ANGE PITOU.
Ange was too young to feel the whole extent of his loss: but he divined
that the angel of the hearth had vanished: and when the body was taken
to the churchyard and interred, he sat down by the grave and replied to
all pleadings for him to come away by saying that Mamma Madeline was
there, that he never had left her and he would stay beside her now.
It was there that Dr. Gilbert, for Ange Pitou's future guardian was
a physician, found him when he hastened to Haramont on receiving the
dying mother's appeal.
Ange was very young when thus he saw the doctor for the first time.
But, we know, youth can feel deep impressions, leaving everlasting
memories. The previous passing of the young man of mystery through the
cottage had impressed its trace. He had left welfare with the boy:
every time Ange heard his mother pronounce the benefactor's name, it
had been almost with worship. Finally, when he appeared, grown up,
adorned with the title of Physician, joining to the past boons the
future promises, Pitou had judged by his mother's gratitude that he
ought himself be grateful. The poor lad, without clearly knowing what
he was saying, faltered words of eternal remembrance, and profound
thanks such as he had heard his mother use.
Therefore, as soon as he perceived the doctor coming among the grassy
graves and broken crosses, he understood that he came at his mother's
appeal and he could not say no to him as to the others. He made him no
resistance except to turn his head to look backwards as Dr. Gilbert
grasped his hand and led him from the cemetery.
A stylish cab was at the gates, into which the doctor made the poor boy
step, and he was taken to the town tailor's, where he was fitted with
clothes: they were made too large so that he would grow up to them. At
the rate our hero grew this would not take long.
Thus equipped, Ange was walked in a quarter of the town called Pleux,
where Pitou's pace slacked. He recalled this as being the abode of his
Aunt Angelique, of whom he had preserved an appalling memory.
Indeed the old maid had no attractions for a boy who cherished true
motherly affections: she was nearly sixty by this period. The minute
practice of religion had brutalized her, and mistaken piety had twisted
all sweet, merciful and humane feelings, so that she cultivated in
their stead a natural dose of greedy intelligence, augmented daily
by her association with all the prudes. She did not precisely live
on public charity but besides the sale of linen thread hand-spun,
and letting out chairs in the church, she received from kindly souls
ensnared by her devout posturings, petty coin which she converted into
silver and that into gold. Nobody suspected she accumulated them and
she stuffed the gold in the cushion and frame of an old armchair in
which she sat at work.
It was to this venerable relative's dwelling that Gilbert led little
Pitou. We might say Big Pitou, for he was too large for his age.
Miss Rose Angelique Pitou, as they came up, was in a merry humor as she
had just sent another gold piece to go and keep company with the rest
of her hoard. She was going around her seat of revenue when the doctor
and his ward appeared at the door, and she had to welcome the relic of
her family.
The interview would have been affecting if it had not been so
grotesque. The doctor, a man of keen observation, and physiognomist,
read the character of the hypocritical old maid at a glance. With her
long nose, thin lips and small bright eyes, she collected in one person
cupidity, selfishness and hypocrisy.
As soon as the stranger stated his little text on the duty of aunts
to take care of their nieces and nephews, she turned sour and replied
that, whatever her love for her poor sister, and her interest in her
dear little nephew, the slenderness of her means did not permit her,
though she was godmother as well as aunt, to add to her expenses.
"It is this way, Master Gilbert; this would run me into six cents a
day extra, for that lubberly boy would eat a pound of bread."
Ange screwed up his face, for he could tuck away a pound and a half at
breakfast alone.
"This is saying nothing for his washing, for he is a dirty little chap."
Considering that Ange was a regular gipsy for burrowing after moles and
climbing trees, this was true enough; but it is fair to say that he
tore his clothes worse than he soiled them.
"Fie!" said Doctor Gilbert; "do you who understand the Christian
virtues so well, make such close calculations about a nephew and an
orphan?"
"Then the keeping of his clothes in repair," went on the miser,
recalling the quantity of patches she had seen sewn by her sister on
the knees, and seat of Master Ange's pants.
"In short," said the doctor, "you refuse to shelter your nephew in your
house--the orphan boy who will have to beg for alms at the doors of
others."
Mean as she was, she felt the disgrace befalling her as if she drove
her next of kin to this step.
"No, I will take charge of him," she said.
"Good," said the doctor, delighted to find a moist spot in this desert.
"I will recommend him to the Augustin Monastery and have them take him
as a boy of all work."
The doctor was a philosopher, we have mentioned; which means that he
was the opponent of all the churchmen. He resolved to tear this recruit
from the enemy with all the warmth that the Augustines would have shown
to deprive him of a disciple.
"Well," he rejoined, sticking his hand in his deepest pocket, "since
you are in so hard a position, dear Miss Angelique, that you are
forced to send your nephew into beggary, I will find somebody else to
take him and the sum I am going to set aside for his maintenance. I
am obliged to return to America. Meanwhile I must apprentice the boy
to some craft, which he can choose for himself. In my absence he will
grow up and then we will see what to make of him. Kiss your good aunt
good-bye, and let us try our luck elsewhere," concluded the doctor.
He had barely finished before Pitou rushed into his aunt's long, bony
arms to exchange the hug which he wanted to be in token of eternal
separation. But the mention of a sum of money and Gilbert's movements
of putting his hand in his pocket for cash, with the chink of silver,
set the warmth of greed up from her old heart.
"Lord, doctor, do not you know that nobody in all the wide world can
love this poor lone, lorn thing like his own dear fond auntie?"
Entwining him with her long arms, she imprinted on his cheeks a couple
of kisses so sour that they made his hair stand on end and then curl
with a shriveling up.
"Just what I thought; but still you are too poor to do the proper
thing."
"Nay, good Master Gilbert," said the pious dame, "forget not that we
have the Father of the fatherless above and that He has promised that a
swallow shall not be sold for a penny without its being spent for the
orphan's share."
"The text may be so, but it nowhere says that the orphan is to be bound
out as a servant. I am afraid to do with Ange as I suggested; it would
be too dear for your slight resources."
"But with the sum you spoke of, in your pocket," said the old devotee,
with her eyes rivetted on the place whence the chink had sounded.
"I would give it, assuredly, but only on condition that the boy should
be brought up to some livelihood."
"I promise that," cried Aunt Angelique; "I vow it, as true as the sheep
are tempered for the storm-wind." And she raised her skeleton hand to
heaven.
"Well," replied Gilbert, drawing out a bag rounded with coin; "I am
ready to deposit the funds, but you must sign a contract at Lawyer
Niquet's."
Niquet was her own business man and she raised no objections.
A bargain was made for five years: Ange Pitou was to be brought up to
some trade and boarded, etc., for two hundred livres to his aunt,
a-year. The doctor paid down the money.
Next day he quitted Villers, after arranging matters with a farmer on
some property of his, named Billet, whose acquaintance we shall make in
good time.
Miss Pitou, pouncing on the first payment in advance of the maintenance
fund, buried eight bright gold pieces in her armchair bottom.
With eight livres over, she put the small change waiting to make up the
amount of a gold piece to be placed, when converted, in the peculiar
savings-bank.
We noticed the scant sympathy Ange felt for his aunt; he had foreseen
the sorrow, disappointment and tribulations awaiting him under her roof.
In the first place, as soon as the doctor had turned his back, there
was no longer a question about his learning any trade. When the good
notary made a remark on this agreement, the tender aunt rejoined that
her nephew was too delicate to be put out to work. The lawyer had
admired his client's sensitive heart and deferred the apprenticeship
question for another year. He was only twelve so that it would not
waste much valuable time.
While his aunt was ruminating how to evade the contract, Ange resumed
his truant life in the woods, as led at Haramont: it was the same woods
and hence the same life.
As soon as he had the best spots located for bird-catching, he made
some birdlime and having a four-pound loaf under his arm, he went off
into the forest for the whole day.
He had foreseen a storm when he came back at nightfall, but he expected
to parry it with the proceeds of his skill.
He had not presaged how the tempest would fall. In fact, Aunt Angelique
had ambushed herself behind the door to deal him a cuff, as he crept
in which he recognized as inflicted by her hard hand. Happily he had
a hard head, too, and though the blow staggered him, he had the sense
left to hold out as a peace-offering and buckler the talisman he had
prepared. It was a bunch of two dozen small birds.
"What is this?" challenged his aunt, continuing to grumble for form's
sake but opening her eyes more widely than her mouth.
"Birds, you see, good Aunt Angelique," replied Pitou as she grabbed the
lot.
"Good to eat?" questioned the old maid who was greedy in all her senses
of the word.
"Redbreasts and larks--I should bet they are good to eat--but they are
better to sell. They command a good price in the market."
"Where did you steal them, you little rogue?"
"Steal? they ain't stolen--I took 'em at the pool in the woods. A
fellow has only to set up limed twigs anywhere round the water and the
silly birds get tangled; then you run up, wring their necks, and there
you have them."
"Lime? do you catch birds with lime?" queried Angelique.
"Not mortar lime, bless your innocence, but birdlime; it is made by
boiling down holly sap."
"I understand, but where did you get the money to buy holly sap?"
"I should be a saphead to buy that: one makes it."
"Ah, then these birds are to be had for the picking up?"
"Yes: any day; but not everyday, for, of course, you cannot catch on
Tuesday those you caught on Monday."
"Very true," returned the aunt, amazed at the brightness her nephew was
for once displaying: "you are right."
This unheard of approval delighted the boy.
"But, on the days when you ought not to go to the pools, you go
elsewhere. When you are not catching birds, you snare hares. You can
eat them, too, and sell the skins for two cents."
Angelique stared at her nephew who was coming out as a financier.
"Oh, I can do the selling!"
"Of course, just as Mother Madeline did," for Pitou had never supposed
he was to enjoy the fruit of his hunting.
"When will you go snaring hares?" she asked eagerly.
"I will go snaring hares and rabbits when I have wire for snares."
"All right, make it."
"Oh, I cannot do that," Pitou said, scratching his head. "I must buy
that at the store but I can weave the springes."
"What does it cost?"
"I can make a couple of dozen with four cents' worth, and it ought
to catch half a dozen bunnies--and the snares are used over and over
again--unless the gamekeepers seize them."
"Here are four cents," said Aunt Angelique, "go and buy wire and get
the rabbits to-morrow."
Wire was cheaper in the town than at the village so that Ange got
material for twenty-four snares for three cents; he brought the odd
copper to his aunt who was touched by this honesty. For an instant she
felt like giving him the cent but unfortunately for Ange, it had been
flattened by a hammer and might be passed in the dusk for a twosous
piece. She thought it wicked to squander a piece that might bring a
hundred per cent, and she popped it into her pouch.
Pitou made the snares and in the morning asked mysteriously for a bag.
In it she put the bread and cheese for his meals, and away he went to
his hunting ground.
Meanwhile she plucked the robins intended for their dinner; she took
a brace of larks to Abbe Fortier, and two brace to the Golden Ball
innkeeper, who paid her three cents for them and ordered as many as she
could supply at that rate.
She went home beaming: the blessing of heaven had entered the house
with Ange Pitou.
"They are quite right who say a good action is never thrown away," she
observed as she munched the robins, as fat as ortolans and delicate as
beccaficoes.
At dark in walked Ange, with the rounded out bag on his shoulders; Aunt
Angelique received him on the threshold but not with a slap.
"Here I am, with my bag," said he with the calmness of having well
spent his day.
"And what have you in the bag?" cried the aunt, stretching out her hand
in sharp curiosity.
"Beech-mast," replied Pitou. "It is this way. If Daddy Lajeunesse, the
gamekeeper, saw me rambling without the bag he would want to know what
I was lurking for and he would feel suspicion. But when he challenged
me with the bag, I just answered him: 'I am gathering beechmast,
father--it is not forbidden to gather mast, is it?' and not being
forbidden, he could not do anything. So he said nothing except: 'You
have a good aunt, Pitou; give her my compliments.'"
"So you have been collecting mast instead of catching rabbits," cried
Aunt Angelique, angrily.
"No, no, I laid my snares under cover of mast-gathering: the old donkey
saw me doing that and thought it right."
"But the game?" said the woman, bent on the first principle.
"The moon will be up at twelve and I will go and see how many I have
snared."
"You will go into the woods at midnight?"
"Why, not? what is there to be afraid of?"
The woman was as amazed at Ange's courage as at the breadth of his
speculations. But brought up in the woods, Ange was not to be scared at
what terrifies the town boy.
So at midnight he set out, skirting the cemetery wall, for the innocent
lad, never in his ideas offending anybody, had no more fear of the dead
than of the living.
The only person he dreaded was Lajeunesse. So he made a turn round his
house and stopped to imitate the barking of a dog so naturally that the
gamekeeper's basset "Snorer," deceived by the provocation, replied with
a full throat and came to the door to sniff the air.
Pitou ran on, chuckling, for if Snorer were home his master was surely
asleep there, as the man and the dog were inseparable.
In the snares two rabbits had been strangled, Pitou stuffed them into
the pockets of a coat made too long for him and now too small.
Greed kept the aunt awake, though she had lain down. She had reckoned
on two brace of game.
"Only a pair," said Pitou. "It is not my fault that I have not done
better but these are the cunningest rabbits for miles round."
Next day Pitou renewed his enterprises and had the luck to catch
three rabbits. Two went to the tavern and one to Abbe Fortier, who
recommended Aunt Angelique to the benevolent of the town.
Thus things went on for three or four months, the woman enchanted and
Ange thinking life endurable. Except for his mother's loss, matters
were such as at Haramont: he passed his time in rural pleasures.
But an unexpected circumstance broke the jar of illusion of the prude
and stopped the nephew's trapping.
A letter from Dr. Gilbert arrived from New York. He had not forgotten
his little ward on landing, but asked Master Niquet if his instructions
had been followed and if young Pitou were learning the means to make
his own living.
It was a pinch, for there was no denying that Ange was in first-rate
health. He was tall and lank but so are hickory saplings, and nobody
doubts their strength and elasticity.
The aunt asked a week to put in her reply; it was miserable for both.
Pitou asked no better career than he was leading, but it was quiet at
the time; not only did the cold weather drive the birds away but the
snow fell and as it would retain footprints, he dared not go into the
woods to lay traps and snares.
During the week the old maid's claws grew; she made the stripling so
wretched that he was ready to take up any trade rather than be her butt
any longer.
Suddenly a sublime idea sprouted in her cruelly tormented brain, where
peace reigned again.
Father Fortier had two purses for poor students attached to his school,
out of the bounty of the Duke of Orleans.
Angelique resolved to beg him to enter Ange for one of them. This would
cost the teacher nothing, and to say nothing of the game on which the
woman had been nourishing the doctor for half a year, he owed something
to the church-seat letter.
Indeed, Ange was received without fee by the schoolmaster.
The old girl was delighted for it was the school of the district where
Dr. Gilbert's son was educated. He paid fifty livres and Ange got in
for nothing, but nobody was to let Sebastian Gilbert or any others know
that.
Whether they guessed this or not, Ange was received by his school
fellows with that sweet spirit of brotherhood born among children
and perpetuated among "the grown ups," in other words with hooting
and teasing. But when three or four of the budding tyrants made the
acquaintance of Pitou's enormous fist and were trodden under his even
more enormous foot, respect began to be diffused. He would have had a
life a shade less worried than when under Angelique's wing; but Father
Fortier in soliciting little children to come unto him, forgot to warn
them that the hands he held out were armed with the Latin Rudiments and
birch rods.
Little did the aunt care whether the information was flogged or
insinuated mentally into her nephew. She basked in the golden ray from
dreamland that in three years Ange would pass the examination and be
sent to college with the Orleans Purse.
Then would he become a priest, when he would, of course, make his aunt
his housekeeper.
One day a rough awakening came to this delusion. Ange crawled into the
house as if shod in lead.
"What is the matter?" cried Aunt 'Gelique, who had never seen a more
piteous mien. "Are you hungry?"
"No," replied Pitou dolefully.
The hearer was uneasy, for illness is a cause of alarm to good mothers
and bad godmothers, as it forces expenses.
"It is a great misfortune," Pitou blubbered: "Father Fortier sends me
home from school--so no more studies, no examination, no purse, no
college----"
His sobs changed into howls while the woman stared at him to try to
read in his soul the reason for this expulsion.
"I suppose you have been playing truant again," she said. "I hear that
you are always roaming round Farmer Billet's place to catch a sight
of his daughter Catherine. Fie, fie! very pretty conduct in a future
priest!"
Ange shook his head.
"You lie," shrieked the old maid, with her anger rising with the
growing certainty that it was a serious scrape. "Last Sunday you were
again seen rambling in Lovers-Walk with Kate Billet."
It was she who fibbed but she was one who believed the end justified
the means, and a whale-truth might be caught by throwing out a tub-lie.
"Oh, no, they could not have seen me there," cried Ange; "for we were
out by the Orange-gardens."
"There, you wretch, you see you were with her."
"But this is not a matter that Miss Billet is concerned in," ventured
Ange, blushing like the overgrown boy of sixteen that he was.
"Yes, call her 'Miss' to pretend you have any respect for her, the
flirt, the jilt, the mincing minx! I will tell her father confessor how
she is carrying on."
"But I take my Bible oath that she is not a flirt."
"You defend her, when you need all the excuses you can rake up for
yourself. This is going on fine. What is the world coming to, when
children of sixteen are walking arm in arm under the shade trees."
"But, aunt, you are away out--Catherine will not let me 'arm' her--she
keeps me off at arms-length."
"You see how you break down your own denials. You are calling her
Catherine, plain, now. Oh, why not Kate, or Kitty, or some such silly
nickname which you use in your iniquitous familiarity? She drives you
away to have you come nearer, they all do."
"Do they? there, I never thought of that," exclaimed the swain,
suddenly enlightened.
"Ah, you will have something else to think of! And she," said the old
prude, "I will manage all this. I will ask Father Fortier to lock you
up on bread and water for a fortnight and have her put in a nunnery if
she cannot moderate her fancy for you."
She spoke so emphatically that Pitou was frightened.
"You are altogether wrong, my good aunt," pleaded he, clasping his
hands: "Miss Catherine has nothing to do with my misfortune."
"Impurity is the mother of all the vices," returned Angelique
sententiously.
"But Impurity has nothing to do with my being turned out of school,"
objected the youth: "the teacher put me out because I made too many
barbarisms and solecisms which prevent me of having any chance to win
that purse."
"What will become of you, then?"
"Blest if I know," wailed Pitou, who had never looked upon priesthood,
with Aunt 'Gelique as housekeeper as Paradise on earth. "Let come what
Providence pleases," he sighed, lamentably raising his eyes.
"Providence, do you call it? I see you have got hold of these
newfangled ideas about philosophy."
"That cannot be, aunt, for I cannot go into Philosophy till I have
passed Rhetoric, and I am only in the third course."
"Joke away," sneered the old maid to whom the school-jargon was Greek.
"I speak of the philosophy of these philosophers, not what a pious man
like the priest would allow in his holy house. You are a serpent and
you have been gnawing a file of the newspapers in which these dreadful
writers insult King and Queen and the Church! He is lost!"
When Aunt Angelique said her ward was lost, she meant that she was
ruined. The danger was imminent. She took the sublime resolution to run
to Father Fortier's for explanation and above all to try to patch up
the breach.