The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty
The latter showed some brass wire loops.
“The rabbits over our way are getting shy of me. I am going to lay some
snares on your farm, if you do not mind. Yours are so tender from the
grain they get.”
“I did not know you had so sweet a tooth.”
“Oh, not for me but for Miss Catherine.”
“Yes, she has no appetite, lately, that is a fact.”
At this moment, Pitou felt a touch to his foot. It was Catherine
directing his attention to the window past which a man was making for
the door where he entered with the farmer’s gun on his shoulder.
“Father Clovis,” he was hailed by the master.
Clovis was the old soldier who had taught Pitou to drill.
“Yes, Papa Billet, a bargain is a bargain. You paid me to pick out a
dozen bullets to suit your rifle and here they are.”
He handed the farmer his gun and a bag of bullets. Calm as the veteran
was, he inspired terror in Catherine as he sat at table.
“By the way I cast thirteen bullets instead of a dozen so I squandered
one on the hare you see. Your gun carries fine.”
“Is there a prize for shooting offered anywhere?” asked Pitou simply.
“You will win it, I guess like you did that silver cup and the bowl you
are drinking of, Miss Catherine. Why, what is the matter?”
“Nothing,” replied the girl opening her eyes which she had half closed
and leaning back in her chair.
“All I know is,” said Billet, “that I am going to lay in wait. It is a
wolf, I think.”
Clovis turned the bullets out on a plate. Had Pitou looked from them to
Catherine he would have seen that she nearly swooned.
“Wolf?” repeated he. “I am astonished that before the snowfalls we
should see them here.”
“The shepherd says one is prowling round, out Boursonne way.”
Pitou looked from the speaker to Catherine.
“Yes, he was spied last year, I was told; but he went off, and it was
thought forever; but he has turned up again. I mean to turn him down!”
This was all the girl could endure; she uttered a cry and staggered out
of the door. Pitou followed her to offer his arm and found her in the
kitchen.
“What ails you?”
“Can you not guess? he knows that Isidore has arrived at Boursonne this
morning, and he is going to shoot him.”
“I will put him on his guard----“
The voice of Billet interrupted the pair.
“If you are going to lay snares, Master Pitou, it seems to me it is time
you were jogging. Father Clovis is going your way.”
“I am off,” and he went out by the kitchen door, while Catherine went up
to her room, where she bolted the door.
The forest was Pitou’s kingdom and when he had left Clovis to go home,
he felt easy about what he had undertaken to do.
He thought of running to Boursonne and warning Viscount Isidore; but he
might not be believed and the warning might not be heeded.
He considered he had better wait.
He had not a doubt that at the windows of Billet’s room and of his
daughter’s, they two were on the alert. All the tragedy or its failure
depended on him. If he let the viscount pass within rifle range, he
would let him march to his death.
In fact, Billet, sure that the nobleman would not marry a farmer’s
daughter, had resolved to wipe out the insult done him in blood.
Suddenly Pitou, lying on the ground in a clump of willow, heard the
gallop of a horse.
Billet must have heard it also for he came out of the house; and Ange
had not a doubt that the willow copse which he had chosen to spy
Catherine’s window had for the same reason recommended itself to the
farmer.
As the latter advanced, he slipped back and slid down into the ditch.
The horse crossed the road at sixty paces, and as a shadow was soon
detached from it, the rider must have leaped off, and turned the steed
loose. It went on without stopping.
There was ten minutes of dreadful silence.
The night was so black that Pitou, reckoning his eyes better than
Billet’s, hoped that he alone saw the shadow stealing towards the house.
But at the same moment, as the shadow went up under Catherine’s window,
Pitou heard the click of a hammer going on full cock on the gun.
The shadow did not notice but rapped three times on the shutter.
Pitou quivered--Catherine would surely blame him for not having passed
the warning as he had promised.
But what could he do?
Pitou heard the hammer fall and saw the priming flash; the powder in the
touchhole did not catch and the living target received no bullet.
At the same moment Catherine opened her window. She saw all and cried:
“Up, it is my father!” she almost dragged Charny in at the casement.
The farmer had his second barrel to fire and he thought:
“He must come out and this time I will not miss him.”
Presently the dogs began barking.
“Oh, the jade,” he growled, “she has let him out at the back, through
the orchard.”
He ran round the house to overtake the escaping prey.
“There is hope,” thought Pitou: “aim cannot be taken in the night as in
the day and the hand is not so steady in firing on a man as at a wolf in
the den.”
Indeed, Billet had fired on a man whom he saw scaling the orchard wall
but he had got away on a horse which came up at his whistle. While
Billet was following the pair in vague hope that he had hurt the rider
so that he must fall out of the saddle, Ange reached the orchard where
he saw Catherine leaning up against a tree with her hand on her heart.
“Let me take you into the house,” he said.
“No, I will not live under the roof of the man who shot at my
sweetheart.”
“But then----“
“Do you refuse to accompany me?”
“No, but----“
“Come.”
No one saw them leave the farm and both disappeared in the valley.
God only knew the refuge of Catherine Billet!
All night a dreadful storm raged in the heart of the injured father.
Something vital seemed to snap in the mighty frame of the man when he
returned emptyhanded to see that his daughter had taken to flight.
When he came home at nine as usual to breakfast, his wife said. “Where
is our Catherine?”
“Catherine?” he said with an effort. “The air is bad on the farm and I
sent her over to her aunt’s in Sologne.”
“Good, she wanted a change. Will she make a long stay?”
“Till she gets better.”
Drying her tears the good woman went to sit in the chimney corner while
her husband rode off into the fields.
Dr. Raynal had passed a restless night also. He was roused by Viscount
Charny’s lackey pulling at his nightbell and, riding over to Boursonne,
found that he had a couple of bullets in his side. Neither wound was
dangerous, though one was serious. In three calls he set him up again;
but he had to wear a bandage for a time, which did not prevent him
riding out. Nobody had an idea of his accident.
It was time for him to be healed--time to return to Paris!
Mirabeau had promised the Queen to save her, and she wrote to her
brother on the Austrian throne:
“I follow your counsel. I am making use of Mirabeau but there is nothing
of weight in my relations with him.”
On the following day, he saw groups on the way to the Assembly and went
up to learn the nature of the outcries.
Little newsheets were passing from hand to hand and newsdealers were
calling out:
“Buy the Great Treason of Mirabeau!”
“It seems this concerns me,” he said, taking a piece of money out. “My
friend,” he said to one of the venders who had a donkey carrying
panniers full of the sheets, “how much is this Great Treason of
Mirabeau?”
“Nothing to you, my lord,” replied the man, looking him in the eye, “and
it is struck off in an edition of one hundred thousand.”
The orator went away thoughtful. A lampoon in such an edition and given
away by a newsman who knew him!
Still the sheet might be one of those catchpennys which abounded at that
epoch, stupid or spiteful. No, it was the list of his debts, accurate,
and the note that their 200,000 francs had been paid by the Queen’s
almoner on a certain date; also the statement that the court paid him
six thousand francs per month. Lastly the account of his reception by
the Queen.
What mysterious enemy pursued him, or rather pursued the monarchy like a
hellhound?
This is what we shall learn, with many another secret which none but
Cagliostro the superhuman might divine, in the sequel to this volume
entitled “THE ROYAL LIFEGUARD.”
THE END
* * * * *
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