“But you did not buy the bird—I know the old acquaintance by his nine years comb. I stole him for you from under his mother and by the same token, you flogged me because I did not steal enough corn to feed him. But I begged the grain from Miss Catherine Billet; as I procured the bird and the food, I had a lien on him, as the lawyers say. I have only been eating my own property.”
“Out of this house,” she gasped, almost losing her voice while she tried to pulverize him with her gaze.
Pitou remarked with satisfaction that he could not have swallowed one grain more of rice.
“Aunt, you are a bad relative,” he said loftily. “I wanted you to show yourself as of old, spiteful and avaricious. But I am not going to have it said that I eat my way without paying.”
He stood on the threshold and called out with a voice which was not only heard by the starers without but by anybody within five hundred paces:
“I call these honest folk for witnesses, that I have come from Paris afoot, after having taken the Bastile. I was hungered and tired, and I have sat down under my only relation’s roof, and eaten, but my keep is thrown up at me, and I am driven away pitilessly!”
He infused so much pathos in this exordium that the hearers began to murmur against the old maid.
“I want you to bear witness that she is turning from her door a poor wayfarer who has tramped nineteen leagues afoot; an honest lad, honored with the trust of Farmer Billet and Dr. Gilbert; who has brought Master Sebastian Gilbert here to Father Fortier’s; a conqueror of the Bastile, a friend of Mayor Bailly and General Lafayette.”
The murmuring increased.
“And I am not a beggar,” he pursued, “for when I am accused of having a bite of bread, I am ready to meet the score, as proof of which I plank down this silver bit—in payment of what I have eaten at my own folk’s.”