Ah, clever girl! she was not mistaken. At the first blow of the stick, at the first pearly notes of the fife Roumestan was trapped once more and went into raptures.
The musician leaned against the curb of an old well in front of the farmhouse door. Over the well was an iron frame, round which a wild fig-tree had wound itself and made a marvellously picturesque background for his handsome figure and swarthy face. With his bare arms, his dusty, toil-worn garments, his uncovered sun-browned breast, he looked nobler and prouder than he had appeared when in the arena, where his natural grace had a somewhat tawdry touch through a certain striving after theatrical effect. The old airs that he played on his rustic instrument, made poetic by the solitude and silence of the mountains and waking the ancient golden ruins from their slumbers in stone, floated like skylarks round the slopes all gray with lavender or checkered with wheat and dead vines and mulberry-trees with their broad leaves casting longer but lighter shadows on the grass at their feet. The wind had gone down. The setting sun played upon the violet line of the Alpilles and poured into the hollows of the rocks a very mirage of lakes, of liquid porphyry and of molten gold.
All along the horizon there seemed as it were a luminous vibration, like the stretched cords of a lyre, to which the song of the crickets and the hum of the tabor furnished the sonorous base. Silent and delighted, Hortense, seated on the parapet of the old tower, leaning her elbow on the fragment of a broken column near which a pomegranate grew, listened and admired while she let her romantic little mind wander, filled with the legends and stories that Roumestan had told her on the way to the farm.
She pictured to herself the old château rising from its ruins, its towers rebuilt, its gates renewed, its cloister-like arches peopled with lovely women in long-bodiced gowns, with those pale, clear complexions that the sun cannot injure. She herself was a princess of the house of Baux with a pretty name of some saint in a missal and the musician who was giving her a morning greeting was also a prince, the last of the Valmajours, dressed in the costume of a peasant.
“Of a certes, ywis, the song once finished,” as the chroniclers of the courts of love of old used to say, she broke from the tree above her a bunch of pomegranate blossoms and held it out to the musician as the prize won by his playing. He received it with gallantry and wound it round the strings of his tabor.
CHAPTER VI.
CABINET MINISTER!
Three months have passed since that expedition to Mount Cordova.
Parliament had met at Versailles in a deluge of November rain, which brought the low cloudy sky down to the lakes in the parks, enveloped everything in mist and wrapped the two Chambers in a dreary dampness and darkness; but it had done nothing to cool the heat of political hatreds. The opening was stormy and threatening. Train after train filled with deputies and senators followed and crossed each other, hissing, whistling, spluttering, blowing defiant smoke at each other as if animated by the same passions and intrigues they were carrying through the torrents of rain. During this hour in the train, discussion and loud-voiced conversation prevail above all the tumult of rushing wheels in the different carriages, as violently and furiously as if they were in the Chamber.
The noisiest, the most excited of all is Roumestan. He has already delivered himself of two speeches since Parliament met. He addresses committees, talks in the corridors, in the railway station, in the café, and makes the windows tremble in the photographer’s shop where all the Rights assemble. Little else is seen but that restless outline and heavy form, his big head always in motion, the roll of his broad shoulders, so formidable in the eyes of the Ministry, which he is about to “down” according to all the rules, like one of the stoutest and most supple of his native Southern wrestlers.
Ah! the blue sky, the tabors, the cicadas, all the bright pleasures of his vacation days—how far away they seem, how utterly dislocated and vanished! Numa never gives them a moment’s thought nowadays, entirely carried away as he is by the whirl of his double life as politician and man of the law. Like his old master Sagnier, when he went into politics he did not renounce the law, and every evening from six o’clock to eight his office in the Rue Scribe is thronged with clients.