Page:Stanley Weyman--Count Hannibal.djvu/338

326 and she had been thankful for it. But now, as she moved away, she looked back and saw him still standing; she marked that he wore his corselet, and in one of those revulsions of feeling—which outrun man’s reason—she who had tossed on her couch through half the night, in passionate revolt against the fate before her, took fire at his neglect and his silence; she resented on a sudden the distance he kept, and his scorn of her. Her breast heaved, her colour came, involuntarily she checked her horse, as if she would return to him, and speak to him. Then the Carlats and the others closed up behind her, Badelon’s monotonous “Forward, Madame, en avant!” proclaimed the day’s journey begun, and she saw him no more.

Nevertheless, the motionless figure, looming Homeric through the fog, with gleams of wet light reflected from the steel about it, dwelt long in her mind. The road which Badelon followed, slowly at first, and with greater speed as the horses warmed to their work, and the women, sore and battered resigned themselves to suffering, wound across a flat expanse broken by a few hills. These were little more than mounds, and for the most part were veiled from sight by the low-lying sea-mist, through which gnarled and stunted oaks rose mysterious, to fade as strangely. Weird trees they were, with branches unlike those of this world’s trees, rising in a grey land without horizon or limit, through which our travellers moved, weary phantoms in a clinging nightmare. At a walk, at a trot, more often at a jaded amble, they pushed on behind Badelon’s humped shoulders. Sometimes the fog hung so thick about them that they saw only those who rose and fell in the saddles immediately before them; sometimes the air cleared a little, the curtain rolled up a space, and for a minute or two they discerned stretches of unfertile fields, half-tilled and stony, or long tracts of gorse and broom, with here and there a thicket of dwarf shrubs or a wood of wind-swept pines.