Part 35 (1/2)

She gave a wild gasp of terror and ran back to the chair--like a frightened feline creature, swift and silent--and sank into it, still gasping, her whole body shaken now as with fever, her teeth chattering, her limbs numb.

Death had been so near! She had felt an icy breath across her throat!

She was frightened--hideously, abjectly, miserably frightened. Death lurked for her, there outside in the dark, from behind the acacia tree!

Death in the guise of a jealous madman, whose hate had been whetted by an hour's lonely watch in the dark--lonely, but for his thoughts.

Tears of self-pity as well as of fear rose to the unfortunate girl's eyes; convulsive sobs shook her shoulders and tore at her heart till she felt that she must choke. She threw out her arms across the table and buried her face in them and lay there, sobbing and moaning in her terror and in her misery.

How long she remained thus, crying and half inert with mental anguish and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense on the alert.

Surely she could not have heard the fall of footsteps at the back of the house! There was the whole width of the inner room and two closed doors between her and the yard at the back, and the ground there was soft and muddy; no footstep, however firm, could raise echoes there.

And yet she had heard! Of that she felt quite sure, heard with that sixth sense of which she, in her ignorance, knew nothing, but which, nevertheless, now had roused her from that coma-like state into which terror had thrown her, and set every one of her nerves tingling once more and pulsating with life and the power to feel.

For the moment all her faculties seemed merged into that of hearing.

With that same sixth sense she heard the stealthy footsteps coming nearer and nearer. They had not approached from the village, but from the fields at the back, and along the little path which led through the unfenced yard straight to the back door.

These footsteps--which seemed like the footsteps of ghosts, so intangible were they--were now so near that to Klara's supersensitive mind they appeared to be less than ten paces from the back door.

Then she heard another footstep--she heard it quite distinctly, even though walls and doors were between her and them--she heard the movement from behind the acacia tree--the one that stands at the corner of the house, in full view of both the doors--she heard the rustle among its low-hanging branches and that hissing sound as of an indrawn breath.

She shot up from her chair like an automaton--rigid and upright, her mouth opened as for a wild shriek, but all power of sound was choked in her throat. She ran into the inner room like one possessed, her mouth still wide open for the frantic shriek which would not come, for that agonizing call for help.

She fell up against the back door. Her hands tore at the lock, at the woodwork, at the plaster around; she bruised her hands and cut her fingers to the bone, but still that call would not come to her throat--not even now, when she heard on the other side of the door, less than five paces from where she lay, frantic with horror, a groan, a smothered cry, a thud--then swiftly hurrying footsteps flying away in the night.

Then nothing more, for she was lying now in a huddled ma.s.s, half unconscious on the floor.

CHAPTER XXVII

”The shadow that fell from the tall sunflowers.”

How Klara Goldstein spent that terrible night she never fully realized.

After half an hour or so she dragged herself up from the floor. Full consciousness had returned to her, and with it the power to feel, to understand and to fear.

A hideous, awful terror was upon her which seemed to freeze her through and through; a cold sweat broke out all over her body, and she was trembling from head to foot. She crawled as far as the narrow little bed which was in a corner of the room, and just managed to throw herself upon it, on her back, and there to remain inert, perished with cold, racked with s.h.i.+vers, her eyes staring upwards into the darkness, her ears strained to listen to every sound that came from the other side of the door.

But gradually, as she lay, her senses became more alive; the power to think coherently, to reason with her fears, a.s.serted itself more and more over those insane terrors which had paralysed her will and her heart. She did begin to think--not only of herself and of her miserable position, but of the man who lay outside--dying or dead.

Yes! That soon became the most insistent thought.

Leopold Hirsch, having done the awful deed, had fled, of course, but his victim might not be dead, he might be only wounded and dying for want of succour. Klara--closing her eyes--could almost picture him, groaning and perhaps trying to drag himself up in a vain endeavour to get help.

Then she rose--wretched, broken, terrified--but nevertheless resolved to put all selfish fears aside and to ascertain the full extent of the tragedy which had been enacted outside her door. She lit the storm-lantern, then, with it in her hand, she went through the tap-room and opened the front door.

She knew well the risks which she was running, going out like this into the night, and alone. Any pa.s.ser-by might see her--ask questions, suspect her of connivance when she told what it was that she had come out to seek in the darkness behind her own back door. But to this knowledge and this small additional fear she resolutely closed her mind.

Drawing the door to behind her, she stepped out on to the verandah and thence down the few steps into the road below.

A slight breeze had sprung up within the last half-hour, and had succeeded in chasing away the heavy banks of cloud which had hung over the sky earlier in the evening.