'Then all go!' I said, choking down the sobs that would rise. And I turned first from the place.
I will not try to state what that cost me. I saw my girl's face everywhere--everywhere in the darkness, and the eyes reproached me. That she of all should suffer, who had never fainted, never faltered, whose patience and courage had been the women's stay from the first--that she should suffer! I thought of the tender, weak body, and of all the things that might happen to her, and I seemed, as I went away from her, the vilest thing that lived.
But reason was against me. If I stayed there and waited on the road by the old crone's body until morning, what could I do? Whither could I turn? Marie was gone and already might be half a dozen miles away. So the bonds of custom and duty held me. Dazed and bewildered, I lacked the strength that was needed to run counter to all. I was no knight-errant, but a plain man, and I reeled on through the last hour of the night and the first grey streaks of dawn, with my head on my breast and sobs of despair in my throat.
CHAPTER XXV.
[NUREMBERG.]
If it had been our fate after that to continue our flight in the same weary fashion we had before devised, lying in woods by day, and all night riding jaded horses, until we passed the gates of some free city, I do not think that I could have gone through with it. Doubtless it was my duty to go with my lady. But the long hours of daylight inaction, the slow brooding tramp, must have proved intolerable. And at some time or other, in some way or other, I must have snapped the ties that bound me.
But, as if the loss of my heart had rid us of some spell cast over us, by noon of that day we stood safe. For, an hour before noon, while we lay in a fir-wood not far from Weimar, and Jacob kept watch on the road below, and the rest slept as we pleased, a party of horse came along the way, and made as if to pass below us. They numbered more than a hundred, and Jacob's heart failed him, lest some ring or buckle of our accoutrements should sparkle and catch their eyes. To shift the burden he called us, and we went to watch them.
'Do they go north or south?' I asked him as I rose.
'North,' he whispered.
After that they were nothing to me, but I went with the rest. Our lair was in some rocks overhanging the road. By the time we looked over, the horsemen were below us, and we could see nothing of them; though the sullen tramp of their horses, and the jingle of bit and spur, reached us clearly. Presently they came into sight again on the road beyond, riding steadily away with their backs to us.