"If I do not return in half an hour," he said, "you will know that I am taken."
Then he gathered up the reins, swung into the saddle, and rode out of the court eastward into the park.
Caroline Childers returned slowly across the court to the terrace above the gardens. The night was soft and warm. From the gardens, one lying below the other, came the trickling of water.
Meanwhile the Duke of Dorset rode slowly among the trees down toward the stone bridge over the river. But the facetious mood, which he had assumed to cover the wisdom of this scouting, had departed from him, and something of the sense of loss that used to await him at night, passing the picture on the stairway, replaced it. This consuming mood entered in and possessed the man, and signs which he should have seen, marking events on the way, escaped him.
He came presently to the stone bridge over the river. The horse refused, for a moment, to go on it. He struck it over the withers with his crop, and forced it to go on. The horse swerved, plunged, and half over the arch, tried to turn back. The Duke swung it around with a powerful wrench of the bit. The horse went instantly on his hind legs into the air, striking out with his fore feet.
That rearing saved the man's life. As the horse arose, some one fired from the cover of the woods beyond the bridge—a dull heavy report like that of an old-time musket. The horse, struck in the chest between the shoulders, hung a moment in the air, then it fell forward stumbling to its knees in the road. The Duke slipped out of the saddle and rolled to the side of the bridge where the low wall hid him. The horse got slowly up, and stood with its head down and its legs far apart, trembling, wet with sweat; the blood poured out of the wound in its chest, in a stream that flowed slowly into a big, claret-colored pool, and then broke and trickled across the road in a thin line to where the Duke lay, soaking his coat. The horse stood for some minutes unsteadily, thus, on its feet; then it began to stagger, the breath whistling through its distended nostrils. In this staggering it nearly trod on the man, and, to escape that danger, he began to crawl along the bridge close to the wall.
Presently he reached the abutment and slipped from the shelter of the wall into the wood of the park. Here he ascended the long hill to the château, keeping in the shadow of the trees, moving slowly and with caution. When he came to the last tree, at the summit of the park, he stopped and looked back.
No one followed that he could see. The horse still staggered, bleeding, over the white floor of the bridge, now to one side of it and now to the other; then, as he looked, the beast's knees struck violently against the low wall where he had just been lying, it lurched forward, lost its balance, toppled and fell with a scream, crashing through a tree top into the river below.
The word is not accurate. A horse in the extremity of terror utters a cry like no other sound heard upon this earth. It is a great, hideous shudder, made vocal. Then, as though that cry had called them into life, the Duke saw figures emerging from the wood beyond the bridge. He stepped out into the light, walked swiftly along the court and into the door of the château.