Hound and horn give voice and tongue——
And through it all the horn, now clear and ringing, now caught and dying in the echoes of the forest, now lost in the echoes of the Brocken, the wild notes flying before the phantom of the flying stag; ever the horn threading the gushing music of the violins, the voices of the musicians, and the chorus of the jägers.
More music came after this, but nothing so beautiful; and as the musicians put their instruments away, and prepared to go, I nodded to the happy-faced one who had spied me. He smiled, and I trotted back to bed. I had been there listening in the gallery for a full hour, and I was cold as ice, but no one had seen me, or only the violin-player who had the face of a good angel.
I shut the door cautiously, and crept back to bed. But there was something on the bed, something on the protuberance caused by my pillow. It was the handle of a knife. The blade of the knife was plunged into the mound of the bedclothes just where my head would have been.
It was Joubert's knife—his "couteau de chasse," a thing he was immensely proud of, a thing as keen as a razor.
That was just like one of Joubert's tricks. He had come in, found my device, and left this, as much as to say, "You'll see what you'll get in the morning."
I plucked the knife out and put it on the floor. Then I crawled into bed.
As I lay thinking of the music, my restless fingers kept digging into holes in the sheet. Half a dozen holes, or rather slits, there were. One might have thought that the hunting-knife of Joubert had been furiously plunged again and again into the heap of bedclothes before being left sticking there. But I did not think of this: the knife was Joubert's. Besides, my head was alive with those dreams that stand at the door of sleep to welcome the innocent in.
The forms of the weather-beaten musicians, sent like good angels from God to charm me and hold me with their music; the happy, innocent, and friendly face of the one who had smiled at me, and the hunting-song: