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For three months Lacheneur was the tyrant of Montaignac. But this metier of public speaker is by no means lucrative, so the surprise throughout the district was immense, when it was ascertained that the former ploughboy had purchased the chateau, and almost all the land belonging to his old master.
The former ploughboy slumbered in the bed of the Ducs de Sairmeuse; he ate from the massive plate, graven with their coat-of-arms; he received his visitors in the magnificent salon in which the Ducs de Sairmeuse had received their friends in years gone by. To those who had known him in former days, M. Lacheneur had become unrecognizable. He had adapted himself to his lofty station.
How melancholy the inexpressible noise when the fair is left behind, and the wet vapours are settling and thickening around it! But the melancholy is not in the fair the ploughboy likes it; it is in ourselves, in the thought that thus, though the years go by, so much of human life remains the same the same blatant discord, the same monotonous roundabout, the same poor gingerbread.
There had been a certain pride in his heart as he taught these lessons, wrong though it might be that there should be a Marquis and a ploughboy so far reversed by the injustice of Fate. There had been a comfort to him in feeling that Fate had made him the Marquis, and had made some one else the ploughboy. He knew what it was to be a Marquis down to the last inch of aristocratic admeasurement.
"You will not even drink absinthe," Henri continued, helping himself from a little carafe which stood between them, "absolutely the most artistic of all drinks. You prefer a thing you call a pipe to my choicest cigarettes, and you have upon your cheeks a color of which a ploughboy should be ashamed." Guy laughed good-humoredly. "Well, I can't help being sunburnt!" he declared.
But whoever the guest was, soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, apothecary, ploughboy, or thief, he was judged at the Mission House as a man. Some of the visitors repaid their host by theft or fraud; but when they did, nobody uttered proverbs or platitudes about mistaken kindness.
There was only a low hedge of elder between the cottage and a dirty lane; and in the night, especially if there happened to be a light burning, it was common enough for a stone to come through the window, flung by some half-drunken ploughboy. A pretty place for a human being to live in: and again he looked up into Smith's face for comment.
One edge of it is polished by the friction of the earth through which it has been forced; it has to be straightened, or repaired, and the ploughboy waits while it is done. He sits down outside the shed on a broken and rusty iron wheel, choosing a spot where the sun shines and the building keeps off the wind.
'Look 'ee 'ere, Miss Zusie, this vowl 'ave airt her vut; and the small ploughboy I before mentioned came in at the garden gate, holding a hen in his arms. 'Oh, give it to me, Joey, cried the little girl, full of sympathy for the wounded bird. 'How did it happen? Poor dear, poor dear!
From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy. And if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friendship, a note of personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more human. Her nature had been stirred.
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