The rehearsal had almost wrecked Franzius, but he was all right now; the ship was built; only the launching remained. As to Eloise, in six months she had altered subtly yet marvellously. I had last seen her a girl in her bridal dress; she was now a woman, for in six months she had aged years, without gaining a wrinkle or losing a trace of the beauty of youth. Love had ripened her; her every movement was marked by that self-contained grace which comes from maturity of mind; the wild beauty of spring had vanished, giving place to the full beauty of summer—the grace of Demeter gazing upon the fields of immortal wheat.
It was the wish of both my guardian and myself that Franzius and Eloise should inhabit the Pavilion as much as they chose. We had offered the place to them, indeed, as a wedding gift, but the permission to live there was all they would take.
This morning we breakfasted with the windows open. The swallows had not come back, yet the wind that puffed the chintz curtains was warm as the wind of May. Its sound amidst the trees was like the sound of April walking in the woods.
We came out and walked to the cottage of old Fauchard, whose wife was ill. Eloise had made her some soup, and she carried it in one of those tins the workmen use for their food.
The birds were calling to each other from tree to tree; clumps of violets were showing their blue amidst the brown of last autumn's fallen leaves, and the forest, half fledged, was breathing in the delicious breeze, sighing and shivering under the kiss of April.
It was no poetic fancy that presence which we felt around us, that call to which every fibre of my being responded. It was very real, and reaching far. The swallows were listening to it away at Luxor and Carnac; it touched the sun-baked Pyramids and the reeds of the Mareotid lakes, that call from the green fields of France; fields that in a few short months were to be ploughed by the cannon and watered with blood and tears.
We came to Paris in the afternoon, and, leaving Eloise with the Vicomte at the Place Vendôme, I accompanied Franzius to the Opera House, where he had some business to transact.
The last rehearsal had taken place the day before, and the huge building seemed very grim, empty and deserted as it was.
"Franzius," I said, as we stood looking at the empty orchestra, "do you remember that night in the Schloss Lichtenberg when you and Marx and the rest of your band played in the great hall, and a child in his nightshirt peeped at you from the gallery?"