They all then left the garden and went round to the front of the inn. They found the Count and Mrs. Christmas standing outside, and listening to the prodigious singing-bout which was being held within by the keepers and the beaters; the chorus following each verse of the various hunting-songs being accompanied by the measured beating of hands and feet on the tables and wooden floor.
"If mademoiselle goes forward to the window," said the little grave German girl with the yellow hair, "she will hear better, and Herr Spiegelmann is about to sing 'Der Weisse Hirsch.'"
They all went forward to one of the many small windows, and looked in. The men were sitting in a picturesque undress round the table, their long-bowled china pipes in their fingers or mouth, and chopins of pale-yellow wine before them. Grete's father was standing by, laughing and joking with them; the old grandmother from time to time replenishing the tall transparent bottles. They had all been singing the elaborate chorus to the hunting-song, "Im Wald und auf der Haide"—all except the ancient Spiegelmann, who sat solemnly over his pipe-tube, and winked his small black eyes occasionally, as if trying to shut in the internal pleasure the rattling melody gave him. His large black moustache caught the tobacco-smoke that issued from his lips; and his wrinkled weather-tanned face, like the other sunburnt faces around, caught a bronzed glow from the solitary candle before him.
"The Spiegelmann missed a buck in the second drive," said one. "He will pay the forfeit of a song."
"I was driving, not shooting, the roe," growled the Spiegelmann, though he was not displeased to be asked to sing.
All at once, before any of his comrades were prepared, the venerable keeper, blinking fiercely, began to sing, in a low, querulous, plaintive voice, the first stanza of a well-known ballad, which ran somewhat in this fashion—
"'Twas into the forest three sportsmen went,
On shooting the white deer they were bent."
Suddenly, and while Miss Brunel fancied that the old man was singing a pathetic song of his youth, there rang out a great hoarse chorus from a dozen bass voices—the time struck by a couple of dozen horny hands on the table—
"Husch, husch! bang, bang! trara!"
Then Spiegelmann, gravely and plaintively as before, took up the thread of the wondrous story—