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The band which played was the best string-band in Brussels, attracting a great throng of listeners; and every table around them had its complement of guests; and the civil waiters who flitted hither and thither had almost more than they could do to keep the tables properly served.
It gave Cissie a certain tang of triumph to smile at the swathed ones and to think that she knew better than that. At night a negro string-band played for the white excursionists to dance, and Cissie would sit, with glowing eyes, clenching Peter's hand, every fiber of her asway to the music, and it seemed as if her heart would go mad.
The band of instrumentalists and singers was one of the largest in the county; and, unlike the smaller and finer Mellstock string-band, which eschewed all but the catgut, it included brass and reed performers at full Sunday services, and reached all across the west gallery.
From the bowling-green below there floated the strains of a string-band specially hired for the occasion; but, above it all, came the sound of Sally's laughter as she tried to steer some of the village boys and girls safely through the mysteries of a new country dance an effort not wholly crowned with success. The shifting scene was full of animation and happiness. "I think Mrs.
Red-haired, soft eyed, moon-faced, round of belly and lymphatic of temperament, his principal occupation in life was to play fiddle in the Sardis string-band, and in the intervals of professional engagements at dances and picnics, to fill one of the large splint-bottomed chairs in front of the hotel with his pulpy form, and receive the smart or bitter sayings of the loungers there with a laught that began before any one else's, and lasted after the others had gotten through.
"Well, I drew that fool contract, an', after it was signed, Sam delivered ten one-thousand-dollar bills to the young man, who was to become his son-in-law the following month with the assistance of a caterer and a florist and a string-band, all from New Haven. "Within half an hour Dan Pettigrew came roarin' up in front o' my office in the big red automobile of his father's.
"You will have nothing to do but draw your pay, my lad," he said. "The cookery is hardly A 1, but 'twill pass. Think of the beds, pillows of hops under your head; and every regiment has its own set of billiard-markers and a select string-band, every performer an artist."
The restaurant was, however, separated more completely from the drinking-lounge, in which, among palms, a string-band played.
The vast solitudes of Espartillar were within eight hours of Buenos Ayres, three by wagon and five by rail, so it was possible to wander out one night to the star-lit camp, where the silence was only broken by the screech of an occasional night-bird, or the beat of the wings of myriads of flighting ducks, without the slightest trace of man or his works perceptible in the great, grey, still, unpeopled world, and to be sitting the next night in evening clothes in a garish, over-gilt, over-decorated restaurant, humming with the clatter of plates and the chatter of high-pitched Argentine voices, as a noisy string-band played selections from the latest Paris operette.
Pleasure-boats were gliding up and down; a gay party went by, dancing on the deck of a luxurious barge to the music of a string-band; a young man skimmed the surface in a skiff, another punted two girls along; and people walked on the banks or sat about under the trees, and children played and they were all free! Suddenly Beth burst into tears. Miss Smallwood questioned her.
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