The flames, checked by the stone passage, and rising straight and clear in a windless night, had spared the stables; and thither at the last they all bent their footsteps, bearing the dead and the wounded with them.
My lord, my lady; Tom and Dick and Moll—there they were fain to camp amongst the muck and litter left by the fallow-deer; and the frost pinched them sadly, and hunger even, and for the sick thirst; and never did reluctant day so dawdle in the East.
CHAPTER LIV.
From a deadening of all his faculties, of all his perceptives, to stupor; from stupor to a delirium of weariness, in which so little as a ring on his finger was a conscious burden; from weariness to fever and a recrudescence of those mental and bodily pains he strove so frenziedly to forget; from this state at last to the yielding stage of exhaustion, and Tuke, the man not so much hurt as overwrought, fell into a profound slumber and got his restoration of it.
For long, before this came, he was aware only of a close darkness—a darkness that seemed a cabined horror of himself, were it not assured and comforted by a presence that, in supreme moments of torture, he grew to know he could depend upon for pitiful help and a silent passion of sympathy. This presence, swift and invisible, was always at hand when he most needed it—soothing, murmuring; taking upon itself the responsibility of questions he could not answer; brushing away with snowflakes the stinging wasps that settled on his shoulder. It was so prompt, so gentle, so full of resource, that he came to think that if he could only put to it the supreme problem that vexed him beyond endurance, it would resolve it at once with a quiet laugh, and so secure him everlasting peace. But, whenever he came to the point of explanation, he found that the problem itself had eluded him, and he could not remember what road it was that his tired brain had gone astray on. At length, ceasing to struggle, he floated inanimate on the tide against which he had fought to make head, and was borne by it into a haven of rest.
He woke to find himself lying on the ground in a queer little chilly chamber, into which a weak light filtered through a cobwebbed window. Looking up, in some pleasure of languor, he was interested in certain straps and buckles that hung from wooden brackets, and a couple of odd bonnet-shaped things that stuck out from the wall. Lazily he amused himself by associating these with twenty different uses, until—reason passing from the fields of romance into the high-road—he came in a moment to the knowledge that he was lying in his own harness-room, and to memory of all that had brought him there.
In the shock of revelation he struggled to a sitting posture and uttered a startled little pipe. It was no great sound, but it was enough to bring a certain bird to its wounded mate.
She came in, shut the door behind her, and, hurrying to him, knelt down and threw her arms round his neck, and cried joyful tears. Her pretty plumes were ruffled, her eyes clouded with the weariness of long watching; but she was ten times woman for her blouzed appearance, and he would not have had her one draggled wisp of hair the neater.
“Why, Betty, I am well—and what a fainting miss to succumb to a scratch!”
“Indeed it is an angry wound, and you were worn and sick.”