Chapter XXIII

This time, we arrived at Tribschen without being expected.

What joy to know and to return! to leap from the boat to the landing with its familiar little shed! to see again with our real eyes, the garden, the house, the lovely verdure, the air so blue....

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."

"We were playing, Cosima and I, some of Haydn's symphonies, arranged for four hands, and that with the greatest pleasure. We have chosen the twelve English Symphonies, which Haydn wrote after the death of Mozart. For some time we have been following this study and it has given us some delightful hours."

Richter who had been at Tribschen for several days, had undoubtedly heard us arrive. He slipped into the drawing-room almost furtively, and saluted us with a restrained affection. In Wagner's presence, he always seemed ecstatic and overwhelmed. Cosima assured me that he had been so since his arrival. "One can hardly make him speak. He stays out of sight, for fear of being in the way, renders all sorts of services, goes to bathe the dogs, and, when he is present he stands off in a corner, where he listens and admires. Sometimes he starts away, suddenly, and one can hear him going down to the kitchen. Curious to know what he wanted to do there, one evening some one followed without his suspecting it, and heard him relating to the servants who listened to him open-mouthed, as to a sermon, all the beautiful things that Wagner had said!"