"As I believe, that child's unhappy father."
Aroused by this to forget her own sufferings, even to forget for the moment the dreadful burden borne by the gallows tree, she thrust out her hand and seized his sleeve.
"Who, then, is the dying man?" she whispered.
"I know not—but—but—for mercy's sake, in memory of the misery you have suffered, in pity for mine, lead me to this man! You know where he is; you can do so?"
"Come," she said. "Come. He is in my hut close by. We were very poor, we had no better. Come. Tie your horse to a tree and follow me."
Dazed, scarce knowing whether he was awake or asleep and dreaming, he obeyed her, leading the horse away some paces so that it should be no more frightened by the horrible burden of the gibbet, and following her through a thicket. In other circumstances he might have feared an ambush; now, a thousand hidden enemies would not have held him back.
She wound her way along a trodden track leading down into the valley below, but went only a few score yards when she stopped outside what was indeed no better than a hut, a wooden building thatched with turf, from a window in which there gleamed a ray of light. And she, placing her ears to the door ere she pushed it open, said to him: "He lives still. You can hear his breathing. Hark!"
"Thank God!" St. Georges said fervently. "Whoever he may be, he will be able to tell me of the child. Open, I beg you; open in the name of mercy!"
She obeyed him at once, thrusting the door open and drawing him in, and then by the light of a miserable, small oil lamp that flickered on a rude wooden table he saw stretched upon a pallet in a corner of the place the dying man. Also he noticed that the room reeked and was fetid with his hot breath and with another hot, dry odour that he knew was the odour of blood.
In the shadow of the room St. Georges could see a white face, could also perceive two great staring eyes turned up to the rafters; he could hear, too, the drawn, labouring breath as it rattled through his throat and chest, accompanied by a moan as it came forth.