I felt her heart give a great leap under my hand, and a shiver ran through her. But she did not raise her head, and I, who had thought to tease her into looking at me, had to put back her little face till it gazed into mine.
"Why?" I said; "why?"--drawing her closer and closer to me.
Then the colour came into her face like the sunlight itself. "Because you love me," she whispered, shutting her eyes.
And I did not gainsay her.
CHAPTER XXIV.
MISSING!
We lay in the osier bed two whole days and a night, during which time two at least of us were not unhappy, in spite of peril and hardship.
We left it at last, only because our meagre provision gave out, and we must move or starve. We felt far from sure that the danger was over, for Steve, who spent the second day in a thick bush near the road, saw two troops of horse go by; and others, we believed, pa.s.sed in the night. But we had no choice. The neighbourhood was bleak and bare.
Such small homesteads as existed had been eaten up, and lay abandoned.
If we had felt inclined to venture out for food, none was to be had.
And, in fine, though we trembled at the thought of the open road, and my heart for one grew sick as I looked from Marie to my lady, and reckoned the long tale of leagues which lay between us and Ca.s.sel, the risk had to be run.
Steve had discovered a more easy though longer way out of the willow-bed, and two hours before midnight on the second night, he and I mounted the women and prepared to set out. He arranged that we should go in the same order in which we had come: that he should lead the march, and I bring up the rear, while the Waldgrave, who was still far from well, and whose continued lack of vigour troubled us the more as we said little about it, should ride with my lady.
The night seemed likely to be fine, but the darkness, the sough of the wind as it swept over the plain, and the melancholy plashing of the water as our horses plodded through it, were not things of a kind to allay our fears. When we at last left our covert, and reaching the road stood to listen, the fall of a leaf made us start. Though no sounds but those of the night came to our ears--and some of these were of a kind to rea.s.sure us--we said "Hush!" again and again, and only moved on after a hundred alarums and a.s.surances.
I walked by Marie, with my hand on the withers of her horse, but we did not talk. The two waiting-women riding double were before us, and their muttered fears alone broke the silence which prevailed at the end of the train. We went at the rate of about two leagues an hour, Steve and I and the men running where the roads were good, and everywhere and at all times urging the horses to do their best. The haste of our movements, the darkness, our constant alarm, and the occasional confusion when the rear pressed on the van at an awkward place, had the effect of upsetting the balance of our minds; so that the most common impulse of flight--to press forward with ever-increasing recklessness--began presently to possess us. Once or twice I had to check the foremost, or they would have outrun the rear; and this kind of race brought us gradually into such a state of alarm, that by-and-by, when the line came to a sudden stop on the brow of a gentle descent, I could hardly restrain my impatience.
"What is it?" I asked eagerly. "Why are we stopping?" Surely the road is good enough here."
No one answered, but it was significant that on the instant one of the women began to cry.
"Stop that folly!" I said. "What is in front there? Cannot some one speak?"
"The Waldgrave thinks that he hears hors.e.m.e.n before us," Fraulein Max answered.
In another moment the Waldgrave"s figure loomed out of the darkness.
"Martin," he said--I noticed that his voice shook--"go forward. They are in front. Man alive, be quick!" he continued fiercely. "Do you want to have them into us?"
I left my girl"s rein, and pushing past the women and Fraulein, joined Steve, who was standing by my lady"s rein. "What is it?" I said.
"Nothing, I think," he answered in an uncertain tone.
I stood a moment listening, but I too could hear nothing. I began to argue with him. "Who heard it?" I asked impatiently.
"The Waldgrave," he answered.
I did not like to say before my lady what I thought--that the Waldgrave was not quite himself, nor to be depended upon; and instead I proposed to go forward on foot and learn if anything was amiss. The road ran straight down the hill, and the party could scarcely pa.s.s me, even in the gloom. If I found all well, I would whistle, and they could come on.
My lady agreed, and, leaving them halted, I started cautiously down the hill. The darkness was not extreme; the cloud drift was broken here and there, and showed light patches of sky between; I could make out the shapes of things, and more than once took a clump of bushes for a lurking ambush. But halfway down, a line of poplars began to shadow the road on our side, and from that point I might have walked into a regiment and never seen a man. This, the being suddenly alone, and the constant rustling of the leaves overhead, which moved with the slightest air, shook my nerves, and I went very warily, with my heart in my mouth and a cry trembling on my lips.
Still I had reached the hillfoot before anything happened. Then I stopped abruptly, hearing quite distinctly in front of me the sound of footsteps. It was impossible that this could be the sound that the Waldgrave had heard, for only one man seemed to be stirring, and he moved stealthily; but I crouched down and listened, and in a moment I was rewarded. A dark figure came out of the densest of the shadow and stood in the middle of the road. I sank lower, noiselessly. The man seemed to be listening.
It flashed into my head that he was a sentry; and I thought how fortunate it was that I had come on alone.
Presently he moved again. He stole along the track towards me, stooping, as I fancied, and more than once standing to listen, as if he were not satisfied. I sank down still lower, and he pa.s.sed me without notice, and went on, and I heard his footsteps slowly retreating until they quite died away.
But in a moment, before I had risen to my full height, I heard them again. He came back, and pa.s.sed me, breathing quickly and loudly. I wondered if he had detected our party and was going to give the alarm; and I stood up, anxious and uncertain, at a loss whether I should follow him or run back.
At that instant a fierce yell broke the silence, and rent the darkness as a flash of lightning might rend it. It came from behind me, from the brow of the hill; and I started as if I had been struck. Hard on it a volley of shouts and screams flared up in the same direction, and while my heart stood still with terror and fear of what had happened, I heard the thunder of hoofs come down the road, with a clatter of blows and whips. They were coming headlong--my lady and the rest. The danger was behind them, then. I had just time to turn and get to the side of the road before they were on me at a gallop.
I could not see who was who in the darkness, but I caught at the nearest stirrup, and, narrowly escaping being ridden down, ran on beside the rider. The horses, spurred down the slope, had gained such an impetus that it was all I could do to keep up. I had no breath to ask questions, nor state my fear that there was danger ahead also. I had to stride like a giant to keep my legs and run.
Some one else was less lucky. We had not swept fifty yards from where I joined them, when a dark figure showed for a moment in the road before us. I saw it; it seemed to hang and hesitate. The next instant it was among us. I heard a shrill scream, a heavy fall, and we were over it, and charging on and on and on through the darkness.
To the foot of the hill and across the bottom, and up the opposite slope. I do not know how far we had sped, when Steve"s voice was heard, calling on us to halt.
"Pull up! pull up!" he cried, with an angry oath. "It is a false alarm! What fool set it going? There is no one behind us. Donner und Blitzen! where is Martin?"
The horses were beginning to flag, and gladly came to a trot, and then to a walk.
"Here! I panted.
"Himmel! I thought we had ridden you down!" he said, leaving my lady"s side. His voice shook with pa.s.sion and loss of breath. "Who was it? We might all have broken our necks, and for nothing!"
The Waldgrave--it was his stirrup I had caught--turned his horse round. "I heard them--close behind us!" he panted. There was a note of wildness in his voice. My elbow was against his knee, and I felt him tremble.
"A bird in the hedge," Steve said rudely. "It has cost some one dear.
Whose horse was it struck him?"
No one answered. I left the Waldgrave"s side and went back a few paces. The women were sobbing. Ernst and Jacob stood by them, breathing hard after their run. I thought the men"s silence strange. I looked again. There was a figure missing; a horse missing.
"Where is Marie?" I cried.
She did not answer. No one answered; and I knew. Steve swore again. I think he had known from the beginning. I began to tremble. On a sudden my lady lifted up her voice and cried shrilly--
"Marie! Marie!"
Again no answer. But this time I did not wait to listen. I ran from them into the darkness the way we had come, my legs quivering under me, and my mouth full of broken prayers. I remembered a certain solitary tree fronting the poplars, on the other side of the way, which I had marked mechanically at the moment of the fall--an ash, whose light upper boughs had come for an instant between my eyes and the sky. It stood on a little mound, where the moorland began to rise on that side. I came to it now, and stopped and looked. At first I could see nothing, and I trod forward fearfully. Then, a couple of paces on, I made out a dark figure, lying head and feet across the road. I sprang to it, and kneeling, pa.s.sed my hands over it. Alas! it was a woman"s.
I raised the light form in my arms, crying pa.s.sionately on her name, while the wind swayed the boughs overhead, and, besides that and my voice, all the countryside was still. She did not answer. She hung limp in my arms. Kneeling in the dust beside her, I felt blindly for a pulse, a heart-beat. I found neither--neither; the woman was dead.
And yet it was not that which made me lay the body down so quickly and stand up peering round me. No; something else. The blood drummed in my ears, my heart beat wildly. The woman was dead; but she was not Marie.
She was an old woman, sixty years old. When I stooped again, after a.s.suring myself that there was no other body near, and peered into her face, I saw that it was seamed and wrinkled. She was barefoot, and her clothes were foul and mean. She had the reek of one who slept in ditches and washed seldom. Her toothless gums grinned at me. She was a horrible mockery of all that men love in women.
When I had marked so much, I stood up again, my head reeling. Where was the man I had seen scouting up and down? Where was Marie? For a moment the wild idea that she had become this thing, that death or magic had transformed the fair young girl into this toothless hag, was not too wild for me. An owl hooted in the distance, and I started and shivered and stood looking round me fearfully. Such things were; and Marie was gone. In her place this woman, grim and dead and unsightly, lay at my feet. What was I to think?
I got no answer. I raised my voice and called, trembling, on Marie. I ran to one side of the road and the other and called, and still got no answer. I climbed the mound on which the ash-tree stood, and sent my voice thrilling through the darkness of the bottom. But only the owl answered. Then, knowing nothing else I could do, I went down wringing my hands, and found my lady standing over the body in the road. She had come back with Steve and the others.