In a few moments my luggage had come upstairs, and when they who brought it had finally disappeared, I went to the window again and looked out. Opposite, on the same _étage_, were two windows, corresponding to my two, wide open, letting me see into an empty room, in which there seemed to be books and many sheets of white paper, a music-desk and a vase of flowers. I also saw a piano in the clare-obscure, and another door, half open, leading into the inner room. All the inhabitants of the rooms were out. No tone came across to me--no movement of life. But the influence of the absent ones was there. Strange concourse of circumstances which had placed me as the opposite neighbor, in the same profession too, of Eugen Courvoisier! Pure chance it certainly was, for von Francius had certainly had no motive in bringing me hither.
"Kismet!" I murmured once again, and wondered what the future would bring.
"He looks his angel in the face Without a blush: nor heeds disgrace, Whom naught disgraceful done Disgraces. Who knows nothing base Fears nothing known."
It was noon. The probe to "Tannhauser" was over, and we, the members of the kapelle, turned out, and stood in a knot around the orchestra entrance to the Elberthal Theater.
It was a raw October noontide. The last traces of the by-gone summer were being swept away by equinoctial gales, which whirled the remaining yellowing leaves from the trees, and strewed with them the walks of the deserted Hofgarten; a stormy gray sky promised rain at the earliest opportunity; our Rhine went gliding by like a stream of ruffled lead.
"Proper theater weather," observed one of my fellow-musicians; "but it doesn't seem to suit you, Friedhelm. What makes you look so down?"
I shrugged my shoulders. Existence was not at that time very pleasant to me; my life's hues were somewhat of the color of the autumn skies and of the dull river. I scarcely knew why I stood with the others now; it was more a mechanical pause before I took my spiritless way home, than because I felt any interest in what was going on.
"I should say he will be younger by a long way than old Kohler," observed Karl Linders, one of the violoncellists, a young man with an unfailing flow of good nature, good spirits, and eagerness to enjoy every pleasure which came in his way, which qualities were the objects of my deep wonder and mild envy. "And they say," he continued, "that he's coming to-night; so Friedhelm, my boy, you may look out. Your master's on the way."