The companion of old Judas died the following day.
He buried her himself, in front of her door.
They were people of so little account that no one
took any interest in them.
Then they saw the man take his pigs out again to the
lake and up the hillsides. And he also began
begging again to get food. But the people gave
him hardly anything, as there was so much gossip about
him. Every one knew, moreover, how he had treated
the priest.
Then he disappeared. That was during Holy Week,
but no one paid any attention to him.
But on Easter Sunday the boys and girls who had gone
walking out to the lake heard a great noise in the
hut. The door was locked; but the boys broke
it in, and the two pigs ran out, jumping like gnats.
No one ever saw them again.
The whole crowd went in; they saw some old rags on
the floor, the beggar’s hat, some bones, clots
of dried blood and bits of flesh in the hollows of
the skull.
His pigs had devoured him.
“This happened on Good Friday, monsieur.”
Joseph concluded his story, “three hours after
noon.”
“How do you know that?” I asked him.
“There is no doubt about that,” he replied.
I did not attempt to make him understand that it could
easily happen that the famished animals had eaten
their master, after he had died suddenly in his hut.
As for the cross on the wall, it had appeared one
morning, and no one knew what hand traced it in that
strange color.
Since then no one doubted any longer that the Wandering
Jew had died on this spot.
I myself believed it for one hour.
He was a tall man of forty or thereabout, this Jules
Chicot, the innkeeper of Spreville, with a red face
and a round stomach, and said by those who knew him
to be a smart business man. He stopped his buggy
in front of Mother Magloire’s farmhouse, and,
hitching the horse to the gatepost, went in at the
gate.
Chicot owned some land adjoining that of the old woman,
which he had been coveting for a long while, and had
tried in vain to buy a score of times, but she had
always obstinately refused to part with it.
“I was born here, and here I mean to die,”
was all she said.
He found her peeling potatoes outside the farmhouse
door. She was a woman of about seventy-two, very
thin, shriveled and wrinkled, almost dried up in fact
and much bent but as active and untiring as a girl.
Chicot patted her on the back in a friendly fashion
and then sat down by her on a stool.
“Well mother, you are always pretty well and
hearty, I am glad to see.”
“Nothing to complain of, considering, thank
you. And how are you, Monsieur Chicot?”
“Oh, pretty well, thank you, except a few rheumatic
pains occasionally; otherwise I have nothing to complain
of.”
“So much the better.”
