Mrs. Molesworth - The Little Old Portrait

“We need travel no further than Sarinet, the place I have spoken of as the home of my grandmother’s family – the wife of the good Count. She had married young, fortunately for her, for Sarinet would not have been a happy home for her. It was in the possession of her half-brother, the proud Marquis de Sarinet, who lived there a great part of the year with his wife and one child, Edmond, a boy about the age of Pierre Germain.

“It is winter – that same cruelly severe winter which laid the seeds of the good Count’s fatal illness. Heavy snow is on the ground, and the air is bitter and cutting. The village of Sarinet seems asleep; there is hardly any one moving about. It is so cold – so cold that the poor inhabitants, such as are not obliged to be away at their daily work, are trying to keep some little warmth in them by staying indoors. And yet indoors it is scarcely warmer; in many of the cottages there is no fire to be seen, in some but a few wretched embers on the great open chimney, down which blows the wintry wind as if angry that any one should attempt to get warm. The well, or fountain, as they call it, whence they all draw water, has been frozen for some days; when the men come home at night they have to break the ice away with hatchets. There are few children to be seen – one is almost glad to think so – and yet the absence of the little creatures has brought sad sorrow to many hearts. For not many months ago the village and some others in the neighbourhood had been visited by a wasting fever, the result of bad food, overwork, and general wretchedness, and scarcely a family but had lost some of its members – above all, among the children.

“At the door of one of the miserable cottages stands a young girl of about fifteen, crying bitterly. Cold though it is, she scarcely seems to feel it. She looks up and down the road as if watching for some one, then she re-enters the cottage, which is bare and miserable beyond description, and tries to coax into flame a little heap of twigs and withered leaves which are all the fuel she possesses. Her clothing is desperately poor – one could scarcely see that it had ever had any colour or shape – and yet there is an attempt at neatness about her, and she is or rather she would have been had she had a fair amount of food and decent clothing, a pretty, sweet-looking girl.

“As she stands again in her restless misery at the door of the cottage, an old woman comes out from the next door.

”‘What is the matter, Marguerite?’ she says; ‘is your brother ill again?’

”‘Oh, Madelon,’ she exclaims, ‘I think it would be better if he were dead! My poor boy!’ and she burst out sobbing again.

”‘What is it? Anything new? Come in here and tell me,’ said the woman, and she drew Marguerite inside her own dwelling, which was, perhaps, a shade less wretched than its neighbour, though in one corner, on a pallet bed hardly worth calling such – it was in reality but a bag of coarse sacking filled with straw – a man, looking more like a corpse than a human being, was lying, apparently in a state of half-unconsciousness.

”‘He is getting better, they say,’ observed the woman nodding her head in his direction. ‘The doctor looked in yesterday – he had been up at the Château to see the little lord. Yes, he says Jean is getting better, and with good food he might be fit for something again,’ she added in a hard, indifferent tone, as if she did not much care.

”‘And will they not send some to him – they – up at the Château?’ said Marguerite, indignantly. ‘They know how the accident happened; it was in saving my lord’s haystacks; but for him every one says they would all have been burnt.’

“The woman gave a short, bitter laugh.

”‘On the other hand, as the bailiff says,’ she replied, ‘we should be overwhelmed with gratitude that Jean has not been accused of setting fire to them. You know what that would have meant,’ and she passed her hand round her neck with an expressive gesture, for in those days a much smaller crime than that of incendiarism – or even, alas! in most cases, the suspicion of such a crime – was too surely punished by hanging, and hanging sometimes preceded by tortures too frightful to tell you of, and followed by hideous insult to the poor, dead body, adding untold horror to the misery of the victim’s friends, even after he could no longer suffer. ‘There is one cause for thankfulness,’ Jean’s wife went on, – I have called her an old woman, but she was, in reality, barely forty, though you would have taken her for fully twenty years more – ‘and that is that he and I are now alone to bear it. The fever has been our best friend after all.’

”‘Yes,’ said Marguerite simply, ‘your children with my mother and little Angèle – they are all at rest and happy in heaven.’

”‘But how can there be a heaven – how can there be a God, if He lets us suffer so horribly? Suffer till there is no good , no gentleness, no pity left in us, my girl. There are times when I feel as if the devil were in me, when I would enjoy the sight of their suffering, they who treat us worse than their dogs – dogs indeed! see my lady’s little pampered poodles! if we were treated like their dogs we need not complain – when I would not have a drop of pity in my heart, however I saw them tortured,’ and Madelon’s face, in its thin misery, took an expression which made Marguerite shiver, so that the elder woman, thinking it was from cold, drew her nearer to the fire, which she stirred with her foot.

”‘I should not talk so to you, poor child. Now tell me your troubles. Is it about Louis?’

”‘Partly, and about everything. Last night, Madelon, quite late, that horrible Martin, the bailiff’s son, came down again, sent by his father about the rent. He said if we had not yet got it ready, Louis must either pay the fine or do extra work. You know we have not got it ready – how could we? And then – I think he had been drinking – he began teasing me. He said I was a pretty girl, in spite of my rags; – they are poor enough, Madelon, but they are not rags; I do my best to mend them.’

”‘Ah, that you do,’ replied the neighbour.

”‘And,’ pursued Marguerite, ‘he pulled me to him and tried to kiss me, and said if I would be amiable he would get me a new silk kerchief, and would persuade his father not to be harsh with us for the rent. Put I tried to push him away – and Louis, he got so angry – my poor Louis! – he seized a stick and hit him.’

”‘Hit Martin, the bailiff’s son!’ exclaimed Madelon, an expression of fear and anxiety replacing the sort of hard indifference on her face. ‘My poor child – he must have been mad!’

”‘He did not hurt him much,’ continued Marguerite, ‘but Martin was furious. He went out vowing vengeance, and with an evil smile on his face. And not half-an-hour after he left, one of the bailiff’s men came down, late as it was, to order Louis to be there at five this morning. Louis, so delicate as he is, and so cold and dark and miserable as it was! But that is not the worst; the man – it was André Michaud – was sorry for us, and warned us that Louis is to be terribly punished. The bailiff swore he would put him in harness – the roads are so bad for the horses in this weather; he laughed and said it would give one of them a rest. Oh, Madelon, you know how dreadful it is – and Louis so weak as he is still – it will kill him! I have been all the morning running to the door, thinking he would be coming back, or that perhaps they would be carrying him back, all torn and bleeding, like Félix – you remember Félix, when they put him in the horse’s place, and he broke a blood vessel?’

“Madelon turned away – ah, yes, she remembered but too well, but what could she say? It was true what Marguerite had described, and there was no use in complaining. The lords, such as were cruel enough to do so, were allowed by law to drive the peasants in their employ, in the place of horses or oxen, and even if lashed or goaded till they dropped, the wretched sufferers could claim no redress.