THE BLACK WOLF
Thibault’s first thought was to get himself some supper, for he was
terribly tired. The past day had been an eventful one for him, and
certain things which had happened to him had evidently been calculated
to produce a craving for food. The supper, it must be said, was not
quite such a savoury one as he had promised himself, when starting to
kill the buck; but the animal, as we know, had not been killed by
Thibault, and the ferocious hunger which now consumed him made his black
bread taste almost as delicious as venison.
He had hardly, however, begun his frugal repast, when he became
conscious that his goat--of which I think we have already spoken--was
uttering the most plaintive bleatings. Thinking that she, too, was in
want of her supper, he went into the lean-to for some fresh grass, which
he then carried to her, but as he opened the little door of the shed,
out she rushed with such precipitancy that she nearly knocked Thibault
over, and without stopping to take the provender he had brought her, ran
towards the house. Thibault threw down the bundle of grass and went
after her, with the intention of re-installing her in her proper place;
but he found that this was more than he was able to do. He had to use
all his force to get her along, for the goat, with all the strength of
which a beast of her kind is capable, resisted all his efforts to drag
her back by the horns, arching her back, and stubbornly refusing to
move. At last, however, being vanquished in the struggle, it ended by
the goat being once more shut up in her shed, but, in spite of the
plentiful supper which Thibault left her with, she continued to utter
the most lamentable cries. Perplexed, and cross at the same time, the
shoe-maker again rose from his supper and went to the shed, this time
opening the door so cautiously that the goat could not escape. Once
inside he began feeling about with his hands in all the nooks and
corners to try and discover the cause of her alarm. Suddenly his fingers
came in contact with the warm, thick coat of some other animal. Thibault
was not a coward, far from it, none the less, he drew back hastily. He
returned to the house and got a light, but it almost fell from his hand,
when, on re-entering the shed, he recognised in the animal that had so
frightened the goat, the buck of the Lord of Vez; the same buck that he
had followed, had failed to kill, that he had prayed for in the devil’s
name, if he could not have it in God’s; the same that had thrown the
hounds out; the very same in short which had cost him such hard blows.
Thibault, after assuring himself that the door was fastened, went gently
up to the animal; the poor thing was either so tired, or so tame, that
it did not make the slightest attempt to move, but merely gazed out at
Thibault with its large dark velvety eyes, rendered more appealing than
ever by the fear which agitated it.
“I must have left the door open,” muttered the shoe-maker to himself,
“and the creature, not knowing where to hide itself, must have taken
refuge here.” But on thinking further over the matter, it came back to
him that when he had gone to open the door, only ten minutes before, for
the first time, he had found the wooden bolt pushed so firmly into the
staple that he had had to get a stone to hammer it back; and then,
besides, the goat, which, as we have seen, did not at all relish the
society of the new-comer, would certainly have run out of the shed
before, if the door had been open. What was, however, still more
surprising was that Thibault, looking more closely at the buck, saw that
it had been fastened up to the rack by a cord.
Thibault, as we have said, was no coward, but now a cold sweat began to
break out in large drops on his brow, a curious kind of a shiver ran
through his body, and his teeth chattered violently. He went out of the
shed, shutting the door after him, and began looking for his goat, which
had taken advantage of the moment when the shoe-maker had gone to fetch
a light, and ran again into the house, where she was now lying beside
the hearth, having evidently quite made up her mind this time not to
forsake a resting place, which, for that night at least, she found
preferable to her usual abode.
Thibault had a perfect remembrance of the unholy invocation he had
addressed to Satan, and although his prayer had been miraculously
answered, he still could not bring himself to believe that there was any
diabolic intervention in the matter.
As the idea, however, of being under the protection of the spirit of
darkness filled him with an instinctive fear, he tried to pray; but when
he wished to raise his hand to make the sign of the cross on his
forehead, his arm refused to bend, and although up to that time he had
never missed a day saying his _Ave Maria_, he could not remember a
single word of it.
These fruitless efforts were accompanied by a terrible turmoil in poor
Thibault’s brain; evil thoughts came rushing in upon him, and he seemed
to hear them whispering all around him, as one hears the murmur of the
rising tide, or the laughing of the winter wind through the leafless
branches of the trees.
“After all,” he muttered to himself, as he sat pale, and staring before
him, “the buck is a fine windfall, whether it comes from God or the
Devil, and I should be a fool not to profit by it. If I am afraid of it
as being food sent from the nether regions, I am in no way forced to eat
it, and what is more, I could not eat it alone, and if I asked anyone to
partake of it with me, I should be betrayed; the best thing I can do is
to take the live beast over to the Nunnery of Saint-Rémy, where it will
serve as a pet for the Nuns and where the Abbess will give me a good
round sum for it. The atmosphere of that holy place will drive the evil
out of it, and I shall run no risk to my soul in taking a handful of
consecrated crown pieces.
“What days of sweating over my work, and turning my auger, it would
take, to earn even the quarter of what I shall get by just leading the
beast to its new fold! The devil who helps one is certainly better worth
than the angel who forsakes one. If my lord Satan wants to go too far
with me, it will then be time enough to free myself from his claws:
bless me! I am not a child, nor a young lamb like Georgine, and I am
able to walk straight in front of me and go where I like.” He had
forgotten, unhappy man, as he boasted of being able to go where and how
he liked, that only five minutes before he had tried in vain to lift his
hand to his head.
Thibault had such convincing and excellent reasons ready to hand, that
he quite made up his mind to keep the buck, come whence it might, and
even went so far as to decide that the money he received for it should
be devoted to buying a wedding dress for his betrothed. For, strange to
say, by some freak of memory, his thoughts would keep returning towards
Agnelette; and he seemed to see her clad in a long white dress with a
crown of white lilies on her head and a long veil. If, he said to
himself, he could have such a charming guardian angel in his house, no
devil, however strong and cunning he might be, would ever dare to cross
the threshold. “So,” he went on, “there is always that remedy at hand,
and if my lord Satan begins to be too troublesome, I shall be off to the
grandmother to ask for Agnelette; I shall marry her, and if I cannot
remember my prayers or am unable to make the sign of the cross, there
will be a dear pretty little woman, who has had no traffic with Satan,
who will do all that sort of thing for me.”
Having more or less re-assured himself with the idea of this compromise,
Thibault, in order that the buck should not run down in value, and might
be as fine an animal as possible to offer to the holy ladies, to whom he
calculated to sell it, went and filled the rack with fodder and looked
to see that the litter was soft and thick enough for the buck to rest
fully at its ease. The remainder of the night passed without further
incident, and without even a bad dream.
The next morning, my lord Baron again went hunting, but this time it was
not a timid deer that headed the hounds, but the wolf which Marcotte had
tracked the day before and had again that morning traced to his lair.
And this wolf was a genuine wolf, and no mistake; it must have seen many
and many a year, although those who had that morning caught sight of it
while on its track, had noted with astonishment that it was black all
over. Black or grey, however, it was a bold and enterprising beast, and
promised some rough work to the Baron and his huntsmen. First started
near Vertefeuille, in the Dargent covert, it had made over the plain of
Meutard, leaving Fleury and Dampleux to the left, crossed the road to
Ferté-Milou, and finally begun to run cunning in the Ivors coppices.
Then, instead of continuing in the same direction, it doubled, returning
along the same track it had come, and so exactly retracing its own
steps, that the Baron, as he galloped along, could actually distinguish
the prints left by his horse’s hoofs that same morning.
Back again in the district of Bourg-Fontaine, he ranged the country,
leading the hunt right to the very spot where the mis-adventures of the
previous day had had their start, the vicinity of the shoe-maker’s hut.
Thibault, we know, had made up his mind what to do in regard to certain
matters, and as he intended going over to see Agnelette in the evening,
he had started work early.
You will naturally ask why, instead of sitting down to a work which
brought in so little, as he himself acknowledged, Thibault did not start
off at once to take his buck to the ladies of Saint-Rémy. Thibault took
very good care to do nothing of the sort; the day was not the time to be
leading a buck through the forest of Villers-Cotterets; the first keeper
he met would have stopped him, and what explanation could he have given?
No, Thibault had arranged in his own mind to leave home one evening
about dusk, to follow the road to the right, then go down the sandpit
lane which led into the Chemin du Pendu, and he would then be on the
common of Saint-Rémy, only a hundred paces or so from the Convent.
Thibault no sooner caught the first sound of the horn and the dogs, than
he immediately gathered together a huge bundle of dried heather, which
he hastily piled up in front of the shed, where his prisoner was
confined, so as to hide the door, in case the huntsmen and their master
should halt in front of his hut, as they had the day before. He then sat
down again to his work, applying to it an energy unknown even to himself
before, bending over the shoe he was making with an intentness which
prevented him from even lifting his eyes. All at once he thought he
detected a sound like something scratching at the door; he was just
going through from his lean-to to open it when the door fell back, and
to Thibault’s great astonishment an immense black wolf entered the room,
walking on its hind legs. On reaching the middle of the floor, it sat
down after the fashion of wolves, and looked hard and fixedly at the
sabot-maker.
Thibault seized a hatchet which was within reach, and in order to give a
fit reception to his strange visitor, and to terrify him, he flourished
the weapon above his head.
A curious mocking expression passed over the face of the wolf, and then
it began to laugh.
It was the first time that Thibault had ever heard a wolf laugh. He had
often heard tell that wolves barked like dogs, but never that they
laughed like human beings. And what a laugh it was! If a man had laughed
such a laugh, Thibault would verily and indeed have been scared out of
his wits.
He brought his lifted arm down again.
“By my lord of the cloven foot,” said the wolf, in a full and sonorous
voice, “you are a fine fellow! At your request, I send you the finest
buck from His Royal Highness’s forests, and in return, you want to split
my head open with your hatchet; human gratitude is worthy to rank with
that of wolves.” On hearing a voice exactly like his own coming forth
from a beast’s mouth, Thibault’s knees began to shake under him, and the
hatchet fell out of his hand.
“Now then,” continued the wolf, “let us be sensible and talk together
like two good friends. Yesterday you wanted the Baron’s buck, and I led
it myself into your shed, and for fear it should escape, I tied it up
myself to the rack. And for all this you take your hatchet to me!”
“How should I know who you were?” asked Thibault.
“I see, you did not recognise me! A nice sort of excuse to give.”
“Well, I ask you, was it likely I should take you for a friend under
that ugly coat?”
“Ugly coat, indeed!” said the wolf, licking his fur with a long tongue
as red as blood. “Confound you! You are hard to please. However, it’s
not a matter of my coat; what I want to know is, are you willing to
make me some return for the service I have done you?”
“Certainly,” said the shoe-maker, feeling rather uncomfortable! “but I
ought to know what your demands are. What is it? What do you want?
Speak!”
“First of all, and above all things, I should like a glass of water, for
those confounded dogs have run me until I am out of breath.”
“You shall have it in a moment, my lord wolf.”
And Thibault ran and fetched a bowl of fresh, clear water from a brook
which ran some ten paces from the hut. The eager readiness with which he
complied with the wolf’s request betrayed his feeling of relief at
getting out of the bargain so cheaply.
As he placed the bowl in front of the wolf, he made the animal a low
bow. The wolf lapped up the contents with evident delight, and then
stretched himself on the floor with his paws straight out in front of
him, looking like a sphinx.
“Now,” he said, “listen to me.”
“There is something else you wish me to do,” asked Thibault, inwardly
quaking.
“Yes, a very urgent something,” replied the wolf. “Do you hear the
baying of the dogs?”
“Indeed I do, they are coming nearer and nearer, and in five minutes
they will be here.”
“And what I want you to do is to get me out of their way.”
“Get you out of their way! and how?” cried Thibault, who but too well
remembered what it had cost him to meddle with the Baron’s hunting the
day before.
“Look about you, think, invent some way of delivering me!”
“The Baron’s dogs are rough customers to deal with, and you are asking
neither more nor less than that I should save your life; for I warn you,
if they once get hold of you, and they will probably scent you out, they
will make short work of pulling you to pieces. And now supposing I spare
you this disagreeable business,” continued Thibault, who imagined that
he had now got the upper hand, “what will you do for me in return?”
“Do for you in return?” said the wolf, “and how about the buck?”
“And how about the bowl of water?” said Thibault.
“We are quits there, my good sir. Let us start a fresh business
altogether; if you are agreeable to it, I am quite willing.”
“Let it be so then; tell me quickly what you want of me.”
“There are folks,” proceeded Thibault, “who might take advantage of the
position you are now in, and ask for all kinds of extravagant things,
riches, power, titles, and what not, but I am not going to do anything
of the kind; yesterday I wanted the buck, and you gave it me, it is
true; to-morrow, I shall want something else. For some time past I have
been possessed by a kind of mania, and I do nothing but wish first for
one thing and then for another, and you will not always be able to spare
time to listen to my demands. So what I ask for is, that, as you are the
devil in person or someone very like it, you will grant me the
fulfilment of every wish I may have from this day forth.”
The wolf put on a mocking expression of countenance. “Is that all?” he
said, “Your peroration does not accord very well with your exordium.”
“Oh!” continued Thibault, “my wishes are honest and moderate ones, and
such as become a poor peasant like myself. I want just a little corner
of ground, and a few timbers, and planks; that’s all that a man of my
sort can possibly desire.”
“I should have the greatest pleasure in doing what you ask,” said the
wolf, “but it is simply impossible, you know.”
“Then I am afraid you must make up your mind to put up with what the
dogs may do to you.”
“You think so, and you suppose I have need of your help, and so you can
ask what you please?”
“I do not suppose it, I am sure of it.”
“Indeed! well then, look.”
“Look where,” asked Thibault.
“Look at the spot where I was,” said the wolf. Thibault drew back in
horror. The place where the wolf had been lying was empty; the wolf had
disappeared, where or how it was impossible to say. The room was intact,
there was not a hole in the roof large enough to let a needle through,
nor a crack in the floor through which a drop of water could have
filtered.
“Well, do you still think that I require your assistance to get out of
trouble,” said the wolf.
“Where the devil are you?”
“If you put a question to me in my real name,” said the wolf with a
sneer in his voice, “I shall be obliged to answer you. I am still in
the same place.”
“But I can no longer see you!”
“Simply because I am invisible.”
“But the dogs, the huntsmen, the Baron, will come in here after you?”
“No doubt they will, but they will not find me.”
“But if they do not find you, they will set upon me.”
“As they did yesterday; only yesterday you were sentenced to thirty-six
strokes of the strap, for having carried off the buck; to-day, you will
be sentenced to seventy-two, for having hidden the wolf, and Agnelette
will not be on the spot to buy you off with a kiss.”
“Phew! what am I to do?”
“Let the buck loose; the dogs will mistake the scent, and they will get
the blows instead of you.”
“But is it likely such trained hounds will follow the scent of a deer in
mistake for that of a wolf?”
“You can leave that to me,” replied the voice, “only do not lose any
time, or the dogs will be here before you have reached the shed, and
that would make matters unpleasant, not for me, whom they would not
find, but for you, whom they would.”
Thibault did not wait to be warned a second time, but was off like a
shot to the shed. He unfastened the buck, which, as if propelled by some
hidden force, leapt from the house, ran round it, crossing the track of
the wolf, and plunged into the Baisemont coppice. The dogs were within a
hundred paces of the hut; Thibault heard them with trepidation; the
whole pack came full force against the door, one hound after the other.
Then, all at once, two or three gave cry and went off in the direction
of Baisemont, the rest of the hounds after them.
The dogs were on the wrong scent; they were on the scent of the buck,
and had abandoned that of the wolf.
Thibault gave a deep sigh of relief; he watched the hunt gradually
disappearing in the distance, and went back to his room to the full and
joyous notes of the Baron’s horn.
He found the wolf lying composedly on the same spot as before, but how
it had found its way in again was quite as impossible to discover as how
it had found its way out.