The forester roughly shook the man off the arm to which he was still clinging: "What? Lost? Thunder and lightning, man! what do you mean? Just when I think I have found the Countess, you turn up without her. Why did you not stay with her, as was your bounden duty?"
"It was not my fault," wailed the man. "The fog--the storm--and the horses have gone too!"
"Hold your tongue about the horses!" Wolfram interposed, roughly. "Men's lives are at stake, and you tell me nothing that I can understand. How came you here without the Countess?"
It was some time before the exhausted man was able to answer the forester's questions. He was an old family servant, faithful and trustworthy, and had therefore been chosen by the Countess to attend her daughter on this expedition, but he had completely lost his presence of mind in the face of the present peril, and had been of no service whatever to his mistress.
As Michael had surmised, they had taken the wrong road, and had discovered their mistake only upon reaching the mountain chapel. Then they had turned their horses' heads; but the moon, which until then had shone brightly, began to be obscured, and their ignorance of the country was disastrous. In vain did they turn in every direction; they could not find the road again and were completely lost. The horses, bewildered and nettled by the aimless wandering to and fro, finally refused to stir a step. There was nothing for it but to alight.
Then the tempest began; clouds gathered from all quarters. The Countess sent her attendant back a short distance for the horses, which had been left at the foot of a declivity, in a last hope that by trusting to their instinct the way might be found; but the servant had no sooner left her than the gathering mist closed about him, obscuring everything. He could not find the horses, nor make his way back to his mistress. His cry of distress was drowned by the roar of the tempest, and he had probably wandered away from her in his attempt to find her. How he had gone astray he could not tell.
"That is the worst of all!" exclaimed the forester. "The Countess is now entirely alone, and very likely has wandered towards the Eagle ridge, as Captain Rodenberg supposed. I should like to know why he chooses to run blindly into all kinds of danger after her? What we have to do, however, is to get to the mountain chapel as soon as possible. Come along! On the way we can go on shouting; it may do some good."
The storm raged with undiminished fury. Black clouds swept overhead and enveloped the mountains, breaking from time to time into a host of misty phantom shapes. And there was a roaring, a shrieking, and a howling, as of a myriad voices of the night echoing from the air above and from chasm and abyss below.
At the foot of a huge fir, the summit of which soared bare and dead into the air, a female figure was crouching, worn out by fruitless wandering, chilled by the mist and despairing of succour. The delicate child of luxury, whom hitherto the winds of heaven had not been allowed to visit too roughly, had nevertheless bravely confronted a real peril, and had done everything to encourage her attendant while they were together. The trembling old servant could neither advise nor aid his mistress; but he had at least given her a sense of human companionship, and now he had disappeared. No searching for him, no call, was of any avail; she was alone amid the horrors of this night,--entirely alone.
More than an hour had passed thus,--a time which must always be dream-like in her memory. She wandered on and on. Gloomy forests; dark rocky crests reared aloft like phantoms; mountain streams, whose foaming waters gleamed dimly in the fitful glimpses of the moon,--all passed her by, shadowy and indistinct. Like a somnambulist, she wandered on the brink of clefts and abysses, not heeding the perils of a path which she never would have dreamed of traversing in the broad light of day. But at last it came to an end in its upward course, and she could go no farther; she sank down exhausted.