CHAPTER XV
THE EYES IN THE CLEFT
THE giant trees of the great forest streaked the velvety glades with their lengthening shadows as the autumn sun touched the broken outline of the mountain screen and sent the last of its blaze sweeping through the valley and flooding its alleys with purple light. A solitary ray, finding, as it were, the clue to the maze where the forest was thickest, stretched with insistent brilliance across a natural arbour which lay in the most sheltered recesses of the woodland depths. This somewhat abnormal feature of the sylvan region reared itself in a hollow a score of paces from one of the forest paths, and was formed in the largest of the rocks which here for a space of perhaps fifty yards square bulged out and reared themselves, a rough excrescence on the plush-like ground, and, as it might seem, an outpost of the huge battalions towering in their grandeur but a short league away.
On one side of this rocky dell the overhanging escarpment formed a shallow recess, and in this, on the rough bench afforded by a ledge of rock, sat Philippa and Von Tressen. The light falling athwart the retreat and intercepted and split up by the sharp angles of the projecting roof, just tinged with a stray glimmer the girl’s gold-brown hair and sparkled in the jewel on the hand which lay on her lover’s arm. They had met that afternoon by arrangement, and Philippa had chosen the way to that secluded spot as lying in a part of the forest where riding was hardly practicable, and so out of Count Zarka’s beat. Von Tressen had divined the reason and gently taxed her with it.
“Why need you seek so far for a motive,” she returned with laughing evasion. “Is this all the thanks I get for bringing you to see this romantic dell? It is the beauty spot of, at any rate, this part of the forest. I found it out by accident the other day, and——”
“Thought it wanted only one thing to complete its romance,” he laughed.
“No, sir; I thought nothing of the sort. It was before——” she stopped suddenly.
But it was too late. “Before you knew me, Philippa?” he supplied, with all an accepted lover’s confidence. “Yes? Now you shall not deny it. Did it seem as delightful then as it does to-day?”
“Hardly,” she returned archly. “There was no sun that day; it was grey and dull, but the place was lovely nevertheless.”
“Nothing like this?” he urged.
“I am glad to see it in the glory of the sunlight,” she said, still baffling him.
“And with me, Philippa?”
“I wanted to bring you to see it,” she replied fencingly, although her eyes played traitor to her tone of laughing indifference. “It has been a long walk, and I hope you are grateful. You know, sir, you would probably never have discovered it for yourself; or if you had passed by, your mind would have been so full of partridges and hares that you would never have noticed it.”
“And so Count Zarka has nothing to do with our coming here?” he persisted, only half convinced, and still unable to feel happy on the subject.
“Why must you harp on the Count?” she protested with a little natural impatience. “Can you not enjoy the short hour we have without letting that shadow come between us? Is it not as well that we took this secluded way, or would you rather we went where the Count would be likely to light upon us? I did not know you thought so much of him.”
“I think very little of him, dearest,” he replied. “I only wish you regarded him as indifferently as I. It is because I feel you do not that I confess I am not satisfied.”
“You silly boy!” she laughed. “I tell you the Count is nothing to me.”
“No, no,” she protested.
“You are, Philippa,” he maintained. “Do tell me why,” he added persuasively.
“No,” she replied, with an effort to mask the troubled thought which lay behind her words. “How can I, when I tell you it is not so? Count Zarka is nothing to me.”
“An object of fear?”
“No; why should he be?”
“That is what you must tell me.”
“Osbert,” she said impetuously, “you are determined to make me wretched. Can you not, to please me, dismiss the subject of Count Zarka? I hate it as I hate him.”
“Yet you are always with him?” he persisted dubiously.
“Can I help it if he comes every day to the farm? He has business with my father.”
Von Tressen’s face was troubled. It was clear he felt far from satisfied. But what more could he urge? His expression darkened as though a cloud of gloom had drifted over him. For some moments there was silence. Then Philippa laid her hand lovingly on his arm.
“Osbert,” she pleaded; “you are unkind to me; unkind to let these suspicions run in your mind. Can you not trust me? Is your love so shallow that it cannot believe my word against all appearances? Does it ask so much that I must prove to you that I love you and hate Zarka? How can I do that?”
His answer was ready. “Will you tell your father and the Count that we are betrothed?”
She met his eyes steadfastly. “In a week,” she answered without faltering.
“Not now?”
“Osbert, is this fair?”
His innate chivalry ousted his jealous suspicion. “Forgive me, darling,” he said, as love lighted up his face and its gloom vanished; “forgive me that I am so unkind. I do not deserve that you should love me when I torment you so. But I distrust this man Zarka; I know him to be bad and unscrupulous, and, worst of all, to be in love with you. Is it a wonder that I am troubled when I see the fear he inspires you with?”
“No, no; not fear,” she protested.
“I am sure you fear him, dear one.”
“Then you are wrong. Avoidance does not necessarily imply fear. Why will you persist in thinking that? You must have faith in me, Osbert.”
He could hardly resist that appeal backed by the love that was in the look she gave him. “I am offending again; how can I ask for pardon?” he said lovingly. “Only if you knew how I long for the end of this mystery—for there surely is a mystery, Philippa—to call you mine before the world, to defy and triumph over this scheming fellow, Zarka, you would not be hard on me. I want the sunshine for our love, not to have to lurk with it in the shade.”
“And it shall be,” she returned in the same tone. “Only one week, and the mist shall clear away, if indeed there be one?”
“Is there not?” he asked, smiling wistfully.
“Need there be?” she rejoined. “Is not the sun upon us now. Ah, how lovely, it is! Osbert, why will you torment yourself by seeing nothing but gloom?”
“I am a fool,” he said, as his trouble seemed to vanish. “At any rate, if there is a little cloud over us, I might know that the sun is behind it. My sun my glorious love, Philippa, my darling.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. Suddenly she gave a cry and started up pushing him excitedly from her.
“Philippa!” he cried. “What is it?”
Her eyes were fixed on the irregular wall of rock which ran along the opposite side of the dell. “There,” she exclaimed under her breath, in terror as though not daring to raise her voice, “there, in that cleft, a man’s eyes; so horrible! Ah!”
“I can see nothing, dearest,” her lover said, reassuringly.
“They are gone now,” she returned, hardly daring to look towards the place. “But I saw them; they were there, glaring at us.”
“I will soon satisfy you,” he cried, leaving her and hurrying forward.
But she followed and clung to him. “No, no! Osbert, my love, stay here! Do not go; there is danger,” she implored.
It was scarcely the argument to avail with a soldier, and with a confident smile he released himself.
“I must go and see,” he insisted. “I will not have you frightened, dear one.”
He ran to a spot where the rocks shelved down and afforded a possibility of climbing. It was not by any means an easy ascent, but to an active man it was quicker than going by the level outlet round to the back of the rocks. Philippa followed him half way across the hollow; then stopped, watching him breathlessly. In a few seconds he stood on the rocky escarpment and looked all round.
“No one here; no one to be seen,” he called to her encouragingly.
But the fear did not leave her face: she was not reassured.
“Come back, Osbert,” she exclaimed, “You will find no one there now.”
He stayed a little, making a cursory examination of the place, and then rejoined her.
“Nothing to be seen,” he announced cheerfully, “Not a sign of man or beast.”
“I am certain there was some one there,” she insisted. “Ah, those hateful eyes!”
He put his arm round her protectingly. “Dearest, you must not alarm yourself so. It was not another of your wild boars, was it?”
“No, no. It was a man.”
“Need you be afraid of him? It was not the only man in the world, or in the forest,” he added with a confident smile. Then his face darkened a little as he said, “Was it the Count?”
“Count Zarka?” She spoke with an effort, “I could not tell. No. How could it have been he? Osbert, you are sure you saw no one?”
“Quite sure,” he answered. He could see that it needed all her self-command to restrain the betrayal of her fear. “Let us go back to our seat,” he said, “and watch for the mysterious eyes to re-appear, I promise you their owner shall not escape me a second time.”
“No, no,” she objected, “I must be going homewards now. It is getting late, and my father will wonder at my absence.”
“Must you go so soon, Philippa?” he protested.
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, evidently anxious to get away from the place. “We can walk slowly,” she added with a smile that bore down his protest. “I love sauntering through the forest, it is a shame to hurry; but you know we have a long way to go.”
With that they went up out of the dell, Von Tressen looking round him sharply as they gained the level ground outside, but seeing nothing that could account for Philippa’s fright.
“Why did you ask me whether it was Count Zarka?” she said presently.
“Your fear put it into my head,” he answered frankly.
“Are there no other living things to fear in the forest?” she demanded, regaining a more confident tone as they left the somewhat eerie dell behind them. “You forget how lately my life was in peril, and can hardly wonder if my nerves are shaken.”
“I dare say it is to be accounted for by that,” he said reassuringly. “You have plenty of courage, Philippa, more than most women, and that makes me wonder at your evident fear of the Count.”
“It is you who make a bugbear of him,” she objected, although not very convincingly. “Ah——”
With the exclamation she caught her lover’s arm and drew him back from the glade they had been about to cross. Von Tressen had seen nothing and looked at her for an explanation. The fear had returned to her face, which had now gone white to the lips.
“What is it?” he asked, trying to bend forward and see. But she held him fast, as, with an effort, she recovered herself.
“The very man we were speaking of,” she answered in a hurried undertone. “Don’t let him see you. Do we want a third person on our walk home?”
“Hardly,” Von Tressen laughed, as they slipped back among the thick underwood. But it was too late, for the Count came down the ride at a hand gallop and hailed them. His quick eyes had doubtless detected their presence at the moment Philippa saw him.