His passion now revived in him as with the throes of an intermittent fever. His spirit was free from all other prepossession. Enthusiasm for his country, for his calling, had been driven out of him. His whole being was defenceless against the might of this love, and he was carried away by it as on the wings of a tempest.
He now only lived in the thought of Hannah Gropphusen. How long was it since he had seen her last?
He had to go far back in his memory to the beginning of the past winter. She had been the fairest at one of the first balls of the season. Her face had shone with seductive charm; a black dress, glittering with sequins, had enveloped her slender form, leaving bare the tender whiteness of her arms and shoulders. She bore the palm of beauty, and every one had acknowledged her sovereignty. And as he had sat idly in one of the most distant rooms, a morose observer of the gay throng, she had come gliding up to him like some dazzling messenger of joy. She had spoken to him, few words only and on indifferent topics, with a hasty, excited voice; but in her eyes had been once more that expression of utter self-abandonment which had made him so happy on their return from the tennis-ground during the previous spring.
He had stood before her, his shoulders bowed beneath his adverse fate, and had not dared to raise his eyes to hers.
Since the night of that ball, Frau von Gropphusen had been absent for the whole winter; she had gone on a visit to her parents, after (so the gossips whispered) a terrible scene with her husband. And on this occasion even the women had taken the side of their own sex. For Gropphusen had been getting wilder and wilder; it could hardly fail that legal proceedings would before very long be undertaken against him for his scandalous behaviour.
The injured wife had returned only a few days ago, probably for a last painful attempt to preserve appearances. Gropphusen himself would be leaving the garrison for the gun-practice, and she would at least remain there during that time; but she did not go out, and nobody had yet seen her face to face.
Reimers was possessed with a restless impatience to meet the woman he loved; he had wasted too much time already to brook delay.
Then again he was thrown into dull inaction by an agonising doubt. How could he think of approaching Hannah Gropphusen--he, a marked man, a condemned man? He set it before himself a thousand times, and dinned it into his own ears: he desired nothing, he wanted nothing but to be allowed to live in her soothing presence. He racked his brains to discover a pretext for visiting her but could find none. He directed his goings from day to day so as to pass by the Gropphusen villa as often as possible. He sauntered near the house by the hour together, possessed by the foolish hope of catching sight of his beloved. Perhaps she would come to the window to breathe the fresh air of the night, to cool her burning forehead in the soft breeze, or to refresh her tear-stained eyes with a sight of the starry heaven.
He waited in vain.
On the morning of their march to the practice-camp, Captain von Gropphusen, the head of the second battery, was missing.