The first day everything went well, and yet it seemed ugly and dreary to Andreas as it passed, and he would have preferred not to live through it again. But it was no use wishing.

Andreas had intended to ride to Spittal, and then through the Tyrol, but the servant talked him into turning left and staying in the province of Carinthia. The roads, he declared, were much better there, and the inns without their like, and life far merrier than among those blockheads in the Tyrol. The Carinthian maids and millers’ daughters had a way with them, and the roundest, firmest bosoms in all Germany—there was a saying about them, and many a song. Didn’t Herr von Ferschengelder know that?

Andreas made no answer; he shuddered hot and cold beside the fellow, who was not so much older than he—five years at most. If he had known that Andreas had never seen, let alone touched, a woman without her clothes, some shameless jeer would have been forthcoming, or talk such as Andreas could not even imagine, but then he would have torn him from his horse and set upon him in a fury—he felt it, and the blood throbbed in his eyes.

They rode in silence through a wide valley; it was a rainy day, grassy hill-slopes rose right and left, here and there a farm, a hayrick, and woods high above on which the clouds lay sluggishly. After dinner Gotthilff grew talkative—had the young master taken a look at the landlady? She was nothing much now, but in ’69—that was nine years ago, when he was sixteen years old—he had had that woman every night for a month. Then it had been well worthwhile. She had had black hair down to below the hollows of her knees. And he urged on his little horse and rode quite close to Andreas, till Andreas had to warn him not to ride him foul—his chestnut could not stand it. In the end she got something to remember him by, it had served her right. At the time he had been with a countess’s waiting-woman, as pretty as a picture, and the landlady had smelt a rat and gone quite thin with jealousy, and as hollow-eyed as a sick dog. At that time he had been courier to Count Porzia—it was his first place, and a fine surprise it had been for all Carinthia that the Count had made him his huntsman at sixteen, and confidential servant into the bargain.

But the Count knew very well what he was doing, and whom he could trust, and he had good need of somebody who could keep his mouth shut, for the Count had more love-affairs than teeth in his head, and many a married man had sworn to kill him, gentlemen and farmers too, and millers and huntsmen. Just then the Count was carrying on with the young Pomberg Countess—she was like a vixen in love, but she was no more in love with the Count than her maid was in love with him, Gotthilff. And when her husband had had the shoot in Pomberg the Countess had stolen to Count Porzia’s stand—crawling along on all fours, and meanwhile the Count had given him his piece and told him to shoot for him, so that nobody should notice, and nobody had noticed, for he was just as good a shot as the Count. And once, he had brought down a fine deer at somewhere about forty paces, through undergrowth: he had caught a glimpse of its shoulder in the dusk. Then the animal had collapsed under his fire, but at the same time a woeful cry had come out of the thicket—it sounded like a woman, but directly afterwards all was still again, as though the wounded woman had held her mouth shut with her own hand. Of course, he could not leave his stand then, but the next day he had paid a visit to the landlady and had found her in bed with wound-fever. And he had been smart enough to find out that she had been driven into the wood by jealousy, because she thought the waiting-woman was out with him and that she would find them in the undergrowth together. He had split his sides with laughing, to think she had got something to remember him by, and from his own hand, and all the same couldn’t upbraid him with it, but had to listen to his jeers, and sharp ones too, and hold her tongue to everybody, and lie herself out of it by saying that she had fallen on the scythe and cut herself over the knee.

Andreas pressed on, the other too; his face, close behind Andreas’s, was red with wild, shameless lust, like a fox in rut. Andreas asked whether the Countess was still alive. Oh, she? She had made many a man happy, and still looked no more than twenty-five, and for that matter the ladies in the big houses here, if you only knew how to take them, where a countrywoman would only give her finger, would give their whole hand, and all the rest with it. Now he was riding close behind Andreas, but Andreas paid no heed. The wretch was as loathsome to him as a spider, yet he was but twenty-two, and his young blood was afire with the talk, and his thoughts were wandering elsewhere. He might, he thought, be arriving himself at Pomberg Castle that evening, an expected guest along with other guests. It is evening—the shoot is over, he was the best shot: wherever he fired something fell. The lovely Countess was at his side as he fired, her eyes playing with him as he with the life of the wild creatures. Now they are alone—an utterly solitary room, he alone with the Countess, walls a fathom thick, in deathly silence. He is appalled to find her a woman, no longer a Countess and young cavalier—nothing gallant nor fine about it all, nor beautiful either, but a frenzy, a murdering in the dark. The ruffian is beside him, emptying his gun on a woman who has crept to him in her nightdress.