"Yes," she said, "I have him sleep here. He might need me in the night."
"I should like to see him, to embrace him."
"Come."
The old woman rose, took her lamp, led the way gravely to the alcove, where she softly drew aside the long curtain and motioned to her son to come, without making a noise.
He was asleep. And it was certain that something lived in him that was not there the day before, for, instead of the flaccid immobility in which he was mired all day, he was shaken at that moment by violent tremors, and on his expressionless, dead face there was a wrinkle of suffering life, a contraction as of pain. Jansoulet, profoundly moved, gazed at that thin, wasted, earth-colored face, on which the beard, having appropriated all the vitality of the body, grew with surprising vigor; then he stooped, placed his lips on the forehead moist with perspiration, and, feeling that he started, he said in a low tone, gravely, respectfully, as one addresses the head of the family:
"Good-evening, Aîné."
Perhaps the imprisoned mind heard him in the depths of its dark, degrading purgatory. But the lips moved and a long groan made answer; a far-off wail, a despairing appeal caused the glance Françoise and her son exchanged to overflow with impotent tears, and drew from them both a simultaneous cry in which their sorrows met: Pécaïré! the local word expressive of all pity, all affection.
Early the next morning the uproar began with the arrival of the actors and actresses, an avalanche of caps, chignons, high boots, short petticoats, affected screams, veils floating over the fresh coats of rouge; the women were in a large majority, Cardailhac having reflected that, where a bey was concerned, the performance was of little consequence, that one need only emit false notes from pretty lips, show lovely arms and well-turned legs in the free-and-easy négligé of the operetta. All the plastic celebrities of his theatre were on hand, therefore, Amy Férat at their head, a hussy who had already tried her eye-teeth on the gold of several crowns; also two or three famous comic actors, whose pallid faces produced the same effect of chalky, spectral blotches amid the bright green of the hedgerows as was produced by the plaster statuettes. All that motley crew, enlivened by the journey, the unfamiliar fresh air, and the copious hospitality, as well as by the hope of hooking something in that procession of beys, nabobs, and other purse-bearers, asked nothing better than to caper and sing and make merry, with the vulgar enthusiasm of a crowd of Seine boatmen ashore on a lark. But Cardailhac did not propose to have it so. As soon as they had arrived, made their toilets and eaten their first breakfast, out came the books; we must rehearse!—There was no time to lose. The rehearsals took place in the small salon near the summer gallery, where they were already beginning to build the stage; and the noise of the hammers, the humming of the refrains, the thin voices supported by the squeaking of the orchestra leader's violin, mingled with the loud trumpet-calls of the peacocks on their perches, were blown to shreds in the mistral, which, failing to recognize the frantic chirping of its grasshoppers, contemptuously whisked it all away on the whirling tips of its wings.
Sitting in the centre of the porch, as if it were the proscenium of his theatre, Cardailhac, while superintending the rehearsals, issued his commands to a multitude of workmen and gardeners, ordered trees to be felled which obstructed the view, drew sketches of the triumphal arches, sent despatches and messengers to mayors, to sub-prefects, to Arles to procure a deputation of girls of the province in the national costume, to Barbantane, where the most skilful dancers of the farandole are to be found, to Faraman renowned for its herds of wild bulls and Camarguese horses; and as Jansoulet's name blazed forth at the foot of all these despatches, as the name of the Bey of Tunis also figured in them, everybody acquiesced with the utmost eagerness, the telegraphic messages arrived in an endless stream, and that little Sardanapalus from Porte-Saint-Martin, who was called Cardailhac, was forever repeating: "There is something to work with;" delighted to throw gold about like handfuls of seed, to have a stage fifty leagues in circumference to arrange, all Provence, of which country that fanatical Parisian was a native, and thoroughly familiar with its resources in the direction of the picturesque.