“No, I must go now, sir.”
Peter stood perspiring and nervous and withheld the money for the bill:
“Won’t you have a look round old Selambshof for a moment? There isn’t a soul at home. I reign alone here now. Come along.”
He pulled her with him up to the main building and, eager and flushed, piloted her through the dusty closed rooms where the old gloomy and worn-out furniture slept and dreamed evil dreams in the heat and twilight.
“It is so cursedly quiet here tonight,” exclaimed Peter. “Can’t you laugh a little again so that I may hear what it sounds like?”
Frida laughed, but the echo came back hollow and scoffing from the depths of the corridors. Then they entered the green smoking room off the hall, which resembled a thousand other smoking rooms in so far as it contained an equipment of guns, deers’ horns, elks’ heads and stuffed birds. Peter seized the opportunity to impress upon her what a wonderful Nimrod he was and what an expert on the secrets of animal life, especially of animal sex attraction. He imitated the call of the capercailzie, he described the feathers of the mating ruff and its collar of feathers and finally he imitated the night call of the ruttish elk and its stamping so that it echoed through the whole of the empty house. Meanwhile he drew nearer and nearer to the door of the next room where he slept in the summer because it was so much cooler there than in his own wing. But when Frida saw that they were approaching the bedroom she wisely stopped on the threshold and not even the wildest and most seductive bird-calls could make her penetrate further. No, now she suddenly remembered that she ought to have met a friend long ago. She thanked him for all the kindness he had shown her and insisted on going. Then Peter became furious and reproached her coarsely for her behaviour with the bailiff:
“If that blackguard was good enough, I ought to be too—don’t you think so?”
A hard look came into Frida’s eyes and she hissed out as if testing a hot iron with her wet finger:
“I should like to tell you, sir, that I am on my own now and don’t need to listen to anybody.”
“Don’t be so high and mighty. It was I who managed things so that you escaped examination when Brundin was caught, because I was sorry for you.”