"A waterlily may defy the ooze," observed Geiger-Hans, sententiously.
But the simile was hateful to the youth—a water-lily, a flower that flourishes, in atrocious beauty, upon the very slime! Then he cursed his wound for its slow healing, and his blood for its ill-timed fever, and the length of the road, and the perversity of women.
"And the wrong-headedness of young men!" added the musician, drily.
But thereafter, in tones of consolation, for dudgeon reigned on the saddle above him, he pointed to a light far off through the dark flicker of leaf and shadowy march of trees.
"See, yonder shall we sup and sleep, and thence, rested, start in the brisk dawn. And to-morrow——"
"To-morrow!" interrupted the bridegroom, impatiently. "No; I shall be in Cassel to-night."
"You forget the times we live in, comrade," came the fiddler's answer. "Why, here is my nobility afoot; and yours, all wounded, upon a sorry steed, because any less notable progression were to court suspicion, putting aside the fact that your worship's carriage and horses (Sidonia would have none of them, and if you were not otherwise matched you two would be one by pride, comrade) have been requisitioned for the use of the State. And Frantz fled with his master's dressing set, his English pistols, and his second portmanteau! Court suits I make no doubt, tut, tut. The fellow was a rogue. I saw it at half a blink. And worthy Peter, our postilion, bitten with the war fever and passed over to the Prussians! Nay, but 'tis a riddance that suits me. And here we go as I love, at our own free will, save, indeed, that we enter not Cassel to-night. Have you already forgotten that we are at war, in Westphalia? Not, I grant you, that it signifies much to our pretty monarch—so long as it does not interfere with his amusements at home. He has thought it wise, nevertheless, to make a little fortress of his capital—breastworks and glacis where lay the orchards and cottage gardens; posterns and corps de garde at all road entrances, and everything closed at the setting of the watch, an hour after sundown!"
Steven the lover had, in his mind's eye, seen his pilgrimage ended before the fall of the day; seen himself dashed or crowned. Crowned! Upon the vision the surge rose in his heart till it overpowered him well-nigh to swooning.
Geiger-Hans, with his diabolic insight, chose this moment to draw from his fiddle a sudden strain.
"Oh, stop!" panted the young man. "I cannot bear it."