The Forest Lovers | Page 5

struck over the heath
towards a solemn beech-wood, which he took to be the very threshold
of Morgraunt. As a fact it was no more than an outstretched finger of its
hand, by name Cadnam Thicket. He skirted this place, seeking an entry,
but found nothing to suit him for an hour or more. Then at last he came
to a gap in the sandy bank, and saw that a little mossy ride ran straight
in among the trees. He put his horse at the gap, and was soon cantering
happily through the wood. Thus he came short upon an adventure. The
path ran ahead of him in a tapering vista, but just where it should meet
in a point it broadened out suddenly so as to make a double bay. The

light fell splashing upon this cleared space, and he saw what he saw.
This was a tall lady, richly dressed in some gauzy purple stuff,
dragging a dead man by the heels, and making a very bad business of it.
She was dainty to view, her hands and arms shone like white marble;
but apart from all this it was clear to Prosper that she lacked the mere
strength for the office she had proposed herself. The dead man was not
very tall, but he was too tall for the lady. The roughness of the ground,
the resistance of the underwood, the incapacity of the performers, made
the procession unseemly.
Prosper, forgetting Brother Bonaccord, quickened his horse to a gallop,
and was soon up with the toiling lady. She stopped when she heard him
coming, stood up to wait for him, quick-breathing and a little flushed,
and never took her eyes off him.
It was clearly a time for discretion: so much she signalled from her
brown eyes, which were watchful, but by no means timid. He
remembered afterwards that they had been apt to fall easily into set
stares, and thus to give her a bold look which seemed to invite you to
be bold also. But though he could not see this now, and though he had
no taste for women, it was certain she was handsome in a profuse way.
She had a broad full bust; her skin, dazzling white at the neck, ran into
golden russet before it reached the burnt splendour of her cheeks; her
mouth, rather long and curved up at the corners, had lips rich and
crimson; of which, however, the upper was short to a fault, and so
curled back as to give her, a pettish or fretful look. Her dark hair, which
was plentiful and drawn low over her ears into a heavy knot at the nape
of her neck, was dressed within a fine gold net. Her arms were bare to
the elbow, large and snowy white; from her fingers gems and gold
flashed at him. Prosper, who knew nothing whatever about it, judged
her midway between thirty and forty. Such was the lady; the man he
had no chance of overlooking, for the other had dropped her
handkerchief upon his face before she left him. "Sir," she now said, in a
smooth and distinguishable voice, when Prosper had saluted her, "you
may do me a great service if you will, which is to carry this dead man
to his grave in the wood."

"By the faith I have," Prosper replied, "I will help you all I can. But
when we have buried him you shall tell me how he came by his death,
and how it is that his grave is waiting for him."
"I can tell you that at once," she said quickly; "I have but just dug it
with a mattock I was so lucky as to find by a stopped earth on the bank
yonder. The rest I will gladly acquaint you with by and by. But first let
us be rid of him."
Prosper dismounted and went to take up his burden. First of all,
however, he deliberately removed the handkerchief and looked it in the
face. The dead man lay stiff and staring, with open eyes and a wry
mouth. Hands and face were livid, a light froth had gathered on his lips.
He looked to have suffered horribly--as much in mind as body: the
agony must have bitten deep into him for the final peace of death never
to have come. Now Prosper knew very little of death as yet, save that
he had an idea that he himself would never come to endure it; but he
knew enough to be sure that neither battle nor honour had had any part
here. The man had been well-dressed in brown and tawny velvet, was
probably handsome in a sharp, foreign sort. There was a ring upon his
finger, a torn badge upon his left