The presence of Caroline Childers in the door brought the Duke of Dorset forward into the room. He alone had some understanding of the incident; but for the moment he said nothing. Cyrus Childers put his hand on a bell. "Nonsense, Caroline," he said.
But the bell brought no response. He tried another. Then he turned to the Duke.
"Pardon me a moment," he said, "these bells are evidently broken." He crossed to the door, spoke to Caroline, and went with her out into the corridor.
A moment later the Marchesa entered. The Duke had remained on his feet, where he had arisen, a thin wisp of smoke clinging to the end of his cigar, as it went slowly out.
The Marchesa Soderrelli crossed straight to him.
"There is something wrong here," she said; "the place is deserted."
The Duke of Dorset laid the cigar down gently on an ash tray, then he smiled.
"My dear Marchesa," he said, "something has gone wrong with the bells; that is all."
"That is not all," replied the woman; "I have been through the house to my room; there is no servant anywhere."
The Duke continued to smile. "I would wager a hunter," he said, "that every man and maid of them is at this moment in the servant's hall." He advanced a step. "Look again, my dear Marchesa," he said, "I think you will find the maids scurrying up at the end of the corridor." The Marchesa Soderrelli looked steadily at him for a moment.
"My friend," she said, "there is evidently trouble here. Let us look this situation in the face. We are in the center of an isolated Japanese colony, and these Orientals have made some concerted, premeditated move. Do you understand what it is?"
The calm, resolute bearing of the woman caused the Duke of Dorset to change his plan. He determined to take her into his confidence.
"I would be glad if I knew that," he said; "I have only a conjecture."
The Marchesa continued to regard him with undisturbed composure.
"May I inquire," she said, "what your conjecture is!"
The Duke told her then of the idle Oriental, and what he had observed on this evening at the foot of the park. He feared that the servants had, in fact, gone; that the thing was a concerted act, planned and carried out by the whole corps of servants. The Oriental would sometimes slip away like that, leaving the very kettles on the fire. They were doubtless displeased at something, and had determined to abandon the château. This, the Duke feared, was the situation here—an awkward one, but not a thing to be alarmed over. Still, among so many servants setting off in a body, some one of them might attempt mischief; theft, fire, anything that should suggest itself. However, the very concert of their act indicated a certain order, and that of itself discouraged any fear of violence. The Duke pointed out that this was merely a theory, a conjecture, which he hoped would presently prove unfounded.
The big voice of Cyrus Childers now came to them from the corridor, and, a moment later, he entered with Caroline. The muscles of the man's face were distended with rage, he controlled that passion only with the greatest effort. When he spoke, his voice came out slowly, as though held and measured.
"We seem to be abandoned by the servants," he said; "I do not understand it."
Then abruptly, as though the question had been for sometime considered, Caroline Childers spoke to the Duke of Dorset.
"Have you noticed any indication of this thing?" she said; "any warning incident?" The Duke saw instantly that he must say here what he had just said to the Marchesa, and he told again of the Oriental, and especially of what he had seen this evening at the bridge. But he forgot again another more pointed incident of the same afternoon. He spoke with a studied unconcern; he minimized the significance of the thing; it was like Eastern servants to leave in a body; it meant no more than a going without permission; the annoyance of it was the only feature to be thought of; any alarm was obviously unfounded. But his manner and his comment carried no visible effect. Caroline was evidently alarmed. Cyrus Childers added now a word in support of the Duke's conclusion—his face fallen into composure, or rather into control; there was no reason for alarm; they could all get on somehow for tonight; to-morrow he would adjust the thing. His massive jaw clamped on that closing sentence.
The Marchesa added also a further word. "They are both quite right," she said; "we shall get on very well to-night."
Caroline Childers did not at once reply. She remained looking from one person to the other.
"I wonder," she said, "why it is that we do not say what we are all thinking. It is extraordinary that the servants should all suddenly leave the house; it is more extraordinary that they should leave it at the direction of this person who has been hanging about the grounds."
Then she turned to the Marchesa.
"Neither my uncle nor the Duke of Dorset are in the least misled, neither are you, nor am I. Let us not pretend to one another; we do not know what may happen. Nothing, or the very worst thing."
The Marchesa did not reply, and in the meantime Cyrus Childers answered for her.
"Nonsense, Caroline," he said, "you are unduly excited."
"I am not excited at all," replied the girl.
Her eyes came back to the Duke of Dorset.
"Do you agree with my uncle—shall we wait until morning?"
The Duke met this situation with something approaching genius.
"By no means," he said; "the ground ought to be at once reconnoitered. I will follow the deserters a little."
He was smiling, and his voice under the words laughed. But within, the man did not smile, and he did not laugh. He was oppressed by certain foreboding memories.
The host at once protested. The thing was absurd, unnecessary.
But the Duke continued to smile.
"I beg you to permit it," he said. "Here is a beautiful adventure. I would not miss it for the world."
The old man understood then, and he laughed. "Very well," he said, "will you have a horse and weapons?"
"I will take the horse," replied the Duke, "but not the weapons, thank you. In the meantime, I must dress for the part."
He went swiftly out of the library and up to his room. Here he got into his riding clothes.
At the foot of the stairway, as he came down, he found Caroline Childers waiting for him. The two walked from the château door along the turf court to the stable. The place was lighted as the Duke had first observed it on this evening, but it was now wholly deserted and silent. Caroline Childers pointed out the way and the Duke found a horse, led him out, and girted on a saddle. The horse was a big red sorrel, smooth as silk, sixteen hands high, and supple as a leopard. The Duke measured the stirrup leather on his arm, and let it out to the last buckle hole. Then he turned to the girl beside him, his voice running on that amused, mock-dramatic note.
"If I do not return in half an hour," he said, "you will know that I am taken."
Then he gathered up the reins, swung into the saddle, and rode out of the court eastward into the park.
Caroline Childers returned slowly across the court to the terrace above the gardens. The night was soft and warm. From the gardens, one lying below the other, came the trickling of water.
Meanwhile the Duke of Dorset rode slowly among the trees down toward the stone bridge over the river. But the facetious mood, which he had assumed to cover the wisdom of this scouting, had departed from him, and something of the sense of loss that used to await him at night, passing the picture on the stairway, replaced it. This consuming mood entered in and possessed the man, and signs which he should have seen, marking events on the way, escaped him.
He came presently to the stone bridge over the river. The horse refused, for a moment, to go on it. He struck it over the withers with his crop, and forced it to go on. The horse swerved, plunged, and half over the arch, tried to turn back. The Duke swung it around with a powerful wrench of the bit. The horse went instantly on his hind legs into the air, striking out with his fore feet.
That rearing saved the man's life. As the horse arose, some one fired from the cover of the woods beyond the bridge—a dull heavy report like that of an old-time musket. The horse, struck in the chest between the shoulders, hung a moment in the air, then it fell forward stumbling to its knees in the road. The Duke slipped out of the saddle and rolled to the side of the bridge where the low wall hid him. The horse got slowly up, and stood with its head down and its legs far apart, trembling, wet with sweat; the blood poured out of the wound in its chest, in a stream that flowed slowly into a big, claret-colored pool, and then broke and trickled across the road in a thin line to where the Duke lay, soaking his coat. The horse stood for some minutes unsteadily, thus, on its feet; then it began to stagger, the breath whistling through its distended nostrils. In this staggering it nearly trod on the man, and, to escape that danger, he began to crawl along the bridge close to the wall.
Presently he reached the abutment and slipped from the shelter of the wall into the wood of the park. Here he ascended the long hill to the château, keeping in the shadow of the trees, moving slowly and with caution. When he came to the last tree, at the summit of the park, he stopped and looked back.
No one followed that he could see. The horse still staggered, bleeding, over the white floor of the bridge, now to one side of it and now to the other; then, as he looked, the beast's knees struck violently against the low wall where he had just been lying, it lurched forward, lost its balance, toppled and fell with a scream, crashing through a tree top into the river below.
The word is not accurate. A horse in the extremity of terror utters a cry like no other sound heard upon this earth. It is a great, hideous shudder, made vocal. Then, as though that cry had called them into life, the Duke saw figures emerging from the wood beyond the bridge. He stepped out into the light, walked swiftly along the court and into the door of the château.
There, in the library out of which he had just gone, a strange scene awaited him. The curtains had been pulled over the windows and the lights were all out except a single one above the big table in the center of the room. On this table lay a dozen different weapons, hunting and target rifles, duck and bird guns, and a variety of pistols. The Marchesa Soderrelli stood over this table, piles of cartridges in little heaps before her on the polished mahogany board. The others were not anywhere to be seen.
The Marchesa started when the door opened. "Thank God!" she said; "they missed you. I heard the shot. I thought you were killed."
"They got the horse," said the Duke.
Then a memory seized him and he crossed to the table, took up one of the rifles, threw open the breech, and passed his finger over the firing pin. He tossed the weapon back onto the table and tried another, and still another.
The Marchesa explained: "I have every gun in the house; two or three of the rifles will do, and the pistols are all good."
The Duke took up one of the pistols, sprung the hammer, broke it and felt the breech plate with his thumb. Then he laid it on the table.
"These weapons," he said, "are all quite useless."
The Marchesa Soderrelli did not understand.
"They may not be of the best," she said, "but they will shoot."
"I fear not," replied the Duke.
Then he told swiftly, in a few words, of his experience with the shotgun on this afternoon; threw open the breech of the rifles and pointed out the filed-off firing pin in each. Every weapon, to the last one, had been made thus wholly useless.
The woman's face became the color of plaster, but it remained unmoving, as though every nerve in it were cut.
"I could bear it," she said, "if we had any chance; if we could make a fight of it."
"I think we can do that," replied the Duke; "I have a hunting rifle among my luggage, packed with its ammunition in an ordinary box. That box has not been opened, and I think its contents not suspected. I will see."
And he went swiftly out of the room.
The Duke of Dorset hurried through the deserted corridor and ascended the great stair.
From the moon, sheets of light, entering through the long windows, lay here and there, white, across the steps, and red across that bronze frieze wherein satyrs danced. Although the man hurried, habit for an instant stopped him in the arc of light at the turn of the stair. He lifted his eyes to see that woman, in her costume of old time, descending, but the illusion of it was gone. The thing was now only a lifeless picture hanging in its frame—a sheet of painted canvas from which no disturbing influences emerged. For the fraction of a second surprise held him, then the sound of some one moving in the corridor above caught his ear. Some one walked there, was come now to the stairway, was descending. And the next moment Caroline Childers, coming hurriedly down, saw the Duke of Dorset standing on the step by the window. She stopped instantly, and, like one in terror, put up her hands to her face, her fingers wandering into her hair.
"Oh!" she said, "you are hurt! There is blood!"
The man was standing in the light; his sleeve, soaked from the wounded horse, was visibly red.
The girl came slowly to another step, her fingers still moving in her hair; her speech fragments.
"They shot you... I heard it... I knew they would.... Are you killed!"
The Duke remembered now this blood on his coat and hurried to explain it.
"I am not hurt," he said. "They killed the horse. I am not in the least hurt."
The girl thrust back her hair with a curious deliberate gesture. Her head moved a little forward. Her bosom lifted. She came down slowly from one step to another. The moment of stress seemed to have matured her face. She was now not unlike the woman whom he had met every night on the turn of the stair.
The Duke saw this, and all that had been illusion, fancy, a state of the mind, emerged into reality. Not on the instant, but in gradual sequence, like one coming in broad day upon events approaching as he had seen them in a dream. It is a moment rare in the experience of life, when the situation dreamed of begins to arrive, in order, in the sun. And especially when these foreseen events appear to demand a decision which one must on the instant hazard. Here was the opportunity, coming in life, which had presented itself so many times to this man in fancy. Then the foreseen march of events, as is usual in life, wholly altered.
The long sheet of glass in the window by the Duke's elbow broke with a sharp sound, shivered to fragments, rattled on the step, and a stone struck the rail of the stairway.
The Duke sprang to the window and looked out. A little group of figures was gathering along the northern border of the court; one, who had come closer to the château, was now running back to them. The Duke turned to find Caroline Childers looking, with him, through the window. He did not stop to explain what she could see; he gave her a brief direction, and vanished up the stairway.
"Find your uncle. Have all wait for me in the library. I will come in a moment."
He ran down the corridor to his room, dragged a leather box out into the floor, unlocked it and took out the gun and ammunition which he had packed there at Doune. He examined the breech of the gun a moment with suffocating interest. It had not been touched, doubtless because the box seemed an ordinary piece of luggage, and he had kept the key to it. He put the gun barrel swiftly into its stock, filled his pockets with cartridges, and returned, running, to the library.
There he found a certain order which he had not hoped for. Cyrus Childers, who had gone to look at the situation for himself, had returned. He had restored the lights, thrown a rug over the useless weapons on the table, and was talking calmly to the others when the Duke entered. He looked up, saw what the Duke carried, and shook his head.
"We must put away these guns," he said, "there is no need of them. We must be careful not to provoke violence. I am going out to talk to these people. Let us not lose our heads."
It was certain that the man's quiet, masterful seizure of the situation had cleared the air. The Duke saw this and hesitated to make an issue.
"I agree with you," he said, "shooting is the last thing to be done, but one ought to take every precaution."
The old man frowned, lifting the muscles of his mouth. "If a man has a gun ready," he said, "he is apt to use it."
The Duke smiled. "I think you can trust me there."
The old man was not convinced, but he formally agreed.
"Very well," he said, "keep the gun out of sight. I am going out now."
Cyrus Childers went over to another table, got a cigar, deliberately bit off the end, lighted it, pulled a soft hat over his head and went out.
The Duke followed behind him, but at the door, under the light, he stopped a moment, and put a clip of cartridges into the Mannlicher. The Marchesa Soderrelli and Caroline Childers remained in the library. In the corridor confused sounds, coming from outside, were audible, and another window in the stairway broke. The old man gave these things no visible attention; he neither lagged nor hurried. A few minutes before he had closed the door of the château; he stopped now, drew the bolts, and threw it open. Then he stepped up into the full light of the door, and stood looking calmly out. The Duke, bare-headed, stepped up beside him, holding the rifle with one hand behind his back.
Outside a crowd of figures, scattered over the court, drew together and advanced toward the door. It was possible, under so bright a moon, to observe these persons distinctly, and the Duke of Dorset was not reassured by what he saw. They were the scum of Japan; a mob such as the devil, selecting at his leisure, might have put together—dirty, uncouth, a considerable mob, reinforced every moment by others entering the northern border of the court in little groups of perhaps half a dozen. The ones nearest to the château were servants, but foresters were beginning to arrive, equally sinister, equally repulsive to the eye. The mob, drawing together by a common instinct, stopped about fifty paces from the door, hesitated and chattered. At the distance the Duke could not catch the words, but he recognized the language in which they were uttered.
Cyrus Childers spoke then to the Duke beside him.
"I am going out to talk to these people," he said. "Please remain here."
He spoke without turning his face. Then he stepped down into the court and walked as he had walked through the corridor, deliberately, with unconcern, out to the mob waiting in the middle of the court. The voices died down and ceased as he approached. The moving figures stopped on their feet. The old man walked on until he came up close to the mob; then he took the cigar out of his mouth and began to speak. At the distance the Duke could not hear what he said; he seemed to address certain individuals and, now and then, to put a question.
The Duke stood gripping the stock of his rifle, expecting the man to be attacked. But instead the mob seemed brought to reason; it was wholly silent and, the Duke thought, wholly motionless. The old man talked for perhaps five minutes. Then he put his cigar back into his mouth, made a gesture with his hand like a speaker dismissing an audience, turned and began to walk back leisurely to the château. He had covered perhaps half the distance, when a single voice crashed out of this mob, loud, harsh, grating.
At the cry the mob surged forward as at a signal. The Duke of Dorset brought the rifle from behind him, like a flash, to his shoulder. He saw the mob hang a moment on its toes. He heard in several dialects shouted assurance that the gun was harmless. Then, hoping to drive the mob back by the exposure of its error, he fired close over it, so the whistle of the bullets could be heard. But the whole mass was already on the way. It rushed, hurling a shower of missiles. The Duke, struck violently, was thrown back against the door; he heard a scattering popping, as of twigs snapping in a fire, and a clattering of stones against the wall.
Then he got on his feet and understood what had happened. The mob had charged, believing the gun useless; had discovered the error on the way, and was now running for cover to the stables. A stake, thrown by some gigantic arm, had struck across the gun barrel, which he had involuntarily raised to protect his body, and the violent impact of the blow had carried him against the door. His fire had failed to check the rush of the mob in time. It had passed over the old man before it broke. He lay out there on the trampled turf, one arm doubled under him.
The Duke thrust a clip of cartridges into the Mannlicher and stepped out into the court. But no man, in the crowd scurrying to cover, turned. They vanished like rats into a wall. The Duke crossed the court, reached the body of the old man, took it up, and began to return with it to the house. Then, from somewhere about the stables, that irregular popping began. The Duke saw, or thought he saw, a hand holding a pistol thrust out from the partly open door of a horse stall. He stopped, put down the body, swung the muzzle of the Mannlicher on the spot and fired; a fragment of the door as big as a man's hand detached itself and flew into splinters. The popping instantly ceased, and the Duke went on into the château, unmolested, with his burden.
He laid the body down on the floor, closed and bolted the doors of the château, then he stooped down to examine the body. The old man seemed quite dead, but he could not at once locate the injury. He felt over the body; he looked for blood; then he put his hand under the head and the whole of the occipital bone, at the base of the skull, was soft to the touch. The man had been killed instantly by a stone or the blow of a club.
When he looked up from this examination, both Caroline Childers and the Marchesa So-derrelli were standing beside him. The girl was pressing her hands together, and jerking them in and out against her bosom. But she was not speaking a word. The face of the Mar-chesa retained its unmoving aspect of plaster. The Duke arose and spoke to the Marchesa.
"Why did you not keep her in the library? I feared this might happen."
"They are coming that way, too," she answered, "up the hill from the river."
"How many?"
"I don't know. Hundreds! I don't know." The Duke stepped swiftly to the door and looked out through one of the side windows. Groups of figures were hurrying into the service portion of the house. He turned quickly from the window and started down the corridor toward that end of the château. He had not gone a dozen steps when he stopped. Smoke met him!
It had been presently clear to the Duke of Dorset that the little party ought somehow to get out of the château. He could not hold it against this rising, especially when led by servants familiar with every door and window. He might hold a detached tower of it, or a certain passage. But to make such a stand was to put all into a corner, with every way out presently cut off. Against mere assault, such a plan was to be considered, but now, against fire, it was wholly out of the question. Moreover, no time was to be lost. The service portion of the house had already been entered and the park leading to the river occupied. The only directions offering a safe exit were on the road south, leading down through the meadow land, westward to the coast, or directly across the court, up the stone steps into the mountain. This latter seemed the better way out. But to cross the court from the door was not to be thought of; the little party would be instantly seen, and an open target over every step of the way.
The Duke returned to the window by the door. Caroline Childers was on her knees by the body of the old man, the tears were streaming down her face. The Marchesa Soderrelli walked up and down with a short nervous stride. When the Duke looked through the window, he saw instantly a way out. The wall bordering the formal gardens ran from the south wing of the château along the court; they could cross, behind the cover of that, to where the road entered. There the distance to the stone steps was short, and once on these steps the vines would screen them, and they might go unobserved into the mountain.
But this way remained only for that moment open. The vines moved and the Duke saw, indistinctly, a man standing at the bottom of these steps. He watched a moment to see if others came that way, but no others followed. The man remained alone, watching the château through the heavy border of vines. This evidently was a sentinel, and a plan, on the instant, suggested itself to the Duke of Dorset. He broke a corner out of the window with the muzzle of the rifle, thrust the barrel through, and brought the gun to his shoulder. Then a thing happened, by chance, and to the eye trivial. A black beetle, sleeping there against the sash, aroused by the breaking glass, crept over from its place onto the gun barrel; the Duke put out his hand to brush the creature out of the line of sight, but the beetle ran along the barrel to the muzzle. The Duke slipped the gun back under his arm and brushed the insect off. But he had no longer time to remain at the window.
A crashing sound, as of a door rammed with a heavy timber, echoed through the corridor.
"This way," he said, "through the house to the garden."
At the word the Marchesa caught Caroline Childers by the arm, and hurried with her through the corridor; the Duke followed. They crossed the south wing of the château; through picture galleries; through corridors, beautified by innumerable human fingers, hung with paintings worth the taxes of a province, decked with bits of wood, bits of ivory, cut curiously by masters who sat over that one work for a lifetime.
Finally they came to a last drawing-room, opening from the south tower of the château into the Italian garden. Its west windows, hung with curtains, looked out over the turf court. They hurried through this chamber out onto the terrace, and from there halfway along the wall of the Italian garden, running here beside the south border of the court.
The situation south of the château was curiously puzzling. The gardens, lying in terraces, one below the other, had not been entered; the road, too, running south was clear. But beyond the gardens, in the meadow land to which the road descended, tiny groups of figures moved out from the river as though stretching a cordon that way, westward toward the mom-tains. But no group advanced, from this direction, toward the château. The situation gave a minute's respite.
The Duke of Dorset, in that respite, again considered the avenues of escape, and that way up the mountain, under cover of the vines, seemed the only one remaining. The mob was evidently advancing wholly from the east; spreading from the stone bridge on the north, through the park, and on the south, through the meadows. The mountain, due west, was perhaps clear, except for the one man whom the Duke had just discovered among the vines. If that man were out of the way, then, doubtless, the whole of the steps to the top would be open. The man could not be seen from the garden, but he could be seen from the west windows of the drawing-room through which they had just passed. Moreover, the shot would better be fired from there so that the report of the rifle would indicate that they were still in the château. The Duke explained the plan in a dozen words. The Marchesa Soderrelli understood at once and assented.
The Duke knew that little time remained to him. At any moment those entering the house on the north might come out into this garden. He ran to the drawing-room, entered it, and crossed quickly to a window looking out over the turf court. He drew aside the curtain, and stepped in behind it with his rifle. But he came now on the heels of chance. The heavy vines at the foot of the stairway moved. The lighter tendrils above were shaking. The man, whom he had come to kill, was going up the stone steps hidden by the leaves.
There was no moment to be lost, and the Duke immediately returned to the garden.
The situation east of the château had changed. Not only was that curious cordon, stretching from the river southwest to the meadows, drawing nearer, but a body of several hundred was coming up the great road, leading to the court west of the gardens.
He stood for a moment on the terrace before the door; his body rigid, the rifle in his hand. He knew what this advance meant. The end of this business was approaching. The play hurried to its last act—a single moment of desperate fighting in some corner of the wall. He saw with what patience, with what order, events had gathered to this end. The time wasted in that fatal parley before the door; the moment lost at the window; the escape of that one among the vines; this advance now on the south road. Events, all moving to a single, deadly purpose, as under the direction of some intelligence, infinite and malicious.
The thing looked like a sentence of death deliberately ordered; and the man took it for such a sentence, but he took it in no spirit of submission. He took it as a desperate challenge; before he died he would kill every man that he could kill, and he would do it with care, with patience, with caution.
Caroline Childers, and the Marchesa Soder-relli remained where they had been standing by the wall. The Duke, on the terrace before the door, saw that the steps up the face of the mountain was the only route not now visibly hopeless. He had seen but one man there; doubtless there were others, but there was a chance against it, and he determined to take that chance.
At this moment a crowd of figures poured out into the road from the shelter of the wall running parallel with the gardens. They swarmed onto the open road before the stone pillars. Then they saw the two women, and they swept with a babel of cries across the garden. The Duke was about an equal distance away from the Marchesa and Caroline Childers when he saw the rush start. He was strong; hard as oak. Every nerve, every muscle in him lifted instantly to its highest tension. It was a breathless race, but the man whose body had been trained, disciplined, made fit by the perils of the wilderness, won it. He was on the gravel beside them, with the mob forty paces to come. He had perhaps thirty seconds remaining to him, and each one of them was worth a life, but he took the time to say: "Don't move."
Then a thing happened that would convince any student of warfare of the utter futility of the bayonet as against the modern rifle at close range. Within twenty seconds the Duke emptied the magazine of the Mannlicher four times into the mob—a shot for every second. And yet the man did not fire with a mere convulsive working of the trigger. He shot with a precise, deadly, catlike swiftness, choosing and killing his man like one driving the point of a knife with accuracy into a dozen different spots on a table before him. The momentum of the massed rush carried the mob almost to his feet before it fell back and scattered into the garden, and yet the Duke never clubbed his rifle. The one man who almost reached him, who fell against his feet, was shot through the head, or rather the whole top of his head was removed by the expanding bullet of the Mannlicher.
The conduct of women in the presence of violent death has usually been imagined, and they stand thus charged with a coma, a hysteria, that observation does not justify. The testimony of those who observed the English women during the Mutiny, who marked the carts passing through the streets of Paris under the Terror, is to the contrary. When the Duke swung around with the rifle in his hand the two women were close beside him; they had neither moved nor uttered a sound. He indicated the mountain with a gesture, and the three of them ran along the wall, beside the dead bodies, across the road, and over the dozen yards of green turf to the stone steps.
He saw that no minute was to be wasted. The crowd advancing on the road was now running, and the mob, scattered by the fire, would remain only for a moment in confusion. He ran with the rifle held ready in his hand, his finger on the trigger guard. But the precaution was unnecessarily taken. The stone stairway at its foot was wholly clear. They began to ascend it, the Duke going first, with the muzzle of the rifle presented before him.
It is doubtful if any man ever accurately anticipated a coming event, even when that event was beginning to appear on the sky line. The man whom the Duke had seen was not on these steps; the way was clear to the top. Here was a change of status as complete and swift as any related of the fairy. The three persons, come now to the top of this stairway, stood above and outside the zone of death, within the shelter of the forest. Below, the scene was wholly unreal and fantastic. It was not possible to believe that all the savage, bestial, primitive passions of the Oriental swarmed here to a work of ruin; that the beast was in control of this place of exquisite beauty; that the cordon of civilization had been forced here at its most perfect quarter.
For a moment the scene held the Duke as a thing staged under his eye in some elaborate drama. Then groups of figures began to emerge from the doors of the château and a thin line of scarlet crept along the whole face of the north wing under the roof—flames licking the wooden cornice. He realized, then, that he and the two women had not escaped; that they would be hunted through these mountains; that the struggle would be one of extermination; that he faced a condition as primitive as any obtaining in the morning of the world.
He stepped back, tucked the rifle under his arm, and looked about for the trail leading down to the river and the great road. He found it in a moment and began to descend, followed by the two women. The three figures hurried, a curious moving picture in the moonlit forest. The Duke of Dorset, bare-headed, forcing his way through the brush of the mountain, a rifle in his hand; the Marchesa Soderrelli in a trailing, elaborately embroidered evening dress, the skirt of it tearing at every step; Caroline Childers with bare arms, bare shoulders, her white gown fouled by the leaves—all on their way to the wilderness. So swiftly had conditions been reversed.
Finally they came to the river at the point where the Duke had crossed on his way to the château. Here not only was the current swift, but the water was up to a man's waist. That meant to the shoulders of the women, and consequently too deep to ford. He did not stop to discuss the crossing, but set out along the bank of the river in the hope of finding a shallow. This bank, unlike the opposite one, was dense with underbrush. The two women followed close behind the man's shoulders in order to escape the bushes that he thrust aside. Sometimes they touched him, crowded against him, stumbled against him. Caroline Childers was more fortunate than the Marchesa Soder-relli. Her dinner dress had no train. The older woman's long, heavy skirt caught in every bush, sometimes she was thrown down by it, sometimes it tore. Finally she stopped, reached back to the skirt band, gave it a jerk that wrenched off the delicate hooks, and when the garment fell about her feet, stepped out of it. Under it was a black-satin petticoat. She went on, leaving the skirt lying in the trail.
It was the first toll taken of civilization by the wild.
The bank continued for several hundred yards, thus, through thickets, then it became a forest, clear of undergrowth, but close set with trees, and dark. A forest that grew thicker and consequently darker as they advanced. There was now scarcely any light. Here and there a vagrant ray descended through some opening in the tree tops, or a patch lay, like a detached fragment, on the boles of the trees.
The Duke watched the river as they advanced, but for perhaps half a mile he found no favorable change in the swift current. Finally the bank ascended to a heavily wooded knoll; below it the river pounded over bowlders. But above, there was evidently a shallow, where the sheet of water glided at no great depth over a rock bed. They stopped on this knoll, among the trees in the dark; the bank was clear of any brush, and dry, covered with a rug of moss, browned by the autumn sun, and yielding like velvet to the foot. The river glistened in the white moonlight, black, viscous, sinister, slipping through the forest. The road, lying beyond it, was also in the light, while the mountains, stretching off westward from this road, lay under a vast inky shadow.
The Duke of Dorset took off his coat, laid it at the foot of a tree, set the rifle beside it, bade the women await his return, and went down the bank into the river. He found the water not deeper than he had judged it, but the current was rather stronger, and the rock bed uneven and seamed with cracks. He crossed to the opposite bank and was returning, when something dropped into the river beside him with a slight splash. He looked up and behind him.
The road, white here under the moon, stretched up the river gradually into shadow. From the direction of the chateau, a man was advancing, running in a long, slouching trot. The Duke remembered that the river, like the road, was in light. He stooped, hooked his fingers into a crack of the rock bed, and lowered himself into the water. He remained thus with the water pouring over him until a second splash advised him that the man had gone on. He got slowly to one knee, and in a moment to his feet. The road was now clear. The Duke hurriedly waded to the bank and came to the shelter of the trees. It was dark under the trees, but he could make out the figure of a woman sitting by the tree where he had placed the rifle, and a second figure, vaguely white, standing at the edge of the bank against a fir trunk. He spoke to this standing figure.
"Where did the man go?" he said. "I could not see from the river."
"He followed the road," replied the figure; "can we cross?"
The Duke looked out at the moon. It stood high in the heavens, bright and clear, a disk of silver. Behind it the sky was clean and swept, but to the eastward, traveling slowly up, were a company of clouds, one flying like a wild goose behind the other.
"We can cross," he answered, "but not until the moon is hidden. There may be others on the road."
Then he sat down on the dry moss.
Immediately the figure by the tree moved toward him. He noticed that it was but half white, as it stood, and now, as it drew nearer, it became wholly white. The explanation followed, his coat was put around his shoulders. He got up at once.
"No, no," he said, "please keep it on; I am not cold."
"But you are wet," replied Caroline Childers, "and you will be cold." Then she added, as though to settle the discussion, "I put the coat on because the cartridges were in the pocket. I have the rifle."
And she held out the Mannlicher.
The Duke hesitated. Then he put the coat on and took the gun out of her hand. The girl remained where she was standing.
A question came into the man's mouth, but he closed his lips on it, and dropped the butt of the rifle on the moss beside him. A swift comprehensive understanding came to him. A picture arose strikingly before him: the mob arriving on the road, he in the river there, and this white figure, wearing his coat, fighting with a rifle from behind a fir tree, like the first resolute women of this republic, holding the log house against the savage. She had flung the bits of stone into the river to warn him, and had taken up the rifle to defend him.
"Sit down," he said; "we shall doubtless have a long distance to walk."
The girl sat down where she stood. The man remained a moment leaning on the muzzle of the rifle, then he, too, sat down, placing the gun across his knees.
It was that hour when the wilderness is silent; before the creatures that hunt at daybreak have gone out; before the temperature of the night changes; when the solitary places of the world seem to wait as with a reverential stillness for the descending of some presence—the hour when the discipline of life is lax, and the human mind will turn from every plan, every need of life, however urgent, to any emotion that may enter.
The Duke of Dorset did not move. The desperate and crying difficulties that beset him became gradually remote. He could not take the road to the coast as he had hoped; he dared not cross the river under this moon. And every moment here was one of almost immediate peril. They had been quickly followed on the road. They would be as quickly followed down the mountain. These things were impending and real, but they seemed, in this silence, remote and unreal. The man sat in contentment, like one drawing at a pipe of opium; a peace, a serenity like that of the night entered into him; a thing for which we have no word; something strange, mysterious, wonderful, drew near—was at hand—a thing that was, somehow, the moving impulse of life, the object of it, the focus into which drew every act running back to the day that he was born.
A certain vast importance seemed now to attend him. The horror and turbulence of this night had been benefits to him. Events, ruthless to others, kind to him. Some god, bloody and old, savage and cruel, but somehow loving him, had stamped out the world for his benefit, and left him sitting among the wreck of it, with the one thing he wanted. It could not escape from him; he had only to put out his hand.
An hour passed. The world still lay silent. The very dead fringe clinging to the fir limbs were motionless; the dull, monotonous sound of the river, rolling in its bed, was a sort of silence. Brief periods of darkness now covered the river and the road as the moon entered the company of clouds. No one of the three persons moved. The white figure so near to the Duke of Dorset might have been wholly an illusion of the sense. The wet clothes on the man's body dried. Another hour passed. Then faint cries, hardly to be distinguished, descended from the mountain behind them. The man arose and listened, he now heard the sounds distinctly; he heard also a second sound carrying through the forest.
Some one was coming along the river bank, through the undergrowth, a mile away.