A great laugh burst from the throats of the guests. Malivoire, excited by his success, went on: “There’s nothing like a plaster of black pudding for the rheumatics. It’ll warm your inside, with a glass of brandy. …”
All the men shouted, hammering the table with their fists, rolling with laughter, bending and straightening their bodies as if they were working at a pump. The women clucked like hens, the servants writhed with amusement as they stood by the walls. Only old Amable did not laugh, and waited, without replying, while they laid a place for him.
They put him in the centre of the table, facing his daughter-in-law, and he began to eat as soon as he was seated. It was his son who was paying, after all, and he must have his share of it. With each ladleful of soup that dropped into his stomach, with each mouthful of bread or meat chewed by his gums, with each glass of cider and wine that rolled down his gullet, he felt that he was getting back some of his property, taking back a little of his money that all these gluttons were devouring, saving a fragment of his possessions, in fact. And he ate in silence, with the obstinacy of a miser who hides halfpennies, with the gloomy tenacity that he used to bring to his persevering toil.
But all at once he saw Céleste’s child at the foot of the table, sitting on a woman’s knee, and his eyes never left it again. He continued to eat, his glance fixed on the little creature. The woman nursing him kept putting between his lips little bits of stew which he nibbled, and the old man suffered more from the few mouthfuls sucked by this grub than from all that the rest of the guests swallowed.
The meal lasted till evening. Then everyone went home.
Césaire helped old Amable to his feet.
“Come, dad, time to get home,” he said. And he put his two sticks into his hands. Céleste took the child in her arms, and they went slowly through the sombre night lit by the gleaming snow. The deaf old man, three parts drunk, and made all the more spiteful thereby, refused obstinately to get on. Several times he even sat down, with the idea that his daughter-in-law might take cold; and he groaned, without saying a word, delivering himself of a sort of long-drawn dolorous wail.
When they reached home, he climbed up to his attic at once, while Césaire made up a bed for the child near the wide nook where he and his wife were going to lie. But as the newly married pair did not go to sleep at once, they heard the old man tossing on his mattress for a long time, and several times he even spoke aloud, as if he were dreaming and giving away his thoughts despite himself, unable to keep them back, so obsessed he was by the one idea.
When he came down his ladder in the morning he saw his daughter-in-law hurrying round at work.
“Come, dad!” she cried; “hurry up, here’s some good soup.”
And at the end of the table she set a round black earthern pot full of steaming liquid. He made no reply but sat down and took up the scalding bowl, and warmed his hands on it as he always did. It was such a cold day that he even pressed it against his chest and tried to get a little of the quick heat of the boiling water into his old body that so many winters had stiffened.
Then he sought his sticks and went out into the frozen fields until noon, until dinnertime, for he had seen Céleste’s baby installed in a big soap box, still asleep.
He kept altogether to himself. He went on living in the cottage as before, but he bore himself as if he were no longer part of it, no longer interested in anything, regarding these people, his son, the woman and the child, as strangers whom he did not know and to whom he never spoke.
The winter dragged on. It was long and hard. Then the first days of spring burst the seeds; and once more the peasants, like industrious ants, spent their days in the fields, working from dawn to dark, in the northeast wind, in rain, along the furrows of the brown earth that bore in its bosom the bread of man.
The year promised well for the newly married pair. The crops pushed up thick and hardy; there were no late frosts; and the blossoming apple trees scattered over the grass a pink and white snow that foretold a bumper harvest.
Césaire worked very hard, rising early and going to bed late, to save the cost of a hired man. Sometimes his wife said to him:
“You’ll make yourself ill in the long run.”
“No, I’ll not,” he answered; “I’m used to it.”
But one evening he came home so exhausted that he had to lie down without any supper. He rose at the usual hour in the morning; but he could not eat, in spite of his fast of the night before; and he had to come home in the middle of the afternoon to rest again. During the night, he began to cough; and he tossed on his mattress, feverish, with burning forehead, and dry tongue, consumed with a frightful thirst.
He did, however, go as far as his fields at daybreak; but the next day the doctor had to be called in, and pronounced him very ill, and down with inflammation of the lungs.
He never left now the nook which served him for bedroom. He could be heard coughing, panting and tossing in the depths of
