Pitou made a wry face: he was in the habit of eating a pound and a half at his breakfast alone.
“And without calculating the soap for his washing,” added Mademoiselle Angélique; “and I recollect that he is a sad one for dirtying clothes.”
In fact, Pitou did sadly dirty his clothes, and that is very conceivable, when we remember the life he had led, climbing trees and lying down in marshes; but we must render him this justice, that he tore his clothes even more than he soiled them.
“Oh, fie, Mademoiselle,” cried the doctor, “fie, Mademoiselle Angélique! Can you, who so well practise Christian charity, enter into such minute calculations with regard to your own nephew and godson?”
“And without calculating the cost of his clothes,” cried the old devotee most energetically, who suddenly remembered having seen her sister Madeleine busily employed in sewing patches on her nephew’s jacket and knee-caps on his small-clothes.
“Then,” said the doctor, “am I to understand that you refuse to take charge of your nephew? The orphan who has been repulsed from his aunt’s threshold will be compelled to beg for alms at the threshold of strangers.”
Mademoiselle Angélique, notwithstanding her avarice, was alive to the odium which would naturally attach to her if from her refusal to receive her nephew he should be compelled to have recourse to such an extremity.
“No,” said she, “I will take charge of him.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the doctor, happy to find a single good feeling in a heart which he had thought completely withered.
“Yes,” continued the devotee, “I will recommend him to the Augustin Friars at Bourg Fontaine, and he shall enter their monastery as a lay-servant.”
We have already said that the doctor was a philosopher. We know what was the meaning of the word philosopher in those days.
He therefore instantly resolved to snatch a neophyte from the Augustin brotherhood, and that with as much zealous fervor as the Augustins, on their side, could have displayed in carrying off an adept from the philosopher.
“Well, then,” he rejoined, plunging his hand into his deep pocket, “since you are in such a position of pecuniary difficulty, my dear Mademoiselle Angélique, as to be compelled, from your deficiency in personal resources, to recommend your nephew to the charity of others, I will seek elsewhere for some one who can more efficaciously than yourself apply to the maintenance of your nephew the sum which I had designed for him. I am obliged to return to America. I will, before I set out, apprentice your nephew Pitou to some joiner, or a smith. He shall, however, himself choose the trade for which he feels a vocation. During my absence he will grow bigger, and on my return he will already have become acquainted with his business, and then—why, I shall see what can be made of him. Come, my child, kiss your aunt,” continued the doctor, “and let us be off at once.”
The doctor had not concluded the sentence when Pitou rushed towards the antiquated spinster; his long arms were extended, and he was in fact most eager to embrace his aunt, on the condition that this kiss was to be the signal, between him and her, of an eternal separation.
But at the words “the sum,” the gesture with which the doctor had accompanied them, the thrusting his hand into his pocket, the silvery sound which that hand had incontinently given to a heap of crown-pieces, the amount of which might have been estimated by the tension of the pocket, the old maid had felt the fire of cupidity mount even to her heart.
“Oh,” cried she, “my dear Monsieur Gilbert, you must be well aware of one thing!”
“And what is that?” asked the doctor.
“Why, good heaven! that no one in the world can love this poor child half so much as I do.”
And entwining her scraggy arms round Pitou’s neck, she imprinted a sour kiss on each of his cheeks, which made him shudder from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair.
“Oh, certainly,” replied the doctor; “I know that well, and I so little doubted your affection for him that I brought him at once to you as his natural support. But that which you have just said to me, dear mademoiselle, has convinced me at the same time of your good-will and of your inability, and I see clearly that you are too poor to aid those who are poorer than yourself.”