'Himmel! I thought we had ridden you down!' he said, leaving my lady's side. His voice shook with passion and loss of breath. 'Who was it? We might all have broken our necks, and for nothing!'
The Waldgrave--it was his stirrup I had caught--turned his horse round. 'I heard them--close behind us!' he panted. There was a note of wildness in his voice. My elbow was against his knee, and I felt him tremble.
'A bird in the hedge,' Steve said rudely. 'It has cost some one dear. Whose horse was it struck him?'
No one answered. I left the Waldgrave's side and went back a few paces. The women were sobbing. Ernst and Jacob stood by them, breathing hard after their run. I thought the men's silence strange. I looked again. There was a figure missing; a horse missing.
'Where is Marie?' I cried.
She did not answer. No one answered; and I knew. Steve swore again. I think he had known from the beginning. I began to tremble. On a sudden my lady lifted up her voice and cried shrilly--
'Marie! Marie!'
Again no answer. But this time I did not wait to listen. I ran from them into the darkness the way we had come, my legs quivering under me, and my mouth full of broken prayers. I remembered a certain solitary tree fronting the poplars, on the other side of the way, which I had marked mechanically at the moment of the fall--an ash, whose light upper boughs had come for an instant between my eyes and the sky. It stood on a little mound, where the moorland began to rise on that side. I came to it now, and stopped and looked. At first I could see nothing, and I trod forward fearfully. Then, a couple of paces on, I made out a dark figure, lying head and feet across the road. I sprang to it, and kneeling, passed my hands over it. Alas! it was a woman's.
I raised the light form in my arms, crying passionately on her name, while the wind swayed the boughs overhead, and, besides that and my voice, all the countryside was still. She did not answer. She hung limp in my arms. Kneeling in the dust beside her, I felt blindly for a pulse, a heart-beat. I found neither--neither; the woman was dead.
And yet it was not that which made me lay the body down so quickly and stand up peering round me. No; something else. The blood drummed in my ears, my heart beat wildly. The woman was dead; but she was not Marie.