The whole tiny army of long, blue, ankle-hiding cottonade pantalettes and pantaloons tried to fulfil the injunction. Not one but had a warm place in the teacher’s heart. But Toutou, Claude, Sidonie, anybody who glanced into that heart could see sitting there enthroned. And some did that kind of reconnoitring. Catou, ’Mian’s older brother, was much concerned. He saw no harm in a little education, but took no satisfaction in the introduction of English speech; and speaking to ’Mian of that reminded him to say he believed the schoolmaster himself was aware of the three children’s pre-eminence in his heart. But ’Mian only said:—
“Ah bien, c’est all right, alors!” (Well, then, it’s all right.) Whether all right or not, Bonaventure was aware of it, and tried to hide it under special kindnesses to others, and particularly to the dullard of the school, grandson of Catou and nicknamed Crébiche[4]. The child loved him; and when Claude rang the chapel bell, and before its last tap had thrilled dreamily on the morning air, when the urchins playing about the schoolhouse espied another group coming slowly across the common with Bonaventure in the midst of them, his coat on his arm and the children’s hands in his, there among them came Crébiche, now on one side, now running round to the other, hoping so to get a little nearer to the master.
“None shall have such kindness to-day as thou,” Bonaventure would silently resolve as he went in through a gap in the pieux. And the children could not see but he treated them all alike. They saw no unjust inequality even when, Crébiche having three times spelt “earth” with an u, the master paced to and fro on the bare ground among the unmatched desks and break-back benches, running his hands through his hair and crying:—
“Well! well aht thou name’ the crawfish; with such rapiditive celeritude dost thou progress backwardly!”
It must have been to this utterance that he alluded when at the close of that day he walked, as he supposed, with only birds and grasshoppers for companions, and they grew still, and the turtle-doves began to moan, and he smote his breast and cried:
“Ah! rules, rules! how easy to make, likewise break! Oh! the shame, the shame! If Victor Hugo had seen that! And if George Washington! But thou,”—some one else, not mentioned,—“thou sawedst it!”
The last word was still on the speaker’s lips, when—there beside the path, with heavy eye and drunken frown, stood the father of Crébiche, the son of Catou, the little boy of twenty-five known as Chat-oué. He spoke:
“To who is dat you speak? Talk wid de dev’?”
Bonaventure murmured a salutation, touched his hat, and passed. Chat-oué moved a little, and delivered a broadside:
“Afteh dat, you betteh leave! Yes, you betteh leave Gran’ Point’!”