The brittle silence of a frosty morning seemed unbroken as yet, and Denise, after looking half fearfully about her, came out from the shadow of the thorn hedge, and walked quickly in the direction of the road. She would be away and over the Abbey bounds before anyone knew in the town that she had gone. Reaching the road, she climbed down the path into it, for the road ran in a hollow there. A bramble had caught the latchet of her shoe and pulled it loose, and Denise bent down to refasten it, putting the cloth with the food on the bank beside her.
Now Dom Silvius’s treachery had betrayed her to the people, and Denise, as she fastened her shoe-latchet, was startled by a shrill, gaggling laugh that seemed to rise out of the ground close to her. The banks on either side of the road were covered with furze bushes, and a number of these bushes were suddenly endowed with the miraculous power of movement. They rose up from where they had grown, and came jigging down the steep banks into the road.
Moreover these same furze bushes burst into loud laughter, and began to crow with exultation.
“A miracle, a miracle!”
“St. Denise has worked a wonder, at last!”
“Holy virgin, see how the bushes dance!”
Denise stood still at the foot of the bank, and the furze bushes came jigging round her like mummers in a mask. Flapping skirts and shuffling feet gave a human undercurrent to the green swirl of the furze. Now and again she saw a red, triumphant face, or a pair of brown arms holding a bough, while the frolic went on with giggles and little screams of laughter. Then, at a given shout from one of them, these women of the winter dawn flung their furze boughs upon Denise, as the Sabines threw their shields upon Tarpeia.
The thorns were as nothing compared with that circle of coarse and jeering faces that stood revealed. Old hags with white hair, skinny arms, and flat bosoms; women in their prime, rough and buxom, with hard features and loud mouths; young girls, whose tongues were pert and insolent. Bridget, the smith’s wife, led this wolf pack, like a hungry and red-eyed dam.
Denise’s face was bleeding, but she did not flinch now that her pride had been driven against the pricks. She looked round at the women, holding her head high, although they had beaten her across the face. And for the moment the women hung back from her as she pushed the furze boughs aside, and made as though to pass on without answering a word.
Bridget, the smith’s wife, stood in her path. She flung up her head and laughed like a great raw-boned mare, and an echo came down from Mountjoye Hill like the answering neigh of a horse. On the ridge above, where the dawn light shone, were crowded the men who had come out to see their women bait Denise.