Sons of the Soil Part 23

"Yes," replied Brunet, "we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the a.s.sistant at Conches. Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the chateau. Rigou has gained his second suit, and I've got to deliver the verdict."

So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of gla.s.ses of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the good man's esteem.

No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing reproach to the government and to capitalists. Contemporaneous history can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why--he gained what the Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three hours in advance of rumor. So, not an hour after the encounter between old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the Grand-I-Vert a.s.sembled there to hear the tale.

The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. "He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted to be a bourgeois himself."

In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pa.s.s for a bourgeois in buying the Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got up before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.

Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.

Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingrat.i.tude. In short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten with the demon of proprietors.h.i.+p, that toil had increased and food decreased.

"Courtecuisse has done too much to the property," the people said, secretly envying his position. "He ought to have waited till he had paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit palings."

With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like Fourchon, poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of a huntsman, now thrust his feet into sabots and accused "the rich" of Les Aigues of having caused his dest.i.tution. These wearing anxieties had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of poison or with some chronic malady.

"What's the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue tied?" asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told him about the battle which had just taken place.

"No, no!" cried Madame Tonsard; "he needn't complain of the midwife who cut his string,--she made a good job of it."

"It is enough to make a man dumb, thinking from morning till night of some way to escape Rigou," said the premature old man, gloomily.

"Bah!" said old Mother Tonsard, "you've got a pretty daughter, seventeen years old. If she's a good girl you can easily manage matters with that old jail bird--"

"We sent her to Auxerre two years ago to Madame Mariotte the elder, to keep her out of harm's way; I'd rather die than--"

"What a fool you are!" said Tonsard, "look at my girls,--are they any the worse? He who dares to say they are not as virtuous as marble images will have to do with my gun."

"It'll be hard to have to come to that," said Courtecuisse, shaking his head. "I'd rather earn the money by shooting one of those Arminacs."

"Well, I call it better for a girl to save a father than to wrap up her virtue and let it mildew," retorted the innkeeper.

Tonsard felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, delivered by Pere Niseron.

"That is not a right thing to say!" cried the old man. "A father is the guardian of the honor of his family. It is by behaving as you do that scorn and contempt are brought upon us; it is because of such conduct that the People are accused of being unfit for liberty. The People should set an example of civic virtue and honor to the rich. You all sell yourselves to Rigou for gold; and if you don't sell him your daughters, at any rate you sell him your honor,--and it's wrong."

"Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in," said Tonsard.

"See what a position I am in," replied Pere Niseron; "but I sleep in peace; there are no thorns in my pillow."

"Let him talk, Tonsard," whispered his wife, "you know they're just _his notions_, poor dear man."

Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas's failure, and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud's advice to the countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.

"The harvest's coming; well, I vow I'll not go before I've lighted my pipe at their wheat-stacks," he cried, striking his fist on the table as he sat down.

"Mustn't yelp like that before people," said G.o.dain, showing him Pere Niseron.

"If the old fellow tells, I'll wring his neck," said Catherine.

"He's had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him virtuous; it's his temperament that keeps him so, that's all."

Strange and noteworthy sight!--that of those lifted heads, that group of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the drinkers.

Of all those faces, that of G.o.dain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps the most alarming, though the least p.r.o.nounced. G.o.dain,--a miser without money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely takes precedence of him who h.o.a.rds it, one turning his eagerness within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,--G.o.dain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.

He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant workers like Courtecuisse succ.u.mb. His face was no bigger than a man's fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. G.o.dain never perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening of which could be seen a s.h.i.+rt of coa.r.s.e linen, so black that he must have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.

Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin's receipt for his money sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,--having it renewed every year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.

"Hey! what do I care," cried Nicolas, replying to G.o.dain's prudent advice not to talk before Niseron. "If I'm doomed to be a soldier I'd rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it dribbled out drop by drop in the battles. I'll deliver this country of at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us."

And he related what he called Michaud's plot against him, which Marie and Bonnebault had overheard.

"Where do you expect France to find soldiers?" said the white-haired old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which followed the utterance of this threat.

"We serve our time and come home again," remarked Bonnebault, twirling his moustache.

Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his gla.s.s of wine.

When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief and satisfaction pa.s.sed through the a.s.sembled drinkers which would have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he was rid of the living image of his own conscience.

"Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?" asked Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related Vatel's attempt.

Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set his gla.s.s on the table.

"Vatel put himself in the wrong," he said. "If I were Mother Tonsard, I'd give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have that Shopman and his keeper up before the a.s.sizes and get twenty crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them."

"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would make," said G.o.dain.

Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall, with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker, kept silence with a hesitating air.

"Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted by the idea of damages. "If they had broken twenty crowns' worth of my mother's bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip--"

"And break it, too," interrupted Madame Tonsard; "they do that in Paris."

"It would cost too much," remarked G.o.dain.

"I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that matters will go as you want them," said Vaudoyer at last, remembering his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. "If it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry represents the government there, and he doesn't wish well to the Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they'll defend themselves viciously; they'll say, 'The woman was to blame; she had a tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the highroad; she wouldn't have run away; if an accident happened to her it was through her own fault.'

No, you can't trust to that plan."

"The Shopman didn't resist when I sued him," said Courtecuisse; "he paid me at once."

"I'll go to Soulanges, if you like," said Bonnebault, "and consult Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night if _there's money in it_."

"You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl, Socquard's daughter," said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on the shoulder that made his lungs hum.

Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:--

"One fine moment of his life Was at the wedding feast; He changed the water into wine,-- Madeira of the best."