"Station for Saint-Romans, your Highness!"
You know that sort of vague light peculiar to dreams, that colorless, empty atmosphere, in which everything assumes a ghostly aspect? well, Jansoulet was suddenly enveloped, made prisoner, paralyzed by it. He tried to speak, but the words would not come; his nerveless fingers clung so feebly to their support that he nearly fell backward. In heaven's name, what had he seen? Half reclining on a divan which extended across one end of the car, his fine head with its dead-white complexion and its long, silky black beard resting on his hand, the bey, buttoned to the chin in his Oriental frock-coat, without other ornament than the broad ribbon of the Legion of Honor across his breast and the diamond clasp in his cap, was fanning himself impassively with a little fan of spartum, embroidered with gold. Two aides-de-camp were standing near him and an engineer of the French company. Opposite him, upon another divan, in a respectful attitude, but one indicating high favor, as they alone remained seated in presence of the bey, both as yellow as saffron, their long whiskers falling over their white cravats, sat two owls, one fat, the other thin. They were the Hemerlingues, father and son, who had reconquered his Highness and were carrying him in triumph to Paris. A ghastly dream! All those people, although they knew Jansoulet well, stared coolly at him as if his face conveyed no idea to them. Pitiably pale, with the perspiration standing on his brow, he stammered: "But, your Highness, do you not mean to leave—" A livid flash, like that of a sabre stroke, followed by a frightful peal of thunder, cut him short. But the flash that shot from the monarch's eyes seemed far more terrible to him. Rising to his feet and stretching out his arm, the bey crushed him with these words, prepared in advance and uttered slowly in a rather guttural voice accustomed to the harsh Arabic syllables, but in very pure French:
"You may return home, Mercanti. The foot goes where the heart leads it, mine shall never enter the door of the man who has robbed my country."
Jansoulet tried to say a word. The bey waved his hand: "Begone!" And the engineer having pressed the button of an electric bell, to which a whistle replied, the train, which had not come to a full stop, stretched and strained its iron muscles and started ahead under full steam, waving its flags in the wind of the storm amid whirling clouds of dense smoke and sinister flashes.
He stood by the track, dazed, staggering, crushed, watching his fortune recede and disappear, heedless of the great drops of rain that began to fall upon his bare head. Then, when the others rushed toward him, surrounded him and overwhelmed him with questions: "Isn't the Bey going to stop?" he stammered a few incoherent words: "Court intrigues—infamous machinations." And suddenly, shaking his fist at the train which had already disappeared, with bloodshot eyes and the foam of fierce wrath on his lips, he cried with the roar of a wild beast:
"Vile curs!"
"Courage, Jansoulet, courage."
You can guess who said that, and who, passing his arm through the Nabob's, tried to straighten him up, to make him throw out his breast as he did, led him to the carriages amid the stupefied silence of the braided coats, and helped him to enter, crushed and bewildered, as a relative of the deceased is hoisted into a mourning carriage at the close of the lugubrious ceremony. The rain was beginning to fall, the peals of thunder followed one another rapidly. They crowded into the carriages, which started hurriedly homeward. Thereupon a heart-rending, yet comical thing took place, one of those cruel tricks which cowardly destiny plays upon its victims when they are down. In the fading light, the increasing obscurity caused by the squall, the crowd that filled all the approaches to the station believed that it could distinguish a Royal Highness amid such a profusion of gold lace, and as soon as the wheels began to revolve, a tremendous uproar, an appalling outcry which had been brewing in all those throats for an hour past, arose and filled the air, rebounded from hill to hill and echoed through the valley: "Vive le Bey!" Warned by that signal, the first flourishes rang out, the singing societies struck up in their turn, and as the noise increased from point to point, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was naught but one long, unbroken wave of sound. In vain did Cardailhac, all the gentlemen, Jansoulet himself, lean out of the windows and make desperate signs: "Enough! enough!" Their gestures were lost in the confusion, in the darkness; what was seen of them seemed an encouragement to shout louder. And I give you my word that it was in no wise needed. All those Southerners, whose enthusiasm had been kept at fever heat since morning, excited still more by the tedium of the long wait and by the storm, gave all that they had of voice, of breath, of noisy energy, blending with the national hymn of Provence that oft-repeated cry, which broke in upon it like a refrain: "Vive le Bey!" The majority had no sort of idea what a bey might be, did not even picture him to themselves, and gave a most extraordinary pronunciation to the unfamiliar title, as if it had three b's and ten y's. But no matter, they worked themselves into a frenzy over it, threw up their hands, waved their hats, and waxed excited over their own antics. Women, deeply affected, wiped their eyes; and suddenly the piercing cry of a child came from the topmost branches of an elm: "Mamma, mamma, I see him!" He saw him! They all saw him for that matter; to this day they would all take their oath that they saw him.
Confronted with such delirious excitement, finding it impossible to impose silence and tranquillity upon that mob, there was but one course for the people in the carriages to pursue: to let them alone, raise the windows and drive at full speed in order to abridge that unpleasant martyrdom as much as possible. Then it was terrible. Seeing the cortège quicken its pace, the whole road began to run with it. The farandoleurs of Barbantane, hand-in-hand, bounded from side to side, to the muffled wheezing of their tambourines, forming a human garland around the carriage doors. The singing societies, unable to sing at that breathless pace, but howling none the less, dragged their banner-bearers along, the banners thrown over their shoulders; and the stout, red-faced curés, panting, pushing their huge overburdened paunches before them, still found strength to shout in the mules' ears, in sympathetic, effusive tones: "Vive notre bon Bey!" And with it all, the rain, the rain falling in bucketfuls, in sheets, soiling the pink carriages, increasing the confusion, giving to that triumphal return the aspect of a rout, but a laughable rout, compounded of songs, laughter, blasphemy, frantic embraces and infernal oaths, something like the return from a Corpus Christi procession in the storm, with cassocks tucked up, surplices thrown over the head, and the good Lord hastily housed under a porch.
A dull rumbling announced to the poor Nabob, sitting silent and motionless in a corner of his carriage, that they were crossing the bridge of boats. They had arrived.