A hundred yards further, and the flame became a fire dancing redly by the roadside; and there were shadows flitting about it, and, close by, a looming mass that threw back little spars and runlets of reflection to the spouting blaze.
Clipping indecision with a jerk of his rowels, Mr. Tuke uttered a shout and rode down upon the group. There was an answering cry; and he saw a figure or two throw up its hands, dramatically entreating him to a halt. Something he noticed in time to respond, and pulled up his horse with so great a suddenness upon the icy road, that the brute sank upon its haunches and half-tumbled him out of the saddle.
He was on the ground in a moment, and, whipping the frightened animal to its feet, moved towards the fire and was made way for by those about it.
He looked down. The body of a man lay uncouthly flung beside the glow—that had been built up hastily of brushwood and dead sticks in a hopeless effort to rekindle a late-extinguished spark of life. The flame painted the waxen face and fallen jaw with a hectic mockery of vitality, and glinted on a dribbling splash in the forehead where something had crushed in through the very ring of a cherished love-lock.
A woman was down upon the grass by the figure—moaning to it, caressing it, with some piteous shame of the awful publicity of her conduct; for she would not believe in the impotence of her agony to rouse that silent shape to any responsive gesture; and, in the background of her thoughts, was some insane speculation as to how, when all was right again, she should hold her terror an apology for her emotion.
Close behind her stood a little crying boy, his fingers in his eyes; and it was moving to see how, in the youngling’s cap and in the breast of the kneeling woman, were merry knots of Christmas—earnests of a thoughtless time.
“The guard?” murmured the new-comer.
He grasped the situation with only too sure an intuition. The glooming mass in the road was nothing less than that same lusty vehicle they had seen but an hour or two before rumble away from the inn-door, its jovial horn answering to the lips of that formless thing by the fire.
“Aye,” grunted the coachman, from the covert of his preposterous neckcloth. He had come up on the moment, from the task of slowly manipulating his cut traces.
“That’s the last of Charlie,” he said, with some thickness of fury in his tone.