For six weeks, they talked of nothing in the huerta but old Barret.
Men and women went on Sundays to the prison of Valencia as though on a pilgrimage, in order to look through the bars at the poor liberator, who grew thinner and thinner, his eyes more sunken, and his glance more troubled.
The day of his trial arrived and he was sentenced to death.
The news made a deep impression in the plain; parish priests and mayors started a movement to avoid such a shame.... A member of the district to find himself on the scaffold! And as Barret had always been among the docile, voting as the political bosses ordered him to vote, and passively obeying as he was commanded, they made trips to Madrid in order to save his life, and his pardon was opportunely granted.
The farmer came forth from the prison as thin as a mummy, and was conducted to Ceuta, where he died after a few years.
His family scattered; disappearing like a handful of straw in the wind.
The daughters, one after the other, left the families which had taken them in, and went to Valencia to earn their living as servants; and the poor widow, tired of troubling others with her infirmities, was taken to the hospital, and died there in a short time.
The people of the huerta, with that facility which every one displays in forgetting the misfortune of others, scarcely ever spoke of the terrible tragedy of old Barret, and then only to wonder what had become of his daughters.
But nobody forgot the fields and the farm-house, which remained exactly as on the day when the judge ejected the unfortunate farmer from them.
It was a silent agreement of the whole district; an instinctive conspiracy which few words prepared but in which the very trees and roads seemed to have a part.