"Come in!" he cried.
Fouan, who felt himself challenged, and who had for a long time past been regretting his loss of form, now once more regained the accomplishment of his youthful days, and, raising his leg, he also broke out into a noisy explosion.
"Here I come!" he exclaimed.
Then they both clapped their hands, slobbering and laughing. They enjoyed it immensely. But it was too much for La Trouille, who had fallen down on the floor, and was so shaken with wild spasms of laughter that she, too, gave vent to a slight explosion, but soft and musical, like a note from a fife in comparison with the sonorous, organ-like sounds of the two men.
Hyacinthe sprang up with an air of indignant protest, and stretched out his arm with a tragical gesture of authority:
"Out of the room with you, you dirty sow. Out of the room at once, you stink-pot! I'll teach you to show proper respect to your father and grandfather!"
He had never tolerated this familiarity on her part. It was only for people of a certain age. He cleared the air as it were with his outstretched hand, and pretended to be nearly choked by the little flute-like sound. His own, and his father's, he said, only smelt of gunpowder. Then, as the culprit, who had turned very red, and was quite upset by her forgetfulness of etiquette, hung back and showed a disinclination to leave, he, himself, cast her out of the room with an energetic shove.
"Go and shake your petticoats, you filthy sow, and don't venture in here again for another hour, till you've got yourself well ventilated!" said he.
That day was the commencement of a careless life full of jovial merriment. The girl's bedroom was given up to the grandfather. It was one of the divisions of the old cellar, cut off by a wooden partition. La Trouille herself, relinquishing her room with the greatest willingness, now took up her quarters at the far end of the cellar, in an excavation in the rock, which led, so the local legends said, into some immense subterranean caverns which had been blocked up by land-slips. Unfortunately this fox-hole of a Château was getting more deeply buried every winter by the action of the heavy rains, which flowed down the steep slope of the hill and swept the earth and pebbles along with them. The old ruin, with its ancient foundations and rough repairs, would have disappeared altogether if the aged lime-trees that had been planted over it had not kept the stones together by their thick, spreading roots. However, when the spring-time came round it was a charmingly fresh little spot, a kind of grotto lying hid beneath a tangle of briars and hawthorns. The sweet-briar that grew in front of the window was starred over with pink blossoms, and the door was wreathed with a drapery of wild honey-suckle, which had to be lifted like a curtain before one could enter the place.
It was by no means every evening that La Trouille was called upon to cook kidney beans and veal and onions. This only happened when the old man had been induced to part with a five-franc piece. Hyacinthe never attempted to obtain the money by any show of force or harshness; he worked upon his father's love of good living and his paternal feelings to despoil him of his money. There was always a good deal of feasting at the commencement of each month, when Fouan received his sixteen francs' allowance from the Delhommes; and every quarter, when the notary paid him his dividend of thirty-seven francs and a-half, there was the most uproarious junketing. At first the old man, clinging to his ingrained habits of parsimony, would only hand out half a franc at a time, expecting that amount to last for a long while; but, by-and-bye, he gradually surrendered himself to his scamp of a son, who flattered him and wheedled him, and sometimes so worked upon his feelings by his extraordinary stories that he was dissolved in tears, and easily prevailed upon to part with two and three francs. He, too, then took to stuffing himself with food, saying that it was best to enjoy one's-self while one could.