Part 20 (2/2)
Genevieve had heard Pere Niseron take an oath to kill any man, no matter who he was, who should dare to _touch_ (that was his word) his granddaughter. The old man thought the child amply protected by the halo of white hair and honor which a spotless life of three-score years and ten had laid upon his brow. The vision of b.l.o.o.d.y scenes terrifies the imagination of young girls so that they need not dive to the bottom of their hearts for other numerous and inquisitive reasons which seal their lips.
When La Pechina started with the milk which Madame Michaud had sent to the daughter of Gaillard, the keeper of the gate of Conches, whose cow had just calved, she looked about her cautiously, like a cat when it ventures out onto the street. She saw no signs of Nicolas; she listened to the silence, as the poet says, and hearing nothing, she concluded that the rascal had gone to his day's work. The peasants were just beginning to cut the rye; for they were in the habit of getting in their own harvests first, so as to benefit by the best strength of the mowers.
But Nicolas was not a man to mind losing a day's work,--especially now that he expected to leave the country after the fair at Soulanges and begin, as the country people say, the new life of a soldier.
When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl, who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made her unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the woods to the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook bubbled up.
Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type of woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in former days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men of the valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular legs, and a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms, her eyes that could flash and sparkle, and her jaunty air; with the ma.s.ses of hair twisted in coils around her head, her masculine forehead and her red lips curling with that same ferocious smile which Eugene Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and represented so admirably. True image of the People, this fiery and swarthy creature seemed to emit revolt through her piercing yellow eyes, blazing with the insolence of a soldier. She inherited from her father so violent a nature that the whole family, except Tonsard, and all who frequented the tavern feared her.
”Well, how are you now?” she said to La Pechina as the latter recovered consciousness.
Catherine had placed her victim on a little mound beside the brook and was bringing her to her senses with dashes of cold water. ”Where am I?”
said the child, opening her beautiful black eyes through which a sun-ray seemed to glide.
”Ah!” said Catherine, ”if it hadn't been for me you'd have been killed.”
”Thank you,” said the girl, still bewildered; ”what happened to me?”
”You stumbled over a root and fell flat in the road over there, as if shot. Ha! how you did run!”
”It was your brother who made me,” said La Pechina, remembering Nicolas.
”My brother? I did not see him,” said Catherine. ”What did he do to you, poor fellow, that should make you fly as if he were a wolf? Isn't he handsomer than your Monsieur Michaud?”
”Oh!” said the girl, contemptuously.
”See here, little one; you are laying up a crop of evils for yourself by loving those who persecute us. Why don't you keep to our side?”
”Why don't you come to church; and why do you steal things night and day?” asked the child.
”So you let those people talk you over!” sneered Catherine. ”They love us, don't they?--just as they love their food which they get out of us, and they want new dishes every day. Did you ever know one of them to marry a peasant-girl? Not they! Does Sarcus the rich let his son marry that handsome Gatienne Giboulard? Not he, though she is the daughter of a rich upholsterer. You have never been at the Tivoli ball at Soulanges in Socquard's tavern; you had better come. You'll see 'em all there, these bourgeois fellows, and you'll find they are not worth the money we shall get out of them when we've pulled them down. Come to the fair this year!”
”They say it's fine, that Soulanges fair!” cried La Pechina, artlessly.
”I'll tell you what it is in two words,” said Catherine. ”If you are handsome, you are well ogled. What is the good of being as pretty as you are if you are not admired by the men? Ha! when I heard one of them say for the first time, 'What a fine sprig of a girl!' all my blood was on fire. It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's lighted up, my dear, with gla.s.s lamps, and you'll think you are in paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes will be there.
Ever since that first night I've loved the place where those words rang in my ears like military music. It's worthy giving your eternity to hear such words said of you by a man you love.”
”Yes, perhaps,” replied La Pechina, thoughtfully.
”Then come, and get the praise of men; you're sure of it!” cried Catherine. ”Ha! you'll have a fine chance, handsome as you are, to pick up good luck. There's the son of Monsieur Lupin, Amaury, he might marry you. But that's not all; if you only knew what comforts you can find there against vexation and worry. Why, Socquard's boiled wine will make you forget every trouble you ever had. Fancy! it can make you dream, and feel as light as a bird. Didn't you ever drink boiled wine? Then you don't know what life is.”
The privilege enjoyed by older persons to wet their throats with boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put her lips to a gla.s.s of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her grandfather when ill.
The taste had left a sort of magic influence in the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine had held in reserve, was to end the matter by intoxicating the victim.
”What do they put into it?” asked La Pechina.
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