"His woodcraft is too good," Erna returned. "It is idle to match with him; he has outridden us. He must have cut across our track at the last turning. Mother of God!"
Her cry was one of mingled astonishment and of dread. Her husband had taken advantage of a stumble which the unhappy stag made, the good dog Gelert being already at the beast's throat, to drive his horse abreast of the deer, to leap from his saddle, and to seize the fleeing animal by its mighty horns. The pair on the hillside opposite drew rein involuntarily, and Erna tried to call out to Albrecht, in the vain hope that he might free himself from a position of so much danger. Before she could speak, however, he had thrown all his force into one powerful effort, and before their eyes had twisted the head of the stag half-way around. The creature dropped with its neck broken, falling among the yelping hounds and at the feet of Rupert, the master of the pack, as suddenly as if an arrow had reached his heart.
"By the wounds of God!" cried Count von Rittenberg, pricking his horse forward down the hillside; "what a giant is this!"
Erna hastened after, her heart beating, and all her body burning with the sudden rush of blood that for one breathless instant had seemed to gather itself into her heart, leaving her cold and lifeless. She had never seen her husband as in this act he had revealed himself to her, and she was divided between wonder and a fearful admiration. He had seemed a creature more than human as he bent the mighty neck of the great stag, and there was in her proud sense of his prowess not a little feeling of dread and too of strangeness, as if this hunter were not only the husband she knew, but some strange being whose true nature she had never before suspected. As her palfrey carried her across the narrow valley, she remembered the taunt she had flung at him as they left the castle, and it flashed through her mind that anger at herself might have mingled with the excitement of the chase to move him.
The hunt was all about the dead stag by the time Erna reached the spot. Albrecht came forward to help her dismount. His eyes were shining, his cheek was flushed, and under the open collar of his hunting-jacket, pushed back from his throat, his chest rose and fell. He had never looked handsomer, and as he swung his wife down from her palfrey, she brushed his hand with a quick kiss. The restless fancies which had been weaving themselves about her and drawing her nearer as in a net toward Count Stephen seemed to be snapped and swept aside in an instant, and her heart was as truly her husband's as on the day when she had wed.
XVIII
HOW HERR VON ZIMMERN CAME AGAIN.
For a night and for a day Erna's love of her husband burned again with its most ardent flame; but Albrecht, so far from rejoicing as she did in the mighty feat he had done at the stag-hunt, seemed to be repentant that his old-time mood should have got the better of him, and when Erna told the tale of his prowess to her great-aunt the baron hastened to change the conversation, and that with the air of regretting and being ashamed of having given way to the impulse of the moment.
So strangely changed was Erna from the maiden who had welcomed Albrecht to Rittenberg that she could not even understand a feeling so nice, but only felt with a secret irritation that contempt which any mortal feels for a prejudice which he has outgrown; and nothing appears more foolish and contemptible than a scruple that has been outlived. Albrecht and Erna had changed each other, but the impetus in each case had been so strong that both were carried beyond the point where their tastes and desires came together. It was as if two stars had attracted each other, and then shot past the place where they met, parting again from the stress of the very force which had drawn them toward one another. Every day they seemed to have less in common. The glories of the spiritual drew Albrecht as strongly and as irresistibly as the delights of the senses attracted Erna, to whom all this was a new world. They had passed each other, and now they were parting more and yet more widely.