|The Duke turned instantly.
"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.