The supper after the chase, in a large apartment fitted up for the purpose, was always of the merriest sort. The Major was here in his element, and officiated as lord of the castle; he spoke of the evenings which Eric enlivened at Villa Eden by reading the ancient and modern dramas; he never knew before that there were so many fine things in the world, and that one individual man could make everything so plain merely by his voice.
Eric had read aloud almost without exception one evening every week. The impression made upon the hearers was various. The Major always sat with his hands devoutly folded; Frau Ceres reclined in her easy-chair, occasionally opening her eyes, to show that she was not asleep; Fräulein Perini was employed with some hand-work, which she prosecuted steadily, exhibiting no emotion; the Mother and the Aunt sat there quietly; Sonnenkamp had a standing request that they would excuse his rudeness. Turning to Roland, he said good-humoredly,—
"Don't get this bad habit—don't get in the way of having a stick in your hand to whittle."
And so he sat and whittled away, occasionally looking up with a fixed stare, holding the knife in his right hand and the piece of wood in his left; then he would resume his whittling.
Roland always seated himself opposite the reader, so that Eric must look him in the face. Often, until it was very late, Roland would talk with Eric about the wonderful things he had been listening to.
Eric had been reading Macbeth, and he was glad to hear Roland say,—
"This Lady Macbeth could easily be transformed into a witch, like one of those who came in at the beginning."
Another time, when Eric had been reading Hamlet, he was not a little surprised at hearing Roland say to him in the evening, before going to bed,—
"Strange! Hamlet, in that soliloquy, speaks of no one returning from the other world, when, only a short time before, the spirit of his father had appeared, and he appears again afterwards."
One evening, after Eric had read Goethe's Iphigenia, Roland said,—