PIPER
Mind your eyes, tune your tongue!
Let it never be said, but sung, but sung,
'Out of your cage, out of your cage!'
Maiden, maiden,—
[He wakes her gently. BARBARA sits up, plainly bewildered;
then she sees the PIPER, and says happily:—
BARBARA
Oh!—you have come to save me. They are gone.
All this, for love of me!
PIPER [ruefully] No, no—I—No!
BARBARA
You—you are robbers?
[Her hands go to the pearls about her neck.]
PIPER
[indignant]
No! Blood on the Moon!
This is the maddest world I ever blinked at.—
Fear nothing, maiden. I will tell you all.
Come, sit you down; and Michael shall keep watch
From yonder hillock, lest that any pass.
Fear nothing. None will pass: they are too sure
The Devil hath this cross-ways!—Sit you down.
[MICHAEL watches, with jealous wistfulness, from the road (left rear).—BARBARA half fearfully sits up, on the bank by the well.
BARBARA
Not love? And yet . . . you do not want my pearls?
Then why—
PIPER
For why should all be love or money?
Money! Oho,—that mouldy thousand guilders
You think of!—But it was your Hamelin friends
That loved the guilders, and not I.
BARBARA
Then why—
Why did you steal me hence?
PIPER
Why did yourself
Long to be stolen?