Renaud did not lose his patience. Several times, being informed that Rampal was in this or that place, he had tried to find him, but had not succeeded.
“I shall catch him some day!” said Renaud. “He loses nothing by waiting.”
He hoped that the fête at Saintes-Maries would bring the rascal back.
“He will come back with the thieving gipsies!” he said; and he was not mistaken.
Not for an empire would Rampal have missed making the pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries. The rascal would have thought himself everlastingly damned. It had been his habit from childhood to come and ask forgiveness of his sins from the two Marys and Sara the bondwoman, at whom he did nothing but laugh in a boastful way, unable to satisfy himself whether he believed in them or not.
This year, being affiliated with the gipsies in matters of horse-trading (every one knows that the gipsies, men and women,—roms and juwas, as they say,—have a profound acquaintance with everything connected with the horse), Rampal had been a fruitful source of information to them.
By divers methods they had led him to talk about this and that, about every one and everything. He had no idea himself that he had told so many things. They had questioned him, sometimes directly, taking him unawares; sometimes in a slow, roundabout way; when he was drunk, and when he was asleep. And his replies had been pitilessly registered in the gipsies’ unfailing memory—the wherewithal to astonish all Camargue.
Rampal had not even been questioned by the gipsy queen, who did not trust his discretion; she learned the secrets of the province at second-hand.
Once only had he spoken to her. It was one evening when the beggar queen began to dance for her own amusement on the high-road, to the music of her tambourine, which she hardly ever laid aside.
“You are beautiful!” he said to her.