The sunset-hour being supper-time, the single street of Zeiden seemed deserted. You saw it as a hilly thoroughfare, bordered with detached timber-built houses, solid and quaintly-shaped and gayly-painted, their feet planted in gardens full of lilac and syringa and laburnum, daffodils and narcissi, violets and anemones and tulips; their walls and balconies tapestried with the sweet May rose and the pink and white clematis; the high-pitched roofs of the most ancient structures, green to the ridge-poles with mosses and gilded by lichens, rosetted with houseleek, and tufted with sweet yellow wallflower and flaunting dandelion. And you had just begun to wonder at the silence and apparent emptiness of the place, when, presto! it suddenly sprang into life. Doors opened and shut; footsteps crackled on gravel; gates clicked, releasing avalanches of barking dogs and laughing, racing children; the adult natives and visitors of Zeiden (Swiss for the most part, leavened with Germans and sprinkled with English and French) appeared upon the Promenade.... And the band of the Kursaal, magnificent in their green, white-faced, silver-tagged uniform, marched down the street to the Catholic Church, and being admitted by the verger—a magnificent official carrying a wand, and attired in a scarlet frock-coat, gilt chain, and lace-trimmed cocked hat—presently appeared upon the platform of the tower, and—it being the Feast of The Ascension—played a chorale, and were tremendously applauded when it was over.
“They play well, finely, to-night!” said the old man, nodding and twinkling in his bright pleased way. “Kindly clap my hands for me, my Sister. M. Pédelaborde may take it amiss if I do not join in the applause.” So the chef d’orchestre was gratified by the approval of the paralytic M. Dunoisse, which indeed he would have been sorely chagrined to miss.
“I think that white-haired old man in the black velvet cap has the most noble, spiritual face I ever saw,” said a little English lady to her husband—a tall, lean, prematurely-bald and careworn man, arrayed in a leather cap with goggles, a knicker suit of baggily-cut, loud-patterned tweeds, a shirt of rheumatism-defying Jaeger material, golfing hose, and such prodigiously-clouted nailed boots, with sockets for the insertion of climbing-irons, as London West End and City firms are apt to impose upon customers who do their Swiss mountain-climbing per the zigzag carriage-road, or the cog-wheel railway.
“Ah, yes! quite so!” absently rejoined the husband, who was Liberal Member for a North London Borough, and an Under-Secretary of State; and was mentally engaged in debating whether the six o’clock supper recently partaken of, and consisting of grilled lake-trout with cucumber, followed by curd-fritters crowned with dabs of whortleberry preserve, did not constitute a flagrant breach of the rules of dietary drawn up by the London specialist under whose advice he was trying the Zeiden whey-cure for a dyspepsia induced by Suffragist Demonstrations and the Revised Budget Estimate. “Quite so, yes!”
“You are trying to be cynical,” said the little lady, who was serious and high-minded, and Member of half-a-dozen Committees of Societies for the moral and physical improvement of a world that would infinitely prefer to remain as it is “Skeptics may sneer,” she continued with energy, “and the irreverent scoff, but a holy life does stamp itself upon the countenance in lines there is no mistaking.”
“I did not sneer,” retorted her husband, whose internal system the unfortuitous combination of cucumber with curds was rapidly upsetting. “Nor am I aware that I scoffed. Your saintly-faced old gentleman is certainly a very interesting and remarkable personage. His name is M. Hector Dunoisse.” He added, with an inflection the direct result of the cucumber-curd-whortleberry combination: “He was a natural son of the First Napoleon’s favorite aide-de-camp, a certain Colonel—afterwards Field-Marshal Dunoisse (who did tremendous things at Aboukir and Austerlitz and Borodino)—by—ah!—by a Bavarian lady of exalted rank,—a professed nun, in fact,—who ran away with Dunoisse, or was run away with. M. Pédelaborde, the man who told me the story, doesn’t profess to be quite certain.”
“I dare say not! And who is M. Pédelaborde, if I may be allowed to know?”
Infinite contempt and unbounded incredulity were conveyed in the little English lady’s utterance of the foregoing words.
“Pédelaborde,” explained her husband, sucking a soda-mint lozenge, and avoiding the wifely eye, “is the fat, tremendously-mustached personage who conducts the Kursaal Band.”