And The
Whole Party As Grave And Silent As The Woods Around Them!
My
friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows.
They
took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
party to mechanical waxworks. Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
dragoon. And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter. Nothing has ever
transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata;
or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that
this is all another chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the
upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove,
and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or
Mars.
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