The other two men, looking awestruck and horrified over the edge of the crag, saw them fall two hundred feet sheer into the soft snow beneath. It received them gently. Not a sign marked the spot where the two bodies sank in. The soft snow closed over them. But they must have been dead many seconds before they reached the bottom.
CHAPTER LII
A CONFESSION OF FAITH
It was a terrible time for Linnet, those few days at the inn, while she waited to bury her murdered husband. She felt so lonely, here among her own people; her isolation came out even more vividly than she could have expected: she had outgrown them, that was the fact, and they could no longer sympathise with her. Their very deference and respect chilled her heart to the core in that appalling season of solitary wretchedness: they regarded her just in the light of the great lady from London, too grand and too fine for them to venture upon comforting her. So Linnet was forced to have out her dark hour by herself, and be content for the rest with the respectful silence of her poor fellow-country-people.
The first night, in particular, was a very painful trial to her. By evening, they had brought back Franz’s body from the snowdrift; and now it lay with Ludwig Dangl beside her dead husband’s in the dancing-hall that stood just below the very room where Linnet had to spend the first night of her widowhood. Though she kept the candle burning, and the crucifix by her side, the awful sense of solitude through the long slow hours, with those three hostile corpses lying side by side in the hall beneath her, made her shudder with affright each time she woke with a start from a snatch of hurried sleep, much disturbed by hateful dreams, to the reality of her still more hateful position.
Early next morning, however, a messenger arrived post haste from Zell, with a telegram directed to Frau Hausberger, St Valentin. Linnet tore it open mechanically, half dreading some fresh surprise. As she read it, she drew a deep breath. Oh, that dear, dear Rue! This was quite too good of her. “Have heard of your trouble, and sympathise with you deeply. Am on my way to join you. Shall reach St Valentin to-morrow evening.”
It was a measure to Linnet of how English she had become, that, as she stood on the platform at Jenbach next day, awaiting the arrival of Rue’s train from Innsbruck, she felt as though she were expecting the advent of some familiar home-friend, coming to cheer her solitude in a land of strangers. When at last the train drew up, Rue leapt from the carriage into her rival’s arms, and caressed her tenderly. Linnet looked sweet in her simple dark dress, the plainest she possessed, for she hadn’t yet had time to get her mourning ready. “How did you hear of it all, you dear kind Rue?” she inquired, half-hysterically, clasping her new friend to her bosom in a sudden outburst of sated sympathy. “It couldn’t surely have got so soon into the English papers.”
“No, dear,” Rue answered, in her tenderest tone, laying one soft hand soothingly on the pale cheek as she answered. “I’d written to St Valentin beforehand, to some one whose address Will Deverill gave me, asking for news of you every day, and enclosing money; and he telegraphed to me at once as soon as all this happened. His name’s Fridolin Telser, and Will says he is a cousin of yours. So, of course, as soon as I heard, I felt I must come out, post haste, to join you; for I knew, Linnet, how lonely you’d be—and how much in need of a woman’s sympathy.”
Linnet answered nothing. That “of course” was too much for her. She burst into tears instead, and sobbed her full heart out contentedly on Rue’s friendly shoulder. They drove back to St Valentin hand-in-hand together. That night, Rue slept with her, in a little room in the village; and though they talked for hours with one another, and only dozed at intervals, Linnet rose next morning fresher and stronger by far than she had felt at any time since the day of the murder.