SHOWING HOW THERE MAY BE FISHERMEN AND FISHERMKN.
Maître Courtin had been very unhappy in mind during the whole evening Madame de la Logerie had compelled him to pass with her. By gluing his ear to the door he had heard every word the baroness had said to her son, and he knew, therefore, of the scheme of the schooner.
Michel's departure would, of course, upset all his projects for the discovery of Petit-Pierre; consequently, he was little desirous of the honor the baroness did him in taking him home with her. He was, in fact, most anxious to get back to the farmhouse. He hoped, by evoking the image of Mary, to prevent, or at least delay, the flight of his young master; for if the latter departed he lost, of course, the thread by which he expected to penetrate the labyrinth in which Petit-Pierre was hidden.
Unluckily for him, as soon as Madame de la Logerie reached the château she struck another vein of ideas. In taking Courtin from the farmhouse her only idea had been to hide her son's departure and protect him from the farmer's curiosity; but on reaching the château she found the house, occupied for the last few weeks by a band of soldiers, in such deplorable disorder that she forgot, in presence of a devastation which assumed to her eyes the proportions of a catastrophe, all her natural distrust of Courtin, and she kept him with her as the recipient and echo of her lamentations. Her despair, expressed with the energy of conviction, prevented Courtin from leaving her, without some decided pretext, and therefore delayed his return to the farmhouse.
He was too shrewd not to suspect that the baroness had brought him to keep him away from her son; but her despair was so genuine at the sight of her broken china, shattered mirrors, greasy carpets, and her salon transformed into a guard-room and adorned with primitive but most expressive designs, that he began to doubt his first suspicion, and to think that if his young master had really not been cautioned against him it would be an easy matter to join him before he could board the vessel.
It was nine o'clock before the baroness, after shedding a last tear over the filthy defacements of the château, got into her carriage and Courtin was enabled to give the order to the postilion to drive on: "Road to Paris!" No sooner had he done so than he turned round rapidly and ran with all his might toward the farmhouse.
It was empty; the servant told him that Monsieur Michel and Mademoiselle Bertha had been gone two hours, and had taken the road to Nantes.
Courtin at once thought of following them, and ran to the stable to get his pony,--that, too, had gone! In his hurry he had forgotten to ask the servant by what manner of locomotion his young master had started. The recollection of his pony's extremely slow method of progression reassured him somewhat; but, at any rate, he only stopped in his own house long enough to get some money and the insignia of his dignity as mayor; then he started bravely afoot in quest of him whom by this time he regarded as a fugitive and almost as the embezzler of a hundred thousand francs, which his imagination had already discounted through the person of Mary de Souday's lover.
Maître Courtin ran like one who sees the wind whirling away his bank-notes; in fact, he went almost as fast as the wind. But his haste did not prevent him from stopping to make inquiries of every one he passed. The mayor of La Logerie was innately prying at all times, and on this occasion, as may well be supposed, he was not backward with his questions.
At Saint-Philbert-de-Grand-Lieu, he was told that his pony had been seen about half-past seven o'clock that evening. He asked who rode it; but he got no satisfactory answer on that point,--the inn-keeper, of whom he inquired, having taken notice only of the obstinacy of the animal in refusing to pass the tavern sign (a branch of holly and three apples saltierwise) where his master usually baited him on the way to Nantes.
A little farther on, however, the farmer was luckier; the rider was described to him so exactly that he could have no doubt about his being the young baron; and he was also told that the traveller was alone. The mayor, a prudent man if ever there was one, supposed that the two young people had parted company out of prudence, meaning to rejoin each other by different roads. Luck was evidently on his side; the pair were parted, and he knew, if he could only meet Michel alone, the game was won.
He felt so sure that the young baron had not deviated from the road and was now in Nantes that when he reached the inn of the Point-du-Jour he did not trouble himself to ask the inn-keeper for further information, which, by the bye, he doubted if the man would give him. He stopped only long enough to eat a mouthful, and then, instead of following Michel into Nantes, he turned back over the pont Rousseau and then to the right, in the direction of Pèlerin. The wily farmer had his plan.
We have already explained the hopes which Courtin had founded on Michel. Mary's lover would sooner or later betray to him, for some personal end, the secret hiding-place of the woman he loved; and as that beloved woman was living with Petit-Pierre, Michel's betrayal of Mary's retreat would also betray the duchess. But if Michel contrived to escape, all Courtin's hopes went with him. Consequently, at any cost Michel must not escape. Now, if Michel did not find the "Jeune Charles" at her anchorage Michel would be forced to remain.
As for Madame de la Logerie, she being well on the road to Paris, it would be some days at least before she could hear that her son had not sailed, and could take other measures to remove him from La Vendée. Courtin was confident that this delay would suffice him to obtain from Michel the clue he sought.
The only difficulty was that he did not know in what way to reach the captain of the "Jeune Charles," the name of the schooner which he had heard the baroness tell to Michel; but--without dreaming of his likeness in this to the greatest man of antiquity--Courtin resolved to run for luck.
Luck did not escape him. When he reached the top of the hill above Couéron he saw, above the poplar-trees on the islet, the masts of the schooner; the foretopsail was hoisted and was flapping to the breeze. Undoubtedly, it was the vessel he was in search of. In the lessening twilight, which was beginning to make all things indistinct, Maître Courtin, glancing along the shore, saw at about ten paces from him a fishing-rod held horizontally over the river with a line at the end, and a cork at the end of the line which floated on the current.
The rod seemed to come from a small hillock, but the arm that held it was invisible. Maître Courtin was not a man to remain in ignorance of what he wanted to know; he walked straight to the hillock and round it; there he discovered a man crouching in a hollow between two rocks, absorbed in contemplation of the swaying of his float at the will of the current.
The man was dressed as a sailor,--that is, he wore trousers of tarred-cloth and a pea-jacket; on his head was a species of Scotch-cap. A few feet from him the stern of a boat, fastened by its bow to the shore, swayed gently to the wash of the water. The fisherman did not turn his head as Courtin approached him, although the latter took the precaution to cough, and make his cough significant of a desire to enter into conversation. The fisherman not only kept an obstinate silence, but he did not even look Courtin's way.
"It is pretty late to be fishing," remarked the mayor of La Logerie at last.
"That shows you know nothing about it," replied the fisherman, with a contemptuous grimace. "I think, on the contrary, that it is rather too early. Night is the time it is worth while to fish; you can catch something better than the young fry at night."
"Yes; but if it is dark how can you see your float?"
"What matter?" replied the fisherman, shrugging his shoulders. "My night eyes are here," he added, showing the palm of his hand.
"I understand; you mean you feel a bite," said Courtin, sitting down beside him. "I'm fond of fishing myself; and little as you think so, I know a good deal about it."
"You? fishing with a line?" said the other, with a doubtful air.
"No, not that," replied Courtin. "I depopulate the river about La Logerie with nets."
Courtin dropped this hint of his locality, hoping that the fisherman, whom he took to be a sailor stationed there by the captain of the schooner to take Monsieur Michel de la Logerie on board, would catch it up; but he was mistaken; the man gave no sign of recognizing the name; on the contrary he remarked coolly:--
"You boast of your talent for the great art of fishing, but I don't believe in it."
"Pray why?" asked Courtin. "Have you the monopoly?"
"Because you seem to me, my good sir, to be ignorant of the first principle of that art."
"And what may that principle be?" asked Courtin.
"When you want to catch fish avoid four things."
"What are they?"
"Wind, dogs, women, and chatterers. It is true, I might say three," added the man in the pea-jacket, philosophically, "for women and chatterers are one."
"Pshaw! you'll soon find out that my chattering, as you call it, is not out of season, for I am going to propose to you to earn a couple of francs."
"When I've caught half a dozen fish I shall have earned more than a couple of francs, and amused myself into the bargain."
"Well, I'll go as far as four, or even five francs," continued Courtin; "and you will have the chance to do a service to your neighbor, which counts for something, doesn't it?"
"Come," said the fisherman, "don't beat round the bush; what do you want of me?"
"I want you to take me on board your schooner, the 'Jeune Charles,' the masts of which I see over there beyond the trees."
"The 'Jeune Charles,'" said the sailor, reflectively, "what's the 'Jeune Charles'?"
"Here," said Maître Courtin, giving the fisherman an oil-skin hat he had picked up on the shore, on which appeared the words, in gilt letters: "LE JEUNE CHARLES."
"Well, I admit you must be a fisherman, my friend," said the sailor. "The devil take me if your eyes are not in your fingers, like mine; otherwise you never could have read that in the darkness! Now, then, what have you to do with the 'Jeune Charles'?"
"Didn't I mention something just now that struck your ear?"
"My good man," said the fisherman, "I'm like a well-bred dog; I don't yelp when bitten. Heave your own log and don't trouble yourself about my keel."
"Well, I am Madame la Baronne de la Logerie's farmer."
"What of it?"
"I am sent by her," said Courtin, growing more and more audacious as he went on.
"What of that?" asked the sailor, in the same tone, but more impatiently. "You come from Madame de la Logerie; well, what have you got to say for her?"
"I came to tell you that the thing is a failure; it is all discovered, and you must get away as fast as you can."
"That maybe," replied the fisherman; "but it doesn't concern me. I am only the mate of the 'Jeune Charles;' though I do know enough of the matter to put you aboard and let you talk with the captain."
So saying, he tranquilly wound up his line and threw it into the boat, which he pulled toward him. Making a sign to Courtin to sit down in the stern, he put twenty feet between him and the shore with one stroke of the oars. After rowing five minutes he turned his head and found they were close alongside the "Jeune Charles," which, being in ballast, rose some twelve feet above them out of the water.
At the sound of oars a curiously modulated whistle came from the schooner, to which the mate replied in somewhat the same manner. A figure then appeared in the bows; the boat came up on the starboard side and a rope was thrown to it. The man with the pea-jacket climbed aboard with the agility of a cat, then he hauled up Courtin, who was less used to such nautical scrambling.