Meanwhile the Bishop waked, and reading the piece of paper, looked down at his feet to find full confirmation of François’ words. In the midst of it, Mathilde tore into the room.
“Well, your Grace,” bawled Mathilde, “what does your Grace think of your rowdy friend now? He stole a beehive off the bench as he went by. Pierre, the cobbler’s boy, was passing and saw him and told the cook who told the footman who told me, and I went out, and the beehive is gone! And look at your Grace’s feet! The wretch actually stole your Grace’s shoes!”
“Why do you speak with such violence?” said the Bishop, loath to lose, for a single pair of shoes and a beehive, the joy of François’ company. “Suppose I meet a man whom I have known as a boy, when I was in very humble circumstances and he was very high up in the world, and suppose that man’s shoes are worn, and I choose to give him a good pair and take his in return? Is that anybody’s business except my own? And suppose I gave him the beehive by way of a joke, you know?”
“It would be exactly like your Grace,” snapped Mathilde. “But it was the only good pair of shoes your Grace had in the world, and I shall have to go out into the town immediately to buy your Grace another pair.”
“Do,” said the Bishop, delighted to get rid of Mathilde on any terms.
When the door had slammed after the excellent Mathilde, the Bishop drew a long sigh of relief.
“I did not tell a single lie,” he said to himself; “I merely stated a hypothetical case. After all, the poor fellow needed the shoes, and he turned it into a pleasantry. I owed him that much for the hearty laughs he gave me, and for singing my mother’s old songs to me.”
The Bishop was always meeting François in the street after that; it was as if François were lying in wait for him, and by the simple expedient of beginning a good story, or intimating that he had a merry song, just as they reached the gates of the Bishop’s palace, François could always get a meal.
The affair of the purse had made Mathilde his mortal enemy, and she complained to the General that the Bishop was giving scandal by having that acrobat and juggler, François What’s-his-name, to breakfast at the palace about three times a week. General Bion, who was punctilious beyond any maiden lady in Bienville, felt it his duty to remonstrate with his brother about having François so often at the palace.
“But, my brother,” mildly urged the Bishop, “you would not have me, the son of our father, a laborer, uppish to the son of the Count d’Artignac. And besides, François has a good heart, and I am trying to bring him to penitence and to leave his present uncertain mode of life and to settle down somewhere. I think he is very amenable to grace, and I shall succeed in doing much with him. And then, he sings to me the songs our mother sang—ah, me!”