The words were broken, disjointed, almost inarticulate, but they stung her to action as the spur stings a horse.
She started erect, and crossed the chamber, leapt through the open portion of the casement, and lighted again without, knee-deep in water; she lost her footing and fell entangled in the rushes; but she rose and climbed in the darkness to where the roots of an oak stump stretched into the stream, and, gaining the shore, ran as well as the storm and the obscurity allowed her, along the bank, straight towards Yprès.
It was a wild and bitter night; the rushing of the foaming river went by her all the way; the path was flooded, and she was up to her ankles in water at every step, and often forced to wade through channels a foot deep.
She went on straight towards her home, unconscious of cold, of fatigue, of her wet clinging clothes, of the water that splashed unseen in the black night up against her face as her steps sank into some shaking strip of marsh, some brook which, in the rising of the river, ran hissing and swelling to twice its common height. All she was sensible of was of one inspiration, one purpose, one memory that seemed to give her the wings of the wind, and yet to clog her feet with the weight of lead,—the memory of that white, sad, senseless face, lying beneath the watch of the cruel gods.
She reached Yprès, feeling and scenting her way by instinct, as a dog does, all through the tumult of the air and against the force of the driving rains. She met no living creature; the weather was too bad for even a beggar to be afoot in it, and even the stray and homeless beasts had sought some shelter from a ruined shed or crumbling wall.
As softly as a leaf may fall she unloosed the latch of the orchard, stole through the trees, and took her way, in an impenetrable gloom, with the swift sure flight of one to whom the place had long been as familiar by night as day.
The uproar of wind and rain would have muffled the loudest tread. The shutters of the mill-house were all closed; it was quite still. Flamma and his serving people were all gone to their beds that they might save, by sleep, the cost of wood and candle.
She passed round to the side of the house, climbed up the tough network of a tree of ivy, and without much labor loosened the fastenings of her own loft window, and entering there passed through the loft into the body of the house.
Opening the doors of the passages noiselessly, she stole down the staircase, making no more sound than a hare makes stealing over mosses to its form. The ever-wakeful lightly-sleeping ears of a miser were near at hand, but even they were not aroused; and she passed down unheard.
She went hardily, fearlessly, once her mind was set upon the errand. She did not reason with herself, as more timorous creatures might have done, that being half starved as recompense for strong and continual labor, she was but about to take a just due withheld, a fair wage long overdue. She only resolved to take what another needed by a violence which she had never employed to serve her own needs, and, having resolved, went to execute her resolution with the unhesitating dauntlessness that was bred in her, blood and bone.