She was an old woman, sixty years old. When I stooped again, after assuring myself that there was no other body near, and peered into her face, I saw that it was seamed and wrinkled. She was barefoot, and her clothes were foul and mean. She had the reek of one who slept in ditches and washed seldom. Her toothless gums grinned at me. She was a horrible mockery of all that men love in women.
When I had marked so much, I stood up again, my head reeling. Where was the man I had seen scouting up and down? Where was Marie? For a moment the wild idea that she had become this thing, that death or magic had transformed the fair young girl into this toothless hag, was not too wild for me. An owl hooted in the distance, and I started and shivered and stood looking round me fearfully. Such things were; and Marie was gone. In her place this woman, grim and dead and unsightly, lay at my feet. What was I to think?
I got no answer. I raised my voice and called, trembling, on Marie. I ran to one side of the road and the other and called, and still got no answer. I climbed the mound on which the ash-tree stood, and sent my voice thrilling through the darkness of the bottom. But only the owl answered. Then, knowing nothing else I could do, I went down wringing my hands, and found my lady standing over the body in the road. She had come back with Steve and the others.
I had to listen to their amazement, and a hundred guesses and fancies, which, God help me! had nothing certain in them, and gave me no help. The men searched both sides of the road, and beat the moor for a distance, and tried to track the horse--for that was missing too, and there lay my only hope--but to no purpose. At last my lady came to me and said sorrowfully that nothing more could be done.
'In the morning!' I cried jealously.
No one spoke, and I looked from one to another. The men had returned from the search, and stood in a dark group round the body, which they had drawn to the side of the road. It wanted an hour of daylight yet, and I could not see their faces, but I read in their silence the answer that no one liked to put into words.
'Be a man!' Steve muttered, after a long pause. 'God help the girl. But God help us too if we are found here!'
Still my lady did not speak, and I knew her brave heart too well to doubt her, though she had been the first to talk of going. 'Get to horse,' I said roughly.
'No, no,' my lady cried at last. 'We will all stay, Martin.'
'Ay, all stay or all go!' Steve muttered.