Andreas Read Online Free

aged, the whole beast changed. Gotthilff broke out that it was small wonder, when the horses were tired in the legs and a man pulled up his beast on the road in the twilight, without a by your leave, so that the man behind could not help stumbling. He had never seen such manners; in the cavalry he would have been put in irons for it.
    Again Andreas let it pass; the fellow knows something about horses, he said to himself, he thinks he’s responsible for the horse, that’s what maddens him. But he wouldn’t have taken that tone with the Freiherr von Petzenstein. It serves me right. There’s something about a great gentleman that a lackey respects. There’s nothing of the kind about me: if I tried to put it on it wouldn’t suit me. I’ll take him along with me till Saturday, then I shall sell the horse, though I lose half the money, and pay him off; a man like that will find ten places for one he loses, but he needs a firmer hand than mine.
    Soon they were riding at a foot-pace; the horse’s head looked thin and jaded, and Gotthilff’s facebloated and furious. He pointed to a big farm in front of them, to the side of the road—there they would stop: “I’m not going to ride a dead-lame beast a step further.”

    T HE HOMESTEAD was more than substantial. A square of stone wall ran round the whole, with a stout turret at each corner; the gate was framed in stone, with a coat of arms above. Andreas thought it must be a gentleman’s house. They dismounted, Gotthilff took the two horses—he had to pull rather than lead the bay through the gate. The courtyard was empty save for a fine big cock on a dunghill, surrounded by hens; on the other side a little stream of water flowed from the fountain, and made its way out under the wall, among nettles and briars: ducklings were swimming on it. There was a tiny chapel, with flowers against it growing on trellises, and all this was within the wall. The path leading across the farmyard was flagged, the horses’ hoofs clattered on it. The path led straight through the house under a huge vaulted archway. The stables must be behind the house.
    Then farm-hands appeared, with a young maid, followed by the farmer himself, a tall man, not much over forty, and slim and handsome. A stable was allotted to the strangers, Andreas was shown to apleasant room in the upper storey. Everything gave the impression of a well-to-do house where nobody is put out by the arrival of even unexpected guests. The farmer glanced at the little bay, went up and looked at the horse between its forelegs, but said nothing. The two strangers were bidden to table at once.
    The room was massively arched, on the wall a huge crucifix, in one corner the table, with the meal already standing on it. The men and maids sat spoon in hand, at the head of the table the farmer’s wife, a big woman with an open face, but not so handsome and cheerful as her husband; beside her the daughter, as tall as her mother, yet still a child, with her mother’s regular features, though all lighting up with pleasure at every breath, like her father’s.
    With the memory of the meal that followed Andreas struggled as with some mouthful of horror that he must get down his throat, whether he would or no. The farmer and his family so kind, so trustful, everybody so frank and mannerly, so unsuspicious, the grace pleasantly spoken by the farmer, the wife attentive to her guest, as if he had been her son, the men and maids neither bold nor bashful, and between master and man the same frank kindliness. But there sat Gotthilff, like a bull in the young corn,insolent and patronizing with his master, lewd and overbearing with the servants, guzzling, showing off, bragging. It gripped Andreas’s throat to see the lengths to which the ruffian could go, and still laugh: it pierced him tenfold to see how unabashed he was in his shameless silliness. He felt as though his soul enfolded every one of the servants, and the farmer and his wife as well. The