"Where?" replied the wanderer, "where, but to the forest, to the green arms that will hold your love so safely, so discreetly? To the quiet and peace of the forest, before you shape your way together, children, into the great noisy world. To the simplicity of the forest, you, young magnate, that you may for ever afterwards have a memory of love as the breath of nature itself to haunt you in your grandeur. To the Forest House, you, little madam, whither I once brought a youth who was missing his springtime and had lost his way, that he might find them both."
* * * * *
The fiddler sat on the box, and the horses went roundly. The rain had given place to a heavy autumnal mist, soaking, all encompassing. It muffled every sound, the drumming of the hoofs in the mud, the roll of the wheels, the very clack of the whip. But he drove with extraordinary sureness and speed in spite of the gloom, and the lamps of the berline soon cast their flashes out upon the flying ghosts of the poplars on the desert country road. It seemed as if the night, the whole world, connived at the lovers' flight, gathered round them in screening mystery and silence.
Sidonia lay on her husband's shoulder, half dreaming again in happy weariness, lulled by the monotonous movement and rhythm. It was from a profound sleep that she started suddenly with a faint cry:
"What was that?"—A dull boom was still droning in her ears.
"That was cannon," said Steven.
At this moment the carriage drew up, and they could hear the fiddler calling to them. Steven put his head out of the window and saw the dark face with its sardonic smile, lit up by the carriage-lamp, looking down at him.
"Did you mark that, comrade?—and again! Ha, there goes little brother Jerome's little throne! Hey, what a scuttle there be yonder now! My children, you have not run away together one hour too soon. That will no doubt be Csernischeff and his Cossacks; they have made good use of the first autumn fog. It is in with them by the Leipzig gate, no doubt—of ill omen! And few of our honest Westphalians will care to turn out to-night and be spitted or shot for the sweet eyes of Jerome. It is the end this time—meet that it should be our friends the Huns that do the scavenging.... You remember them, Count Steven, the carrion crows on the trail...?"
Sidonia pulled her husband back that she might look out in her turn. The red glow of some distant conflagration was beginning to be faintly perceptible behind them in the pall of fog. She had heard the fiddler's explanation, and rejoiced in her young, unforgiving heart. Yet already Cassel and its terrors were fading from her mind. She sniffed the wet air as a doe might; and while the fiddler gazed down at her, an air of tender amusement driving the scorn from his face, she strained her ear as though to catch some secret sounds.
"Yes, child," said he, nodding at her; "yes, it is the woods you smell, the trees you hear. Yonder is the inn of The Three Ways, and presently we shall turn into the forest road."