An old man sat on one side of the wide hearth; an old woman, who span, on the other; the spinning-wheel turned, the thread flew, the logs smoked and flamed, the red glow played on the blue and white tiles of the chimney-place, and danced on the pewter and brass on the shelves; from the rafters there hung smoked meats and dried herbs and strings of onions; there was a crucifix, and below it a little Nativity, in wax and carved wood.
He could not tell that the goodly stores were only gathered there to be sold later at famine prices to a starving peasantry; he could not tell that the wooden god was only worshiped in a blind, bigoted, brutal selfishness, that desired to save its own soul, and to leave all other souls in eternal damnation.
He could not tell; he only saw old age and warmth and comfort; and what the people who hooted him as a heathen called the religion of Love.
"They will surely be good to her?" he thought. "Old people, and prosperous, and alone by their fireside."
It seemed that they must be so.
Anyway, there was no other means to save her from Taric.
His heart was sore within him, for he had grown to love the child; and to the vagrant instincts of his race the life of the house and of the hearth seemed like the life of the cage for the bird. Yet Phratos, who was not altogether as his own people were, but had thought much and often in his own wild way, knew that such a life was the best for a woman-child,—and, above all, for a woman-child who had such a sire as Taric.
To keep her with himself was impossible. He had always dwelt with his tribe, having no life apart from theirs; and even if he had left them, wherever he had wandered, there would Taric have followed, and found him, and claimed the child by his right of blood. There was no other way to secure her from present misery and future shame, save only this; to place her with her mother's people.
She stood beside him, still and silent, gazing through the snowflakes at the warmth of the mill-kitchen within.
He stooped over her, and pushed between her fur garment and her skin the letter he had found on the breast of the dead woman in the Liebana.