"Why?" she asked; and as she spoke looked up at last, a flash of light in her grey eyes.
"Why?" he repeated, grinning across the table at her, "because he would be worth five crowns to me. There is five crowns, I am told, on the head of every Girondin who has been in arms, my girl. Five crowns! It is not every day we can earn five crowns!"
The French Revolution, it will be understood, was at its height. The more moderate and constitutional Republicans—the Girondins, as they were called—worsted in Paris by the Jacobins and the mob, had lately tried to raise the provinces against the capital, and to this end had drawn together at Caen, near the border of Brittany. They had been defeated, however, and the Jacobins, in this month of August, were preparing to take a fearful vengeance at once on them and on the Royalists. The Reign of Terror had begun. Even to such a boor as this, sitting over his black bread, in his remote hovel, the Revolution had come home, and, in common with many a thousand others, he wondered what he could make of it.
The girl did not answer, even by the look of contempt to which he had become accustomed, and for which he hated her, and for which he beat her; and he repeated, "Five crowns! Ah, it is money, that is! Mon Dieu!" Then, with a sudden exclamation, he sprang up. "What is that?" he cried.
He had been sitting with his back to the barn, but he turned, as he spoke, so as to face it. Something had startled him—a movement, a rustling in the straw behind him. "What is that?" he asked again, his hand on the table, his face lowering and watchful.
The girl had risen also; and, as the last word passed his lips, sprang by him with a low cry, and aimed a frantic blow with her stool at something he could not see, something low, on the floor.
"What is it?" he asked, recoiling.
"A rat!" she answered, breathless. And she aimed another blow at it.
"Where?" he asked sharply. "Where is it?" He snatched up his stool, too, and at that moment a rat darted out of the straw, ran nimbly between his legs, and plunged into a hole by the door. He flung the wooden stool after it; but in vain. "It was a rat!" he said, as if until then he had doubted it.
"Thank God!" she muttered. She was shaking all over.