In Direst Peril

by David Christie Murray

In effect, he found it, and found means to send it on to me. It was scrawled in pencil from a posting place on the road to Vienna, distant from Itzia four-and-twenty miles English, or thereabouts. I pored over this document in my own room, and made many heart-breaking attempts to imitate it. They were absolute failures, one and all. I had no faculty in that direction, and my own hand stared at me from the written page the more plainly and uncompromisingly for every effort I made to disguise it. Apart from the utter vileness of the imitation, I did not even clearly understand the words employed, and for aught I knew might be giving an order which, if put into execution, would be useless for my purpose.

I was compelled, unwillingly, to appeal to Brunow. He made light of the business, and in less than an hour he brought me an imitation which looked completely deceptive. He had been able, he told me, to trace the greater part of the order on the window-pane from the original I had given him to imitate; for the rest, to my surprise and gratitude, Brunow volunteered. He took advantage of our next meeting with Breschia to tell him that he was off on a three or four days' sketching expedition, leaving me behind. He commended me to the lieutenant's friendly hospitality with all his usual gayety of manner, and on the following morning he rode away. The arrangement made between us was that he should return at about ten o'clock on the following night with news of the general's approach. The general's horses should appear to have come to grief somehow, anyway (he guaranteed to find a plausible story), and Brunow was to pretend to have ridden on with a message ordering remounts. Then Hinge was to meet us at a given point, we being on foot, and we should all make for the frontier with speed.

So long as I live I shall never forget that day or the day that followed it. Hinge was advised of everything, and no doubt was doing all that needed to be done, but the suspense was scarcely bearable. To saunter about and look at those impenetrable walls, and to wonder what was going on behind them—to invent a thousand accidents, any one of which might wreck our plans for good and all, and to suffer in the contemplation of each of these inventions of my own as much as I could have suffered if it had been true, to read knowledge or suspicion in every innocent glance that fell upon me, to fear and suspect everybody and everything, and to keep a constant guard upon myself lest I should seem for an instant to be anxious and preoccupied with all this weight upon me—all this was an agony. I am not afraid to confess all this, for I have shown more than once that I am not deficient in courage of my own kind. But here I was a very coward, hateful and contemptible to myself.

The long day passed, and the long night, and then the real day of waiting came. The thing that weighed upon me most of all was that while I knew that every minute of rest and tranquillity I could snatch might be of moment to me, rest and tranquillity were absolutely impossible. For two whole nights I had not closed my eyes in sleep, and my brain seemed on fire. My nerves were going, too, under this intolerable strain, and I feared that if a crisis should arise I should lack coolness, and plunge into some avoidable disaster.

But the day wore itself out at last, and at ten o'clock at night I was wandering along the road by which Brunow must come, and listening with my soul in my ears for the first distant noise of hoof-beats. The sun had gone down in a bank of threatening cloud, and before the moon rose the last look I had taken at the hills which hemmed us in on every side had shown them seemingly hidden by driving mists, which travelled at an astonishing pace, betokening a wild wind up there, while the valley lay in a hot stillness. The light of the moon was in the sky long before she rose above the mountains, and I could see that the wild work up there was growing wilder every minute. The wind was descending, too, from its lofty altitude, and I could hear it now roaring and now muttering in the gullies like a discontented giant.

In the course of that waiting I was often mistaken in the sound of distant hoofs. I was tricked at least a thousand times. Now it was the wind in the trees, now it was a gurgle in the river, now it was a murmur of life in the village, now it was the movement of a goat, a cow, or a horse upon the hill-side. But at last I caught the real sound, and knew it at once from all the noises which had till then deceived my fancy. The rider came along at a good round pace, and in a while I heard Brunow singing—a signal to me, no doubt. I called aloud “Hello! that you, Brunow?” and he answered with a whoop, expressive of high spirits. There was light enough to see me as he passed without drawing rein.

“I've a message from the governor to the officer in charge,” he shouted. “Meet you at the inn by-and-by.” There was no reason why we should have met at all, but the sense of precaution which touched me in his words allayed my anxiety a little. If by any very improbable chance anybody within hearing had understood him, the pretence justified itself. It could do no harm, and it was worth while to look natural. I betook myself at once to the point we had agreed upon for a meeting-place, and waited there in a renewed suspense, to which all the wretchedness of waiting I had hitherto known seemed as nothing. Suddenly the wind took me with a great gust, which almost carried me off my feet; a clap of thunder directly overhead seemed actually simultaneous with a piercing glare of lightning, and the rain came down in torrents. After the flash of lightning everything looked so impenetrably black and formless that I might as well have stared about me with my eyes shut, but a second flash showed me the gate of the fortress quivering in the light, and so distinct and near that I might have believed it no more than a stone's throw off, though I knew it to be a full mile away. In the sudden howling of the wind and the pelting of the rain I could hear nothing, but I kept my aching eyes fixed in the direction of the fortress, and over and over again I saw it leap out of darkness distinct and seeming near, but quivering as if it were built of air and shaken by a wind. The river, which flowed quite near me, began to take a roaring and ominous tone, and I grew anxious lest the ford we meant to attempt three or four miles below should have become impassable by the time we reached it. To have passed through the village would have betrayed the fact that we were going in an opposite direction to the one proposed, and might have excited suspicion and immediate inquiry and pursuit. While the river growled in a more and more menacing tone beside me, I began to wish that our arrangements could be recast. We might easily have dared the village, trusting to a half-hour's start and the chapter of accidents, while now the swollen ford might delay us for whole hours. The plans could not be changed, however, and there was nothing to be done but wait.

I was wet to the skin, and dazed by the noises of the storm, and weary with want of sleep, but every sense of fatigue vanished when I saw, by the glare of the lightning between me and the fortress, the recognizable figures of Brunow and Hinge on horseback. There was a third horseman with them, and a led horse, and for a fraction of a second I could see them all wildly prancing and leaping together, as if the beasts were maddened by the storm, as no doubt they were. It seemed an hour—I have known a day seem to go by more quickly many a time—when another flash showed them nearer, like a dark group of statuary, the horses quivering at the glare, and the heads of the riders bent against the wind and rain. I ran forward, not daring to call, and found them again in the lightning and lost them again in the dark half a dozen times. When at last we met I hailed them in a guarded tone, though it was a marvel to me that nobody was abroad at such an hour. Brunow replied boisterously, and I mounted in the dark, being half doubled as I did so by a kick from one of the plunging horses. I was fortunately too near for the full effect of the blow, but the hoof took me at the hipbone, and for the moment paralyzed me. I had much difficulty in getting astride my own beast, but I judged it best to say nothing of what had happened. All sense of power had gone from my right leg, and I could get no grip upon the saddle; but as the first sensation of numbness passed away I became persuaded that no great hurt was done, though I was in much pain and found a difficulty in keeping my seat.

The fear of the horses made this no easy task, for at every flash they reared and broke away, and the ground over which we rode was difficult, and would have been uncanny even in the daylight, so that we made slow progress. I had travelled the way repeatedly, for this was the route by which I had decided to travel if ever we were so lucky as to be allowed the experiment, and I never had more reason to be thankful for my own care and foresight.

These mountain storms are very often things of an hour, and so to-night it proved. By the time we had reached the ford the thunder and lightning were far away, the wind had sunk to an occasional sob and moan, the rain had cleared, and the moon rode high in a mass of skurrying cloud, which at times obscured her light and at times left her almost clear. But the river was terribly swollen, and it was evident that we should not be able to cross it for a considerable time.