“That place is free; my brother is ill, and will not be down.”
“Ill?..” said the Alpinist, seating himself, with an anxious, almost affectionate manner... “Ill? Not dangerously, au moins.”
He said au mouain, and the word recurred in all his remarks, with other vocable parasites, such as hé, que, téy zou, vé, vaï, et autrement, différemment, etc., still further emphasized by a Southern accent, displeasing, apparently, to the young lady, for she answered with a glacial glance of a black blue, the blue of an abyss.
His neighbour on the right had nothing encouraging about him either; this was the Italian tenor, a gay bird with a low forehead, oily pupils, and the moustache of a matador, which he twirled with nervous fingers at being thus separated from his pretty neighbour. But the good Alpinist had a habit of talking as he ate; it was necessary for his health.
“Vé! the pretty buttons...” he said to himself, aloud, eying the cuffs of his neighbour. “Notes of music, inlaid in jasper—why, the effect is charmain!..”
His metallic voice rang on the silence, but found no echo.
“Surely monsieur is a singer, que?”
“Non capisco,” growled the Italian into his moustache.
For a moment the man resigned himself to devour without uttering a word, but the morsels choked him. At last, as his opposite neighbour, the Austro-Hungarian diplomat, endeavoured to reach the mustard-pot with the tips of his shaky old fingers, covered with mittens, he passed it to him obligingly. “Happy to serve you, Monsieur le baron,” for he had heard some one call him so.
Unfortunately, poor M. de Stoltz, in spite of his shrewd and knowing air contracted in diplomatic juggling, had now lost both words and ideas, and was travelling among the mountains for the special purpose of recovering them. He opened his eyes wide upon that unknown face, and shut them again without a word. It would have taken ten old diplomats of his present intellectual force to have constructed in common a formula of thanks.