The fiddler returned to the barn, and cast once more a look at him who slept so deeply. Thence his light, long, striding step brought him to the shed where the patched coach stood. From its recesses he took the traveller's cloak, and, returning, cast it over the inanimate figure. And, having shifted the shade of the lantern, his restlessness took him back into the night. He was nursing his fiddle as he went.
"What things," he said, addressing it as the court fool of old his bauble (after that singular fashion which led people to call him crazy)—"what things, beloved, could we not converse upon to-night, were we not constrained by sinners? What a song of the call of the spring to last year's fawn—of the dream that comes to the dreamer but once in his life's day, and that before the dawn! Chaste and still as the night, and yet tremulous; shadows, mere shadows, and yet afire—voiceless, formless, impalpable, and yet something more lovely than all the sunshine can show, than all the beauty arms can hold hereafter, than all the music ears shall hear. A prescience not yet a presence, a yearning not yet a desire.... O youth! O love!" sighed the fiddler, and drew from his fiddle a long echo to the sigh. "But when we deal with rascals we must play rascally tunes."
The rapscallion air, to which poor Steven's wits had danced away from him, broke shrilly, almost indecently, upon the beautiful calmness of the midnight hour.
Big Mr. Forester Schmidt, seated comfortably in mother Friedel's elbow-chair, his feet upon the table and a long glass of the straw-coloured wine at his elbow, was aroused from an agreeable somnolence by the sudden screech. Friedel, frankly asleep in a corner, woke with a start, and muttered a not ill-natured curse on the mad fiddler.
At the same time the door leading from the kitchen to the lady's parlour was quickly opened, and the head of Herr Inspector Meyer was thrust through the aperture. This gentleman's good-looking countenance seemed sadly discomfited, his airs of blatant importance shaken.
"Diavolo! ... Do you hear that?" he cried to his burly friend. "There it is again! I tell you it means something. It always means something! Remember Brest ... and remember Smolensk!"
"It means that I'll go and throttle him with his own catgut," cried Schmidt, letting his heavy-booted feet fall upon the floor with a stamp. "Look here, you fellow, you Friedel, here, with your gun, and let us see how you Germans can shoot! Down with that caterwauler ... and his Majesty will make you a present of the hide."
Friedel had gathered his sleepy carcase together upon the appearance of the inspector. He now stood very respectfully at attention. But there was nothing respectful in the small, fierce blue eyes he fixed upon Mr. Schmidt.
"May it please your Excellency," he began. But Mr. Meyer, interrupting him irritably, came down into the room, snapping his fingers, stamping his little feet.
"Hark, hark! Do you hear that?" he cried, and seized Schmidt by the arm. "I tell you, man, you are a fool. Will you say now that this is no warning, no menace? Hark!"