Now, as they stood a moment, watchful of each other, the apple in the peasant’s throat flickered of a sudden; and immediately a rising moan, a very strange little ululation, began to make itself audible, and the man lifted his chin, as if to give some voice in him freer passage. At once the priest, in an ecstasy of haste, flung himself between the two.
‘On the threshold of the Church!’ he screamed; ‘and the girl looking on!’
For the first time, indeed, Wilma was alert.
The peasant relaxed from his rigid pose. Corporal Lacoste saw the man’s tongue, curling like a red leaf, pass over and across his upper lip. The movement gave him a little thrilling shock, as if of terror.
‘What am I to do, my father?’ asked the creature.
The priest pushed back his cowl and passed a trembling hand across his forehead.
‘The cards,’ he muttered confusedly, affecting an impossible laugh. ‘Let us reconcile all over a bout at ombre.’
He suddenly bethought himself, and repeated his proposal in French. The soldier threw his sword into the air, recovered it by the hilt, and returned it to its sheath.
‘At bottle or pasteboard!’ he cried: ‘c’la m’est égal – I am a match for the devil!’
He seemed, at least, a match for these commoner spirits. Luck stood at his shoulder, as was befitting when a beau sabreur of Murat staked against a clown and a Friar-Rush.
The three played and drank and wrangled up to midday of the blessed bright morn. Not a soul came in to disturb them. The neighbourhood, it appeared, was depopulated by conscription – stunned by fear. Only the girl moved staidly in the background of the reeking kitchen, quite silent over her simple duties, even when from time to time she brought a fresh bottle to the table and came under fire of the reckless trooper’s badinage.
The play waxed fast and furious. Oaths and execrations, flying from fecund lips, seemed to swarm obscenely under the very rafters overhead. The monk, educated perhaps to the rich vocabulary of anathema, was peculiarly apt at fulminating expletive. He bawled and he cursed from the conscious standpoint of privilege. He never damned but to hell, or failed to translate his most consuming maledictions for the soldier’s benefit.
Now it chanced that once during the morning Corporal Lacoste, happening to glance up as Wilma fetched an empty jug from their midst in order to the replenishing of it, saw the girl’s strange eyes fixed upon him in a curious stare. She looked away immediately; but he rose, took the jug from her with a ‘permettez-moi, mam’selle,’ and followed her to the rear of the premises.
The lip of the dog-man lifted. The priest caught his hand in a warning clinch.
‘Between Angelus and Angelus, Wolfzahn,’ he muttered.
‘What does he with the girl, then, my father?’
‘What does he? The wine consumes his nerve. He is a man of gingerbread. Let him be.’
‘How came we to miss him down there? Between Angelus and Angelus, say’st thou? So! I will whet my tooth. But beware, my father! the dark in these days is an early guest. How came we to miss him – him and his fat gold pieces?’
‘Hush! Der Herr Jesus recompenses otherwise the agents of His vengeance. Little Wolfzahn, the gold shall pay for masses to his soul – his, and the others. Not here, before the girl! The devil, I think, has commerce with her nowadays. Often I see him peep from the windows of her eyes. Between Angelus and Angelus: one snap of thy tooth – and there are twenty fresh indulgences to quit thee of thy purgatory.’
‘But, here, in the forest! Ah, mein Vater! when will thy indulgences quit me of this in the forest?’ The strange creature gave a sort of sob, a bay, and buried his face in his hands.
In the meanwhile Corporal Lacoste followed Wilma to the cellar. She neither invited nor repulsed him. She went down a flight of humid steps, through a square aperture in the floor, into a little musty cavern, the walls of which seemed all eyes. These were the ‘kicks’ of bottles whose long snouts were thrust into wooden racks. Elsewhere a cask or two lolled on its belly, its tap run into purple like a drowsy drunken nose; and the tracks of snails went all over the ceiling.
The girl struck light from a flint, kindled a greasy dip, and, holding it in her hand, turned suddenly round on her escort. The soldier, in whose brain a wanton fever flared, swayed himself steady, endeavouring to return her gaze.
‘Ludwig!’ she whispered hurriedly – ‘my Ludwig that went with Wimpffen’s dragoons to defend the pass – my Ludwigchen that would have taken me out of hell. When I caught thy face against the light, ach, mein Gott! I could have cried in pain. Thou art so like him.’
She held the candle nearer the fuddled stupid eyes. Her own glittered to them like sparks through a curtain of smoke. She drew back with a quick hopeless movement.
‘But I forget,’ she murmured. ‘Thou canst not understand – nor would, nor would, though we spoke in one language.’
She filled the jug, and went hastily past him. Then, at a thought, she turned, with her foot on the first step, and spoke back into his very ear, ‘Hüten Sie sich vor dem Wehrwolf!’
‘Wilma!’ howled her father from above.
Corporal Lacoste reeled back to his cards, with an obfuscated impression that something of moment had been spoken to him. His soul, pregnantly engaged in hatching wind-eggs, squatted in a little private dark-house of cunning, from which it looked forth as full of self-importance as a monkey in a cage.
Now, again, play being resumed, the fetid air of the kitchen blattered with oaths. It was as if, approaching a dunghill, the returned gambler had disturbed a settled cloud of flies.
Howl, and uproar, and the jangle of unbridled tongues! A knife was drawn; the soldier staggered to his feet, and his chair crashed on the floor. At the moment a timepiece tinkled out midday from some attic above. The priest flung up his arm and yelled, ‘Angelus, Angelus, ye swine of the Gadarenes!’
He fell upon his knees. ‘Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariœ,’ he began to gabble.
‘Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto,’ responded the peasant, who, at the word, had pulled from his breast a little leaden image of St Christopher carrying a baby Christ, and prostrated himself before it.
But as to Corporal Lacoste, it was for him to drop upon the floor and asleep simultaneously.
Something – it might have been a savagely restrained kick – aroused the slumbering man. He started up, sitting, and beat away a red-hot film of cobwebs that seemed to stretch and flicker before his eyes. Slowly at first, then by sickening leaps, consciousness returned to him. He looked vacantly from point to point of the frowsy kitchen. Wilma sat knitting as though she had never moved; the dog-like peasant crouched on the hearth, his red eyes glinting back the ember-glow; and whenever he yawned a little singing whine issued from his throat. The priest, his hands as heretofore vanished up the meeting cuffs of his cassock, his cowl pulled forward over his eyes, stood a yard withdrawn from and looking down upon him. At the sound of the first word between them the creature before the fire flashed alert.
‘The noon draws on,’ said the monk. ‘If you wish to track your comrades in safety you must be out of the forest by dusk.’
The trooper got to his feet. He was steady enough on them now. It was his head that seemed to roll and totter.
‘I have delayed too long already,’ he cried peevishly. ‘What does the sword of Corporal Lacoste in this ignoble den? To death or victory, my father – if I but knew the way!’
The monk whistled to the man on the hearth.
‘Up!’ he cried; ‘he would have us show him the way – to victory or death. The issue is his.’
He turned to the soldier.
‘It is the will of God that shall be wrought at the hands of His agents.’
‘Meaning thyself, my father?’
‘Surely, and Wolfzahn here. Arise, and we will put thee on the road.’
‘Thou wear’st His livery, at least. Corne et tonnerre! it is true a priest must not be judged out of his own mouth. To refute the devi
l one must speak the devil’s tongue. And, after all, thy face rounds as jovial as an English rennet.’
‘Hasten!’ cried the peasant from the door, to which he had run. ‘I can hear far off the dusk striking amongst the trees like a woodreeve.’
‘A moment, Wolfzahn!’ exclaimed the priest. ‘One parting dram of brandy for a lock to the stomach!’
As Corporal Lacoste took his petit-verre from Wilma, he was troubled by a desperately elusive thought of some confidence that had passed between him and her. Then he remembered that they had no word in common. It could not be. As for any temptation to gallantry, the nausea following debauch had robbed him of all inclination to it.
But glancing back once, when he had swaggered from the house into the shuddering chillness of the snow without, it startled him to see, as he thought, the white face of the girl pressed against the lattice. The sight, the shadow, gave him a momentary thrill of uneasiness – something like a strange swerve of the heart that was surely inexplicable in a sabreur of the great army.
After the turn of noon a sombreness of cloud had usurped the happy throne of morning. The forest had fallen into deathly silence. The trees were ranked stiffly, each seeming to edge into each in terror of some nameless oppression. From the hollows came trooping grey spectres of mist that climbed the branches to overlook the travellers, or peered stealthily from behind enormous trunks. Not a voice, not a sound but the squeaking crunch of the wayfarers’ feet as they trod the beds of snow that had silted through the openings in the roof above, broke the vast quiet.
This was a matter of concern to the swashbuckler corporal, who rose many times from the deep waters of his dejection to clutch at some straw of comfort in the shape of a monosyllabic utterance by one or other of his guides. It was of no use. The straw would sink with him, leaving him again submerged.
Suddenly light grew upon them – light wan and grudging, but still a beacon of hope. At the same moment their ears were aware of a long quarrelling moan – a diffuse liquid snarl uttered and echoed from a score of points on the ground below them on their left. The peasant, who led, sprang at the instant behind a tree, from the covert of which he looked forth and down into a narrow sloping defile – that very riven pass in which the wounded soldier had spent the night.
The priest stood stricken, petrified, where he had halted at the top of the glen, in a wedge of white slanting mist. The wondering trooper hurried to join him.
‘Mon Dieu Jésus!’ cried the latter, dumfounded; ‘is it that way we must go?’
The gorge was dotted with wolves – ravenous, unclean. Wherever a shapeless bulge of cloth, a hooped flank of man or charger projected, there a bloody snout burrowed and tore, spattering the white with red.
Corporal Lacoste drew and whirled aloft his sabre.
‘Forward, comrades!’ he shouted. ‘It is the sword of Corporal Lacoste!’
He was a man again – a beau sabreur of the wild Murat in face of immediate danger. He ran down into the glen alone and slashed at the first brute he reached. It fled screeching, a near-severed ear flapping against its jaw as it galloped.
He paused a moment, turned, and beckoned to the two above him. They were drawn together, and the priest, it appeared, was frantically beating back the other from descending.
‘Canaille!’ hissed Corporal Lacoste between his teeth, and he faced about once more to his business of aggression.
The alarm was gone abroad. The beasts, converging from their isolated positions, were forming into a compact body.
To the tactician, the moment of rally offers as full opportunity for assault as the moment of retreat. Either is the twilight of disorder. Corporal Lacoste snatched a flung cloak from the ground, wrapped it about his left arm, and with a screaming ‘huéc!’ charged down upon the foe.
At the very outset the wings of the dastard troop folded back before the furious onrush, leaving the formation a wedge. The point of this the soldier crumpled up, thrusting and threshing. His blade flung aloft a spray of crimson; the whole hotchpotch of writhing shapes seemed to boil into hideous jangle; he shrieked again and again as he drove his way into it. Then in a moment the pass was won. The pack, recoiling upon its rear to escape the swingeing flail, fell into demoralisation, showed its panic tail, and went off in a wind of uproar down the glen.
The instant they were vanished, the monk and his companion descended from their coign of ‘reserve’. The soldier held out his dripping weapon mutely, and with a stare of scorn.
‘It is, in truth, a blade worthy of the arm that wields it,’ cried the priest cringingly. His voice shook. He kept glancing furtively at the peasant by his side. This man’s eyes had a strange glare in them, and his mouth was dribbling.
Corporal Lacoste cleansed his sword scrupulously on the cloak he had appropriated.
‘Dishonouring blood,’ he said, ‘for the imbruing of a noble weapon! But – corne et tonnerre! – a king must take tribute of chief and villain alike. At least, now, the stain is wiped away.’
He ran the sword back into its scabbard with a clank.
‘En avant!’ he cried disdainfully, and swaggered off down the defile.
Perhaps for a mile they proceeded in this order, the beau sabreur indulging his fancy with a priest and peasant for lackeys. Now and again he would turn and cry ‘Which way?’ – but, for the rest, he condescended to no familiarity with cravens.
By-and-by the dead air tightened, the trees thinning so as to make but a ragged canopy of the snow overhead. Then the toiling monk quavered out a ‘halt!’ to him that strode in front.
‘Monsieur,’ he panted, ‘it necessitates that we part at the cross-tracks.’
‘How, then!’ exclaimed Corporal Lacoste, facing about.
The two men advanced. The peasant passed the trooper a half-dozen paces, and wheeled round softly. They were all by then come into a little open dell, drowsy with snow, into which the fog drooped from above, like smoke in the downdraught of a chimney. Not a twig of all the laden bushes stirred. The very heart of nature, frozen and constricted, had ceased of its audible beating.
The priest pulled his cowl farther over his eyes.
‘My God, the cold!’ he muttered. Then he appeared to shudder himself into fury.
‘Have we not brought you far enough? Thither goes the road to St Pölten and Wien. Mein Gott, the assurance, the assurance—!’
He leapt back. The point of the wolf’s tooth had almost pricked him as it shot through Corporal Lacoste’s throat.
‘Stehen sie auf! ah, you devil!’ he sobbed, as the dog-man threw himself upon the quivering tumbled body, snarling and quarrelling with the knife that would not be withdrawn.
Suddenly a terrible lust overtook the onlooker. He tore the trooper’s sword from its sheath and slashed at the senseless face till the blade streamed.
‘The blood of a wolf!’ he screeched – ‘of a ravisher and despoiler! Unbuckle me the scabbard. It shall stay here – the red shall stay, and mingle presently, for all his boasting, with that of the beasts to which he was kin!’
For long the winged flakes had fallen, the huddled labyrinths of the forest been dense as with the myriad settling of ghost-moths. Here, indeed, was the spinning-mill of Fate, drawing steadily, relentlessly, from the loaded distaff of the clouds, working an impenetrable warp for the snaring of forfeited lives. Lost, gasping, and horror-stricken, the monk stumbled aimlessly onward, the trooper’s sheathed sword clasped convulsively – half unconsciously – under his arm, the trooper’s gold clinking in his mendicant pouch. He beat his way anywhither among the glimmering trunks, and the terror of hell was in his soul.
For, not a hundred paces of their return journey had the murderers traversed, when the blinding hood of the snow-wraith shut upon the shameful scene – upon all the woodlands of Amstetten, blotting out the voiceless passes, obscuring and confusing the familiar avenues of retreat. Too well then these men realised, out of their knowledge of it, the menace of the dumb eclipse – of the trackless
silence that no instinct might interpret. But the fulness of dismay was for one only of the two.
In a minute they were astray; at the end of an hour, two hours, they were still ice-bound wanderers – white spectres of the living death. And so at last the natural dusk, weaving weft into warp of darkness, had crept upon them; and a greater fear, long-foreshadowed, had knocked at the priest’s heart – a sickening thud to every step he took. Then his eyes, straining in the inhuman blackness, would seek frantically to resolve the character of that that pattered at his side; and he had jibbed as he walked, daring neither to question nor to touch.
Suddenly an attenuated whimper, that swelled to a piercing yaup, had sounded at his very ear, and something had leapt from his neighbourhood and gone scurrying into the darkness.
Then he knew that what he had dreaded had befallen, and the utter ecstasy of horror entered into and possessed his soul.
Now, all in a moment, he broke from the thronged terrorism of trees into a little ghastly glen. A bursting sigh, compound of a dozen clashing emotions, issued from his lungs. He could faintly see here once more; and he knew himself to have happened upon that very pass wherein he had been busy in the morning imbruing his hands, by wolfish proxy, in the blood of the wounded.
But he had not climbed a score of yards up the slope in a whirl of flakes, when a guttural sound, that seemed to come from almost under his feet, shocked him to a pause. He stood, forcibly striving to constrict his heart lest the thud of it knocking on his ribs should betray him. For the wolves were in the glen again. His every nerve jumped to the consciousness of their neighbourhood.
The swinish sound went on. Suddenly the ticking wheel of Life touched off its alarum. Wrought to the topping pitch of endurance, he gave way, uttering scream after scream in a mere paralysis of fright. The whole glen seemed to howl in echo: there came a snarling rush.
Who had shouted it? – ‘The sword of Corporal Lacoste!’ The cry, he could have sworn, clanged in his frantic ears. It rallied him to recollection of what he held in his hand. The sword! At least, in his despair, he could endeavour to do with it as he had seen done.
The Black Reaper Page 14