"There are persons waiting for you, upstairs... some gentlemen... They want you."

"Want me!.. _Outre!_.. What for?" And No. 1 of his folding series appeared before him: Tartarin captured, extradited... Of course he was frightened, but his att.i.tude was heroic. Quickly detaching himself from Sonia: "Fly, save yourself!" he said to her in a smothered voice. Then he mounted the stairs as if to the scaffold, his head high, his eyes proud, but so disturbed in mind that he was forced to cling to the bal.u.s.ter.

As he entered the corridor, he saw persons grouped at the farther end of it before his door, looking through the keyhole, rapping, and calling out: "Hey! Tartarin..."

He made two steps forward, and said, with parched lips: "Is it I whom you are seeking, messieurs?"

"_Te! pardi_, yes, my president!."

And a little old man, alert and wiry, dressed in gray, and apparently bringing on his coat, his hat, his gaiters and his long and pendent moustache all the dust of his native town, fell upon the neck of the hero and rubbed against his smooth fat cheeks the withered leathery skin of the retired captain of equipment.

"Bravida!.. not possible!.. Excourbanies too!.. and who is that over there?.."

A bleating answered: "Dear ma-a-aster!.." and the pupil advanced, banging against the wall a sort of long fishing-rod with a packet at one end wrapped in gray paper, and oilcloth tied round it with string.

"Hey! _ve!_ why it's Pascalon... Embrace me, little one... What's that you are carrying?.. Put it down..."

"The paper... take off the paper!.." whispered Bravida. The youth undid the roll with a rapid hand and the Tarasconese banner was displayed to the eyes of the amazed Tartarin.

The delegates took off their hats.

"President"--the voice of Bravida trembled solemnly--"you asked for the banner and we have brought it, _te!_"

The president opened a pair of eyes as round as apples: "I! I asked for it?"

"What! you did not ask for it? Bezuquet said so.

"Yes, yes, _certainemain_..." said Tartarin, suddenly enlightened by the mention of Bezuquet. He understood all and guessed the rest, and, tenderly moved by the ingenious lie of the apothecary to recall him to a sense of duty and honour, he choked, and stammered in his short beard: "Ah! my children, how kind you are! What good you have done me!"

"_Vive le presidain!_" yelped Pascalon, brandishing the oriflamme.

Excourbanies' gong responded, rolling its war-cry (" Ha! ha! ha! _fen de brut_..") to the very cellars of the hotel. Doors opened, inquisitive heads protruded on every floor and then disappeared, alarmed, before that standard and the dark and hairy men who were roaring singular words and tossing their arms in the air. Never had the peaceable Hotel Jungfrau been subjected to such a racket.

"Come into my room," said Tartarin, rather disconcerted. He was feeling about in the darkness to find matches when an authoritative rap on the door made it open of itself to admit the consequential, yellow, and puffy face of the innkeeper Meyer. He was about to enter, but stopped short before the darkness of the room, and said with closed teeth:

"Try to keep quiet... or I 'll have you taken up by the police..."

A grunt as of wild bulls issued from the shadow at that brutal term "taken up." The hotel-keeper recoiled one step, but added: "It is known who you are; they have their eye upon you; for my part, I don't want any more such persons in my house!.."

"Monsieur Meyer," said Tartarin, gently, politely, but very firmly...

"Send me my bill... These gentlemen and myself start to-morrow morning for the Jungfrau."

O native soil! O little country within a great one! by only hearing the Tarasconese accent, quivering still with the air of that beloved land beneath the azure folds of its banner, behold Tartarin, delivered from love and its snares and restored to his friends, his mission, his glory.

And now, _zou!_

IX.

At the "Faithful Chamois."

The next day it was charming, that trip on foot from Interlaken to Grindelwald, where they were, in pa.s.sing, to take guides for the Little Scheideck; charming, that triumphal march of the P. C. A., restored to his trappings and mountain habiliments, leaning on one side on the lean little shoulder of Commander Bravida, and on the other, the robust arm of Excourbanies, proud, both of them, to be nearest to him, to support their dear president, to carry his ice-axe, his knapsack, his alpenstock, while sometimes before, sometimes behind or on their flanks the fanatical Pascalon gambolled like a puppy, his banner duly rolled up into a package to avoid the tumultuous scenes of the night before.

The gayety of his companions, the sense of duty accomplished, the Jungfrau all white upon the sky, over there, like a vapour--nothing short of all this could have made the hero forget what he left behind him, for ever and ever it may be, and without farewell. However, at the last houses of Interlaken his eyelids swelled and, still walking on, he poured out his feelings in turn into the bosom of Excourbanies: "Listen, Spiridion," or that of Bravida: "You know me, Placide..." For, by an irony on nature, that indomitable warrior was called Placide, and that rough buffalo, with all his instincts material, Spiridion.

Unhappily, the Tarasconese race, more gallant than sentimental, never takes its love-affairs very seriously. "Whoso loses a woman and ten sous, is to be pitied about the money..." replied the sententious Placide to Tartarin's tale, and Spiridion thought exactly like him. As for the innocent Pascalon, he was horribly afraid of women, and reddened to the ears when the name of the Little Scheideck was uttered before him, thinking some lady of flimsy morals was referred to. The poor lover was therefore reduced to keep his confidences to himself, and console himself alone--which, after all, is the surest way.

But what grief could have resisted the attractions of the way through that narrow, deep and sombre valley, where they walked on the banks of a winding river all white with foam, rumbling with an echo like thunder among the pine-woods which skirted both its sh.o.r.es.

The Tarasconese delegation, their heads in the air, advanced with a sort of religious awe and admiration, like the comrades of Sinbad the Sailor when they stood before the mangoes, the cotton-trees, and all the giant flora of the Indian coasts. Knowing nothing but their own little bald and stony mountains they had never imagined there could be so many trees together or such tall ones.

"That is nothing, as yet... wait till you see the Jungfrau," said the P.

C. A., who enjoyed their amazement and felt himself magnified in their eyes.

At the same time, as if to brighten the scene and humanize its solemn note, cavalcades went by them, great landaus going at full speed, with veils floating from the doorways where curious heads leaned out to look at the delegation pressing round its president. From point to point along the roadside were booths spread with knick-knacks of carved wood, while young girls, stiff in their laced bodices, their striped skirts and broad-brimmed straw hats, were offering bunches of strawberries and edelweiss. Occasionally, an Alpine horn sent among the mountains its melancholy ritornello, swelling, echoing from gorge to gorge, and slowly diminishing, like a cloud that dissolves into vapour.

"'T is fine, 't is like an organ," murmured Pascalon, his eyes moist, in ecstasy, like the stained-gla.s.s saint of a church window.

Excourbanies roared, undiscouraged, and the echoes repeated, till sight and sound were lost, his Tarasconese intonations: "Ha! ha! ha! _fen de brut!_"

But people grow weary after marching for two hours through the same sort of decorative scene, however well it may be organized, green on blue, glaciers in the distance, and all things sonorous as a musical clock.

The dash of the torrents, the singers in triplets, the sellers of carved objects, the little flower-girls, soon became intolerable to our friends,--above all, the dampness, the steam rising in this species of tunnel, the soaked soil full of water-plants, where never had the sun penetrated.

"It is enough to give one a pleurisy," said Bravida, turning up the collar of his coat. Then weariness set in, hunger, ill-humour. They could find no inn; and presently Excourbanies and Bravida, having stuffed themselves with strawberries, began to suffer cruelly. Pascalon himself, that angel, bearing not only the banner, but the ice-axe, the knapsack, the alpenstock, of which the others had rid themselves basely upon him, even Pascalon had lost his gayety and ceased his lively gambolling.

At a turn of the road, after they had just crossed the Lutschine by one of those covered bridges that are found in regions of deep snow, a loud blast on a horn greeted them.

"Ah! _va_, enough!.. enough!" howled the exasperated delegation.

The man, a giant, ensconced by the roadside, let go an enormous trumpet of pine wood reaching to the ground and ending there in a percussion-box, which gave to this prehistoric instrument the sonorousness of a piece of artillery.

"Ask him if he knows of an inn," said the president to Excourbanies, who, with enormous cheek and a small pocket dictionary undertook, now that they were in German Switzerland, to serve the delegation as interpreter. But before he could pull out his dictionary the man replied in very good French:

"An inn, messieurs? Why certainly... The 'Faithful Chamois' is close by; allow me to show you the place."

On the way, he told them he had lived in Paris for several years, as commissionnaire at the corner of the rue Vivienne.

"Another employe of the Company, _parbleu!_" thought Tartarin, leaving his friends to be surprised. However, Bompard's comrade was very useful, for, in spite of its French sign, _Le Chamois Fidele_ the people of the "Faithful Chamois" could speak nothing but a horrible German patois.

Presently, the Tarasconese delegation, seated around an enormous potato omelet, recovered both the health and the good-humour as essential to Southerners as the sun of their skies. They drank deep, they ate solidly. After many toasts to the president and his coming ascension, Tartarin, who had puzzled over the tavern-sign ever since his arrival, inquired of the horn-player, who was breaking a crust in a corner of the room:

"So you have chamois here, it seems?.. I thought there were none left in Switzerland."

The man winked:

"There are not many, but enough to let you see them now and then."

"Shoot them, is what he wants, _ve_" said Pas-calon, full of enthusiasm; "never did the president miss a shot!"