“He must be ill,” he said to himself and stuck obstinately to his post. At home his sister watched for his coming in a fever of impatience.
“Well, bé! have you seen the Menister? Has he signed that paper?”
His eternal “No, not yet!” exasperated her, but more his calmness as he threw into a corner his tabor whose strap left a dent on his shoulder—it was the calmness of indolence and shiftlessness, as common as vivacity among Southern nations. Then the queer little creature would fall into one of her furious fits. What had he in his veins in place of blood?—was there to be no end to this?—“Look out, or I will attend to it myself!” Very calm, he made no answer, but let the storm blow over, took his instruments from their cases, his fife and mouth-piece with its ivory tip, and rubbed them well with a bit of cloth for fear of dampness and promised to try at the Ministry again to-morrow, and, if he could not see Numa, ask to see Mme. Roumestan.
“O, vaï! Mme. Roumestan! You know she does not like your music—but the young lady, though—she will be sure to help you; yes indeed!” And she tossed her head.
“Madame or Mademoiselle, they don’t either of them care anything about you,” said the old man, who was cowering over a turf fire that his daughter had economically covered with ashes, a fire about which they were eternally quarrelling.
In the bottom of his heart the old man was not displeased at his son’s want of success, from professional jealousy. All these complications and the uprooting of their lives had been most welcome to the Bohemian tastes of the old wandering minstrel; he was delighted at first with the journey and the idea of seeing Paris, that “Paradise of females and purgatory of hosses,” as the carters of his country put it, imagining that in Paris one would see women like houris arrayed in transparent garments and horses distorted, leaping about in the midst of flames.
Instead he had found cold, privations and rain. From fear of Audiberte and respect for Roumestan he had contented himself with grumbling and shivering in a corner, only an occasional word or wink hinting at his dissatisfaction. But Numa’s treachery and his daughter’s fits of wrath gave him also an excuse for opening hostilities. He revenged himself for all the blows to his vanity that his son’s musical proficiency had inflicted on him for ten years and shrugged his shoulders as he heard him trying his fife.
“Music, music, oh, yes—much good your music is going to do you!”
And then in a loud voice he asked if it wasn’t a sin to bring an old man like him so far—into this Sibelia, this wilderness, to let him perish of cold and hunger. He called on the memory of his sainted wife, whom, by the way, he had killed with unhappiness—“made a goat of her,” as Audiberte put it. He would whine for hours at a time, his head in the fire, red-faced and sullen, until his daughter, wearied with his lamentations, gave him a few pennies and sent him out to get a glass of country wine for himself. In the wine-shop his sorrows fled away. It was comfortable by the roaring stove; in the warmth the old wretch soon recovered his low vein of an actor in Italian comedy, which his grotesque figure, big nose and thin lips made more apparent, taken in connection with his little wiry body, like Punch in the show.
He was soon the delight of the customers in the wine-shop with his buffooneries and his boasting. He jeered his son’s tabor and told them how much trouble it gave them at the hotel; for in order to be ready for his coming out Valmajour, kept at tension by the delay of hopes, persisted in practising up to midnight; but the other tenants objected to the continual thunder of the tabor and the ear-piercing cry of the fife—the very stairs shook with the sound, as if an engine were in motion on the fifth floor.