“Curse it! curse it!” he shouted; “a cursed telegram, it tells you nothing, and it murders you!  She might, at all events, have sent somebody.  I shall have to go there.  Ah the whole thing’s complete, it’s more than a man can bear!”

Lepailleur shouted those words in such accents of rageful despair that Mathieu, full of compassion, made bold to intervene.  The sudden shock of the tragedy had staggered him, and he had hitherto waited in silence.  But now he offered his services and spoke of accompanying the other to Paris.  He had to retreat, however, for the miller rose to his feet, seized with wild exasperation at perceiving him still there in his house.

“Ah! yes, you came; and what was it you were saying to me?  That we ought to marry off those wretched children?  Well, you can see that I’m in proper trim for a wedding!  My boy’s dead!  You’ve chosen your day well.  Be off with you, be off with you, I say, if you don’t want me to do something dreadful!”

He raised his fists, quite maddened as he was by the presence of Mathieu at that moment when his whole life was wrecked.  It was terrible indeed that this bourgeois who had made a fortune by turning himself into a peasant should be there at the moment when he so suddenly learnt the death of Antonin, that son whom he had dreamt of turning into a Monsieur by filling his mind with disgust of the soil and sending him to rot of idleness and vice in Paris!  It enraged him to find that he had erred, that the earth whom he had slandered, whom he had taxed with decrepitude and barrenness was really a living, youthful, and fruitful spouse to the man who knew how to love her!  And nought but ruin remained around him, thanks to his imbecile resolve to limit his family:  a foul life had killed his only son, and his only daughter had gone off with a scion of the triumphant farm, while he was now utterly alone, weeping and howling in his deserted mill, that mill which he had likewise disdained and which was crumbling around him with old age.

“You hear me!” he shouted.  “Therese may drag herself at my feet; but I will never, never give her to your thief of a son!  You’d like it, wouldn’t you? so that folks might mock me all over the district, and so that you might eat me up as you have eaten up all the others!”

This finish to it all had doubtless appeared to him, confusedly, in a sudden threatening vision:  Antonin being dead, it was Gregoire who would possess the mill, if he should marry Therese.  And he would possess the moorland also, that enclosure, hitherto left barren with such savage delight, and so passionately coveted by the farm.  And doubtless he would cede it to the farm as soon as he should be the master.  The thought that Chantebled might yet be increased by the fields which he, Lepailleur, had withheld from it brought the miller’s delirious rage to a climax.

“Your son, I’ll send him to the galleys!  And you, if you don’t go, I’ll throw you out!  Be off with you, be off!”