I
An old paralytic man, whose snow-white hair fell in long silken waves
from under the rim of the black velvet skull-cap he invariably wore,
sat in a light invalid chair-carriage at the higher end of the wide,
steep street that is the village of Zeiden, in the Canton of Alpenzell,
looking at the sunset.
Slowly the rose-red flush was fading behind the glittering green,
snow-capped pinnacle of distant Riedi. A segment of the sun’s huge
flaming disk remained in view above a shoulder of her colossal neighbor
Donatus; molten gold and silver, boiling together as in a crucible,
were spilled upon his vast, desolate, icy sides; his towering,
snow-crested helmet trailed a _panache_ of dazzling glory, snatched
from the sinking forehead of the vanquished Lord of Day, and even the
cap of the Kreinenberg, dwarf esquire in attendance on the giant,
boasted a golden plume.
The old man blinked a little, oppressed by excess of splendor, and the
attendant Sister of Charity, who sometimes relieved the white-capped,
blue-cloaked, cotton-gowned German nurse customarily in charge of the
patient, observing this, turned the invalid-chair so that its occupant
looked down upon the Blau See, the shape of which suggests a sumptuous
glove encrusted with turquoises, as, bordered with old-world, walled
towns, it lies in the rich green lap of a fertile country, deep girdled
with forests of larch and pine and chestnut, enshrining stately ruins
of mediæval castles, and the picturesque garden-villas built by wealthy
peasants, in their stately shadow; and sheltered by the towering
granite ranges of the Paarlberg from raging easterly gales.
The brilliant black eyes that shone almost with the brilliancy of
youth in the wasted ivory face of the old man in the wheeled chair,
sparkled appreciatively now as they looked out over the Lake. For to
the whirring of its working dynamos, and the droning song of its
propeller, a monoplane of the Blériot type emerged from its wooden
shelter, pitched upon a steep green incline near to the water’s edge;
and moving on its three widely-placed cycle-wheels with the gait of a
leggy winged beetle or a flurried sheldrake, suddenly rose with its
rider into the thin, clear atmosphere, losing all its awkwardness as
the insect or the bird would have done, in the launch upon its natural
element, and the instinctive act of flight. The old man watched the
bird of steel and canvas, soaring and dipping, circling and turning,
over the blue liquid plain with the sure ease and swift daring of the
swallow, and slowly nodded his head. When the monoplane had completed a
series of practice-evolutions, it steered away northwards, the steady
tuff-tuff of its Gnome engine thinning away to a mere thread of sound
as the machine diminished to the sight. Then said the watcher, breaking
his long silence:
“That is a good thing!... A capital--a useful thing!... An invention,
see you, my Sister, that will one day prove invaluable in War.”
The Sister, with a shade of hesitation, responded that Monsieur was
undoubtedly right. For carrying dispatches, and for the more dreadful
purpose of dropping bombs upon an enemy, the aeroplane, guided by a
skillful pilot, would no doubt----
“Ah, tschah!... Bah!... br’rr!...” The old man hunched his thin,
broad shoulders impatiently, and wrinkled up his mobile ivory face
into a hundred puckers of comical disgust as he exploded these verbal
rockets, and his bright black eyes snapped and sparkled angrily. “For
dropping shell upon the decks of armored cruisers, or into camps, or
upon columns of marching men, this marvelous machine that the Twentieth
Century has given us might be utilized beyond doubt. But for the
preservation of life, rather than its destruction, its supreme use will
be in War. For the swift and easy removal of wounded from the field of
battle, a fleet of Army Hospital Service Aeroplanes will one day be
built and equipped and organized by every civilized Government, under
the Rules of the Crimson Cross. Beautiful, beautiful!” The old man
was quite excited, nodding his black velvet-capped, white-locked head
as though he would have nodded it off, and blinking his bright eyes.
“_Sapristi!_--I see them!” he cried. “They will hover over the Field
of Action like huge hawks, from time to time swooping upon the fallen
and carrying them off in their talons. Superb! magnificent! colossal!
If we had had air-men and air-machines at Balaklava in ’54, or at
Magenta, or Solferino, or Gravelotte, or in Paris during the Siege!...
Have the kindness, my Sister, to give me a pinch of snuff!”
The Sister fumbled in the pocket of the white flannel jacket--winter
and summer, year in and year out, the old man went clothed from head to
foot in white--and fed the thin, handsome old eagle-beak with pungent
cheap mixture, out of a box that bore the portrait, set in blazing
brilliants, of the Imperial Crowned Head whose gift it had been; as was
recorded by the elaborate inscription engraved in the Russian character
within its golden lid. The old man was particular that no dust of his
favorite brown powder should soil the snowy silken mustache, waxed
to fine points, that jutted above his long, mobile upper-lip, or the
little imperial that was called by a much less elegant name when the
birch-broom-bearded Reds heckled the President of the Third Republic
for wearing the distinctive chin-tuft. After the pinch of snuff the old
man became more placid. He had his chair slewed round to afford him a
fresh point of view, and sat absorbed in the contemplation of which he
never seemed to weary.
The sweet Spring day was dying. Vast brooding pinions of somber purple
cloud already made twilight on the north horizon, where glooming
ramparts topped by pallid peaks, and jagged sierras spiring up into
slender minarets and aguilles, shone ghostly against the gloom. The
horn of the herdsman sounded from the lower Alps, and neck-bells
tinkled as the long lines of placid cows moved from the upper pastures
in obedience to the call, breathing perfume of scented vetch and
honeyed crimson clover, leaving froth of milk from trickling udders on
the leaves and grasses as they went.
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.”
“Indeed!”
“He has known M. Hector Dunoisse all his life--Pédelaborde’s life, I
mean, of course. His father was a fellow-cadet of your old gentleman’s
at a Military Training Institute in Paris, where Dunoisse fought a
duel with another boy and killed him, I am given to understand, by an
unfair thrust. The French are fond of tricks in fencing, and some of
’em are the very dev----Ahem!”
“I decline to credit such a monstrous statement,” said the little lady,
holding her head very high. “Nothing shall convince me that that dear,
sweet, placid old man--who is certainly not to blame for the accident
of his birth--could ever have been guilty of a dishonorable action,
much less a wicked murderous deed, such as you describe! Do you know
him? I mean in the sense of having spoken to him, because everybody
bows to M. Dunoisse on the Promenade. You have!.... Next time you
happen to meet, you might say that if he would allow you to introduce
him to your wife, I should be pleased--so very pleased to make his
acquaintance----”
“Ah, yes! Quite so! We have had a little chat or two, certainly,”
the dyspeptic gentleman of affairs admitted. “And I don’t doubt he
would be highly gratified.” The speaker finished his lozenge, and
added, with mild malignity: “That you would find him interesting I
feel perfectly sure. For he certainly has seen a good deal of life,
according to Pédelaborde.... He held a commission in a crack regiment
of Chasseurs d’Afrique, and ran through a great fortune, I am told,
with the assistance of his commanding officer’s wife--uncommonly
attractive woman, too, Pédelaborde tells me. And he was on the
Prince-President’s Staff at the time of the _coup d’État_, and after
the Restoration--Pédelaborde positively takes his oath that this is
true!--was shut up in a French frontier fortress for an attempt on the
life of the Emperor. But he escaped or was released, when the Allies
were pounding away at Sevastopol, in 1854, and Ada Merling--dead now,
I believe, like nearly everybody else one has ever heard named in
connection with the War in the Crimea--was nursing the wounded English
soldiers at Scutari.” The dyspeptic politician added acidly:
“Here comes M. Dunoisse trundling down the Promenade, saintly smile and
all the rest of it.... Shall I give him your message now?”
But the speaker’s better-half, at last convinced, indignantly withdrew
her previous tender of cordiality, and as the invalid chair, impelled
by the white-capped, blue-cloaked nurse, who had now replaced the nun,
rolled slowly down the wide garden-bordered, orchard-backed _Place_
of ancient timber houses that is Zeiden, the white-haired wearer of
the black velvet cap, nodding and beaming in acknowledgment of the
elaborately respectful salutations of the male visitors and the smiling
bows of the ladies, received from one little British matron a stare so
freezing in its quality that his jaw dropped, and his bright black eyes
became circular with astonishment and dismay.
* * * * *
That an old man at whom everybody smiled kindly--an old man who had
little else to live upon or for but love should meet a look so cold....
His underlip drooped like a snubbed child’s. Why was it? Did not the
little English lady know--surely she must know!--how much, how very
much old Hector Dunoisse had done, and given, sacrificed and endured
and suffered, to earn the love and gratitude of women and of men? He
did not wish to boast--but she might have remembered it!... A tear
dropped on the wrinkled ivory hands that lay helplessly upon the rug
that covered the sharp bony knees.
“You have been guilty of a piece of confoundedly bad taste, let me tell
you!” said the irritated Englishman, addressing his still vibrating
wife. “To cut an old man like that! It was brutal!” He added, “And
idiotic into the bargain!”
“I simply couldn’t help it,” said his wife, her stiffened facial
muscles relaxing into the flabbiness that heralds tears. “When I saw
that horrible old creature coming, looking so dreadfully innocent and
kind; and remembered how often I have seen the little French and German
and Swiss children crowding round his chair listening to a story, or
being lifted up to kiss him”--she gulped--“or toddling to his knee
to slip their little bunches of violets into those helpless hands of
his--I could _not_ help it! I simply had to!”
“Then you simply had to commit a social blunder of a very grave
kind,” pronounced her lord, assuming that air of detachment from the
person addressed which creates a painful sense of isolation. “For
permit me to inform you that M. Hector Dunoisse is not a person, but
a Personage--whom the President of the Swiss Confederation and about
half the Crowned Heads of Europe congratulate upon his birthday. And
who--if he had chosen to accept the crown they offered him half a
lifetime back--would have been to-day the ruling Hereditary Prince of
an important Bavarian State. As it is----”
“As it is, he would forgive me the hideous thing I have done,” the
little lady cried, flushing indignant scarlet to the roots of her
hair, “could he know that it was my own husband who deceived me....
Who humbugged me,” she gulped hysterically. “_Spoofed_ me, as our
boy Herbert would hideously say,--with a whole string of ridiculous,
trumped-up stories----” She hurriedly sought for and applied her
handkerchief, and the final syllable was lost in the dolorous blowing
of an injured woman’s nose. Her husband entreated pusillanimously:
“For Heaven’s sake, don’t cry!--at least, here on the Promenade, with
scores of people staring. What I told you is the simple truth....
Don’t Roman Catholics say that the regular rips make the most
thorough-going, out-and-out saints when they _do_ take to religion
and good works and all the rest of it? Besides ... good Lord!--it’s
Ancient History--happened years and years before our parents saw each
other--and the old chap is ninety--or nearly! And--even supposing
Dunoisse did what people say he did, only think what Dunoisse has done!”
Curiosity prevailed over injured dignity. The wounded wife emerged from
behind a damp wad of cambric to ask: “What _has_ he done?”
“What has he ... why--he has received all sorts of Votes of Thanks from
Public Societies, and he has been decorated with heaps of Orders ...
the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and the Orders of the Annunziata
of Savoy, and the Black Eagle; and he is a Commander of the Legion of
Honor and a Knight of the Papal Order of St. Gregory, and Hereditary
Prince of Widinitz if he liked, but he doesn’t like ... goodness me!
Haven’t I told you all that already?” The M.P. for the North London
borough flapped his hands and lapsed into incoherency.
“But surely you can tell me why these honors were bestowed upon
M. Dunoisse?” asked his wife. “I am waiting for the answer to my
question--what has he done to deserve them?”
The clear, incisive English voice asking the question cut like a knife
through the consonantal, sibilant French, and the guttural be-voweled
German. And a stranger standing near--recognizable as a French priest
of the Catholic Church less by the evidence of his well-worn cloth,
and Roman collar, and wide-brimmed, round-crowned silk beaver, with
the shabby silk band and black enameled buckle, than by a certain
distinctive manner and expression--said upon a sudden impulse,
courteously raising his hat:
“Madame will graciously pardon an old man for presuming to answer a
question not addressed to him. She asks, if I comprehend aright, what
M. Dunoisse has done to deserve the numberless marks of respect and
esteem that have been showered on him?... I will have the honor of
explaining to Madame if Monsieur kindly consents?”
“Pleasure, I’m sure!” babbled the dyspeptic victim of the Suffragists
and the Budget, yawning as only the liverish can. The priest went on,
addressing the little lady:
“Madame, the invalid gentleman whose paralyzed hands rest upon his
knees as inertly and immovably as the hands of some granite statue of
an Egyptian deity, has given with both those helpless hands--gives to
this hour!--will give, when we have long been dust, and these pretty
infants playing round us are old men and aged women--a colossal gift
to suffering Humanity. He has expended wealth, health, all that men
hold dear, in founding, endowing, and organizing a vast international,
undenominational, neutral Society of Mercy, formed of brave and skilled
and noble men and women,--ah!--may Heaven bless those women!--who,
being of all nations, creeds, and politics, are bound by one vow;
united in one purpose; bent to one end--that end the alleviation of the
frightful sufferings of soldiers wounded in War. Madame must have heard
of the Convention of Helvetia?... But see there, Madame!... Observe, by
a strange coincidence--the Symbol in the sky!”
The hand of the speaker, with a graceful, supple gesture of indication,
waved westwards, and the little lady’s eyes, following it, were led
to the upper end of the wide, irregular châlet-bordered Promenade
of Zeiden, where the wheel-chair of the invalid had again come to a
standstill; possibly in obedience to its occupant’s desire to look once
more upon the sunset, whose flaming splendors had all vanished now,
save where against a gleaming background of milky-pale vapor glowed
transverse bars of ardent hue, rich and glowing as pigeon’s blood ruby,
or an Emperor’s ancient Burgundy, or that other crimson liquor that
courses in the veins of Adam’s sons, and was first spilled upon the
shrinking earth by the guilty hand of Cain.
“It is the sign,” the priest repeated earnestly; “the badge of the
great international League of love and pity which owes its institution
to M. Hector Dunoisse.” He added: “The face of Madame tells me that no
further explanation is needed. With other countries that have drunk of
War, and its agonies and horrors, Protestant England renders homage to
the Crimson Cross.”