"I cannot tell really all the people who hear me play. I don't know who they are in public."
"Have you ever heard him play?"
"No."
"Oh, sir! then how can you know? What makes you call him Chevalier? Is that his real name?"
"I tell you precisely what I was told, my boy; Milans-André calls him 'My young friend the Chevalier,'—nothing else. Most likely they gave him the order."
Santonio was now talking Dutch to me, and yet I could not bring myself to detain him by further questioning, for he had strolled to the staircase. Soon afterwards the dinner-bell rang. The afternoon being a little spent, we came up again and rested. It was twilight now, and my heart throbbed as it ever does in that intermediate dream. Soon Santonio retired to smoke, and I then lay all along a seat, and looked to heaven until I fell into a doze; and all I felt was real, and I knew less of what was passing around me than of that which stirred within. Long it may have been, but it seemed very soon and suddenly that I was rudely brought to myself by a sound and skurry, and a suspension of our progress. It was dark and bleak besides, and as foggy as I had ever seen it in England,—the lamp at our head was like a moon; and all about me there were shapes, not sights, of houses, and echoes, not sounds, of voices from the shore.
The shore, indeed! And my first impression of Germany was one of simple astonishment to find it, on the whole, so much like, or so little unlike, England. I told Santonio so much, as he stood next me, and curbed me with his arm from going forwards. He answered that he supposed I thought they all lived in fiddle-cases and slept upon pianofortes. I was longing to land indefinably. I knew not where I was, how near or how far from my appointed place of rest. I will not say my heart was sad, it was only sore, to find Santonio, though so handsome, not quite so beautiful a spirit as my first friend, Lenhart Davy. We watched almost half the passengers out of the boat; the rest were to continue their fresh-water route to a large city far away, and we were the last to land of all who landed there.
In less than an hour, thanks to Santonio's quickening of the pulses of existence at our first landing-place, we were safe in a hackney-coach (very unlike any other conveyance), if indeed it could be called "safe" to be so bestowed, as I was continually precipitated against Santonio. His violin-case had never left his hand since we quitted the vessel,—and this was just as well, for it might have suffered from the jolting. Its master was all kindness now. "Cheer up," said he; "do not let your idea of German life begin here. You will soon find plenty to amuse you." He rubbed the reeking fog from one glass with his handkerchief forthwith, and I, peeping out, saw something of houses drawing near. They were dim and tall and dark, as if they had never fronted daylight. It took us quite half an hour to reach the village, notwithstanding, for our pace was laboriously tardy; and again and again I wished I had stayed with Santonio at the little inn where we took the coach, and to which he was himself to return to sleep, having bespoken a bed there; for I felt that day would have done everything for me in manning and spiriting me, and that there was too much mystery in my transition state already to bear the surcharging mystery of night with thought undaunted. Coming into that first street, I believed we should stop every instant, for the faint few lamps, strung here and there, gave me a notion of gabled windows and gray-black arches, nothing more definite than any dream; so much the better. Still we stopped not anywhere in that region, nor even when, having passed the market-place with its little colonnade, we turned, or were shaken, into a quiet square. It came upon me like a nook of panorama; but I heard the splash of falling water before I beheld, starting from the mist, its shape, as it poured into a basin of shadowy stone beneath a skeleton tree, whose lowest sprays I could have touched as we drove near the fountain, so close we came. And then I saw before me a church, and could discern the stately steps and portico, even the crosses on the graves, which bade me remember that they died also in Germany. No organ echoes pealed, or choral song resounded, no chime struck; but my heart beat all these tunes, and for the first time I associated the feeling of religion with any earth-built shrine.
It was in a street beyond the square, and overlooked by the tower of the church itself, that at length we stopped indeed, and that I found myself bewildered at once by darkness and expectation, standing upon the pavement before a foreign doorway, enough for any picture of the brain.
"Now," said my escort, "I will take you upstairs first,—for you would never find your way,—and then return and see after all these things. The man won't run away with them, I believe,—he is too ugly to be anything but honest. I hope you do not expect a footman to open the door?"