"Adieu, and bon voyage!"
The drivers cracked their whips; in another moment the heavy wheels had thundered over the loose flooring of the drawbridge. Like silver-girt phantoms the coaches disappeared in the misty moonlight.
He was alone--more alone than any outcast in God's wide world. What should he do?
He began wearily to drag his footsteps up the incline. The brambles that tangled the ground wound round his ankles. A firefly made a zigzag thread of flame in front of him. From the top of the hill the great, weird, dark masses of the Castle ruins looked down on him, as if threatening to fall on him and bury him beneath their debris. Through the yawning window-casements the moon shone, giving them the appearance of huge ghostly eyes. He roamed absently past the towers, a sudden exhaustion weighing like lead upon his limbs. If only he could fall asleep and never wake again.
He tried to remember what it was his friend had called out to him from the coach at parting. He racked and racked his brains, but his memory failed him.
The grass plot, where he had first found the half-wild girl, lay before him brightly illumined by the moon. The spot where she had begun to dig the grave stood out in uncanny blackness from the rest of the shining turf.
If only he had shovelled the corpse into it and gone on his way, perhaps somewhere at the other end of the world some sort of happiness might still have been in store for him.
But now it was too late. Now all he could do was to endure--to complete the work of defiance begun to-day under such gloomy circumstances. Desolate and alone till the end. Never to feel again the clasp of a friendly hand, never to look with trust and affection into any human face, since the doughty comrades he had so firmly believed in had recoiled from him shuddering.
And had not the beloved shrunk from him too in horror? It seemed clear now for the first time why she had avoided him and hidden herself.
He was cut adrift from all the joys and sorrows that form a common bond between the hearts of men--cut adrift from love, hope, compassion, from everything but ignominy and hate.