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, passed 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 Cassel, 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 reassure us--we said 'Hush!' again and again, and only
moved on after a hundred alarums and assurances.
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 horsemen 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 pass 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 passed 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 passed 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 passion 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, passed my hands over it. Alas! it
was a woman's.
I raised the light form in my arms, crying passionately 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
assuring 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.
I had to listen to their amazement, and a hundred guesses and fancies,
which, God help me! had nothing certain in them, and gave me no help.
The men searched both sides of the road, and beat the moor for a
distance, and tried to track the horse--for that was missing too, and
there lay my only hope--but to no purpose. At last my lady came to me
and said sorrowfully that nothing more could be done.
'In the morning!' I cried jealously.
No one spoke, and I looked from one to another. The men had returned
from the search, and stood in a dark group round the body, which they
had drawn to the side of the road. It wanted an hour of daylight yet,
and I could not see their faces, but I read in their silence the
answer that no one liked to put into words.
'Be a man!' Steve muttered, after a long pause. 'God help the girl.
But God help us too if we are found here!'
Still my lady did not speak, and I knew her brave heart too well to
doubt her, though she had been the first to talk of going. 'Get to
horse,' I said roughly.
'No, no,' my lady cried at last. 'We will all stay, Martin.'
'Ay, all stay or all go!' Steve muttered.
'Then all go!' I said, choking down the sobs that would rise. And I
turned first from the place.
I will not try to state what that cost me. I saw my girl's face
everywhere--everywhere in the darkness, and the eyes reproached me.
That she of all should suffer, who had never fainted, never faltered,
whose patience and courage had been the women's stay from the
first--that she should suffer! I thought of the tender, weak body, and
of all the things that might happen to her, and I seemed, as I went
away from her, the vilest thing that lived.
But reason was against me. If I stayed there and waited on the road
by the old crone's body until morning, what could I do? Whither could
I turn? Marie was gone and already might be half a dozen miles away.
So the bonds of custom and duty held me. Dazed and bewildered, I
lacked the strength that was needed to run counter to all. I was no
knight-errant, but a plain man, and I reeled on through the last hour
of the night and the first grey streaks of dawn, with my head on my
breast and sobs of despair in my throat.