She had got him out of his room, out of the sitting-room, into the passage. The cab still waited, the cabman dozed on his box in the spring sunlight. Before the landlady Madame von Marwitz embraced Franz and kissed and blessed him. She kept an arm round him till she had him at the cab-door. She almost lifted him in.
"You will tell Karen—that you did not find it right—that I should say good-bye to her," he stammered.
And with a last long pressure of the hand she said: "I will tell her, Franz. We will talk much of you, Karen and I. Trust me, I am with you both. In my hands you are safe."
The cab rolled away and Franz's face, from under the round hat and the quill, looked back at the triumphant conjuror, dulled and dazed rather than elated, by the spectacle of her inconceivable skill.
CHAPTER XLIII
Karen lay sleeping in the little room above. She had slept so much since they had carried her, Franz, and the two women with kind faces, into this little room; deep draughts of sleep, as though her exhausted nature could never rest enough. Fever still drowsed in her blood and a haze of half delirious visions often accompanied her waking. They seemed to gather round her now, as, in confused and painful dreams, she rose from the depths towards consciousness again. Dimly she heard the sound of voices and her dream wove them into images of fear and sorrow.
She was running along the cliff-top. She had run for miles and it was night and beside her yawned the black gulfs of the cliff-edge. And from far below, in the darkness, she heard a voice wailing as if from some creature lost upon the rocky beach. It was Gregory in some great peril. Pity and fear beat upon her like black wings as she ran, and whether it was to escape him or to succour him she did not know.
Then from the waking world came distinctly the sound of rolling wheels, and opening her eyes she looked out upon her room, its low uneven ceiling, its coloured print of Queen Victoria over the mantelpiece, its text above the washhand-stand and chest of drawers. On the little table beside her bed Onkel Ernst's watch ticked softly. The window was open and a tree rustled outside. And through these small, familiar sounds she still heard the rolling of retreating wheels. The terror of her dream fastened upon this sound until another seemed to strike, like a soft, stealthy blow, upon her consciousness.
Footsteps were mounting the stairs to her room. Not Franz's footsteps, nor the doctor's, nor the landlady's, nor Annie the housemaid's. She knew all these.