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The general raised the salary of the new field-keeper to three hundred francs; and built a town-hall, in which he gave him a residence. Then he married him to a daughter of one of his tenant-farmers, who had lately died, leaving her an orphan with three acres of vineyard. Groison attached himself to the general as a dog to his master. This legitimate fidelity was admitted by the whole community.
Don't be uneasy, my lad; I'll find you enough to do for the whole of the coming year. But remember one thing; the wood is for ourselves! Not a single depredation, or the thing is at an end. Send all interlopers to Les Aigues. If there's brush or fagots to sell make people buy ours; don't let them buy of Les Aigues. You'll get back to your place as field-keeper before long; this thing can't last.
"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would make," said Godain. Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall, with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker, kept silence with a hesitating air. "Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted by the idea of damages.
"Monsieur le comte did very right," said the steward, rubbing his hands; "but he must not stop short half-way. The field-keeper of the district who allows the country-people to prey upon the meadows and rob the harvests ought to be changed.
The general promised to get him his pension, and proposed that he should take the place of field-keeper to the district of Blangy, as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by devotion to the new mayor's interests. The appointments of master and man were made simultaneously, and the general gave, as may be supposed, very firm instructions to his subordinate.
The three keepers, with Michaud the bailiff, and Groison the field-keeper of Blangy, led henceforth the life of guerrillas.
"Groison! there's another lucky fellow!" said Vaudoyer, "they've built him a house and given him a good wife, and he's got an income and clothes fit for a king. There was I, field-keeper for twenty years, and all I got was the rheumatism." "Yes, he's very lucky," said Godain, "he owns property " "And we go without, like the fools that we are," said Vaudoyer.
Monsieur Rigou had interested himself for the old woman, and employed a lawyer on her behalf who relied in his defence on the absence of disinterested witnesses; but the testimony of Michaud and his assistants and the field-keeper was found to outweigh this objection. Tonsard's mother was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and the lawyer said to her son:
These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to belong to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by trees, which might be called the square of Blangy, all the more because the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new parsonage, a communal building intended for the mayor's office, the home of the field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had hitherto begged in vain.
All eyes were savage, all gestures menacing; but every one kept silence in presence of the count, the field-keeper, and the bailiff. At this moment all classes were represented, the great land-owners, the farmers, the working men, the paupers; the social question was defined to the eye; hunger had convoked the actors in the scene.