Again I beg of you who read me.... Believe! Believe! Believe!
I was seated on a stone, to one side of what I took for the path. My
eyes turned down toward the hollow from which I had just come--the
place where the body of my horse was lying. Then I looked in the other
direction, over toward the first hump of the double saddle of three
hills. I was intending to rise and start out on my way again. It was my
duty.... I was in honor bound to make the summit of the Grand Cap, find
the battery, deliver my dispatch.
Suddenly, on the hill-top--the first one--it could not have been more
than a hundred yards away, I perceived a human form, standing out in
dark profile against the still livid sky. I say it was a human figure.
It was that of a woman, and she was coming toward me at a rapid pace.
In joyous surprise I sprang to my feet. Certainly this was the last
thing on earth I could have hoped for in such a place and at such an
hour. Even in daytime it is rare to find a peasant, a wood-chopper, or
a hunter in the neighborhood of the _Mort de Gauthier_! There are no
trees worth cutting on those barren mountain sides. There are no fruits
nor berries, nor even game. Yet here on this cold, rainy, foggy night
I was meeting a woman--the only woman, as I was willing to bet, who
had been along that trail in a month’s time. Somebody from Valaury or
Morière, probably, hurrying to get home by nightfall. She would be well
acquainted with the region, doubtless, and would be only too glad to
set me right about the trails.
I took two or three steps in her direction, observing, however, that
she would pass right in front of me, in any case! How fast she was
coming, too! How easily she managed all that rough uneven ground!
She was now some twenty yards away. And I stopped in utter stupefaction!
She was not a peasant girl, by any means. That dress! It was of a
fashionable cut, such as a society woman of distinction might wear. An
afternoon otter cloak, edged with ermine, in the latest style; a large
loosely hanging muff, of ermine also; a turban hat with plumes, the
latter lying flat and pasted to the crown by the rain and mist. She
had no umbrella and no heavier coat. There was nothing about her that
seemed probable in that wilderness. I glanced in panic around me to be
sure I was indeed in the foothills of those mountains and not in the
winter-garden of some fashionable hotel on the Blue Coast; that it was
the same desert in which I had lost my way, and that it was a cold,
raw, rainy night of December.
I could scarcely breathe now, and a cold chill began to run up and down
my back.
Was it not an apparition?
Perhaps, but no ordinary apparition at any rate! Here was no
impalpable, supernatural body. For I could hear the crunching of her
feet on the leaves, a slight squeak in her shoes, and the silken rustle
of her garments as they brushed against the brambles.
The woman came up to me, passed me, barely grazing my body. She was
looking fixedly ahead, without stopping, without turning her eyes this
way or that. I had first a front view of her features, then another in
profile. I recognized her! It was she!
“Madeleine!”
The cry came from me involuntarily, a cry of terror absolute:
“Madeleine!”
The woman seemed not to hear, just as she had seemed not to see. She
walked rapidly past and away down the trail into the underbrush of the
hollow.