BATISTE and his family did not realize how the unheard-of, unexpected event began; who was the first who decided to pass the bridge that joined the road to the hated fields.
In the farm-house they were in no condition to notice such details. Exhausted with suffering, they saw that the people of the huerta had suddenly begun to come to them, and they did not protest, for misfortune needs counsel, nor did they offer thanks for the unexpected impulse to approach.
The news of the little boy's death had been transmitted through all the neighbourhood with the strange swiftness with which all news spreads in the huerta, flying from farm to farm on the wings of scandal, which is the swiftest of all telegraphs.
Many slept poorly that night. It seemed as though the little boy, as he departed, had left a thorn fixed in the consciences of the neighbours. More than one woman tossed about in bed, disturbing with her restlessness her husband's sleep, making him protest indignantly. "But curse you! will you go to sleep?..." No, she couldn't; that child prevented her from sleeping. Poor little fellow! What would he tell the Lord when he reached Heaven?
All shared the responsibility of that death, but each one with hypocritical egotism attributed to his neighbour the chief blame for the bitter persecution whose consequences had fallen on the little fellow's head; each gossiping woman blamed her enemy for the deed. And at last she went to sleep with the intention of undoing all the evil done, of going in the morning to offer her aid to the family, of weeping over the poor child; and amid the mists of sleep they thought they saw Pascualet, as white and resplendent as an angel, looking with reproachful eyes at those who had been so hard with him and his family.
All the people of the neighbourhood rose meditating as to how they could approach and enter Batiste's house. It was an examination of conscience, an explosion of repentance which burst on the poor farm-house from every end of the plain.
It had scarcely dawned when two old women who lived in a neighbouring farm-house entered Batiste's home. The family, crushed with grief, felt almost no wonder at seeing those two women appear in the house which no one had entered for more than six months. They wanted to see the child, the poor little "Bishop," and entering the bedroom they gazed at him still lying there in the bed; the edge of the sheet pulled up to his chin scarcely outlining the shape of his body, his blond head inert and heavy on the pillow. The mother could only weep in her corner, all shrunken and crouched together, as small as a child, as though she were trying to annihilate herself and disappear.
After these women came others and still others; it was a stream of weeping old women who arrived from all parts of the plain; surrounding the bed, they kissed the little corpse and seemed to take possession of him as their own, leaving Teresa and her daughter aside; the latter, exhausted by lack of sleep and weeping, seemed imbecile as they hung their red and tear-wet faces on their breasts.
Batiste, seated in a rush-chair, in the middle of the farm-house, gazed stupidly at that procession of people who had so ill-treated him. He did not hate them, but neither did he feel gratitude. He had come forth from the crisis of the day before crushed, and he gazed at all this with indifference, as though the farm-house were not his, as though the poor little fellow on the bed were not his son.
Only the dog curling up at his feet seemed to remember and feel hatred: he sniffed hostilely at all the procession of petticoats that came and went, and growled as though he wanted to bite and only refrained from doing so in order not to displease his masters.