Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat.
Perhaps we go along to visit our friends at the other
end of the village, where there is always a good welcome
and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled oysters
and white wine to close the evening. Or a dance
is organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits
all its paces under manful jockeying, to the light
of three or four candles and a lamp or two, while
the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor,
and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures,
get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there
looking on approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of
wine. Or sometimes— suppose my lady
moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-lit
dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the
light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear
shadow under every vine-leaf on the wall—sometimes
a picnic is proposed, and a basket made ready, and
a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file
down the long alley, and up through devious footpaths
among rocks and pine-trees, with every here and there
a dark passage of shadow, and every here and there
a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two precede
us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.
We gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and
soon a good blaze flutters the shadows of the old
bandits’ haunt, and shows shapely beards and
comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall.
The bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent
round in scalding thimblefuls. So a good hour
or two may pass with song and jest. And then
we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good
deal among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever
called together again, as one of our leaders winds
his horn. Perhaps some one of the party will
not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own. As he follows the winding sandy road,
he hears the flourishes grow fainter and fainter in
the distance, and die finally out, and still walks
on in the strange coolness and silence and between
the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away
Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.
No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing
knell over the busy market-place, can speak with a
more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations
in his mind. And as he stands rooted, it has
grown once more so utterly silent that it seems to
him he might hear the church bells ring the hour out
all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris,
and away in outlandish cities, and in the village
on the river, where his childhood passed between the
sun and flowers.
