The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty. Dumas Alexandre
our dear Pitou is tired, and here we are keeping him on his legs, when he ought to go home, to his Aunt Angelique’s. The poor old girl will be delighted to see him again.”
“I am not tired but hungry,” returned the other. “I am never tired but I am always sharpset.”
Before this plain way of putting it, the throng broke up to let Pitou go through. Followed by some more curious than the rest, he proceeded to his father’s sister’s house.
It was a cottage where he would have been starved to death by the pious old humbug of an old maid, but for his poaching in the woods for something that they could eat while the superfluity was sold by her to have the cash in augmentation of a very pretty hoard the miser kept in a chair cushion.
As the door was fastened, from the old lady being out gossiping, and Pitou declared that an aunt should never shut out a loving nephew, he drew his great sabre and opened the lock with it as it were an oyster, to the admiration of the boys.
Pitou entered the familiar cottage with a bland smile, and went straight up to the cupboard where the food was kept. He used in his boyish days to ogle the crust and the hunk of cheese with the wish to have magical powers to conjure them out into his mouth.
Now he was a man: he went up to the safe, opened it, opened also his pocket-knife, and taking out a loaf, cut off a slice which might weigh a fair two pounds.
He seemed to hear Aunt Angelique snarl at him, but it was only the creak of the door hinges.
In former times, the old fraud used to whine about poverty and palm him off with cheap cheese and few flavors. But since he had left she got up little delicacies of value which lasted her a week, such as stewed beef smothered in carrots and onions; baked mutton with potatoes as large as melons; or calves-foot, decked with pickled shallots; or a giant omelet sprinkled with parsley or dotted with slices of fat pork of which one sufficed for a meal even when she had an appetite.
Pitou was in luck. He lighted on a day when Aunt Angelique had cooked an old rooster in rice, so long that the bones had quitted the flesh and the latter was almost tender. It was basking in a deep dish, black outside but glossy and attractive within. The coxcomb stuck up in the midst like Ceuta in Gibraltar Straits.
Pitou had been so spoilt by the good living at Paris that he never even reflected that he had never seen such magnificence in his relative’s house.
He had his hunk of bread in his right hand: he seized the baking dish in his left and held it by the grip of his thumb in the grease. But at this moment it seemed to him that a shadow clouded the doorway.
He turned round, grinning, for he had one of those characters which let their happiness be painted on their faces.
The shadow was cast by Angelique Pitou, drier, sourer, bonier, not bonnier, and more mean than ever.
Formerly, at this sight, Pitou would have dropped the bread and dish and fled.
But he was altered. His helmet and sword had not more changed his aspect than his mind was changed by frequenting the society of the revolutionary lights of the capital.
Far from fleeing, he went up to her and opening his arms he embraced her so that his hands, holding the knife, the bread and the dish, crossed behind her skeleton back.
“It is poor Pitou,” he said in accomplishing this act of nepotism.
She feared that he was trying to stifle her because she had caught him red-handed in plundering her store. Literally, she did not breathe freely until she was released from this perillous clasp.
She was horrified that he did not express any emotion over his prize and at his sitting in the best chair: previously he would have perched himself on the edge of a stool or the broken chair. Thus easily lodged he set to demolishing the baked fowl. In a few minutes the pattern of the dish began to appear clean at the bottom as the rocks and sand on the seashore when the tide goes out.
In her frightful perplexity she endeavored to scream but the ogre smiled so bewitchingly that the scream died away on her prim lips.
She smiled, without any effect on him, and then turned to weeping. This annoyed the devourer a little but did not hinder his eating.
“How good you are to weep with joy at my return,” he said. “I thank you, my kind aunt.”
Evidently the Revolution had transmogrified this lad.
Having tucked away three fourths of the bird he left a little of the Indian grain at the end of the dish, saying:
“You are fond of rice, my dear auntie: and, besides, it is good for your poor teeth.”
At this attention, taken for a bitter jest, Angelique nearly suffocated. She sprang upon Pitou and snatched the lightened platter from his hand, with an oath which would not have been out of place in the mouth of an old soldier.
“Bewailing the rooster, aunt?” he sighed.
“The rogue – I believe he is chaffing me,” cried the old prude.
“Aunt,” returned the other, rising majestically, “my intention was to pay you. I have money. I will come and board with you, if you please, only I reserve the right to make up the bill of fare. As for this snack, suppose we put the lot at six cents, four of the fowl and two of bread.”
“Six? when the meat is worth eight alone and the bread four,” cried the woman.
“But you did not buy the bird – I know the old acquaintance by his nine years comb. I stole him for you from under his mother and by the same token, you flogged me because I did not steal enough corn to feed him. But I begged the grain from Miss Catherine Billet; as I procured the bird and the food, I had a lien on him, as the lawyers say. I have only been eating my own property.”
“Out of this house,” she gasped, almost losing her voice while she tried to pulverize him with her gaze.
Pitou remarked with satisfaction that he could not have swallowed one grain more of rice.
“Aunt, you are a bad relative,” he said loftily. “I wanted you to show yourself as of old, spiteful and avaricious. But I am not going to have it said that I eat my way without paying.”
He stood on the threshold and called out with a voice which was not only heard by the starers without but by anybody within five hundred paces:
“I call these honest folk for witnesses, that I have come from Paris afoot, after having taken the Bastile. I was hungered and tired, and I have sat down under my only relation’s roof, and eaten, but my keep is thrown up at me, and I am driven away pitilessly!”
He infused so much pathos in this exordium that the hearers began to murmur against the old maid.
“I want you to bear witness that she is turning from her door a poor wayfarer who has tramped nineteen leagues afoot; an honest lad, honored with the trust of Farmer Billet and Dr. Gilbert; who has brought Master Sebastian Gilbert here to Father Fortier’s; a conqueror of the Bastile, a friend of Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette.”
The murmuring increased.
“And I am not a beggar,” he pursued, “for when I am accused of having a bite of bread, I am ready to meet the score, as proof of which I plank down this silver bit – in payment of what I have eaten at my own folk’s.”
He drew a silver crown from his pocket with a flourish, and tossed it on the table under the eyes of all, whence it bounced into the dish and buried itself in the rice. This last act finished the mercenary aunt; she hung her head under the universal reprobation displayed in a prolonged groan. Twenty arms were opened towards Pitou, who went forth, shaking the dust off his brogans, and disappeared, escorted by a mob eager to offer hospitality to a captor of the Bastile, and boon-companion of General Lafayette.
CHAPTER VII
THE ABDICATION IN A FARMHOUSE
AFTER having appeased the duties of obedience, Pitou wished to satisfy the cravings of his heart. It is sweet to obey when the order chimes in with one’s secret sympathies.
Ange