III
Why should I speak of that weary, wretched tramp of a sorely-wounded man, in the dead of night, on sharply-rising ground, and along a track strewn with dead and dying, with broken bits of steel and torn accoutrements, on sodden ground rendered slippery with blood? Messire Gilles himself never spoke of it to any one, so why should I put it on record? It took him five hours to cover less than half a league, and he, of a truth, could not have told you how he did it even in that time. He was not really fully conscious, which was no doubt one of God's many mercies, for he did not feel the pain and the fatigue, and when he stumbled and fell, as he very often did, he picked himself up again with just that blind, insentient action which the instinct of self-preservation will at times give to man.
Whenever he recalled this terrible episode in his chequered career, it took the form in his brain of a whirl of confused memories. The tinkling of the bell ceased after a while, and the moans which rose from the field of battle were soon left behind. Anon only a group of tiny lights guided him. They came from the windows of the monastery on the heights above, still so far—so very far away. Beyond those lights and the stillness—nothing; neither pain, nor cold, nor fatigue, only a gradual sinking of sense, of physical and mental entity into a dark unknown, bottomless abyss. Then a sudden, awful stumble, more terrible than any that had gone before, a sharp agonizing blow on the head—a fall—a fall into the yawning abyss—then nothing more.