“Do for you in return?” said the wolf, “and how about the buck?”
“And how about the bowl of water?” said Thibault.
“We are quits there, my good sir. Let us start a fresh business altogether; if you are agreeable to it, I am quite willing.”
“Let it be so then; tell me quickly what you want of me.”
“There are folks,” proceeded Thibault, “who might take advantage of the position you are now in, and ask for all kinds of extravagant things, riches, power, titles, and whatnot, but I am not going to do anything of the kind; yesterday I wanted the buck, and you gave it me, it is true; tomorrow, I shall want something else. For some time past I have been possessed by a kind of mania, and I do nothing but wish first for one thing and then for another, and you will not always be able to spare time to listen to my demands. So what I ask for is, that, as you are the devil in person or someone very like it, you will grant me the fulfilment of every wish I may have from this day forth.”
The wolf put on a mocking expression of countenance. “Is that all?” he said, “Your peroration does not accord very well with your exordium.”
“Oh!” continued Thibault, “my wishes are honest and moderate ones, and such as become a poor peasant like myself. I want just a little corner of ground, and a few timbers, and planks; that’s all that a man of my sort can possibly desire.”
“I should have the greatest pleasure in doing what you ask,” said the wolf, “but it is simply impossible, you know.”
“Then I am afraid you must make up your mind to put up with what the dogs may do to you.”
“You think so, and you suppose I have need of your help, and so you can ask what you please?”
“I do not suppose it, I am sure of it.”
“Indeed! well then, look.”
“Look where,” asked Thibault.
“Look at the spot where I was,” said the wolf. Thibault drew back in horror. The place where the wolf had been lying was empty; the wolf had disappeared, where or how it was impossible to say. The room was intact, there was not a hole in the roof large enough to let a needle through, nor a crack in the floor through which a drop of water could have filtered.
“Well, do you still think that I require your assistance to get out of trouble,” said the wolf.
“Where the devil are you?”
“If you put a question to me in my real name,” said the wolf with a sneer in his voice, “I shall be obliged to answer you. I am still in the same place.”
“But I can no longer see you!”
“Simply because I am invisible.”
“But the dogs, the huntsmen, the Baron, will come in here after you?”
“No doubt they will, but they will not find me.”
“But if they do not find you, they will set upon me.”
“As they did yesterday; only yesterday you were sentenced to thirty-six strokes of the strap, for having carried off the buck; today, you will be sentenced to seventy-two, for having hidden the wolf, and Agnelette will not be on the spot to buy you off with a kiss.”
“Phew! what am I to do?”
“Let the buck loose; the dogs will mistake the scent, and they will get the blows instead of you.”
“But is it likely such trained hounds will follow the scent of a deer in mistake for that of a wolf?”
“You can leave that to me,” replied the voice, “only do not lose any time, or the dogs will be here before you have reached the shed, and that would make matters unpleasant, not for me, whom they would not find, but for you, whom they would.”
Thibault did not wait to be warned a second time, but was off like a shot to the shed. He unfastened the buck, which, as if propelled by some hidden force, leapt from the house, ran round it, crossing the track of the wolf, and plunged into the Baisemont coppice. The dogs were within a hundred paces of the hut; Thibault heard them with trepidation; the whole pack came full force against the door, one hound after the other.
Then, all at once, two or three gave cry and went off in the direction of Baisemont, the rest of the hounds after them.
The dogs were on the wrong scent; they were on the scent of the buck, and had abandoned that of the wolf.
Thibault gave a deep sigh of relief; he watched the hunt gradually disappearing in the distance, and went back to his room to the full and joyous notes of the Baron’s horn.
He found the wolf lying composedly on the same spot as before, but how it had found its way in again was quite as impossible to discover as how it had found its way out.
V
The Pact with Satan
Thibault stopped short on the threshold, overcome with astonishment at this re-apparition. “I was saying,” began the wolf, as if nothing had happened to interrupt the conversation, “that it is out of my power to grant you the accomplishment of all the wishes you may have in future for your own comfort and advancement.”
“Then I am to expect nothing from you?”
“Not so, for the ill you wish your neighbour can be carried out with my help.”
“And, pray, what good would that do me personally?”
“You fool! has not a moralist said, ‘There is always something sweet to us in the misfortune of our friends—even the dearest.’ ”
“Was it a wolf said that? I did not know wolves could boast of moralists among their number.”
“No, it was not a wolf, it was a man.”
“And was the man hanged?”
“On the contrary, he was made Governor of part of Poitou; there are, to be sure, a good
