At the close of that summer I remember the boys adopted a very disagreeable method of teasing one another. It lasted for about a week, just when the furze bushes were covered with burs. And while the fancy lasted, the teasing was incessant. Everywhere—in the playground, at study time, under Miss Porquet’s very eyes—handfuls of burs used to be cast by anonymous hands, like harpoons by a whaler, on the innocent heads of unsuspecting boys. The heads chosen were always those covered with the thickest or curliest hair. And the victim would sometimes have to pass an hour in grumbling and complaining, while he disentangled the odious burs from his head; often pulling out handfuls of hair as he did so. This trick was never played on me; that I was spared, I knew well I owed to Marc.
XXVII.
PLANS FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
The holidays drew near, and Marc and I formed the most delightful plans for passing part of them together. It was arranged that I should pass a week with him and his parents at their country house, Bois-Clair. This was situated almost on the borders of the beautiful forest at Loches, and at a short distance from the meadows watered by the river Indre. I already knew something of Bois-Clair, for I had passed a happy half-holiday there. But this time, only to think! what happiness! I was to spend a whole week there.
And yet my joy was not entirely without alloy. For I thought of the forest. We should of course go there to gather wild flowers and berries; that would be delightful! But if we met with wolves, boars, robbers, or snakes! Besides in a forest there would be sure to be thickets so obscure, so dark and terrible, that it made me ill to think of them. It is true we would fish in the little streams for cray-fish, that would be very nice! but supposing the cray-fish were to pinch our fingers with their claws! or supposing we found adders instead of cray-fish, or perhaps frogs! horrid frogs which are so like toads! Yes, but we would go to the banks of the river and fish for gudgeon. Ah! but suppose the bank gave way—as really happened once to my father—and we should be plunged in the Indre, which is over three feet deep quite in-shore.
Marc spoke of all these chances with a smile on his lips, and such perfect confidence in all turning out well, that I began to feel reassured. I began to think that courage was contagious. Not that I can say that I was courageous, that I had courage myself—alas! far from it, I knew I could not trust myself to be brave. But it seemed as if I somehow so trusted in Marc that his courage did for both of us.
If I had dared to tell him how really frightened I was about many things, he would have made me happy by telling me at once something I only learnt by chance in conversation, and that was that François would be with us wherever we went. François was his father’s servant: an old soldier and a worthy man.