Marion made no reply, save by a slight movement, as if she were drawing herself together, and they drove on in silence. Their conversation had been carried on in low tones, but with deep and tremulous emphasis on Marion’s part; she was aroused and moved in a way that Philip had never seen before; the activity of the singular power which she believed herself to possess had caused the veil which usually obscured her character to roll back; and Philip was conscious of the immediate contact, as it were, of a nature warm, deep, passionate, and intensely feminine. The heavy darkness and silence of night that enveloped him and her was made, in a sense, luminous by this revelation, and the anticipation of the adventure which lay so short a distance before them overcame the intellectual coldness which was the vice of his character, and kindled the latent energies of his soul. How incongruous sounded the regular and methodical footfall of the old white horse, duskily visible in the gloom as he plodded between the shafts.
A few minutes passed thus; and then a hard, abrupt noise rang out, ending flatly, without an echo. The distance from which it came seemed not more than a hundred yards. The horse threw up his head and partly halted, but immediately resumed his jog-trot. Philip, holding the reins in his left hand, grasped his pistol with his right, and cocked it. Marion rose to her feet, and sent forth her voice, with an astonishing volume of sound, leaping penetratingly into the night. Another shout answered hers more faintly from the blind region beyond. It was not repeated. The wagon jolted roughly over a narrow bridge that spanned a still-flowing brook. Then, like a sudden portentous birth out of sable chaos, sprang the scrambling speed of a horse’s headlong gallop, and a dark mass hurtled by, with fiery sparks smitten from the flinty road by iron-shod hoofs. It passed them and was gone, plunging into invisibility with a sort of fury of haste, as of a lost spirit rushing at annihilation.
Philip had raised his weapon to fire, but a shade of doubt made him forbear to pull the trigger. This man might not be the guilty one, and to kill an innocent man would be worse than to let a guilty man escape. Marion, who was looking straight forward, had not seemed to notice the figure at all as it swept past. All her faculties were concentrated elsewhere. The old white horse, apparently startled out of his customary impassivity, lifted up his nose and rattled the wagon along at a surprising rate. But the journey was nearly at an end.
A little way beyond the bridge, the road, which had heretofore lain between hawthorn hedges, out of which, at intervals, grew large elm or lime trees, suddenly spread out to three or four times its general breadth, forming a sort of open place of oval shape, and about half an acre in area. The road passed along one side of this oval; the rest was turf, somewhat marshy toward the left. Philip stopped the horse and he and Marion got down. He took the lantern, and they went forward on foot. The narrow rays of the lantern, striking along the ground in front, rested flickeringly upon a dark object lying near the edge of the road, next the turf. They walked up to the object and Philip stooped to examine it, Marion standing by with her head turned away. But, at an exclamation from Philip, she started violently and began to tremble.
“There are two here!” he said.
Marion’s teeth chattered. “Dead?” she said, in a thin voice.
“No. At least, one of them is not. His heart beats, and.... Yes, he’s trying to say something.” Philip stooped lower, and let all the light of the lantern fall on this man’s face. “I don’t recognize him—or—why, it’s Bendibow!”
Marion caught her breath sharply. “Sir Francis?”
“No, no—Tom Bendibow.”
Marion said nothing, but knelt down beside the other figure, which was lying prostrate, and turned it over, so that the face was revealed. It was Mr. Grant, and he was dead, shot through the heart. After a few moments she looked up at Philip and said huskily: