“She showed no proper feeling in letting me go from the farm,” he mused, “and since I went off, she has not inquired whether I starved to death or not. What would Father Billet say if he knew how his friends are thus cast off, and his business neglected? What would he say if he heard that, instead of looking after the working people, his daughter goes to keep appointments with the aristocrat, Lord Charny? He would not say much, but he would kill her. It is something to have the means of revenge in one’s hand,” thought Pitou.
But it is grander not to use them.
Still, Pitou had learnt that there is no benefit in doing good unless the actions are known to the person befriended.
Would it be possible to let Catherine know that he was helping her?
He knew that she came through the woods to go to the hunting-box, and it was very easy for him to plant himself under the trees, a book in hand as if he were studying, where she would be sure to come along.
Indeed, as he was pretending to pore over the “Perfect National Guardsman,” after having watched her to her rendezvous, he heard the soft shutting of a door. The rustle of a dress in the brush came next. Catherine’s head appeared above the bushes, looking with an apprehensive air all round for fear somebody would see her.
She was ten paces from her rustic worshipper, who kept still with the book on his knee. But he no longer looked on it but at the girl so that she should mark that he saw her.
She uttered a slight faint, stifled scream, recognized him, became pale as though death had flitted by and grazed her, and, after a short indecision betrayed in her trembling and the shrug of her shoulders, she flew wildly into the underwood and found her hitched-up horse in the forest. She mounted and fled.
Pitou’s plot was well laid and she had fallen into it.
He went home, half-frightened, half delighted.