Butifer gripped the barrel of his weapon in a convulsive clutch.
“You are right, sir,” he said; “I have done wrong, I have broken bounds, I am a cur. My gun ought to go to you, but when you take it away from me, you take all that I have in the world. The last shot which my mother’s son will fire shall be through my own head.... What would you have? I did as you wanted me. I kept quiet all winter; but the spring came, and the sap rose. I am not used to day labor. It is not in my nature to spend my life in fattening fowls; I cannot stoop about turning over the soil for vegetables, nor flourish a whip and drive a cart, nor scrub down a horse in a stable all my life, so I must die of starvation, I suppose? I am only happy when I am up there,” he went on after a pause, pointing to the mountains. “And I have been about among the hills for the past week; I got a sight of a chamois, and I have the chamois there,” he said, pointing to the top of the crag; “it is at your service! Dear M. Benassis, leave me my gun. Listen! I will leave the Commune, foi de Butifer! I will go to the Alps; the chamois-hunters will not say a word; on the contrary, they will receive me with open arms. I shall come to grief at the bottom of some glacier; but, if I am to speak my mind, I would rather live for a couple of years among the heights, where there are no governments, nor excisemen, nor gamekeepers, nor procureurs du roi, than grovel in a marsh for a century. You are the only one that I shall be sorry to leave behind; all the rest of them bore me! When you are in the right, at any rate you don’t worry one’s life out——”
“And how about Louise?” asked Benassis. Butifer paused and turned thoughtful.
“Eh! learn to read and write, my lad,” said Genestas; “come and enlist in my regiment, have a horse to ride, and turn carabineer. If they once sound ‘to horse’ for something like a war, you will find out that Providence made you to live in the midst of cannon, bullets, and battalions, and they will make a general of you.”
“Ye-es, if Napoleon was back again,” answered Butifer.
“You know our agreement,” said the doctor. “At the second infraction of it, you undertook to go for a soldier. I give you six months in which to learn to read and write, and then I will find some young gentleman who wants a substitute.”
Butifer looked at the mountains.
“Oh! you shall not go to the Alps,” cried Benassis. “A man like you, a man of his word, with plenty of good stuff in him, ought to serve his country and command a brigade, and not come to his end trailing after a chamois. The life that you are leading will take you straight to the convict’s prison. After over-fatiguing yourself, you are obliged to take a long rest; and, in the end, you will fall into idle ways that will be the ruin of any notions of orderly existence that you have; you will get into the habit of putting your strength to bad uses, and you will take the law into your own hands. I want to put you, in spite of yourself, into the right path.”
“So I am to pine and fret myself to death? I feel suffocated whenever I am in a town. I cannot hold out for more than a day, in Grenoble, when I take Louise there——”
“We all have our whims, which we must manage to control, or turn them to account for our neighbor’s benefit. But it is late, and I am in a hurry. Come to see me to-morrow, and bring your gun along with you. We will talk this over, my boy. Good-bye. Go and sell your chamois in Grenoble.”