He began to play Schubert’s “Song to Sylvia.” Having finished the impetuous, heart-felt song, he struck up a variation, then a second, a third, and a fourth. The first was melancholy, the second triumphant, the third meditative, the fourth dreamy. Each was a hymn to forgotten joy.
Herr von Erfft and Agatha were standing in the open door. Sylvia had sat down close beside him on a tabourette; there was a pleasing, far-away look in her eyes, riveted though they were to the floor.
He suddenly stopped, as if to avoid both thanks and applause. Sylvester von Erfft took a seat opposite him, and asked him in a most kindly tone whether he had any definite plans for the immediate future.
“I am going back to Nuremberg and get married,” said Daniel. “My fiancée has been waiting for me for a long time.”
Herr von Erfft asked him whether he was not afraid of premature marriage bonds. Daniel replied rather curtly that he needed some one to stand between him and the world.
“You need some one to act as a sort of buffer,” said Frau Agatha sarcastically. Daniel looked at her angrily.
“Buffer? No, but a guardian angel if such a creature can shield me from rebuffs,” said Daniel, even more brusquely than he had spoken the first time.
“Why do you wish to settle down and live in Nuremberg, a city of such one-sided commercial interests?” continued Herr von Erfft, with an almost solicitous caution. “Would you not have a much better opportunity as a composer in one of the great cities?”
“It is impossible to separate the daughter from her father,” replied Daniel with unusual candour. “It is impossible. Nor is it possible to get the old man to tear himself away from his former associations. He was born and reared there. And I do not wish to live alone any longer. Everybody needs a companion; even the miner digs with a better heart, when he knows that up on the earth above his wife is preparing the soup. I must say, however, that I am not so much taken up with the soup phase of married life: it is the dear little soul that will belong to me that interests me.”
He turned around, and struck a minor chord.