As they entered it for the last time, in both their minds was the thought that they might find it barred to them; and the beating of their hearts was loud in their ears as they crept into its friendly shadow.
“The woods,” Griselda whispered.
They turned into the woods and took cover; and, with a yard or two, the blackness under the trees had closed in on them, blotting out all things from sight. They halted because they could see to walk no further.
“Let me down,” Griselda said—and her husband knew by the gasp in her voice that she was at the end of her powers of endurance. He explored with an outstretched hand for a tree trunk and lowered her gently to the ground with her back supported against it; she panted relief as he sat down beside her and groped for her fingers in the darkness. … So they sat holding to each other and enveloped in thickest night.
The guns had died down altogether, and the rumble from the road, though almost continuous was dulled—so that William could hear his wife’s uneven breathing and the stealthy whisper of the trees. He sat holding Griselda’s hand and staring into the blackness, a man dazed and confounded; who yesterday was happy lover and self-respecting citizen and today had suffered stripes, been slave and fugitive, learned the evil wrought on his wife.
Thinking on it afterwards, he wondered that he had closed an eye; yet he had sat in the darkness but a very few minutes when, swiftly and without warning, he fell into a heavy sleep.
XI
He woke with the blaze of the eastern sun in his eyes, and on the first sensation of bewilderment at finding his bed was moss, came a rush of remembrance and with it self-reproach—he had slept while Griselda suffered. He knelt and bent over her as she lay still asleep, huddled on her right side; her face was flushed, her lips were cracked, and she was breathing in heavy little snorts. As he knelt and gazed the thunder of yesterday broke out in the distance, and Griselda stirred and woke moaning.
Her first cry was for water, and in the insistence of her thirst she was oblivious of everything but her burning need to slake it; he broke cover and ran to the stream, some fifty yards away, soaked his handkerchief and made a tight cup of his hands. The cup was a failure, and the little that was left in it when he reached Griselda was spilled when she tried to drink; but the dripping handkerchief she sucked at eagerly and gave back for another soaking. He was about to break cover to wet it again when he caught sight first of one, then of half-a-dozen horsemen entering the valley by the gap; and shrank back, cowering, into the friendly shelter of the tree-trunks—sick with uncertainty as to whether or no they had seen him. He judged not when he saw them dismount and picket their horses; and having watched them long enough to see that they were making preparations for a meal, he turned and crept back to Griselda.
The terror of yesterday came down on her when she heard his whispered news. A moment before she had seemed incapable of movement, lain crumpled on her side and repulsed, with a feverish pettishness, his efforts to stir and raise her; now she clung to him and struggled to her feet, even pain forgotten in the passion for instant flight. So, holding together, they fled again: fled crawling, they knew not whither. Two instincts guided them and directed their stumbling footsteps: the instinct to leave far behind them the threat of the guns and the instinct to keep out of sight. Thus they held to the woods above the valley of silence, avoiding all paths that led out into the open; their direction, roughly, was southward—though they did not know it—and they dragged a mile, or even less, where a man in health might make five.
When they had gone some few hundred yards they struck the trickle of a hillside rivulet on its way to join the stream in the valley. At the sound of its babble Griselda cried out and tried to hasten, and, when they came to it, slipped down till she could thrust her face into the water and drink like the sun-parched Israelites who marched with Gideon. They drank, they dabbled in it, bathed hands and feet, and Griselda washed her broken side—touching it gingerly and not daring to pull away the linen that the blood had caked to the flesh. After that William helped her to her feet and they dragged on further.
If they found water in abundance, they found but little to eat; and though Griselda made no complaint of hunger, as the hours went by it gnawed at her husband’s vitals. At first their path lay chiefly through beechwoods bare of undergrowth, and they had been an hour or two on their way before they came to blackberry bushes. Upon these William fell, tearing his hands on the thorns by his eager stripping of the bushes; Griselda would hardly touch them, but he shovelled them into his mouth and ate long and voraciously. He had toiled much the day before and eaten little—a scanty breakfast and the scraps of bread and meat allotted by his captors at midday—and, shovel as he might, the berries were a poor substitute for the meal he craved and dreamed of. That was a meal which floated before the eye of his mind as phantom ham and eggs, phantom cuts from the joint, thick slabs of well-buttered bread; something solid that a man could set his teeth in and gnaw till his stomach was satisfied. He was ashamed of the way in which food and the longing for food possessed him—so
