Moreover he was surprised to find that Miss Bachellery was still at Arvillard; he had thought her gone this long while.
“Well, come now, I have got to take care of myself, haven’t I? since Cadaillac pretends that my voice is so sick!”
Then she gave him a little Parisian nod with the ends of her eyelashes and waltzed off, uttering a clear roulade, a delicious undersong like the note of a blackbird, which one hears long after one loses the bird from sight.
Only from that day on she changed her manner. It was no longer the precocious child forever bouncing about the hotel, roqueting Master Paul, playing with the swing and other innocent games; it was no longer the girl who was only happy with the children, disarmed the most severe mammas and most morose ecclesiastics by the ingenuousness of her laugh and her promptness at the sacred services. In place of that appeared Alice Bachellery, the diva of the Bouffes, the pretty tomboy, lively in manners and setting the pace, who surrounded herself with young whipper-snappers, got up impromptu festivities, picnics and suppers, whose doubtful reputation her mother, who was always present, only partly succeeded in making respectable.
Every morning a basket-wagon with a white canopy bordered with fringed curtains drew up to the front door an hour before these fine ladies came downstairs in their light-toned gowns. Meanwhile about them pranced and caracoled a jolly cavalcade consisting of everybody in the way of a free and unmarried person in the Alpes Dauphinoises and the neighboring hotels—the Assistant Justice, the American architect and more especially the young man on springs, whom the young diva seemed no longer to be driving to despair by her innocent infantilities. The carriage well-crammed with cloaks against their return, a big basket of provisions on the box, they swept through the country at a sharp rate on the road for the Chartreuse of St. Hugon. Three hours were spent on the mountain along zigzag, precipitous roads on a level with the black tops of pines that scramble down precipices toward torrents all white with foam; or else in the direction of Brame-farine, where one breakfasts on mountain cheese washed down by a little claret very lively in its nature, which makes the Alps dance before one’s eyes—Mont Blanc and all that marvellous horizon of glaciers and blue peaks which one discovers up there, together with little lakes, fragments shining at the foot of the crags like so many broken pieces of sky.
Then they came down “à la ramasse,” seated upon sledges of branches without any backs to lean against, which made it necessary to grasp the branches frantically, launched headlong as they were down the declivities, steered by a mountaineer who goes straight ahead over the velvet of the upland pastures and the pebbly bed of dry torrents, and passing with the same swiftness a section of rock or the big gap of a river. At last it lands you down below overwhelmed, bruised and suffocated, your whole body in a quiver and your eyes rolling with the sensation of having survived a most horrible earthquake.
And the day’s trip was not complete unless the entire cavalcade had been drenched on the way by one of those mountain storms, bright with lightning flashes and streaks of hail, which frighten the horses, make the landscape dramatic and prepare a sensational return. Little Bachellery would be seated on the box in some man’s overcoat, the tassel of her cap decorated with a feather of the Pyrennean partridge. She would hold the reins, whip the horses hard in order to warm herself and, when once landed from the coach, recount all the dangers of the excursion with the greatest vivacity, a high sharp voice and brilliant eyes, showing the lively reaction of her youthful body against the cold downpour—all with a little shudder of fear.
It would have been well if then at least she had felt the need of a good sleep, one of those leaden slumbers which trips in the mountains produce. Not at all; till early morning, in the rooms of these women, there were goings on without end—laughter, songs, popping bottles, meals brought up at improper hours, card-tables pushed around for baccarat—and all this over the head of the Minister, whose room happened to be just underneath.
Several times he complained of it to Mme. Laugeron, who was very much torn between her desire to be agreeable to his Excellency and fear of causing clients with such good paying qualities discontent. And besides, has any one the right to be very exacting in these hotels at the baths which are always being turned upside down by departures and arrivals in the midst of the night, by trunks that are dragged about, by big boots and iron-bound Alpine sticks of mountain climbers, who are engaged in making ready for the ascent long before daybreak? And then, besides, the fits of coughing of the sick people, those horrible, incessant coughs which seem to tear people in spasms, appearing to combine the elements of a sob, a death rattle and the crowing of a husky cock.
These giddy nights, heavy July nights, which Roumestan passed turning and twisting on his bed, filled with pressing thoughts, while upstairs sounded clear in the night the laughter of his neighbors, broken by single notes and snatches of song—these nights he might have employed writing his speech for Chambéry; but he was too much agitated and too angry. He had to control himself not to run upstairs to the next floor and drive off at the tips of his boots the young man on springs, the American and that shameless Assistant Justice, that dishonor to French jurisprudence in the colonies, so as to be able to seize that naughty little scoundrel by the neck, by her turtle-dove’s neck puffed out with roulades, and at the same time say to her just once for all: