“Nevertheless, my friends,” said he, covering his retreat with a great show of folding the paper and setting his glasses, “nevertheless—her mother was a French woman! Marry the devil to a good girl—and, as the saying goes, there is no more devil. I remember Marie Douay—twenty, twenty-two years ago. I saw her at Görsdorf with Madame Hélène, a little brunette, always gay, always laughing; a bird to cage in Paris; a bird of the gardens and not of the mountains. When she married the Englishman, milord Hamilton, who had lived for two years in the Broglie here, was it for me to be surprised? Nom d’un gaillard, I was not surprised at all. The eagle to the mountains, the gold-breast to the cage. Certainly we were too sleepy for Marie Douay. She went to London with milord—et après—”
He slapped the paper as though all were settled; but Rosenbad, the fat German brewer, took his pipe from his mouth and chuckled with a deep guttural note.
“The après was Mademoiselle Beatrix—hein?” said he. “There were no more après’s, friend Bonot? That is for by-and-by—when the priest là-bas is forgotten.”
Old Hummel, the vintner, shook his head.
“These things bring the white hairs,” he exclaimed dolefully; “when you are sixty you should not go to weddings or to funerals. I have seven children, and the priests are always in my house. Next week, the Abbé Colot baptises my tenth grandchild. When I see a lad at the altar I say to myself, ‘By-and-by he will drink his beer at the Stadt Paris, and will be in no hurry to go home again.’ I do not wish to look through the window while another man dances. If I cannot dance myself, I will sit here and forget the days when I could. Ah—that it should be so many years ago!”
He struck a mournful note, a discord upon that sunny morning of July when there was a sky of azure above the minster spire of Strasburg, and some of the glory of summer hovered even in the well of her narrow streets. Old Père Bonot, called back again in thought to the village of the mountains, closed his eyes and listened to the musical bells pealing now in many a tower and steeple. By here and there, groups of well-dressed citizens crossed the open space before the western door of the vast church and passed from the sunshine to the soft lights of green, of red, of gold, of purple, which fell upon the pavements of the dim, mysterious aisles. Ever and anon, a carriage clattered over the flags, and men in gaudy uniforms, the white and silver of the cuirassiers, the green of the Empress’s dragoons, the blue of the lancers, added their gilt of colour to the swelling throngs. It was a soldier’s wedding, Strasburg said, and you must search many a city of Europe before you would find as pretty a bride as the stately English girl who went to the altar that morning, or a better lancer than Edmond Lefort, who was to take Beatrix Hamilton to the mountains presently.
The bells rang in the steeples; the people gathered in the minster square and at the great western doors of the cathedral. Many were peasants, clattering in their sabots, peasants come down from the vineyards to witness the marriage of the grandchild of one whom they and their fathers before them had held in honour—that servant of charity and of love, Hélène, Countess of Görsdorf. Flowers they carried to scatter upon the path which the mistress of their affections must tread; and those that had no flowers gave laughter and merry tongues, and it may even be a prayer, for the English girl who was Strasburg’s bride that day. And side by side with them were the louts of the hills, the vignerons, the moissonneurs, men of field and farm and orchard, red-cheeked all, with spotless blouses, and many a bon mot, and many a whisper of other marriages that might be when the harvesting was done. Such a crowd had not gathered at the church doors for twenty years, the people said. But then—it was Madame Hélène’s grandchild.
Old Père Bonot watched the people, and the smile came back to his contented face.
“It is forty years ago,” he said, “forty to a day, ma foi. The seventh of July—”