The fiddler worked his bow like one possessed. It was a fierce song of fight that now rose, ever shriller, louder, and faster, up towards the placid sky. The air was thick with the curses, blue with the profanity, of Forester Schmidt. But Steven fought like a gentleman, in silence. To his dying day he maintained that he was getting the better of the hulking bully, when his heel caught in an upstanding root, and he fell with a crash, his opponent over him. There was a moment's agony of suffocation, then the gleam before his eyes of a bared blade, gilt-blue in the moonlight, two echoing shouts, a woman's scream. And then Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg lost consciousness, his wits marching away at double-quick time to the lilt of an extraordinarily joyous vulgar little tune.
* * * * *
"Oh, Geiger-Onkel, is he dead?"
The girl with the yellow plaits stood in the light of the lantern; her wide eyes seemed to devour her face, white even in that uncertain glimmer; her parted lips quivered. From the forest house came the sound of loud wrangling voices, dominated presently by rhythmic feminine screams. In the kennels the dogs were barking furiously: it was a distracting clamour.
Yet the stillness of the young man's comely figure, relaxed at its length on the straw, the pallor of his head, thrown back like a sleeping child's against the fiddler's knee, seemed to make its own circle of silence.
"Dead?" echoed the vagrant. "Dead for a crack on the skull!" His tone was contemptuous. Yet his lean hands shook as they busied themselves in loosening Count Steven's very fine stock; and there was concern in his attitude as he bent over the youth's face, cruelly beautiful in its white unconsciousness.
Now Sidonia, the forest-mother's foster-child, remembered Geiger-Hans as far back as she could remember anything, and knew every shade of that sardonic visage. Dark she had often seen it, with a far-away melancholy—a melancholy, it seemed, beyond anything that life could touch. She had known it alight with mockery, softened into a wonderful tenderness that was for her alone, of all human beings, and for all sick or helpless animals. But moved to anxiousness as now, never before. She clasped her hands across the fluttering of her heart. Geiger-Hans glanced at her again and laughed gently. The traveller's befrogged coat was loose at last, the column of his young throat bare, and the musician had slipped a hand between the folds of a shirt finer than the girl's own snowy bodice.
"Why, little Sidonia," said he, as if she was once again the child, "you look as scared as a rabbit in a trap. Dead, this lad? Nay, his English mother, whoever she was, has built him too well for that. Why, here's a heart for you! With decent luck, it should make him swing into his nineties as steadily as the drums of the Old Guard."
As he spoke, he shifted the burden of the languid head to a convenient pile of straw, sprang to his feet and stood laughing again.
"Our wits are not the strongest part of us," he mocked. "They're always like to be the first things we lose." His lips twisted as he glanced downward. "A knock on our pate, and it is all away with them."