“Why do I stand here in the moonlight,” he thought. “Am I alive or am I only a ghost?”
Yes, the moment of agony had come to Stellan Selamb as it comes to everybody. He felt a cruel fear. But it was not the fear that is the beginning of wisdom. He had gracefully skated on the outside edge on the smooth ice of prejudices and fictions. But now he had fallen through into deep reality. “Ugh—this seems to be bottomless! Yes, the world is as deep as my fears.”
Stellan came down late the following morning and found Count Lähnfeldt in an evident bad temper at Captain von Strelert’s sudden and unceremonious departure.
But out on the parapet of the steps Elvira sat already impatiently waiting for her ride. She laughed and shrugged her shoulders:
“The Baron has already run away,” she said. “It was not an orderly retreat, it was precipitate flight.”
The morning sun and the ride helped Stellan to recover himself. After the ghostly visions of the night he enjoyed feeling Cæsar’s fine shoulders working beneath him. The coolness of the rushing air around his forehead and temples mingled exquisitely with the gentle innocent warmth of the beautiful, gleaming body of the horse. Stellan did not feel exactly tired, only strangely unsubstantial and fragile.
They were riding in silence and he kept a little behind. He could not understand his feelings yesterday in the park. No, today he looked at her more critically than ever. Even during the ride when she appeared to greater advantage than otherwise he found in her something attenuated, tense, unsexed, that left his instincts cold and unmoved. But that did not worry him now. It was rather a relief. It somehow made the thing easier. For one always feels it is easier to reach a goal that one does not long for too intensely. And it was high time. Tomorrow the rest of the shooting party was due to arrive, and then it might be difficult to find an opportunity.
Stellan tried to imagine how his rejected predecessors had behaved under similar circumstances. Of course they had stopped her in a narrow concealed forest path where the horses had been forced close together and were caressing each other’s noses in the twilight of the pines. And then they had avowed their intentions in the traditional style and received a shrug of the shoulders for an answer.
Stellan made up his mind that she should hear something different.