The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories Part 41

"'You must not come here,' I cried, '_I_ am here. I am here with my dead.'

"He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown tongue.

"I repeated what I had said.

"He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

"I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him again very patiently and clearly: 'You must not come here. These are old temples, and I am here with my dead.'

"Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a narrow face, with dull grey eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting unintelligible things, questions perhaps, at me.

"I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not occur to me. As I tried to explain to him he interrupted me in imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

"He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.

"I saw his face change at my grip.

"'You fool,' I cried. 'Don't you know? She is dead!'

"He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes.

"I saw a sort of exultant resolve leap into them--delight. Then suddenly, with a scowl, he swept his sword back--_so_--and thrust."

He stopped abruptly.

I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamorous. I saw through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages pa.s.sing by, and then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn features.

"He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment--no fear, no pain--but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn't hurt, you know. It didn't hurt at all."

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, pa.s.sing first rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men pa.s.sed to and fro without.

"Euston!" cried a voice.

"Do you mean--?"

"There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence--"

"Euston!" clamoured the voices outside; "Euston!"

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truck-load of lighted lamps blazed along the platform.

"A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things."

"Any luggage, sir?" said the porter.

"And that was the end?" I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, "_No_."

"You mean?"

"I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple-- And then--"

"Yes," I insisted. "Yes?"

"Nightmares," he cried; "nightmares indeed! My G.o.d! Great birds that fought and tore."

XXVI.

THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS.

Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and s.p.a.cious valley. The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked the fugitives for so long expanded to a broad slope, and with a common impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them, a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

For a s.p.a.ce they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes. It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few cl.u.s.ters of sere thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless ravine to break its desolation of yellow gra.s.s. Its purple distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills--hills it might be of a greener kind--and above them, invisibly supported, and seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snow-clad summits of mountains--that grew larger and bolder to the northwestward as the sides of the valley drew together. And westward the valley opened until a distant darkness under the sky told where the forests began. But the three men looked neither east nor west, but only steadfastly across the valley.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip was the first to speak. "Nowhere," he said, with a sigh of disappointment in his voice. "But, after all, they had a full day's start."

"They don't know we are after them," said the little man on the white horse.

"_She_ would know," said the leader bitterly, as if speaking to himself.

"Even then they can't go fast. They've got no beast but the mule, and all to-day the girl's foot has been bleeding----"

The man with the silver bridle flashed a quick intensity of rage on him.

"Do you think I haven't seen that?" he snarled.

"It helps, anyhow," whispered the little man to himself.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip stared impa.s.sively. "They can't be over the valley," he said. "If we ride hard----"

He glanced at the white horse and paused.

"Curse all white horses!" said the man with the silver bridle, and turned to scan the beast his curse included.

The little man looked down between the melancholy ears of his steed.

"I did my best," he said.

The two others stared again across the valley for a s.p.a.ce. The gaunt man pa.s.sed the back of his hand across the scarred lip.

"Come up!" said the man who owned the silver bridle, suddenly. The little man started and jerked his rein, and the horse hoofs of the three made a mult.i.tudinous faint pattering upon the withered gra.s.s as they turned back towards the trail...

They rode cautiously down the long slope before them, and so came through a waste of p.r.i.c.kly twisted bushes and strange dry shapes of th.o.r.n.y branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below. And there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground. Still, by hard scanning, by leaning beside the horses' necks and pausing ever and again, even these white men could contrive to follow after their prey.