," thought the peasant, shouldering his axe as he went down into the little wood to cut ash-sticks for the market. "She looks half dead already; and they say the devil-begotten never bleed."
The old man guessed aright. She had received her mortal wound; though it was one bloodless and tearless, and for which no moan was made, lest any should blame the slayer.