Armand had wakened from his attack of faintness, and brother and sister sat close to one another, shoulder touching shoulder. That sense of nearness was the one tiny spark of comfort to both of them on this dreary, dreary way.
The coach had lumbered on unceasingly since all eternity—so it seemed to them both. Once there had been a brief halt, when Heron’s rough voice had ordered the soldier at the horses’ heads to climb on the box beside him, and once—it had been a very little while ago—a terrible cry of pain and terror had rung through the stillness of the night. Immediately after that the horses had been put at a more rapid pace, but it had seemed to Marguerite as if that one cry of pain had been repeated by several others which sounded more feeble and soon appeared to be dying away in the distance behind.
The soldier who sat opposite to them must have heard the cry too, for he jumped up, as if wakened from sleep, and put his head out of the window.
“Did you hear that cry, citizen?” he asked.
But only a curse answered him, and a peremptory command not to lose sight of the prisoners by poking his head out of the window.
“Did you hear the cry?” asked the soldier of Marguerite as he made haste to obey.
“Yes! What could it be?” she murmured.
“It seems dangerous to drive so fast in this darkness,” muttered the soldier.
After which remark he, with the stolidity peculiar to his kind, figuratively shrugged his shoulders, detaching himself, as it were, of the whole affair.
“We should be out of the forest by now,” he remarked in an undertone a little while later; “the way seemed shorter before.”
Just then the coach gave an unexpected lurch to one side, and after much groaning and creaking of axles and springs it came to a standstill, and the citizen agent was heard cursing loudly and then scrambling down from the box.
The next moment the carriage-door was pulled open from without, and the harsh voice called out peremptorily:
“Citizen soldier, here—quick!—quick!—curse you!—we’ll have one of the horses down if you don’t hurry!”
The soldier struggled to his feet; it was never good to be slow in obeying the citizen agent’s commands. He was half-asleep and no doubt numb with cold and long sitting still; to accelerate his movements he was suddenly gripped by the arm and dragged incontinently out of the coach.
Then the door was slammed to again, either by a rough hand or a sudden gust of wind, Marguerite could not tell; she heard a cry of rage and one of terror, and Heron’s raucous curses. She cowered in the corner of the carriage with Armand’s head against her shoulder, and tried to close her ears to all those hideous sounds.
Then suddenly all the sounds were hushed and all around everything became perfectly calm and still—so still that at first the silence oppressed her with a vague, nameless dread. It was as if Nature herself had paused, that she might listen; and the silence became more and more absolute, until Marguerite could hear Armand’s soft, regular breathing close to her ear.
The window nearest to her was open, and as she leaned forward with that paralysing sense of oppression a breath of pure air struck full upon her nostrils and brought with it a briny taste as if from the sea.
It was not quite so dark; and there was a sense as of open country stretching out to the limits of the horizon. Overhead a vague greyish light suffused the sky, and the wind swept the clouds in great rolling banks right across that light.
Marguerite gazed upward with a more calm feeling that was akin to gratitude. That pale light, though so wan and feeble, was thrice welcome after that inky blackness wherein shadows were less dark than the lights. She watched eagerly the bank of clouds driven by the dying gale.
The light grew brighter and faintly golden, now the banks of clouds—storm-tossed and fleecy—raced past one another, parted and reunited like veils of unseen giant dancers waved by hands that controlled infinite space—advanced and rushed and slackened speed again—united and finally torn asunder to reveal the waning moon, honey-coloured and mysterious, rising as if from an invisible ocean far away.
The wan pale light spread over the wide stretch of country, throwing over it as it spread dull tones of indigo and of blue. Here and there sparse, stunted trees with fringed gaunt arms bending to prevailing winds proclaimed the neighbourhood of the sea.
Marguerite gazed on the picture which the waning moon had so suddenly revealed; but she gazed with eyes that knew not what they saw. The moon had risen on her right—there lay the east—and the coach must have been travelling due north, whereas Crecy...
In the absolute silence that reigned she could perceive from far, very far away, the sound of a church clock striking the midnight hour; and now it seemed to her supersensitive senses that a firm footstep was treading the soft earth, a footstep that drew nearer—and then nearer still.
Nature did pause to listen. The wind was hushed, the night-birds in the forest had gone to rest. Marguerite’s heart beat so fast that its throbbings choked her, and a dizziness clouded her consciousness.
But through this state of torpor she heard the opening of the carriage door, she felt the onrush of that pure, briny air, and she felt a long, burning kiss upon her hands.
She thought then that she was really dead, and that God in His infinite love had opened to her the outer gates of Paradise.
“My love!” she murmured.
She was leaning back in the carriage and her eyes were closed, but she felt that firm fingers removed the irons from her wrists, and that a pair of warm lips were pressed there in their stead.
“There, little woman, that’s better so—is it not? Now let me get hold of poor old Armand!”
It was Heaven, of course, else how could earth hold such heavenly joy?
“Percy!” exclaimed Armand in an awed voice.
“Hush, dear!” murmured Marguerite feebly; “we are in Heaven you and I—”
Whereupon a ringing laugh woke the echoes of the silent night.
“In Heaven, dear heart!” And the voice had a delicious earthly ring in its whole-hearted merriment. “Please God, you’ll both be at Portel with me before dawn.”
Then she was indeed forced to believe. She put out her hands and groped for him, for it was dark inside the carriage; she groped, and felt his massive shoulders leaning across the body of the coach, while his fingers busied themselves with the irons on Armand’s wrist.
“Don’t touch that brute’s filthy coat with your dainty fingers, dear heart,” he said gaily. “Great Lord! I have worn that wretch’s clothes for over two hours; I feel as if the dirt had penetrated to my bones.”
Then with that gesture so habitual to him he took her head between his two hands, and drawing her to him until the wan light from without lit up the face that he worshipped, he gazed his fill into her eyes.
She could only see the outline of his head silhouetted against the wind-tossed sky; she could not see his eyes, nor his lips, but she felt his nearness, and the happiness of that almost caused her to swoon.
“Come out into the open, my lady fair,” he murmured, and though she could not see, she could feel that he smiled; “let God’s pure air blow through your hair and round your dear head. Then, if you can walk so far, there’s a small half-way house close by here. I have knocked up the none too amiable host. You and Armand could have half an hour’s rest there before we go further on our way.”
“But you, Percy?—are you safe?”
“Yes, m’dear, we are all of us safe until morning-time enough to reach Le Portel, and to be aboard the Day-Dream before mine amiable friend M. Chambertin has discovered his worthy colleague lying gagged and bound inside the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. By Gad! how old Heron will curse—the moment he can open his mouth!”
He half helped, half lifted her out of the carriage. The strong pure air suddenly rushing right through to her lungs made her feel faint, and she almost fell. But it was good to feel herself falling, when one pair of arms amongst the millions on the earth were there to receive her.
“Can you walk, dear heart?” he asked. “Lean well on me—it is not far, and the rest will do you good.”
“But you, Percy—”
He laughed, and the most complete joy of living seemed to resound through that laugh. Her arm was in his, and for one moment he stood still while his eyes swept the far reaches of the country, the mellow distance still wrapped in its mantle of indigo, still untouched by the mysterious light of the waning moon.
He pressed her arm against his heart, but his right hand was stretched out towards the black wall of the forest behind him, towards the dark crests of the pines in which the dying wind sent its last mournful sighs.
“Dear heart,” he said, and his voice quivered with the intensity of his excitement, “beyond the stretch of that wood, from far away over there, there are cries and moans of anguish that come to my ear even now. But for you, dear, I would cross that wood to-night and re-enter Paris to-morrow. But for you, dear—but for you,” he reiterated earnestly as he pressed her closer to him, for a bitter cry had risen to her lips.
She went on in silence. Her happiness was great—as great as was her pain. She had found him again, the man whom she worshipped, the husband whom she thought never to see again on earth. She had found him, and not even now—not after those terrible weeks of misery and suffering unspeakable—could she feel that love had triumphed over the wild, adventurous spirit, the reckless enthusiasm, the ardour of self-sacrifice.
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