A mournful, wailing, dirgelike sound was heard in front. Standing up in the vehicle, its occupants made out a number of white-clad figures advancing round a bend in the road. The dark-covered horizontal burden borne in the midst; the glitter of the crucifix moving slowly in front; the measured and solemn chant; the clang of the bell from the tower—all told the nature of that procession advancing along the desolate and lonely wooded plateau. Its errand was one of death; and they, the unlooked-for spectators, they, too, were bound upon an errand of death.
“Requiem aeternum dona ei Domine: et lux perpetua luceat ei” chanted the singers. The Basque driver doffed his beret and bent his head devoutly as the cortège went by, and the Major and Philip lifted their hats. But the words, the chant, struck upon the tatter’s ear with indescribable import, for they brought back a very different scene. He saw again the arching blue of the cloudless heavens above the Val d’Anniviers, the rugged cliff and the feathery pine forest, the vernal slopes and the flower-strewn graves. Again the dull roar of the mountain torrent rose upon the air, and Alma Wyatt’s voice was in his ears as upon that glowing morning in the churchyard at Vissoye. And now he heard it again, that chant for the dead, here in the wild solitudes of this Pyrenean forest country, swelling through the murk of the lowering heavens. And he himself was going forth to death—to meet death or to deal it out to another.
“Si iniquitates observaveris Domine: Domine quis sustinebit!” The chant rolled on, now sinking fainter as the funeral procession receded. Heavens! here was a comment on the errand of hate and vengeance—the errand of blood which had brought these two abroad that morning.
“If I were inclined to be superstitious, I should take that incident to be unlucky,” said the Major, with a jerk of his thumb in the direction followed by the receding cortège, “but I’m not, so it doesn’t matter. En avant, Michel.”
But the driver as he obeyed turned half round on his box to ask for directions, with the result that the carriage turned abruptly off into a bypath which penetrated deeper into the forest. A few hundred yards along this and the Major called a halt.
“We will leave the trap here, Orlebar. The place is close at hand, and the other party is sure to be on the spot.”
“You seem to know it well, Major,” said Philip. “Why, I couldn’t have ferretted it out to save my life.”
“My dear fellow, I have been here before—in times past,” was the answer, given with a touch of dryness.
Voices were now heard just ahead of them, and as they emerged into a sequestered open glade three figures were standing in a group chatting. They belonged to Fordham and two strangers—one mustachioed and grizzled, the other mustachioed and dark.
“Good morning—good morning,” said the Major, briskly, raising his hat as he stepped forward.