I walked along with drooping head, without a thought, almost without
sensation, but wholly engrossed in myself.--A measured, dull and angry
roar drew me out of my torpor. I raised my head: it was the sea roaring
and booming fifty paces from me. Greatly agitated by the nocturnal
storm, the sea was a mass of white-caps to the very horizon, and steep
crests of long breakers were rolling in regularly and breaking on the
flat shore, I approached it, and walked along the very line left by the
ebb and flow on the yellow, ribbed sand, strewn with fragments of
trailing seawrack, bits of shells, serpent-like ribbons of eel-grass.
Sharp-winged gulls with pitiful cry, borne on the wind from the distant
aerial depths, soared white as snow against the grey, cloudy sky,
swooped down abruptly, and as though skipping from wave to wave,
departed again and vanished like silvery flecks in the strips of
swirling foam. Some of them, I noticed, circled persistently around a
large isolated boulder which rose aloft in the midst of the monotonous
expanse of sandy shores. Coarse seaweed grew in uneven tufts on one side
of the rock; and at the point where its tangled stems emerged from the
yellow salt-marsh, there was something black, and long, and arched, and
not very large.... I began to look more intently.... Some dark object
was lying there--lying motionless beside the stone.... That object
became constantly clearer and more distinct the nearer I approached....
I was only thirty paces from the rock now.... Why, that was the outline
of a human body! It was a corpse; it was a drowned man, cast up by the
sea! I went clear up to the rock.
It was the corpse of the baron, my father! I stopped short, as though
rooted to the spot. Then only did I understand that ever since daybreak
I had been guided by some unknown forces--that I was in their
power,--and for the space of several minutes there was nothing in my
soul save the ceaseless crashing of the sea, and a dumb terror in the
presence of the Fate which held me in its grip....