Unnoticed of the rest, Erik, the huntsman, has during the last moments been standing in the doorway. He has heard Senta's exclamation, witnessed her strange condition, and affected by it differently from all the others cries, heart-struck, "Senta, Senta, are you determined to destroy me?"--"Oh, help us, Erik," the others appeal to him; "She is out of her senses!" The nurse, who has felt her blood unaccountably running chill, turns angrily to the picture on the wall: "Abominable picture, out of the house you shall go just as soon as the father comes home!"--"The father has arrived," Erik informs them; "From the cliff I saw his ship come in." All minds veer promptly from the subject which had been engrossing them, to this delightful one of the arrival. The girls are for running to the harbour upon the instant. Mary prevents them. "Stop! Stop! You shall remain quietly at home. The sailor-folk will be arriving with hollow stomachs. To the kitchen and cellar! No time to waste! Let curiosity torment you as it may, first of all go and do your duty!" She drives them before her from the room, and follows.
Senta is going, too, but Erik bars the way, pleading, "Stay, Senta, stay for a moment! Release me from this torture--or, if you will, destroy me quite!" She affects, as the simplest girl must, not to understand. "Erik, what is it?"--"Oh, Senta, speak, say what is to become of me! Your father is coming home. Before starting upon a new voyage, he is sure to wish to carry out what he so often has spoken of..."--"And what is that?"--"To give you a husband. My heart with its unchanging love, my humble fortune, my hunter's luck, these things being all I have to offer, will not your father repulse me? And if my heart breaks with its misery, tell me, Senta, who is there will speak a word for me?" He pleads warmly, young Erik; he is at that age and point in life when not to obtain the woman he has set his heart upon seems a calamity such as will extinguish the sun, make the rest of life worthless; when refusal signifies destruction, and he is not ashamed of this as a weakness, but proud of it as a strength, and uses it as the most pertinent argument, and feels no abjectness in confessing himself at the mercy of a girl, a toy in her frail hands. He is the only lover of this type in the Wagnerian assortment, and, it happens, the only one who fails. Senta, we are permitted to divine, had not always felt as removed from him as at this moment. It is but lately, no doubt, with the turning perhaps of her seventeenth year, at some fuller opening into womanhood, that her romantic dream has taken such possession of her, and his warm-blooded urgent love become something to withdraw from, without clearly formulated reason, by an instinct. She tries now to silence him, to put him off with the excuse that she must hurry to her father. But he is not to be put off. To detain her, he reproaches. "You wish to avoid me!"--"I must go to the harbour!"--"You shrink from me?"--"Oh, let me go!"--"You shrink from the wound which yourself you made, the madness of love you inspired? Oh, you shall hear me in this hour, shall hear the last question I will ask. When my heart is breaking with anguish, will not Senta herself speak a word for me?" She applies herself then to quiet and comfort such evident suffering; he is after all flesh-and-blood and close at hand, the other a dream. Her sentiments besides are not very clear even to herself. "Do you doubt my heart?" she asks reassuringly; "Do you doubt that it is full of kindness toward you? What is it, tell me, makes you so unhappy? What suspicion darkens your mind?"--"Oh, your father's heart is set upon riches. And you, Senta, how should I count upon you? Do you ever grant one of my requests? Do you not daily hurt and afflict my heart?"--"Afflict your heart?..." she asks in wonder. "What am I to think?" he goes on to show the jealous core of his unhappiness; "That picture..."--"What picture?..."--"Will you renounce your extravagant imaginings?"--"Can I keep from my face the compassion I feel?"--"And that ballad...