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In: Novels
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #70431.
The novel is a sprawling historical romance set against the backdrop of the Crimean War and the later ambitions of Napoleon III. It opens with an elderly, ivory‑faced veteran in a wheeled chair watching a Blériot‑type monoplane lift from a lakeside meadow, his black eyes sparkling as he imagines the aircraft’s future as a battlefield ambulance and a bomb‑carrier. His animated commentary on the “useful” invention is interrupted by his sister’s hesitant assent, and the scene quickly expands to a vivid tableau of a Swiss village, Zeiden, where locals, tourists, and a brass‑band parade through sun‑drenched streets, while the old man, known as M. Hector Dunoisse, becomes the focal point of gossip, admiration, and whispered scandal. The opening establishes a cast of soldiers, nurses, and aristocratic figures whose lives intersect through war, love, and intrigue, hinting at the tangled personal histories that will drive the narrative.
The prose is richly descriptive, echoing the ornate diction of late‑Victorian adventure tales while weaving in the technical fascination of early aviation. Its tone oscillates between earnest reverence for heroic deeds and a satirical edge that lampoons diplomatic pretensions. Readers who enjoy immersive period settings, complex character webs, and a blend of military drama with romantic and comedic elements will find the book’s elaborate style and historical depth rewarding.
The opening · free to read
“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.
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