Sons of the Soil Part 24

Every one recognized the vinous voice of old Fourchon, to whom the verse must have been peculiarly agreeable; Mouche accompanied in his treble tones.

"Ha! they're full!" cried old Mother Tonsard to her daughter-in-law; "your father is as red as a grid-iron, and that chip o' the block as pink as vine-shoot."

"Your healths!" cried the old man, "and a fine lot of scoundrels you are! All hail!" he said to his granddaughter, whom he spied kissing Bonnebault, "hail, Marie, full of vice! Satan is with three; cursed art thou among women, etcetera. All hail, the company present! you are done for, every one of you! you may just say good-bye to your sheaves. I being news. I always told you the rich would crush us; well now, the Shopman is going to have the law of you! Ha! see what it is to struggle against those bourgeois fellows, who have made so many laws since they got into power that they've a law to enforce every trick they play--"

A violent hiccough gave a sudden turn to the ideas of the distinguished orator.

"If Vermichel were only here I'd blow in his gullet, and he'd get an idea of sherry wine. Hey! what a wine it is! If I wasn't a Burgundian I'd be a Spaniard! It's G.o.d's own wine! the pope says ma.s.s with it--Hey!

I'm young again! Say, Courtecuisse! if your wife were only here we'd be young together. Don't tell me! Spanish wine is worth a dozen of boiled wine. Let's have a revolution if it's only to empty the cellars!"

"But what's your news, papa?" said Tonsard.

"There'll be no harvest for you; the Shopman has given orders to stop the gleaning."

"Stop the gleaning!" cried the whole tavern, with one voice, in which the shrill tones of the four women predominated.

"Yes," said Mouche, "he is going to issue an order, and Groison is to take it round, and post it up all over the canton. No one is to glean except those who have pauper certificates."

"And what's more," said Fourchon, "the folks from the other districts won't be allowed here at all."

"What's that?" cried Bonnebault, "do you mean to tell me that neither my grandmother nor I, nor your mother, G.o.dain, can come here and glean?

Here's tomfoolery for you; a pretty show of authority! Why, the fellow is a devil let loose from h.e.l.l,--that scoundrel of a mayor!"

"Shall you glean whether or no, G.o.dain?" said Tonsard to the journeyman wheelwright, who was saying a few words to Catherine.

"I? I've no property; I'm a pauper," he replied; "I shall ask for a certificate."

"What did they give my father for his otter, bibi?" said Madame Tonsard to Mouche.

Though nearly at his last gasp from an over-taxed digestion and two bottles of wine, Mouche, sitting on Madame Tonsard's lap, laid his head on his aunt's neck and whispered slyly in her ear:--

"I don't know, but he has got gold. If you'll feed me high for a month, perhaps I can find out his hiding-place; he has one, I know that."

"Father's got gold!" whispered La Tonsard to her husband, whose voice was loudest in the uproar of the excited discussion, in which all present took part.

"Hush! here's Groison," cried the old sentinel.

Perfect silence reigned in the tavern. When Groison had got to a safe distance, Mother Tonsard made a sign, and the discussion began again on the question as to whether they should persist in gleaning, as before, without a certificate.

"You'll have to give in," said Pere Fourchon; "for the Shopman has gone to see the prefect and get troops to enforce the order. They'll shoot you like dogs,--and that's what we are!" cried the old man, trying to conquer the thickening of his speech produced by his potations of sherry.

This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of slaughtering them without pity.

"I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed there," said Bonnebault. "We were marched out, and the peasants were cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they've a right, they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!"

"Well, well," said Tonsard, "what is there in all that to frighten you like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put 'em in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can't imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer, too."

"You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,--that's another thing! You don't work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you don't have your liberty."

"Perhaps it would be well," said Vaudoyer, who was among the more valiant in counsel, "if some of us risked our skins to deliver the neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the gate of the Avonne."

"Do Michaud's business for him?" said Nicolas; "I'm good for that."

"Things are not ripe for it," said old Fourchon. "We should risk too much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us, and you'll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning."

"You are all blind moles," shouted Tonsard, "let 'em pick a quarrel with their law and their troops, they can't put the whole country in irons, and we've plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the old lords who'll sustain us."

"That's true," said Courtecuisse; "none of the other land-owners complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if that cuira.s.sier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside myself."

"They won't call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in the district against him," said G.o.dain. "The fault's his own; he tried to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government will just say to him, 'Hush up.'"

"The government never says anything else; it can't, poor government!"

said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government. "Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,--it hasn't a penny, like us; but that's very stupid of a government that makes the money itself, very stupid! Ah! if I were the government--"

"But," cried Courtecuisse, "they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the a.s.sembly."

"That's in Monsieur Rigou's newspaper," said Vaudoyer, who in his capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; "I read it--"

In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the lower cla.s.ses whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious. Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.

"Listen to the old one, he's drunk!" said Tonsard, "and when he is, he is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine--"

"Spanish wine, and that trebles it!" cried Fourchon, laughing like a satyr. "My sons, don't b.u.t.t your head straight at the thing,--you're too weak; go at it sideways. Lay low, play dead; the little woman is scared.

I tell you, the thing'll come to an end before long; she'll leave the place, and if she does the Shopman will follow her, for she's his pa.s.sion. That's your plan. Only, to make 'em go faster, my advice is to get rid of their counsellor, their support, our spy, our ape--"

"Who's that?"

"The d.a.m.ned abbe, of course," said Tonsard; "that hunter after sins, who thinks the host is food enough for us."

"That's true," cried Vaudoyer; "we were happy enough till he came. We ought to get rid of that eater of the good G.o.d,--he's the real enemy."

"Finikin," added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his prim and rather puny appearance, "might be led into temptation and fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old Rigou devilish well. Now if your daughter, Courtecuisse, would leave Auxerre--she's a pretty girl, and if she'd take to piety, she might save us all. Hey! ran tan plan!--"

"Why don't _you_ do it?" said G.o.dain to Catherine, in a low voice; "there'd be scuttles full of money to hush up the talk; and for the time being you'd be mistress here--"

"Shall we glean, or shall we not glean? that's the point," said Bonnebault. "I don't care two straws for your abbe, not I; I belong to Conches, where we haven't a black-coat to poke up our consciences."

"Look here," said Vaudoyer, "we had better go and ask Rigou, who knows the law, whether the Shopman can forbid gleaning, and he'll tell us if we've got the right of it. If the Shopman has the law on his side, well, then we must do as the old one says,--see about taking things sideways."

"Blood will be spilt," said Nicolas, darkly, as he rose after drinking a whole bottle of wine, which Catherine drew for him in order to keep him silent. "If you'd only listen to me you'd down Michaud; but you are miserable weaklings,--nothing but poor trash!"

"I'm not," said Bonnebault. "If you are all safe friends who'll keep your tongues between your teeth, I'll aim at the Shopman--Hey! how I'd like to put a plum through his bottle; wouldn't it avenge me on those cursed officers?"

"Tut! tut!" cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who was supposed to be, more or less, Gaubertin's son, and who had just entered the tavern. This fellow, who was courting Rigou's pretty servant-girl, had succeeded his nominal father as clipper of hedges and shrubberies and other Tonsardial occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall presently see that in making love to Rigou's servant-girl, Jean-Louis deserved his reputation for shrewdness.

"Well, what have you to say, prophet?" said the innkeeper to his son.

"I say that you are playing into the hands of the rich folk," replied Jean-Louis. "Frighten the Aigues people to maintain your rights if you choose; but if you drive them out of the place and make them sell the estate, you are doing just what the bourgeois of the valley want, and it's against your own interest. If you help the bourgeois to divide the great estates among them, where's the national domain to be bought for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you'll get your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley, the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I tell you; so does everybody who works for Rigou,--look at Courtecuisse."