"You can have my money if you will—and I am very rich, as you know—so that you only go. Go!" she cried suddenly.
Sidonia shook from head to foot as she spoke at last. But her eyes and her voice were indomitable in their determination. As if her slender sunburnt hand had struck him a deadly blow, Steven Lee, Count Kielmansegg, stepped back a couple of paces, and the blood, ebbing from his face, left it grey. He paused for a while, then made a bow, turned on his heel, and went to the door. On the threshold he looked back at her for a second again. It was a farewell look, and bore in it a pride as high and bleeding as her own, a reproach as keen. She saw that his lip trembled. Then the door was closed, very gently, between them, and she heard his steps die away down the winding stone stairs.
She glanced at her new wedding-ring and thought her heart must break, but yet she sat and made no effort to recall him.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SKIRT OF WAR
"And there was mounting, in hot haste, the steed.
The mustering squadron and the clattering car
Went pouring forward with impetuous speed..."
BYRON.
It was a day of scurrying breezes and dappled skies. Long pools reflected blue and white in the ruts of his Majesty King Jerome of Westphalia's neglected highway. Wide and deep ruts they were, tracks of the "Grand Army" that had been; and even a village child could have told that great guns and waggons had passed that way before the sweeping by of the last spring storm.
But the rider, on his big-boned, iron-grey horse, splashed through the mud at reckless speed. He had no thought for the story of the wounded country road. Its tragic significance would have left him unmoved had he understood. Such experience as he had just been through changes the whole world in a man's eyes: he becomes as one who, a moment before in perfect health, finds himself shattered by some disabling accident—nothing in life can ever look, ever feel the same again. He had wrenched himself free of love's snare as the wild thing of the woods from the teeth of the springe; but at what vital hurt, how maimed, how bruised, how deeply marked! What was it to him that the west wind, dashing against his face, was balmy with the breath of the black pinewoods on the rising slopes to his right; that the rank meadows that fell away to the left were colour alive, gold-green in the sunlight; that shadows swept across them like spirit messages? His ears were deaf to the organ chant of the pines, to the shrill call of the bird echoing back from the blue vault. Unmoved, he trotted through the poverty-stricken villages, by the deserted homesteads, once flourishing, beside the wasted cornfields. One whom life was treating as evilly as himself could not be expected to bestow even the alms of a pitying thought to the peasant soldiers, stiff in the snows of Russia, or plodding, vanquished at last, in Spanish rocky deserts, nor to the starving families to whom the breadwinner would never return. He did not even care whither he was hurrying, so long as he crossed the nearest frontier of a country to him accursed. To this goal all the passions of his mind were pointed.
* * * * *
With head bent towards the wind, and fiddle slung on his shoulder, a wandering musician was breasting the hill, where the high Imperial road skirting the Thuringian forest bends towards that fertile valley watered by the Fulda. The sinews of Steven's steed faltered before the steepness of the ascent, and the mounted traveller, curbing his impatience to suit the way, found himself level with the humble wayfarer at a pace that made companionship inevitable. Yet, on the instant that he had recognized him, the rider would fain have passed unnoticed. It seemed hard, a perversity of fate, that in this wide, empty country, he should stumble upon the one man whom he would of all others avoid; the man who had had so much influence—he now thought for disaster—upon his life.