Andreas Read Free Page B

more in love with the Count than her maid was in love with him, Gotthilff. And when her husband had had the shoot in Pomberg the Countess had stolen to Count Porzia’s stand—crawling along on all fours, and meanwhile the Count had given him his piece and told him to shoot for him, so that nobody should notice, and nobody had noticed, for he was just as good a shot as the Count. And once, he had brought down a fine deer at somewhere about forty paces, through undergrowth: he had caught a glimpse of its shoulder in the dusk. Then the animal had collapsed under his fire, but at the same time a woeful cry had come out of the thicket—it sounded like a woman, but directly afterwards all was still again, as though the wounded woman had held her mouth shut with her own hand. Of course, he could not leave his stand then, but the next day he had paid a visit to the landlady and had found her in bed with wound-fever. And he had been smart enough to find out that she had been driven into thewood by jealousy, because she thought the waiting-woman was out with him and that she would find them in the undergrowth together. He had split his sides with laughing, to think she had got something to remember him by, and from his own hand, and all the same couldn’t upbraid him with it, but had to listen to his jeers, and sharp ones too, and hold her tongue to everybody, and lie herself out of it by saying that she had fallen on the scythe and cut herself over the knee.
    Andreas pressed on, the other too; his face, close behind Andreas’s, was red with wild, shameless lust, like a fox in rut. Andreas asked whether the Countess was still alive. Oh, she? She had made many a man happy, and still looked no more than twenty-five, and for that matter the ladies in the big houses here, if you only knew how to take them, where a countrywoman would only give her finger, would give their whole hand, and all the rest with it. Now he was riding close behind Andreas, but Andreas paid no heed. The wretch was as loathsome to him as a spider, yet he was but twenty-two, and his young blood was afire with the talk, and his thoughts were wandering elsewhere. He might, he thought, be arriving himself at Pomberg Castle that evening, an expected guest along with other guests. It is evening—the shoot is over, he was the best shot:wherever he fired something fell. The lovely Countess was at his side as he fired, her eyes playing with him as he with the life of the wild creatures. Now they are alone—an utterly solitary room, he alone with the Countess, walls a fathom thick, in deathly silence. He is appalled to find her a woman, no longer a Countess and young cavalier—nothing gallant nor fine about it all, nor beautiful either, but a frenzy, a murdering in the dark. The ruffian is beside him, emptying his gun on a woman who has crept to him in her nightdress. He has started back to the dining-room with the Countess, his thoughts dragging him back to the lighthearted decency there—then he felt that he had pulled up, and at the same moment his servant’s nag stumbled. The man cursed and swore, as if the rider ahead were not his master, but someone he had fed swine with all his life. Andreas let it pass. He felt a great lassitude, the broad valley looked endless under the sagging clouds. He wished it were all over, that he were older and had children of his own, and that it was his son who was riding to Venice, but a different man from him, a fine fellow, and that the world was clean and kindly, like Sunday morning with the bells ringing.
    The next day the road mounted. The valley narrowed, steeper slopes, from time to time a church on a height, far below them rushing water.The clouds were on the move, now and then a shaft of sunlight shot down to the river, where, among willows and hazels, the stones gleamed livid, the water green. Then gloom again, and gentle rain. A hundred paces further the new-bought horse fell lame, its eyes were glazed, its head looked