None but desperate men could have exposed women to such a labour; nor could any but women without hope and at their wit"s end have accomplished it. As it was, Fraulein Max, who never ceased to whimper, twice sank down and would go no farther, and we had to pluck her up roughly and force her on. My lady"s women, who wept in their misery, were little better. Wet to the waist, draggled, and worn out by the clinging slime and the reek of the marsh, they were kept moving only with difficulty; so that, but for Steve"s giant strength and my lady"s courage, I think we should have stayed there till daylight, and been caught like birds limed on a bough.
As it was, we plunged and strove for more than an hour in that place, the dark sky above us, the quaking bog below, the women"s weeping in our ears. Then, at last, when I had almost given up hope, we struggled out one by one upon the road, and stood panting and shaking, astonished to find solid ground under our feet. We had still two miles to walk, but on dry soil; and though at another time the task might have seemed to the women full of adventure and arduous, it failed to frighten them after what we had gone through. Steve took Fraulein Anna, and I one of the women. My lady and the Waldgrave went hand in hand; the one giving, I fancy, as much help as the other. For Marie, her small, white face was a beacon of hope in the darkness. In the marsh she had never failed or fainted. On the road the tears came into my eyes for pity and love and admiration.
At length Steve bade us stand, and leaving us in the way, plunged into the denser blackness of a thicket, which lay between it and the river.
I heard him parting the branches before him, and stumbling and swearing, until presently the sounds died away in the distance, and we remained shivering and waiting. What if the horses were gone? What if they had strayed from the place where he had tethered them early in the day, or some one had found and removed them? The thought threw me into a cold sweat.
Then I heard him coming back, and I caught the ring of iron hoofs. He had them! I breathed again. In a moment he emerged, and behind him a string of shadows--five horses tied head and tail.
"Quick!" he muttered. He had been long enough alone to grow nervous.
"We are two hours gone, and if they have not yet discovered him they must soon! It is a short start, and half of us on foot!"
No one answered, but in a moment we had the Waldgrave, my lady, Fraulein, and one of the women mounted. Then we put up Marie, who was no heavier than a feather, and the lighter of the women on the remaining horse; and Steve hurrying beside the leader, and I, Ernst, and Jacob bringing up the rear, we were well on the road within two minutes of the appearance of the horses. Those who rode had only sacking for saddles and loops of rope for stirrups; but no one complained. Even Fraulein Max began to recover herself, and to dwell more upon the peril of capture than on aching legs and chafed knees.
The road was good, and we made, as far as I could judge, about six miles in the first hour. This placed us nine miles from the camp; the time, a little after midnight. At this point the clouds, which had aided us so far by increasing the darkness of the night, fell in a great storm of rain, that, hissing on the road and among the trees, in a few minutes drenched us to the skin. But no one complained. Steve muttered that it would make it the more difficult to track us; and for another hour we plodded on gallantly. Then our leader called a halt, and we stood listening.
The rain had left the sky lighter. A waning moon, floating in a wrack of watery clouds to westward, shed a faint gleam on the landscape. To the right of us it disclosed a bare plain, rising gradually as it receded, and offering no cover. On our left, between us and the river, it was different. Here a wilderness of osiers--a grey willow swamp that in the moonlight shimmered like the best Utrecht--stretched as far as we could see. The road where we stood rose a few feet above it, so that our eyes were on a level with the highest shoots; but a hundred yards farther on the road sank a little. We could see the water standing on the track in pools, and glimmering palely.
"This is the place," Steve muttered. "It will be dawn in another hour.
What do you think, Master Martin?"
"That we had better get off the road," I answered. "Take it they found him at midnight; the orderly"s patience would scarcely last longer.
Then, if they started after us a quarter of an hour later, they should be here in another twenty minutes."
"It is an aguey place," he said doubtfully.
"It will suit us better than the camp," I answered.
No one else expressed an opinion, and Steve, taking my lady"s rein, led her horse on until he came to the hollow part of the road. Here the moonlight disclosed a kind of water-lane, running away between the osiers, at right angles from the road. Steve turned into it, leading my lady"s horse, and in a moment was wading a foot deep in water. The Waldgrave followed, then the women. I came last, with Marie"s rein in my hand. We kept down the lane about one hundred and fifty paces, the horses snorting and moving unwillingly, and the water growing ever deeper. Then Steve turned out of it, and began to advance, but more cautiously, parallel with the road.
We had waded about as far in this direction, sidling between the stumps and stools as well as we could, when he came again to a stand and pa.s.sed back the word for me. I waded on, and joined him. The osiers, which were interspersed here and there with great willows, rose above our heads and shut out the moonlight. The water gurgled black about our knees. Each step might lead us into a hole, or we might trip over the roots of the osiers. It was impossible to see a foot before us, or anything above us save the still, black rods and the grey sky.
"It should be in this direction," Steve said, with an accent of doubt.
"But I cannot see. We shall have the horses down."
"Let me go first," I said.
"We must not separate," he answered hastily.
"No, no," I said, my teeth beginning to chatter. "But are you sure that there is an eyot here?"
"I did not go to it," he answered, scratching his head. "But I saw a clump of willows rising well above the level, and they looked to me as if they grew on dry land."
He stood a moment irresolutely, first one and then another of the horses shaking itself till the women could scarcely keep their seats.
"Why do we not go on?" my lady asked in a low voice.
"Because Steve is not sure of the place, my lady," I said. "And it is almost impossible to move, it is so dark, and the osiers grow so closely. I doubt we should have waited until daylight."
"Then we should have run the risk of being intercepted," she answered feverishly. "Are you very wet?"
"No," I said, though my feet were growing numb, "not very. I see what we must do. One of us must climb into a willow and look out."
We had pa.s.sed a small one not long before. I plashed my way back to it, along the line of shivering women, and, pulling myself heavily into the branches, managed to scramble up a few feet. The tree swayed under my weight, but it bore me.
The first dawn was whitening the sky and casting a faint, reflected light on the glistening sea of osiers, that seemed to my eyes--for I was not high enough to look beyond it--to stretch far and away on every side. Here and there a large willow, rising in a round, dark clump, stood out above the level; and in one place, about a hundred paces away on the riverside of us, a group of these formed a shadowy mound. I marked the spot, and dropped gently into the water.
"I have found it," I said. "I will go first, and do you bring my lady, Steve. And mind the stumps. It will be rough work."
It was rough work. We had to wind in and out, leading and coaxing the frightened horses, that again and again stumbled to their knees. Every minute I feared that we should find the way impa.s.sable or meet with a mishap. But in time, going very patiently, we made out the willows in front of us. Then the water grew more shallow, and this gave the animals courage. Twenty steps farther, and we pa.s.sed into the shadow of the trees. A last struggle, and, plunging one by one up the muddy bank, we stood panting on the eyot.
It was such a place as only despair could choose for a refuge. In shape like the back of some large submerged beast, it lay in length about forty paces, in breadth half as many. The highest point was a poor foot above the water. Seven great willows took up half the s.p.a.ce; it was as much as our horses, sinking in the moist mud to the fetlock, could do to find standing-room on the remainder. Coa.r.s.e gra.s.s and reeds covered it; and the flotsam of the last flood whitened the trunks of the willows, and hung in squalid wisps from their lower branches.
For the first time we saw one another"s faces, and how pale and woe-begone, mudstained and draggled we were! The cold, grey light, which so mercilessly unmasked our refuge, did not spare us. It helped even my lady to look her worst. Fraulein Anna sat a mere lifeless lump in her saddle. The waiting-women cried softly; they had cried all night. The Waldgrave looked dazed, as if he barely understood where he was or why he was there.
To think over-much in such a place was to weep. Instead, I hastened to get them all off their horses, and with Steve"s help and a great bundle of osiers and branches which we cut, I made nests for them in the lower boughs of the willows, well out of reach of the water. When they had all taken their places, I served out food and a dram of Dantzic waters, which some of us needed; for a white mist, drawn up from the swamp by the rising sun, began to enshroud us, and, hanging among the osiers for more than an hour, prolonged the misery of the night.
Still, even that rolled away at last--about six o"clock--and let us see the sun shining overhead in a heaven of blue distance and golden clouds. Larks rose up and sang, and all the birds of the marsh began to twitter and tweet. In a trice our mud island was changed to a bower--a place of warmth and life and refreshment--where light and shade lay on the dappled floor, and the sunshine fell through green leaves.
Then I took the cloaks, and the saddles, and everything that was wet, and spread them out on branches to dry; and leaving the women to make themselves comfortable in their own way and shift themselves as they pleased, we two, with the Waldgrave and the two servants, went away to the other end of the eyot.
"I shall sleep," Steve said drowsily.
The insects were beginning to hum. The horses stood huddled together, swishing their long tails.
"You think they won"t track us?" I asked.
"Certain," he said. "There are six hundred yards of mud and water, eel-holes, and willow shoots between us and the road."
The Waldgrave a.s.sented mechanically; it seemed so to me too. And by-and-by, worn out with the night"s work, I fell asleep, and slept, I suppose, for a good many hours, with the sun and shade pa.s.sing slowly across my face, and the bees droning in my ears, and the mellow warmth of the summer day soaking into my bones. When I awoke I lay for a time revelling in lazy enjoyment. The oily plop of a water-rat, as it dived from a stump, or the scream of a distant jay, alone broke the laden silence. I looked at the sun. It lay south-west. It was three o"clock then.
[Ill.u.s.tration: We were alone.... I whispered in her ear ...]
A light touch fell on my knee. I started, looked down, and for a moment stared in sleepy wonder. A tiny bunch of blue flowers, such as I could see growing in a dozen places on the edge of the island, lay on it, tied up with a thread of purple silk. I started up on my elbow, and--there, close beside me, with her cheeks full of colour, and the sunshine finding golden threads in her dark hair, sat Marie, toying with more flowers.
"Ha!" I said foolishly. "What is it?"
"My lady sent me to you," she answered.
"Yes," I asked eagerly. "Does she want me?"
But Marie hung her head, and played with the flowers. "I don"t think so," she whispered. "She only sent me to you."
Then I understood. The Waldgrave had gone to the farther end. Steve and the men were tending the horses half a dozen paces beyond the screen of willow-leaves. We were alone. A rat plashed into the water, and drove Marie nearer to me; and she laid her head on my shoulder, and I whispered in her ear, till the lashes sank down over her eyes and her lips trembled. If I had loved her from the first, what was the length and height and breadth of my love now, when I had seen her in darkness and peril, sunshine and storm, strong when others failed, brave when others flinched, always helpful, ready, tireless! And she so small! So frail, I almost feared to press her to me; so pale, the blood that leapt to her cheeks at my touch seemed a mere reflection of the sunlight.
I told her how Steve had made the guards at the prison drunk with wine bought with her dowry; how the horses he had purchased and taken out of the camp by twos and threes had been paid for from the same source; and how many ducats had gone for meats and messes to keep the life, that still ran sluggishly, in the Waldgrave"s veins. She listened and lay still.
"So you have no dowry now, little one," I said, when I had told her all. "And your gold chain is gone. I believe you have nothing but the frock you stand up in. Why, then, should I marry you?"