The silence and the inactivity startled her into a sense of them, as no noise or movement, curses or blows, could have done. She looked around stupidly; the window-shutters of the house-windows were closed, as though it were still night.
She signed rapidly to the dumb boy.
"What has happened? Why is the mill not at work thus late?"
The boy left off blowing the thistle feathers on the wind, and grinned, and answered on his hands, "Flamma is almost dead, they say."
And he grinned again, and laughed, as far as his uncouth and guttural noises could be said to approach the triumph and the jubilance of laughter.
She stared at him blankly for awhile, bewildered and shaken from the stupor of her own misery. She had never thought of death and her tyrant in unison.
He had seemed a man formed to live on and on and on unchanging for generations; he was so hard, so unyielding, so hale, so silent, so callous to all pain; it had ever seemed to her—and to the country round—that death itself would never venture to come to wrestle with him. She stood among the red and the purple and the russet gold of the latest summer flowers in the mill-garden, where he had scourged her as a little child for daring to pause and cool her burning face in the sweetness of the white lilies. Could that ruthless arm be unnerved even by age or death?—it seemed to her impossible.
All was quite still. Nothing stirred, except the silvery gnats of the morning, and the bees, and the birds in the leaves. There seemed a strange silence everywhere, and the great wheels stood still in the mill-water; never within the memory of any in that countryside had those wheels failed to turn at sunrise, unless locked by a winter-frost.
She hastened her steps, and went within. The clock ticked, the lean cat mewed; other sound there was none. She left her wooden shoes at the bottom step, and stole up the steep stairs. The woman Pitchou peered with a scared face out from her master's chamber.
"Where hast been all night?" she whispered in her grating voice; "thy grandsire lies a-dying."