Now that she was dead the way was free to ruin and crime. And Elsbeth? How she had trembled in anticipation of this dreadful moment, how he had vowed to be near her then; and instead of that he was lurking here like a wild beast, bloodthirsty thoughts in his soul—he, the only one in whom her pure soul had once confided.
He shivered. “But what does it matter? She has plenty of people to console her; there is merry Leo, with whom she is said to have a secret love-affair; let him show all his wiles now!” He laughed aloud and scornfully, and as soon as he had made sure that the Erdmanns could not escape him if he waited for them at the road-side, he left the room.
As he drove on in the silence of the moon-lit winter night his soul grew calmer and calmer, and when he saw across the silvery heath the White House gradually rising before him like a monument of marble, he began to weep bitterly.
“Hang it! I am blubbering on like an old woman,” he murmured, and whipped his horse till all the bells jingled loudly. They sounded in his ear like the knell of all that was good.
In the wood, behind which a side path branched off to Lotkeim, he halted, tied his horse to a distant trunk of a tree, and took off the bells so that their jingling should not prematurely betray him. Then he took the revolver out of the boot of the sledge and examined the cartridges. Six shots—two for each—no harm in having an extra one.
It was bitterly cold, and his feet were benumbed. He crouched at the bottom of the sledge, so that the fur rug should entirely cover him. It was warm and comfortable underneath it, and gradually he felt a great lassitude coming over him, as if he could have fallen asleep. But then he roused himself again.
“You are not at all in earnest about killing them,” he murmured, “or you would feel very differently.”
Then he sprang up and cried out in the night, “I will, I swear it to you, mother.... I will!” And in assurance thereof he shot a ball into the air, so that the echo rolled through the silence awfully and the ravens flew croaking from their nests.
The nearer the hour approached at which the brothers must return home the more nervous he grew; but his nervousness was not about the bloody deed: he trembled lest at the last moment his hand should fail him, his courage vanish, for they had always called him a coward.
It might have been about four o’clock in the morning, and the moon was already waning, when the sound of bells was heard in the distance—at first softly, then louder and louder. He sprang into the hollow which the driving snow had nearly filled up, and threw himself flat upon the ground. The sledge neared the edge of the wood; two persons wrapped in furs sat in it—it was they. But how long they were coming!