“I wanted to tell Her Serene Highness that I’d killed that American pig.”
Erica heard; but not until the words had repeated themselves again and again in her brain did she understand them. Her cousin went on: “He was pleased when I told him; he gave me one of his peaches. But he doesn’t want her to know about it. He doesn’t understand women’s—”
“What was that?” exclaimed Moltzahn, and both leaped to their feet. Aloyse rushed to the doorway.
Erica had sunk straight down to the floor, and, as her collapsed body fell over, her sword and helmet clashed against the stone. Aloyse, looking into the dimness, could see the form of a soldier—suggestions of the uniform of the Household Guards. He muttered a curse.
“What is it?” called Moltzahn.
“The old brute has put a guard over me,” said Aloyse, turning back, “and the fellow’s in a drunken sleep. You’d better go.”
Moltzahn fled, with only a glance at Erica, and Aloyse closed his door and went sullenly to bed. Gradually the coolness of the stone revived her. She sat up—and remembered. She could not imagine, did not try to imagine, how long she had lain there or why she had not been discovered. A wave of desolation swept over her. She had thought she loved this man who had come into her life so suddenly, who had taken her heart by storm, who had opened for her a way of escape from a wearisome life which marriage to her cousin would have made hideous, unendurable. But she did not until now realize how much she loved him—not as her liberator but as her lover. “No; he is not dead!” her heart protested. “Aloyse is a liar, a braggart. There is some mistake.”
She dragged herself to her feet. “I will go back,” she moaned. “Dead—my love is dead!” She knew that it was the truth; she felt that it was a lie. “But I shall go back—”
To what? To be the wife of the man she had heard boasting of his murder. She became suddenly strong. “Never! Never!” And aching with grief, yet hoping beside the corpse of hope, she rushed on until she was almost in the arms of a sentinel. She turned back and dropped upon a bench round a corner a few feet from him. The big bell of the chapel boomed half-past one. She rose and went a few steps in the direction of Aloyse’s room. Hate, a passion for vengeance, was bounding through her veins; she would wrench the truth from him, then kill him.
But now there came the sound of several shots and confused shouts. The sentinel ran, and she turned and followed him across one of the huge entrance halls out into the open; the cool air from the mountains poured upon her, and her heart began to revive. She saw a man dart from the shadow of The Castle’s walls to the west, strike down a soldier who barred his path, and run zig-zag towards the forest. All were rushing in that direction, and she ran also, but as quickly as she could plunged into the deep shadows. She made a détour and took a course parallel to the road that led to the park gates, two miles and a half away. She must get to the cross-roads where Ernestine’s brother would be waiting—to tell her that her lover was dead! But instead of enfeebling her the thought carried only enough conviction of its truth to inflame her desire to get away—to fly where she would never again see the wretch who had desolated her.