Christmas gold, p.422
Christmas Gold, page 422
'Hurrah, hurrah! here's the grasshopper man again! Hey, ho! grasshopper, give us a tune—haven't you brought your fiddle?'
But when Paqualin got annoyed, as he sometimes did, and turned round upon them with his glowing eyes, they would all scuttle away as hard as their legs could carry them. For, like a good many other people, they were particularly courageous when they could only see the enemy's back. You may be sure our little Peter never called the charcoal-burner by any offensive names, and therefore, having a good conscience, had no cause to be afraid of him.
'Eh! but what is this?' he cried, in his high cracked voice as he flung down the sacks, and stood by the little lad in the doorway. 'Remember my ears are so quick I can hear the grass grow. Just now I heard the best mother in the world call her little boy to go indoors, and here he stands still on the threshold. If you do not go in do you know what will happen, eh?'
'No; what will happen? Please tell me,' said Peter.
'WHAT WILL HAPPEN? PLEASE TELL ME.'
The charcoal-burner stretched out one long arm and pointed away into the forest, and sunk his voice to a whisper:—
'The old, grey she-wolf will assuredly come pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat over the moss and the stones, pit-a-pat over the pine-needles and the fallen twigs and branches, pit-a-pat out of the wood, and—snap!—like that, catch your poor Cincinnatus by the tail and carry him off to make into soup for her little ones. Picture to yourself poor Cincinnatus in the wolf's great, black, steaming soup-pot, and all the wolf-cubs with their wicked, little mouths wide open, sitting round, with their wooden spoons in their hands, all ready to begin.'
Peter retreated hastily into the kitchen, cat and all, and took up his stand rather close to his mother.
'Is it true, mother?' he said. 'But where do the wolves buy their wooden spoons, do you think—in the shop at Nullepart?'
'Nay, how should I know?' said Susan Lepage, as she stooped down and kissed the child, and then looking up kindly nodded to the charcoal-burner. 'You must ask the old she-wolf herself if you want to know where she buys her spoons, and her soup pot too for that matter. She is no friend of mine, little one.'
After a moment's pause, she added:—
'You will stay to supper, John Paqualin? My husband and sons will be in soon, and there is plenty for all, thank God. You will be welcome.'
But Paqualin shook his head, and the light died away in those strange eyes of his.
'Welcome?' he said. 'The pretty, false word has little meaning for me. And yet perhaps in your mouth it is honest, Susan Lepage, for you are gentle and merciful as a saint in heaven, and the child, here, takes after you. But, for the rest, who welcomes a mad, mis-shapen, half-finished creature on whom Nature herself has had no mercy? Master Lepage will come in hungry. Will he like to have his stomach turned by the sight of the hump-backed charcoal-burner? No, no, I go home to my hut. Good-night, little Peter. I will tell the grey wolf to look elsewhere for her supper.—Ah! I see wonderful things though sometimes, for all that I live alone and in squalor. The red fire and the white moon tell me stories, turn by turn, all the night through.'
And with that he swung the empty sacks across his back again and shambled away into the growing darkness.
'A good riddance,' muttered Eliza, as she set the cheese on the table. 'It is an absolute indignity to ask a respectable servant to wait at table on a wild animal like that.'
But Susan Lepage sighed as she turned from the doorway.
'Poor, unhappy one,' she said. 'God gave thee thy fair soul, but who gave thee thy ungainly body?'
Then she reproved Eliza for her conduct in various matters which had nothing in the world to do with her remarks upon the charcoal-burner. Even the best of women are not always quite logical.
Meanwhile little Peter had sat down on his stool by the fire. For a little while he sat very still, for he was thinking over the visit of his friend John Paqualin. He felt rather unhappy about him, he could not quite have said why. But when we are children it is not easy to think of any one person or one thing for long together. There are such lots of things to think about, that one chases another out of our heads very quickly. And so Peter soon gave up puzzling himself about the charcoal-burner, and began counting the sparks as they flew out of the blazing, crackling, pine logs up the wide chimney. Unfortunately, however, he was not a great arithmetician; and though he began over and over again at plain one, two, three, he always got wrong among the fifteens and sixteens; and never succeeded in counting up to twenty at all. Nothing is more tedious than making frequent mistakes. So he got off his stool, and began hopping from one stone quarry in the kitchen floor to the next. Suddenly he became entangled in Eliza's full petticoats—she was whirling them about a good deal, it is true, being in rather a bad temper—and nearly tumbled down on his poor, little nose.
'Bless the child, what possesses him?' cried Eliza.
Peter retired to his stool again, in a hurry; and after thinking for a minute pulled a long bit of string, with a cross-bar of stick at the end of it, out of the bulging side pocket of his short trousers, and drew it backwards and forwards, and bobbed it up and down just in front of Cincinnatus' nose. But Cincinnatus would not play.
Cincinnatus sat up very stiff and straight, with all his four paws in a row and his tail curled very tight over them, blinking his yellow eyes at the fire. For Cincinnatus was offended! Even cats have feelings. And on thinking it over, he came to the conclusion that he had not been treated with sufficient respect.
'Soup-pots and wooden spoons—fiddledee-dee,' he said to himself in the cat-language. 'Why pervert a child's mind with such inane fictions?'
For you see Cincinnatus was not a common cat; being first cousin once removed, indeed, to the Sacristan's cat at Nullepart—who knew all the feast and fast days in the church calendar as well as the Sacristan himself, and had not eaten a mouse on a Friday for I cannot say how long. When you have a scholar in the family it obliges you to be dignified.
And so poor little Peter, as nothing and nobody would help to amuse him and pass away the time, pressed his two fat, little hands together in a sort of despair, and gave a terrible sigh.
'Bless the child, what possesses him?' cried Eliza again. 'Ah, my heart! How you made me jump!'
'What is the matter, Peter?' asked his mother.
'Oh! I don't believe Antony will ever come home,' said the boy, while the great tears began to run down over his chubby cheeks. 'And I am so tired of waiting. And I want so badly to know whether they have dressed the stable in the big church at Nullepart; and whether we shall really go there on Sunday, to see the dear baby Jesus, and the blessed Virgin, and good St. Joseph, and the donkeys and cows, you told me about. I have never seen them yet. And I want so dreadfully to go.'
Then his mother took up Peter in her arms, and sat down in the wooden chair in the chimney-corner, and held him gently on her lap.
'There, there,' she said, as she stroked his pretty hair, 'what cause have you to fret? The stable will be dressed all in good time; and the donkeys and cows certainly won't run away before Sunday. And St. Joseph and the blessed Virgin will be glad that a little lad like you should come and burn a candle before them—never fear. If the day is fair we will certainly all go to church on Sunday. What is to be will be, and Antony's coming late or early can make no difference. Patience is a great virtue, dear, little one—you cannot learn that too soon.'
But Cincinnatus sat up very stiff, though he was growing slightly sleepy; and still winked his yellow eyes at the fire. He was not at all sure that it was not incumbent upon him to spit at the charcoal-burner next time he saw him. It was an extreme measure certainly, and before adopting it he would have been glad to take his cousin the Sacristan's cat's opinion on the matter. Social position brings its responsibilities. Yet all the same, it is a fine thing to have a scholar in the family.
Chapter II.
Which Introduces the Reader to an Admirer of the Ancient Romans
Table of Contents
Now, Peter's father was a person of some consequence, or, to speak quite correctly, thought himself of some consequence, which, as you will probably find when you grow older, often comes to much the same thing. He had his own piece of land, and his own herd of cows, which the boys, in the spring time, would help Gustavus to drive, along with the cows of their neighbours, to the wide, grass lands that border the forest on the west, where the blue salvias, and gentians, and campanulas, and St. Bruno's white lilies grow in the long grass. But years ago Peter's father had been a soldier in the French army, and had fought in great battles, and had been in Italy, and even across the sea to Africa. He could tell surprising stories of sandy deserts, and camels, and lions, and Arabs, and a number of other remarkable things that he had seen during his travels. And when he went down, as he frequently did, and sat in the wine shop at Nullepart, everybody treated him with deference and distinction, and called him not plain Lepage, but Master Lepage, and listened respectfully to all that he had to say.
Then Master Lepage was very well pleased, and he would take his pipe out of his mouth, and spread out his hands like some celebrated orator, and give the company the benefit of his views upon any subject—even those he did not very well understand. For the great thing is to talk, if you want to make an impression upon society—the sense of that which you say is quite a secondary consideration. Lepage was a handsome man; with a bright, grey eye, and a nose like a hawk's beak; and a fine, grey moustache, the ends of which curled up till they nearly touched his eyebrows. He held himself very erect, so that even in his blue blouse and peg-top trousers, with a great, brown umbrella under his arm, he still looked every inch a soldier.
But Master Lepage, notwithstanding his superior knowledge of the world, did not always contrive to please his friends and companions. For he was—so he said—a philosophic politician; and, like most other philosophers and politicians, he sometimes became both tedious and irritable. On such occasions his voice would grow loud, and he would thump the table with his fist till the plates danced and the glasses rattled again; and the more the person with whom he was conversing smiled and apologised, while he differed from him in opinion, the louder his voice would grow, and the more he would thump the table, and stamp and violently declare that all who did not agree with him were idiots and dolts, and traitors.
He had two fixed ideas. He venerated the republican form of government, and he despised the Prussians. If one of his sons was idle, loitering over his work or complaining that he had too much to do, Master Lepage would say to him sternly:—'Sluggard, you are unworthy to be the child of a glorious republic.'
Or if one of the cows kicked, when Gustavus was milking her, he would cry out:—'Hey then, thou blue imbecile, recollect that thou art the cow of a free citizen, and do not behave like a cut-throat Prussian!'
And during the long evenings of all the winters that little Peter could remember—they were not so very many, though, after all—when the supper was cleared away and the hearth swept, his father, after putting on a big pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, and drawing his chair close up to the table so that the lamp-light might fall full on his book, would read to himself the history of the famous Roman Republic. And always once or twice, during the course of the evening, he would lay down the book and take off his spectacles, and as he rubbed the glasses of them with his red pocket-handkerchief, would sigh to himself and say quite gently:—'Ah! but those were times worth living in! They had men worth looking at in those days.'
The elder of little Peter's brothers was named Antony. He was a smart, brisk young fellow. He was always in a little bit of a hurry and full of business. He liked to go down to the town to market. He liked to drive a sharp bargain, and when he had nothing else to do he would roam away to the railway station, and hang over the blue wooden railings at the back of the platform, staring at the crowded passenger or heavily laden freight trains going through to Paris, or over the frontier into Switzerland. And if he ever happened to catch sight of any soldiers on the trains, his eyes grew bright and his face eager, and he would whistle a stirring march as he walked home through the forest, and would chatter all the evening about the glorious fun he meant to have when the time came for him to serve his term in the army. And, at that, Master Lepage would look up from the pages of his Roman history book, and nod confidentially to his wife, and say:—
'Eh! our Antony is a fine fellow. He will help some day to thrash those rascally Prussians.'
But she would answer rather sadly:—
'That will be as the Lord pleases. There is sorrow and sin enough in the world already, it seems to me, without war to make it greater.'
Then Lepage would shrug his shoulders with an air of slight disgust, and say:—
'My wife, you are no doubt an excellent woman. But your mind is narrow. Only a secular education, and, above all, a careful study of ancient history, can enable us to speak intelligently on these great questions.'
Then he would wipe his spectacles and return once again to the campaigns of the Romans.
Paul, the second boy, was very different to his brother. He was tall and lanky, with quiet, brown eyes and straight, black hair. He had a great turn for mechanics, and made little Peter all manner of charming toys—mill-wheels that turned all splashing and sparkling in the clear water of the stream; or windmills, to set up in the garden, and scare the birds away from the fruit with their clatter, and many other pretty ingenious things. Paul did not talk much about himself; he was a quiet, silent fellow, but he was always busy with his fingers making little models of all the machinery he could see or get pictures of, and, though his father was not quite so partial to him as to Antony, he would sometimes say:—
'Eh! our Paul, too, will distinguish himself, and bring credit upon his family and country.'
Now on the particular evening that I was telling you about in the last chapter, Antony did not come in till quite late. The rest of the family had had their supper, and Eliza was grumbling to Gustavus as she rummaged about in the back kitchen.
'Why can't people be punctual?' she said. 'It would vex a saint to be kept muddling about till just upon bed-time unable to complete the day's work and wash up the plates and dishes. Those who come in late should go to bed supperless if I had my way.'
'Umph,' said Gustavus—which was a remarkably safe answer, since it meant chiefly nothing at all.
Master Lepage sat studying the story of the gallant Horatius, how he and two others defended the falling bridge over the river Tiber against all the host of Clusium and the allied cities. Paul, with a pocket-knife and a number of bits of wood on the table before him, was making a model of a force-pump. And Susan Lepage sat in the chimney corner knitting, little Peter on a stool at her feet resting his head against her knees. He was getting so sleepy that his eyes would shut though he tried very hard to keep them open. Sometimes his poor, little head nodded over all on one side; and then he woke up with a great start, dreaming that he had tumbled out of the old pear-tree in the garden, bump, on to the ground. And the dream was so vivid that it took him quite a minute and a half to remember where he was, and to realise that he was sitting on his own little stool in the kitchen, instead of lying on the asparagus bed under the pear-tree. But sleepy or not, Peter was determined not to go to bed till he had heard the news from Nullepart.
The longest waiting must needs end at last. There was a sound of brisk footsteps, the door was thrown open, and Antony entered the kitchen, with the rush and bustle of a healthy, young whirlwind.
Peter was wide awake in a moment. He jumped up and caught hold of the skirt of his brother's blouse.
'Oh, tell me, tell me,' he cried, 'have they dressed the stable in the church, and can I go on Sunday and see it?'
Now, it is always a great mistake to rush at people with questions when they are full of their own affairs; and so little Peter found in this case. For Antony had some money to pay over to his father, and a great many things to say on his own account; and then, too, he was very hungry and wanted his supper, so he pushed poor Peter aside rather roughly, and told him to get out of the way and mind his own business, and intimated generally that he was an inconvenient and superfluous person.
Peter retired to his stool again feeling very small. Between sleepiness and disappointment he was very much inclined to cry. Perhaps, indeed, he would have done so, had not Cincinnatus got up and rubbed gently against his legs, with a high back and a very upstanding tail, purring very loud, too, and saying as plain as cat-language could say it:—
'Console yourself. I, Cincinnatus, regret what has occurred. I am your friend. Confide in me. All will yet go well.'
For Cincinnatus was a cat of feeling, and never lost an opportunity of making himself agreeable if he could do it without loss of dignity. However, when Antony had transacted his business, and eaten his supper, and bragged a little about his own performances of one sort and another, he became a trifle ashamed of having behaved so roughly to his little brother. He did not say so, for few people have courage to make a public confession of their faults. But he described, with great animation, how the workmen and the good sisters were busy in the church; how bright everybody said the Virgin's blue mantle would be, how there was real straw in the stable, how charmingly natural the cattle and the donkey looked, and how ingeniously a lamp would be arranged—just like the star, in fact—to shine above the manger. Peter felt satisfied again. But he was still a little hurt; so he sat quiet and rubbed Cincinnatus' head in silence, though there were a hundred and one questions he was longing to ask.
'You will come with us, mon ami?' said Susan Lepage, looking across at her husband, who had just laid down his book, and was wiping his spectacles with his red handkerchief.
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