To the starving, wet, and woe-begone peasants who would go to it with aching bones and aching hearts, it seemed desolate and terrible; they dreaded with a great dread the sharp voice of its master—the hardest and the shrewdest and the closest-fisted Norman of them all.
For they were most of them his debtors, and so were in a bitter subjugation to him, and had to pay those debts as best they might with their labor or their suffering, with the best of all their wool, or oil, or fruit; often with the last bit of silver that had been an heirloom for five centuries, or with the last bit of money buried away in an old pitcher under their apple-tree to be the nest-egg of their little pet daughter's dowry.
And yet Claudis Flamma was respected among them; for he could outwit them, and was believed to be very wealthy, and was a man who stood well with the good saints and with holy church,—a wise man, in a word, with whom these northern folks had the kinship of mutual industry and avarice.
For the most part the population around Yprès was thrifty and thriving in a cautious, patient, certain way of well-doing; and by this portion of it the silent old miser was much honored as a man laborious and penurious, who chose to live on a leek and a rye loaf, but who must have, it was well known, put by large gains in the thatch of his roof or under the bricks of his kitchen.
By the smaller section of it—poor, unthrifty, loose-handed fools—who belied the province of their birth so far as to be quick to spend and slow to save, and who so fell into want and famine and had to borrow of others their children's bread, the old miller was hated with a hate deeper and stronger because forced to be mute, and to submit, to cringe, and to be trod upon, in the miserable servitude of the hopeless debtor.
In the hard winter which followed on that sickly autumn, these and their like fell further in the mire of poverty than ever, and had to come and beg of Flamma loans of the commonest necessaries of their bare living. They knew that they would have to pay a hundredfold in horrible extortion when the spring and summer should bring them work, and give them fruit on their trees and crops on their little fields; but they could do no better.
It had been for many years the custom to go to Flamma in such need; and being never quit of his hold his debtors never could try for aid elsewhere.
The weather towards the season of Noël became frightfully severe; the mill stream never stopped, but all around it was frozen, and the swamped pastures were sheets of ice. The birds died by thousands in the open country, and several of the sheep perished in snowstorms on the higher lands.
There was dire want in many of the hovels and homesteads, and the bare harvests of a district usually so opulent in all riches of the soil brought trouble and dearth in their train. Sickness prevailed because the old people and the children in their hunger ate berries and roots unfit for human food; the waters swelled, the ice melted, many homes were flooded, and some even swept away.
Old Pitchou and Claudis Flamma alone were content; the mill wheel never stopped work, and famine prices could be asked in this extremity.