Charles Auchester Volume I Part 25

"Richer generally than most folks, but not all either."

"Oh, sir! I did not mean money." But as I looked at him, I felt he would not, could not, understand what I meant, so I returned to the former charge.

"Does he live in a cellar, sir, or in a very old house?"

"In an old house, certainly. But you won't like him, Auchester,--at least not at first; only he will work you rightly, and take care of your morals and health."

"How, sir?"

"By locking you up when you are at home, and sending you to walk out every day."

"Don't they all send the boys out to walk in Germany then?"

"I suppose so. But how shall you like being locked up?"

"In the dark, sir, do you mean?"

"No, boy; to practise in a little cave of your own."

"What _does_ make you call it a cave?"

"Because great treasures are hidden there for such as like the bore of grubbing them up. You have no idea, by the way, how much dirty work there is to do anything at all in music."

"I suppose you mean, to _get_ at anything. But it cannot be worse than what people go through to get to heaven."

"If that is your notion, you are all right. I have taken some trouble to get you into this place, for the old gentleman is a whimsical one, and takes very few pupils now."

"Did you know him, sir, before you heard of him for me?"

"He taught me all I know, except what I taught myself, and that was preciously little. But that was before he came to Lorbeerstadt. I knew nothing about this place. Your favorite learned of him when he was your age, and long afterwards."

"Who, sir,--the same?"

"The conductor."

"Oh, sir!" It was a dreadful thing to feel I had, as it were, got hold of him and lost him again; but Santonio's manner was such that I did not think he could mean the same person.

"Are you sure it is the same, Mr. Santonio?" I reiterated again, and yet again, while my companion, whose laugh had pa.s.sed into a yawn, was gazing at the smoke.

"Sure? Of course I am sure. I know every conductor in Europe."

"I daresay you do, sir; but this is not a common conductor."

"No conductors are common, my friend. He is very clever, a genius too, and will do a great deal; but he is too young at present to be talked of without caution."

"Why, sir?"

"Because we may spoil him."

I was indignant, I was sick, but so impotent I could only say, "Sir, has he ever heard _you_ play?"

"I cannot tell really all the people who hear me play. I don't know who they are in public."

"Have you ever heard _him_ play?"

"No."

"Oh, sir! then how _can_ you know? What makes you call him Chevalier?

Is that his real name?"

"I tell you precisely what I was told, my boy; Milans-Andre calls him 'My young friend the Chevalier,'--nothing else. Most likely they gave him the order."

Santonio was now talking Dutch to me, and yet I could not bring myself to detain him by further questioning, for he had strolled to the staircase. Soon afterwards the dinner-bell rang. The afternoon being a little spent, we came up again and rested. It was twilight now, and my heart throbbed as it ever does in that intermediate dream. Soon Santonio retired to smoke, and I then lay all along a seat, and looked to heaven until I fell into a doze; and all I felt was real, and I knew less of what was pa.s.sing around me than of that which stirred within. Long it may have been, but it seemed very soon and suddenly that I was rudely brought to myself by a sound and skurry, and a suspension of our progress. It was dark and bleak besides, and as foggy as I had ever seen it in England,--the lamp at our head was like a moon; and all about me there were shapes, not sights, of houses, and echoes, not sounds, of voices from the sh.o.r.e.

The sh.o.r.e, indeed! And my first impression of Germany was one of simple astonishment to find it, on the whole, so much like, or so little unlike, England. I told Santonio so much, as he stood next me, and curbed me with his arm from going forwards. He answered that he supposed I thought they all lived in fiddle-cases and slept upon pianofortes. I was longing to land indefinably. I knew not where I was, how near or how far from my appointed place of rest. I will not say my heart was sad, it was only sore, to find Santonio, though so handsome, not quite so beautiful a spirit as my first friend, Lenhart Davy. We watched almost half the pa.s.sengers out of the boat; the rest were to continue their fresh-water route to a large city far away, and we were the last to land of all who landed there.

In less than an hour, thanks to Santonio's quickening of the pulses of existence at our first landing-place, we were safe in a hackney-coach (very unlike any other conveyance), if indeed it could be called "safe" to be so bestowed, as I was continually precipitated against Santonio. His violin-case had never left his hand since we quitted the vessel,--and this was just as well, for it might have suffered from the jolting. Its master was all kindness now. "Cheer up," said he; "do not let your idea of German life begin here. You will soon find plenty to amuse you." He rubbed the reeking fog from one gla.s.s with his handkerchief forthwith, and I, peeping out, saw something of houses drawing near. They were dim and tall and dark, as if they had never fronted daylight. It took us quite half an hour to reach the village, notwithstanding, for our pace was laboriously tardy; and again and again I wished I had stayed with Santonio at the little inn where we took the coach, and to which he was himself to return to sleep, having bespoken a bed there; for I felt that day would have done everything for me in manning and spiriting me, and that there was too much mystery in my transition state already to bear the surcharging mystery of night with thought undaunted. Coming into that first street, I believed we should stop every instant, for the faint few lamps, strung here and there, gave me a notion of gabled windows and gray-black arches, nothing more definite than any dream; so much the better.

Still we stopped not anywhere in that region, nor even when, having pa.s.sed the market-place with its little colonnade, we turned, or were shaken, into a quiet square. It came upon me like a nook of panorama; but I heard the splash of falling water before I beheld, starting from the mist, its shape, as it poured into a basin of shadowy stone beneath a skeleton tree, whose lowest sprays I could have touched as we drove near the fountain, so close we came. And then I saw before me a church, and could discern the stately steps and portico, even the crosses on the graves, which bade me remember that they died also in Germany. No organ echoes pealed, or choral song resounded, no chime struck; but my heart beat all these tunes, and for the first time I a.s.sociated the feeling of religion with any earth-built shrine.

It was in a street beyond the square, and overlooked by the tower of the church itself, that at length we stopped indeed, and that I found myself bewildered at once by darkness and expectation, standing upon the pavement before a foreign doorway, enough for any picture of the brain.

"Now," said my escort, "I will take you upstairs first,--for you would never find your way,--and then return and see after all these things.

The man won't run away with them, I believe,--he is too ugly to be anything but honest. I hope you do not expect a footman to open the door?"

"I dislike footmen, but there is no knocker. Please show me the bell, Mr. Santonio."

"Please remember that this is a mountain which contains many caves besides that to which we are about to commit you. And if you interfere with anybody else's cave, the inhabitant will spring up yours with gunpowder."

"I know that a great many people live in one house,--my mother said so; but she never told me how you got into the houses."

"I will tell you now. You see the bells here, like organ-stops: this is yours. Number I cannot read, but I know it from the description I took care to procure. I will ring now, and they will let us in."

I found, after waiting in profound expectation, that the door had set itself open, just as the gate of the London Temple Garden is wont to do; but instead of finding access to suns.h.i.+ne and beds of flowers, we were plunged, on our entrance, into darkness which might be felt.

Santonio, evidently accustomed to all conventionalities of all countries, expressed no astonishment, and did not even grumble, as I should have expected a person of his temperament to do. I was so astonished that I could not speak. How soon I learned to love that very darkness, and to leap up and down those very stairs even in the darkness! though I now held Santonio's hand so tightly that I could feel the lissom muscles double up and bend in. He drew me after him gently and carefully to the first floor, and again to the second without speaking, and then we stood still to take breath.

"That was a pull!" he observed. "Suppose the old gentleman has gone to bed?"

"Oh, sir! then I will go back with you until to-morrow."

"No, indeed." He laid hold upon my arm. "Listen! hus.h.!.+"

I stood listening from head to foot. I heard the beloved but unfamiliar voice; creeping down another story, it came--_my_ violin, or _the_ violin, somewhere up in the clouds. I longed to rush forward now, and positively ran up the stairs yet remaining. There upon my one hand was the door through whose keyhole, whose every crack, that sound had streamed, and I knew it as I pa.s.sed, and waited for Santonio upon the haunted precinct.

"Now," said he, arriving very leisurely at the top, "we shall go in to see the old gentleman."

"Will he have a beard, sir, as he is a Jew?"