第75章

"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 Godain, 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 Godain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps the most alarming, though the least pronounced.Godain,--a miser without money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,--

Godain 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 succumb.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.Godain 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 shirt of coarse 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 Godain'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.