The Hero of the People: A Historical Romance of Love, Liberty and Loyalty

During a silent moment the throng parted to let the priest skulk through, and, closing, remained mute and admiring the vigorous man who offered himself as target to the terrible power to which half the world was enslaved at that era.

There was no longer mayor, town councilmen or gendarmes, only the Hero of the People, Billet.

“But we have no priest now,” said Mayor Longpre.

“We do not want him,” replied Billet who had never been in church but twice, for his wedding and his child’s baptism. “We will read the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the altar. That is the Creed of Liberty and the Gospel of the Future.”

Billet could not read but he had his manifesto by heart. When he had finished and with a noble movement embraced the Law and the Sword by taking the mayor’s and Pitou’s hands, the multitude appreciated the grandeur of what they were doing in shouting:

“Long live the Nation!”

It was one of the scenes of which Gilbert had spoken to the Queen without her understanding him.

From that time forward, France became one great family, with one heart and one language.

CHAPTER XXX
UNDER THE WINDOW

ON the surface all was calm and almost smiling on the Billet Farm.

As before, Billet, on his strong horse, trotted all over the land keeping his hands up to the mark. But a sharp observer would have noticed that on whatever part he was he tried to get a look at his daughter’s room window.

Though his face had a little softened toward her, Catherine felt that paternal distrust hovered over her.

Mother Billet was vegetating as formerly; she did not know that her husband harbored suspicion in his bosom, and her daughter anguish in hers.

Pitou, after his glory as captain of the uniformed National Guards, had fallen back into his habitual state of sweet and kindly melancholy. By the postmark on Isidore’s letters he noticed that he had returned to Paris.

He concluded that he would not be long before returning to his estate. Pitou’s heart shrank at this prospect.

Under pretence of snaring rabbits to give his friend more succulent food than farm fare, he haunted the wood until he saw Catherine. She was seeking him, too, for she had a word for him.

He need not trouble about her letters as she would not be receiving any for some days.

He guessed that the writer was coming in person to repeat his vows.

“Have you noticed,” he said, “how gloomy the master has become of late?”

Catherine turned pale.

“I tell you as a sure thing that whoever is the cause of this change in such a hearty good fellow, will have an unpleasant time with him when he meets him.”

“You say, ‘him,'” said Catherine; “why may he not have quarrelled with a woman, against whom he nurses this sullen rage?”

“You have seen something? have you any reason to fear?”

“I have to fear all that a girl may fear when she loves above her station and has an irritated father.”

“It seems to me that in your place,” Pitou ventured to give advice, “I should – no, it nearly killed you to part with him, and to give him up altogether would be your death. Oh, all this is very unfortunate!”

“Hush, speak of something else – here comes father.”

Indeed, seeing his daughter with a man, the farmer rode up at speed: but recognizing Pitou, he asked him in to dinner with less gloom on his face.

“Gracious,” muttered Catherine at the door, “can he know?”

“What?” whispered Pitou.

“Nothing,” replied the girl, going up to her room and closing the shutters.

When she came down, dinner was ready, but she ate little.

“You might tell us what brought you our way to-day,” asked the morose farmer of Pitou.

The latter showed some brass wire loops.

“The rabbits over our way are getting shy of me. I am going to lay some snares on your farm, if you do not mind. Yours are so tender from the grain they get.”

“I did not know you had so sweet a tooth.”

“Oh, not for me but for Miss Catherine.”

“Yes, she has no appetite, lately, that is a fact.”

At this moment, Pitou felt a touch to his foot. It was Catherine directing his attention to the window past which a man was making for the door where he entered with the farmer’s gun on his shoulder.

“Father Clovis,” he was hailed by the master.

Clovis was the old soldier who had taught Pitou to drill.

“Yes, Papa Billet, a bargain is a bargain. You paid me to pick out a dozen bullets to suit your rifle and here they are.”

He handed the farmer his gun and a bag of bullets. Calm as the veteran was, he inspired terror in Catherine as he sat at table.

“By the way I cast thirteen bullets instead of a dozen so I squandered one on the hare you see. Your gun carries fine.”

“Is there a prize for shooting offered anywhere?” asked Pitou simply. “You will win it, I guess like you did that silver cup and the bowl you are drinking of, Miss Catherine. Why, what is the matter?”

“Nothing,” replied the girl opening her eyes which she had half closed and leaning back in her chair.

“All I know is,” said Billet, “that I am going to lay in wait. It is a wolf, I think.”

Clovis turned the bullets out on a plate. Had Pitou looked from them to Catherine he would have seen that she nearly swooned.

“Wolf?” repeated he. “I am astonished that before the snowfalls we should see them here.”

“The shepherd says one is prowling round, out Boursonne way.”

Pitou looked from the speaker to Catherine.

“Yes, he was spied last year, I was told; but he went off, and it was thought forever; but he has turned up again. I mean to turn him down!”

This was all the girl could endure; she uttered a cry and staggered out of the door. Pitou followed her to offer his arm and found her in the kitchen.

“What ails you?”

“Can you not guess? he knows that Isidore has arrived at Boursonne this morning, and he is going to shoot him.”

“I will put him on his guard – “

The voice of Billet interrupted the pair.

“If you are going to lay snares, Master Pitou, it seems to me it is time you were jogging. Father Clovis is going your way.”

“I am off,” and he went out by the kitchen door, while Catherine went up to her room, where she bolted the door.

The forest was Pitou’s kingdom and when he had left Clovis to go home, he felt easy about what he had undertaken to do.

He thought of running to Boursonne and warning Viscount Isidore; but he might not be believed and the warning might not be heeded.

He considered he had better wait.

He had not a doubt that at the windows of Billet’s room and of his daughter’s, they two were on the alert. All the tragedy or its failure depended on him. If he let the viscount pass within rifle range, he would let him march to his death.

In fact, Billet, sure that the nobleman would not marry a farmer’s daughter, had resolved to wipe out the insult done him in blood.

Suddenly Pitou, lying on the ground in a clump of willow, heard the gallop of a horse.

Billet must have heard it also for he came out of the house; and Ange had not a doubt that the willow copse which he had chosen to spy Catherine’s window had for the same reason recommended itself to the farmer.

As the latter advanced, he slipped back and slid down into the ditch.

The horse crossed the road at sixty paces, and as a shadow was soon detached from it, the rider must have leaped off, and turned the steed loose. It went on without stopping.

There was ten minutes of dreadful silence.

The night was so black that Pitou, reckoning his eyes better than Billet’s, hoped that he alone saw the shadow stealing towards the house.

But at the same moment, as the shadow went up under Catherine’s window, Pitou heard the click of a hammer going on full cock on the gun.

The shadow did not notice but rapped three times on the shutter.

Pitou quivered – Catherine would surely blame him for not having passed the warning as he had promised.

But what could he do?

Pitou heard the hammer fall and saw the priming flash; the powder in the touchhole did not catch and the living target received no bullet.

At the same moment Catherine opened her window. She saw all and cried: “Up, it is my father!” she almost dragged Charny in at the casement.

The farmer had his second barrel to fire and he thought:

“He must come out and this time I will not miss him.”

Presently the dogs began barking.

“Oh, the jade,” he growled, “she has let him out at the back, through the orchard.”

He ran round the house to overtake the escaping prey.

“There is hope,” thought Pitou: “aim cannot be taken in the night as in the day and the hand is not so steady in firing on a man as at a wolf in the den.”

Indeed, Billet had fired on a man whom he saw scaling the orchard wall but he had got away on a horse which came up at his whistle. While Billet was following the pair in vague hope that he had hurt the rider so that he must fall out of the saddle, Ange reached the orchard where he saw Catherine leaning up against a tree with her hand on her heart.

“Let me take you into the house,” he said.

“No, I will not live under the roof of the man who shot at my sweetheart.”

“But then – “

“Do you refuse to accompany me?”

“No, but – “

“Come.”

No one saw them leave the farm and both disappeared in the valley.

God only knew the refuge of Catherine Billet!

All night a dreadful storm raged in the heart of the injured father. Something vital seemed to snap in the mighty frame of the man when he returned emptyhanded to see that his daughter had taken to flight.

When he came home at nine as usual to breakfast, his wife said. “Where is our Catherine?”

“Catherine?” he said with an effort. “The air is bad on the farm and I sent her over to her aunt’s in Sologne.”

“Good, she wanted a change. Will she make a long stay?”

“Till she gets better.”

Drying her tears the good woman went to sit in the chimney corner while her husband rode off into the fields.

Dr. Raynal had passed a restless night also. He was roused by Viscount Charny’s lackey pulling at his nightbell and, riding over to Boursonne, found that he had a couple of bullets in his side. Neither wound was dangerous, though one was serious. In three calls he set him up again; but he had to wear a bandage for a time, which did not prevent him riding out. Nobody had an idea of his accident.

It was time for him to be healed – time to return to Paris!

Mirabeau had promised the Queen to save her, and she wrote to her brother on the Austrian throne:

“I follow your counsel. I am making use of Mirabeau but there is nothing of weight in my relations with him.”

On the following day, he saw groups on the way to the Assembly and went up to learn the nature of the outcries.

Little newsheets were passing from hand to hand and newsdealers were calling out:

“Buy the Great Treason of Mirabeau!”

“It seems this concerns me,” he said, taking a piece of money out. “My friend,” he said to one of the venders who had a donkey carrying panniers full of the sheets, “how much is this Great Treason of Mirabeau?”

“Nothing to you, my lord,” replied the man, looking him in the eye, “and it is struck off in an edition of one hundred thousand.”

The orator went away thoughtful. A lampoon in such an edition and given away by a newsman who knew him!

Still the sheet might be one of those catchpennys which abounded at that epoch, stupid or spiteful. No, it was the list of his debts, accurate, and the note that their 200,000 francs had been paid by the Queen’s almoner on a certain date; also the statement that the court paid him six thousand francs per month. Lastly the account of his reception by the Queen.

What mysterious enemy pursued him, or rather pursued the monarchy like a hellhound?

This is what we shall learn, with many another secret which none but Cagliostro the superhuman might divine, in the sequel to this volume entitled “The Royal Lifeguard.”

THE END