"Would you not like your fiddle?" cried Steven, as he caught the half-folded sheet that the musician tossed towards him, "that you may set my folly to a tune? When you want to sermonize, I had rather you did it on the strings, if you don't mind."
For a second Geiger Hans seemed about to resent the pettish speech as an impertinence. A frown gathered; but, with a short laugh, broken by a deep sigh, he resumed his air of sad serenity.
"Nay," said he, stroking the strings of the instrument that Steven pushed towards him, and then laying his hand flat upon them to still their wailing, "did I make music to-night, it would not be music for your youth. Fool!" said Geiger-Hans, fixing his mad, brilliant eyes upon Steven, "is she not living, she whom you love? and you prate to me—to me, of unhappiness!"
Though the words were harsh, his tone was strangely gentle. Had Steven dared, he would have put out his hand to touch the speaker.
The wind was rustling through the trees; there came a stir and a murmur from the woods; the purple-blue depth of the sky seemed to quiver with pallid changes.
"It is the dawn," said the fiddler, in a worn voice. "Get you to that couch again, for you must sleep, and we have a day of action before us. Aye, take that letter with you and lay it under your cheek. If it seem cruel, have not her fingers touched it? Ah, if you but knew from what a wounded heart, perhaps, sprang those reproachful words! Why, if she has pride, man, will she not be the fitter mate for you? And if she will have naught of a loveless marriage, is it not because she would have love? Poor little Sidonia ... who only yesterday was a child! You have awakened a woman's heart in her; see that you know how to meet that heart's measure."
Steven stood by the couch, palpitating to the words, to the golden visions they opened before his fevered eyes.... Sidonia, the child, with her yellow plaits of hair, with her eyes brown and green, clear yet deep, like the brook under the trees.... Sidonia, whose lips he had kissed; who had smiled at him under her bridal veil!
Geiger-Hans had said he would make no music; but it was the music of the gods his words had evoked in the dawn. Presently the older man looked up from his dreary abstraction: Steven, stretched on the sofa in all the abandonment of young fatigue, was sleeping like a child. The watcher's features relaxed.
"O bella Gioventu...!" he murmured. Then he looked down at the scattered sheets before him, and his lips twisted in bitter mockery. Here had been a night's work of petty crime under the fine-sounding title of patriotism and national conspiracy. But might not now some good be brought out of it after all? How sound the fellow slept! Not that he, the wanderer, envied any sleeper but him that would never wake.—Well, to work!
He took up, with contemptuous fingers, Burgravine Betty's easy lines of surrender to the royal Don Juan. It was clear that she was vastly flattered at the thought of becoming one of the mil e tre. But Betty had a husband...! Yes, the butterfly should be saved, if it were only for the sake of the pure child who had, as yet, no better shelter than those fragile gaudy wings.