“Come, then—” interrupted Hummel, the melancholy vintner, “many things will happen to us before the seventh of July, mon vieux. The day is Tuesday, and Sunday was the third. It would be the fifth if I can add three and two.”
Old Bonot assented grudgingly.
“I married Henriette at Reichshoffen on the seventh day of July in the year 1830. To-day is the fifth then, and the year is 1870. It was on the twenty-fifth day of the month that Charles the Tenth signed the five ordinances which cost him his throne. On the next day le roi Guillaume came to the throne of England. Ah, mes enfants, the things that forty years can teach us, the joys we can forget, the griefs we can suffer. And there is always death—always, always—”
He was thinking of little Henriette and the place where she slept in the green valley of Reichshoffen; but Rosenbad, the merry brewer, was all eyes for the wedding and the great throngs then crossing the square.
“Oh! but you are gay this morning, old Bonot,” said he. “I shall go and tell them that there is a skeleton for their feast—the man in black who says that the bell can toll sometimes. Is not he a proper fellow to make their wine sour! And he has children of his own!”
The vintner took up his long glass of Munich beer, and chimed in with his old complaint.
“I will be as gay as ten grandchildren will let me—for the sake of the little English girl. Afterwards I must go home. Père Bonot shall call for some more beer and remember that we are Germans—”
He spoke jestingly, but the Frenchman was up in arms in a moment.
“Not so,” he cried fiercely. “I am the servant of my Emperor, and of no other. As for your beer, it is the drink of louts. I give it to my pigs. When the King of Prussia is crowned in the minster—I will drink your beer on that day.”