And as all this to the mind of the fat boss was a dishonour to his establishment, he would become furious at every murmur of the gossiping women and threaten his timid hired-man with his knife, or reproach old Tomba as he tried to persuade him to reform his rascally grandson.
Finally the butcher discharged the boy and his grandfather found him a position in Valencia in another butcher-shop, where he asked them not to give him any time off even on holidays, so that he would not be able to wait for Batiste's daughter on the road.
Tonet departed submissively, his eyes wet like one of the young lambs whom he had so often dragged before the master's knife. He would not return. The poor girl remained in the farm-house, hiding herself in her bedroom to weep, making efforts not to show her suffering to her mother, who, exasperated by so many vexations, was very intolerant, and before her father, who threatened to kill her if she had another lover and gave their enemies in the district any more chance to talk.
Poor Batiste, who seemed so severe and threatening, was more grieved than by anything else at the girl's inconsolable sorrow, her lack of appetite, her yellow complexion and hollow eyes, and by the efforts she made to feign indifference, in spite of the fact that she scarcely slept at all: this, however, did not prevent her from trudging off punctually every day to the factory with a vagueness in her eyes which showed that her mind was far afield, and that she lived perpetually in a state of inward dream.
Though they did not succeed in crushing Batiste, they undoubtedly cast on him the evil eye, for his poor Morrut, the old horse who was like a member of the family, who had drawn the poor furniture and the youngsters over the roads in the various peregrinations of poverty, gradually grew weaker and weaker in his new stable, the best lodging he had ever known in his long life of labour.
He had behaved like a respectable equine in the worst period, when the family had just moved to the farm, and he had had to plough up the land accursed and petrified by ten years' neglect; when he had had to plod continuously to Valencia to bring back débris and old boards from buildings being torn down; when the food was not plentiful and the work heavy. And now, when before the little window of the stable there stretched out a large field of grass, cool, high and waving, all for him; now that he had his table set with that green and juicy covering which smelled gloriously, now that he was growing fat, that his angular haunches and his bony back were rounding out, he died without even a reason, perhaps in the exercise of his perfect right to rest, after having helped the family through its time of trouble and tribulation.
He lay down one day on his straw and refused to go out, gazing at Batiste with glassy yellow eyes which silenced all angry oaths and threats upon the master's lips. Poor Morrut seemed to be a human being! Batiste, remembering his glance, felt like weeping. The farm-house was all upset, and this misfortune for the time being made the family forget poor Pascualet, who was trembling with fever in his bed.
Batiste's wife was weeping. That poor beast whose gentle face lay there flat on the ground had seen almost all her children come into the world. She still remembered as though it were yesterday when they bought him in the Sagunto-market, small, dirty, covered with scabs, a nag condemned. It was a member of the family that was passing now. And when some repellent old men came in a cart to take the corpse of the old worker to the "boneyard" where they would convert his skeleton into bones of polished brilliancy and his flesh into fertilizer, the children wept, and called interminable farewells to poor Morrut who was carried away with his feet stretched out stiffly and his head swaying, while the mother, as though she felt some terrible presentiment, threw herself with open arms upon her sick little boy.
She saw her little son when he entered the stable to pull Morrut's tail, Morrut, who endured all the youngster's pranks with affectionate submission. She saw the little fellow when his father placed him on the animal's hard spine, beating his little feet against the shining flanks and crying, "Get up! Get up!" with his stammering child's voice. And she felt that the death of the poor animal had somehow opened up a way for others. Oh God! grant that her sorrowful mother's fears might be mistaken; that only the long-suffering horse should die; and that he should not, on his road to heaven, carry away upon his flanks the poor little fellow now as in other times he used to carry him along the paths of the huerta grasping his mane, walking slowly so as not to make him lose his balance!
And poor Batiste, his mind preoccupied by so many misfortunes, confusing all together in his fancy the sick child, the dead horse, the wounded son and the daughter with her concentrated grief, reached the outskirts of the city and passed over the bridge of Serranos.