CHAPTER XXVII
"The shadow that fell from the tall sunflowers."
How Klara Goldstein spent that terrible night she never fully realized. After half an hour or so she dragged herself up from the floor. Full consciousness had returned to her, and with it the power to feel, to understand and to fear.
A hideous, awful terror was upon her which seemed to freeze her through and through; a cold sweat broke out all over her body, and she was trembling from head to foot. She crawled as far as the narrow little bed which was in a corner of the room, and just managed to throw herself upon it, on her back, and there to remain inert, perished with cold, racked with shivers, her eyes staring upwards into the darkness, her ears strained to listen to every sound that came from the other side of the door.
But gradually, as she lay, her senses became more alive; the power to think coherently, to reason with her fears, asserted itself more and more over those insane terrors which had paralysed her will and her heart. She did begin to think—not only of herself and of her miserable position, but of the man who lay outside—dying or dead.
Yes! That soon became the most insistent thought.
Leopold Hirsch, having done the awful deed, had fled, of course, but his victim might not be dead, he might be only wounded and dying for want of succour. Klara—closing her eyes—could almost picture him, groaning and perhaps trying to drag himself up in a vain endeavour to get help.
Then she rose—wretched, broken, terrified—but nevertheless resolved to put all selfish fears aside and to ascertain the full extent of the tragedy which had been enacted outside her door. She lit the storm-lantern, then, with it in her hand, she went through the tap-room and opened the front door.
She knew well the risks which she was running, going out like this into the night, and alone. Any passer-by might see her—ask questions, suspect her of connivance when she told what it was that she had come out to seek in the darkness behind her own back door. But to this knowledge and this small additional fear she resolutely closed her mind. Drawing the door to behind her, she stepped out on to the verandah and thence down the few steps into the road below.
A slight breeze had sprung up within the last half-hour, and had succeeded in chasing away the heavy banks of cloud which had hung over the sky earlier in the evening.