On reflection, however, he did remember having clinched a matter, and sharply too! with a species of Cossack, a certain Mi... Milanof.
"Manilof," corrected Bompard.
"Do you know him?.. Between you and me, I think that Manilof had a spite against me about a little Russian girl..."
"Yes, Sonia... "murmured Bompard.
"Do you know her too? Ah! my friend, a pearl! a pretty little gray partridge!"
"Sonia Wa.s.silief... It was she who killed with one shot of her revolver in the open that General Felianine, the president of the Council of War which condemned her brother to perpetual exile."
Sonia an a.s.sa.s.sin? that child, that little blond fairy!.. Tartarin could not believe it. But Bompard gave precise particulars and details of the affair--which, indeed, is very well known. Sonia had lived for the last two years in Zurich, where her brother Boris, having escaped from Siberia, joined her, his lungs gone; and during the summers she took him for better air to the mountains. Bompard had often met them, attended by friends who were all exiles, conspirators. The Wa.s.siliefs, very intelligent, very energetic, and still possessed of some fortune, were at the head of the Nihilist party, with Bolibine, the man who murdered the prefect of police, and this very Manilof, who blew up the Winter Palace last year.
"_Boufre!_" exclaimed Tartarin, "one meets with queer neighbours on the Rigi."
But here"s another thing. Bompard took it into his head that Tartarin"s letter came from these young people; it was just like their Nihilist proceedings. The czar, every morning, found warnings in his study, under his napkin...
"But," said Tartarin, turning pale, "why such threats? What have I done to them?"
Bompard thought they must have taken him for a spy.
"A spy! I!
"_Be!_ yes." In all the Nihilist centres, at Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva, Russia maintained at great cost, a numerous body of spies; in fact, for some time past she had had in her service the former chief of the French Imperial police, with a dozen Corsicans, who followed and watched all Russian exiles, and took countless disguises in order to detect them.
The costume of the Alpinist, his spectacles, his accent, were quite enough to confound him in their minds with those agents.
"_Coquin de sort!_ now I think of it," said Tartarin, "they had at their heels the whole time a rascally Italian tenor... undoubtedly a spy...
_Differemment_, what must I do?"
"Above all things, never put yourself in the way of those people again; now that they have warned you they will do you harm..."
"Ha! _va! harm!_.. The first one that comes near me I shall cleave his head with my ice-axe."
And in the gloom of the tunnel the eyes of the Tarasconese hero glared.
But Bompard, less confident than he, knew well that the hatred of Nihilists is terrible; it attacks from below, it undermines, and plots.
It is all very well to be a _lapin_ like the president, but you had better beware of that inn bed you sleep in, and the chair you sit upon, and the rail of the steamboat, which will give way suddenly and drop you to death. And think of the cooking-dishes prepared, the gla.s.s rubbed over with invisible poison!
"Beware of the kirsch in your flask, and the frothing milk that cow-man in sabots brings you. They stop at nothing, I tell you."
"If so, what"s to be done! I"m doomed!" groaned Tartarin; then, grasping the hand of his companion:--
"Advise me, Gonzague."
After a moment"s reflection, Bompard traced out to him a programme. To leave the next day, early, cross the lake and the Brunig pa.s.s, and sleep at Interlaken. The next day, to Grindelwald and the Little Scheideck.
And the day after, the JUNGFRAU! After that, home to Tarascon, without losing an hour, or looking back.
"I "ll start to-morrow, Gonzague..." declared the hero, in a virile voice, with a look of terror at the mysterious horizon, now dim in the darkness, and at the lake which seemed to him to harbour all treachery beneath the gla.s.sy calm of its pale reflections.
VI.
The Brunig pa.s.s. Tartarin falls into the hands of Nihilists, Disappearance of an Italian tenor and a rope made at Avignon, Fresh exploits of the cap-sportsman. Pan! pan!
"Get in! get in!"
"But how the devil, que! am I to get in? the places are full... they won"t make room for me."
This was said at the extreme end of the lake of the Four Cantons, on that sh.o.r.e at Alpnach, damp and soggy as a delta, where the post-carriages wait in line to convey tourists leaving the boat to cross the Brunig.
A fine rain like needle-points had been falling since morning; and the worthy Tartarin, hampered by his armament, hustled by the porters and the custom-house officials, ran from carriage to carriage, sonorous and lumbering as that orchestra-man one sees at fairs, whose every movement sets a-going triangles, big drums, Chinese bells, and cymbals. At all the doors the same cry of terror, the same crabbed "Full!" growled in all dialects, the same swelling-out of bodies and garments to take as much room as possible and prevent the entrance of so dangerous and resounding a companion.
The unfortunate Alpinist puffed, sweated, and replied with "_Coquin de bon sort!_" and despairing gestures to the impatient clamour of the convoy: "En route!.. All right!.. Andiamo!.. Vorwarts!.." The horses pawed, the drivers swore. Finally, the manager of the post-route, a tall, ruddy fellow in a tunic and flat cap, interfered himself, and opening forcibly the door of a landau, the top of which was half up, he pushed in Tartarin, hoisting him like a bundle, and then stood, majestically, with outstretched hand for his _trinkgeld_.
Humiliated, furious with the people in the carriage who were forced to accept him _manu militari_, Tartarin affected not to look at them, rammed his porte-monnaie back into his pocket, wedged his ice-axe on one side of him with ill-humoured motions and an air of determined brutality, as if he were a pa.s.senger by the Dover steamer landing at Calais.
"Good-morning, monsieur," said a gentle voice he had heard already.
He raised his eyes, and sat horrified, terrified before the pretty, round and rosy face of Sonia, seated directly in front of him, beneath the hood of the landau, which also sheltered a tall young man, wrapped in shawls and rugs, of whom nothing could be seen but a forehead of livid paleness and a few thin meshes of hair, golden like the rim of his near-sighted spectacles. A third person, whom Tartarin knew but too well, accompanied them,--Manilof, the incendiary of the Winter Palace.
Sonia, Manilof, what a mouse-trap!
This was the moment when they meant to accomplish their threat, on that Brunig pa.s.s, so craggy, so surrounded with abysses. And the hero, by one of those flashes of horror which reveal the depths of danger, beheld himself stretched on the rocks of a ravine, or swinging from the topmost branches of an oak. Fly! yes, but where, how? The vehicles had started in file at the sound of a trumpet, a crowd of little ragam.u.f.fins were clambering at the doors with bunches of edelweiss. Tartarin, maddened, had a mind to begin the attack by cleaving the head of the Cossack beside him with his alpenstock; then, on reflection, he felt it was more prudent to refrain. Evidently, these people would not attempt their scheme till farther on, in regions uninhabited, and before that, there might come means of getting out. Besides, their intentions no longer seemed to him quite so malevolent. Sonia smiled gently upon him from her pretty turquoise eyes, the pale young man looked pleasantly at him, and Manilof, visibly milder, moved obligingly aside and helped him to put his bag between them. Had they discovered their mistake by reading on the register of the Rigi-Kulm the ill.u.s.trious name of Tartarin?.. He wished to make sure, and, familiarly, good-humouredly, he began:--
"Enchanted with this meeting, beautiful young lady... only, permit me to introduce myself... you are ignorant with whom you have to do, _ve!_ whereas, I am perfectly aware who _you_ are."
"Hush!" said the little Sonia, still smiling, but pointing with her gloved finger to the seat beside the driver, where sat the tenor with his sleeve-b.u.t.tons, and another young Russian, sheltering themselves under the same umbrella, and laughing and talking in Italian.
Between the police and the Nihilists, Tartarin did not hesitate.
"Do you know that man, _au mouain?_" he said in a low voice, putting his head quite close to Sonia"s fresh cheeks, and seeing himself in her clear eyes, which suddenly turned hard and savage as she answered "yes,"
with a snap of their lids.
The hero shuddered, but as one shudders at the theatre, with that delightful creeping of the epidermis which takes you when the action becomes Corsican, and you settle yourself in your seat to see and to listen more attentively. Personally out of the affair, delivered from the mortal terrors which had haunted him all night and prevented him from swallowing his usual Swiss coffee, honey, and b.u.t.ter, he breathed with free lungs, thought life good, and this little Russian irresistibly pleasing in her travelling hat, her jersey close to the throat, tight to the arms, and moulding her slender figure of perfect elegance. And such a child! Child in the candour of her laugh, in the down upon her cheeks, in the pretty grace with which she spread her shawl upon the knees of her poor brother. "Are you comfortable?.." "You are not cold?" How could any one suppose that little hand, so delicate beneath its chamois glove, had had the physical force and the moral courage to kill a man?
Nor did the others of the party seem ferocious: all had the same ingenuous laugh, rather constrained and sad on the drawn lips of the poor invalid, and noisy in Manilof, who, very young behind his bushy beard, gave way to explosions of mirth like a schoolboy in his holidays, bursts of a gayety that was really exuberant.
The third companion, whom they called Boli-bine, and who talked on the box with the tenor, amused himself much and was constantly turning back to translate to his friends the Italian"s adventures, his successes at the Petersburg Opera, his _bonnes fortunes_, the sleeve-b.u.t.tons the ladies had subscribed to present to him on his departure, extraordinary b.u.t.tons, with, three notes of music engraved thereon, _la do re_ (l"adore), which professional pun, repeated in the landau, caused such delight, the tenor himself swelling up with pride and twirling his moustache with so silly and conquering a look at Sonia, that Tartarin began to ask himself whether, after all, they were not mere tourists, and he a genuine tenor.
Meantime the carriages, going at a good pace, rolled over bridges, skirted little lakes and flowery meads, and fine vineyards running with water and deserted; for it was Sunday, and all the peasants whom they met wore their gala costumes, the women with long braids of hair hanging down their backs and silver chainlets. They began at last to mount the road in zigzags among forests of oak and beech; little by little the marvellous horizon displayed itself on the left; at each turn of the zigzag, rivers, valleys with their spires pointing upward came into view, and far away in the distance, the h.o.a.ry head of the Finsteraarhorn, whitening beneath an invisible sun.
Soon the road became gloomy, the aspect savage. On one side, heavy shadows, a chaos of trees, twisted and gnarled on a steep slope, down which foamed a torrent noisily; to right, an enormous rock overhanging the road and bristling with branches that sprouted from its fissures.
They laughed no more in the landau; but they all admired, raising their heads and trying to see the summit of this tunnel of granite.
"The forests of Atlas!.. I seem to see them again..." said Tartarin, gravely, and then, as the remark pa.s.sed unnoticed, he added: "Without the lion"s roar, however."
"You have heard it, monsieur?" asked Sonia.