And he pressed the pale face of his wife to his bosom.
"Make haste," said Mariska, "I also want to hasten. If die I must—I would prefer to die among Christians, in the sight of my friends and acquaintances. But you go on in front, for if they were to slay you before my eyes, it would need no sword to slay me; my heart would break from sheer despair."
"Come, sir, come!" said the old courier, seizing the hand of the Prince and dragging him away by force.
Mariska got into the carriage again, and told the coachman to drive on quickly. The Prince allowed himself to be guided by the old courier along the narrow pass, looking back continually so long as the carriage was visible, and mournfully pausing whenever he caught sight of it again from the top of some mountain-ridge.
"Come on, sir! come on!" the old servant kept insisting; "when we have reached that mountain summit yonder we shall be able to rest."
Ghyka stumbled on as heavily as if the mountain was pressing on his bosom with all its weight. He allowed himself to be led unconsciously among the steep precipices, clinging on to projecting bushes as he went along. God guarded him from falling a hundred times.
After half an hour's hard labour they reached the indicated summit, and as the courier helped his master up and they looked around them, Nature's magnificent tableau stood before them; and looking down upon a vast panorama, they saw the tiny winding road by which his wife had gone; and, looking still farther on, he perceived that the carriage had just climbed to the summit of a declivity about half a league off.
Ah! that sight gave him back his soul. He followed with his eyes the travelling coach, and as often as the coach ascended a higher hill, it again appeared in sight, and it seemed to him as if all along he saw inside it his wife, and his face brightened as he fancied himself kissing away her tears.
At that instant a loud uproar smote upon his ears. At the foot of the steep mountain, on the summit of which his wife had just come into sight again, he saw a troop of horsemen trotting rapidly along. These were the pursuers. They seemed scarcely larger than ants.
Ah! how he would have liked to have trampled those ants to death.