"Well, Aubrey," I panted, with my hand on his shoulder.
His jaws chattered: he could make no answer.
It was about then that a light from, say, forty feet above streamed down comet-wise upon us that must have come from an electric dark-lantern, for, on looking up, I could see nothing save the dazzlement, though I have now an impression, too, of the hoofs of a horse on the cliff-edge: and a voice was shouting to us.
"There is," it cried—in English—and stopped; or I may be mistaken, but I am privately convinced that I did hear those two English words, though Langler did not.
"There is," it cried in German, "a stair in the rock twenty metres below"—and at once the light vanished.
We had walked past "the stair"! nor was there any chance that we should ever have found it, though so near; a stair it was not, but a few jags notched out of a slanting slip of the cliff. However, we found them, we contrived to climb to the top: but no one was any longer there when we got to it.
What followed for us that night was almost as baleful as what we had evaded: we were abroad hour after hour in an alpine storm, miners in the colliery of the night, sometimes standing still, dreading to take a step; indeed, it is strange that we were not many times dashed to death, for one could not see the mountains, nor the ground, nor the sky on high, all on all hands was swallowed up in awe, the heart failed at the great rivers of grief which the deluges of wind poured through the forests. It must have been long past midnight when, by a feat of luck, we hit upon a hut in which was one poor woman, living that hermit-life which they call almen-leben, with a few kine only for companions; she took us in, and succoured us; and with such greed did we eat out and still eat out this good Gretel's larder that our griefs ended in laughter.
When at last we were lying wrapped in blankets in a gloom beshone by a blush from the stove, I whispered to Langler: "did you hear the 'there is' in English from the cliff?" "No," said he, "I think not." "But was not the voice at all familiar?" "I thought, Arthur, that it resembled Baron Kolár's." "So did I," I said.
Outside the winds worked, venting brokenly and gruff like breakers of oceans thundering on unearthly shores, while for some time I lay too fore-done to sleep, pondering the wonder of that voice in the night. If it was truly Baron Kolár's—I am still not sure of it!—what, I asked myself, could be his motive? Had he merely wished to prove to us his absolute power over our lives? Or had this terrible man meant to destroy us, but relented in the midst? I oftentimes think that he had a liking for Langler.... But I could not solve the riddle, and before long was asleep.