After that the unhappy peasant never could find any one—they had all betaken themselves to that inaccessible retreat where His Excellency had hidden himself. Still he did not lose calmness or heart and always responded to the evasive answers and shrugging shoulders of the attendants with the surprised but steady look and shrewd half-smile peculiar to the Provençal.
“All right, I will come again.”
And he did come again. But for his high gaiters and the tabor hanging on his arm, he might have been taken for an employee of the house, he came so regularly. But each time he came it was harder than the last.
Now the mere sight of the great arched door made his heart beat. Beyond the arch was the old Hôtel Augereau with its large courtyard where they were already stacking wood for the winter and the double staircase so hard to ascend under the mocking gaze of the servants. Everything combined to harass him—the silver chains of the porters, the gold-laced caps, the endless gorgeous things that made him feel the distance that separated him from his patron. But he dreaded more than all this the dreadful scenes that he went through at home, the terrible frowning brows of Audiberte; that is why he still desperately insisted on coming. At last the hall porter took pity upon him and gave him the advice to waylay the Minister at the Saint-Lazare station when he was going down to Versailles.
He took his advice and did sentry work in the big lively waiting room on the first story at the hour of the Parliament train when it took on a very special look of its own. Deputies, senators, journalists, members of the Left, of the Right and all the parties jostled each other there, forming as variegated a throng as the blue, red and green placards that covered the walls. They watched each other, talked, screamed, whispered, some sitting apart rehearsing their next speech, others, the orators of the lobbies, making the windows rattle with loud voices that the Chamber was never destined to hear. Northern accents and Southern accents, divers opinions and sentiments, swarming ambitions and intrigues, the noisy tramp of the restless crowd—this waiting-room with its delays and uncertainties was an appropriate theatre for politics, this tumult of a journey at a fixed hour which would soon, at bid of the whistle, be speeding over the rails down a perspective of tracks, disks and locomotives, over a country full of accidents and surprises.
Five minutes later he saw Numa enter, leaning on the arm of one of his secretaries who carried his portfolio. His coat was flung open, his face beaming just as he had looked that day on the platform in the amphitheatre and at a distance he recognized the facile voice, the warm words, his protestations of friendship: “Count on me,—put yourself in my hands,—it is as good as granted....”
The Minister just then was in the honey-moon of prosperity. Except for political enmities—not always as bitter as they are supposed to be, simply the result of rivalry between public speakers or quarrels of lawyers on opposite sides of a case—Numa had no enemies, not having been in power long enough to discourage those who sought his services. His credit was still good. Only a few had begun to be impatient and dog his footsteps. To these he threw a loud, hasty “How are you, friend?” that anticipated their reproaches and in a way denied their arguments, while his familiar manner flattered the baffled office-seekers and yet kept their demands at a distance. It was a great idea, was this “How are you?” It sprang from instinctive duplicity.
At sight of Valmajour, who came swinging towards him, his smile showing his white teeth, Numa felt inclined to throw him his fatal, careless “How are you, friend?”—but how could he treat this peasant lad in a little felt hat as a friend as he stood there in his gray jacket, from the sleeves of which his brown hands protruded like those in a cheap village photograph? He preferred to pass him by without a word, with his “Ministerial air,” leaving the poor boy amazed, crushed and knocked about by the crowd that was following the great man. Still Valmajour returned to his station the next day and several days thereafter, but he did not dare approach the Minister; he sat on the edge of a bench with that touching air of sorrowful resignation that one so often sees in a railway station on the faces of soldiers and emigrants, who are going to a strange country, prepared to meet all the chances of their evil destiny.
Roumestan could not evade that silent figure on his path with its dumb appeal. He might pretend not to see it, turn aside his glance, talk louder as he passed; the smile on his victim’s face was there and remained there until the train had gone. Of a certainty he would have preferred a noisy demand and a row, when he could have called a policeman and given the disturber of his complacency in charge and so got rid of him. He, the Minister, went so far as to take a different station on the left bank of the Seine to avoid this trouble of his conscience. Thus in many instances is the greatest man’s life made wretched by some little thing of no account, like a pebble in the seven-league boots.
But Valmajour would not despair.