Ahead of me I could see her figure already ascending the slope of the third knoll. She moved easily, rapidly, experiencing no difficulty from the matted underbrush and cat-briar. She was following the trail. But at the top of the hill she turned—to the eastward, with her back to Toulon, that is. There a thick curtain of night seemed to have fallen before the taller underbrush. I saw her skirt as it vanished across the line of darkness into shrubbery that reached above her head. A second later I caught a glimpse of her ermine collar farther in, and then once more and then for a third time.
I was running with all the headlong speed I could muster. My foot caught in a snarl of cat-briar. I plunged forward, scraping across a flat stone. But I barely touched the ground. I was on my feet in an instant. “Madeleine! Madeleine!” I called.
I thought I caught sight of her ermine collar again as she hurried across a clearing. Then she was gone. The wet moss was thin above the solid ledging of the knoll. It slipped under my feet, on the brink of a ditch such as that which had cost Siegfried his life. I fell a second time. Again I was on my feet. And now, against the sky over the hill-top ahead of me, profiled on the leaden but much darker clouds, I saw the same mysterious figure I had seen at first—save that now it was of hazier, more indistinct outline.
“Madeleine! Madeleine!” I shouted desperately. And I dashed on.
Step by step the figure sank behind the crest of the hill. When I reached the place, I found one of her footprints in the mud on the edge of a stone. But she had disappeared completely. The soft moss preserved no record of her passage. Before me lay the silent, deserted slope of the Col de la Mort de Gauthier; to the right the escarpments of the Maurras range; to my left the approaches to the Grand Cap. And no signs of any human being!
In anguished desperation I tore out into the underbrush, on which night had definitely fallen. I was determined to overtake the fugitive, get to the bottom of this prodigious mystery. I ran and ran, all my heart bent on finding the slightest trace of her ... all my heart and all my bewildered mind. I mounted great boulders with one bound, and was over them in another. I went forward springing from rock to rock, falling at times, turning my ankles, forcing thickets of briars by sheer weight of impact, tearing my clothes, scratching my face and hands, but running, running, running. I thought I saw a light off to the left. I turned in that direction, and again ran on. I must have spent hours in this fruitless, aimless, despairing search. I remember that finally I sank to the ground, breathless, exhausted, utterly unable to move. I don’t know where I fell. I know simply that I lay there, insensible, corpse-like, dead; and, as happens when one had gone beyond his physical and spiritual resources, a deep, dreamless, annihilating sleep came over me.
XII
How long I had been sleeping there I do not know. But suddenly a curious, though well-known sensation drew me from my slumber—the sense of a strange presence near me, and of a gaze fixed upon me. I was lying on one side, with my forehead resting on my bent arm. Evidently then I could not see; but the emanation of that presence and the weight of that gaze impressed me at one and the same time, as a veritable blow striking me on the back of the head. The experience was not new to me. Often in a sound sleep have I thus divined the approach of a living being—though never with such intensity as this. I had the consciousness that the person who was thus powerfully exerting his influence upon me could be like no other human being I had ever seen. And I, who at that time—how unutterably distant in the past it seems!—was a young, a vigorous, a courageous man, instead of sitting up at once, and facing my visitant, lay there as I was, for some moments, with my forehead resting on my arm, pretending not to be awake, and listening, listening.