Servais, who saw it all for the first time, was deeply moved. Villiers exulted.
I ran across the lawn, to be the first to arrive, Russ discovered us, he bounded forward, recognised me and greeted me with loud barks.
Then the children ran with cries of delight. In the salon, the sound of the piano, which I had heard, suddenly ceased. Wagner appeared at the top of the steps and Cosima followed him.
"Ah! there you are at last!" cried he, hurrying down the steps. "Without knowing any thing about it, I expected you to-day!"
And they embraced us, "Not," as Cosima declared, "like people of the world, but like peasants."
How much they had to tell us, and to re-tell chiefly about the nightmare of the Rheingold, which started up again when they thought it had subsided and was not yet at an end!
"You can imagine," Cosima said to me, "the mixture of terror and of joy that overwhelmed me, when, two days after the Master's departure, I received the dispatch announcing his sudden return. I waited for him at the station with the four children and the two dogs. At the sight of his radiant expression I was at once reassured, and the thought that I have something to do with the serenity he is able to preserve through all this trouble, makes me feel as happy as it makes me proud. The moments of weakness and discouragement which he passed through will not come any more, and Tribschen will remain the paradise that you know."
They had had one satisfaction all through these troubled days: the reconciliation with Liszt, or rather the end of the misunderstanding. Cosima confessed, in a low voice, that her father had come one evening, secretly; that he had passed a night at Tribschen, and that this had been a very sweet consolation. Now they had cut off all relation with the outer world again, and they lived for noble labour and domestic joys.
"Do you know how we were occupied when you arrived?" the Master asked me.
"You were making music, but it did not seem to me to be from Wagner."