Across the heath to war I fare,
The great green heath so broad and bare…
She sang it through to the end, to the last hair-raising diminuendo among the distant fanfares.
For there, where the splendid trumpets blare and thunder,
There is my house, my house the green turf under.
She would really have to stop this. When the last note of the postlude died away it was so silent that it was borne in upon her guiltily how late it was. Most of the guests must be trying to sleep. Much better, too, if she put out all the lights and seemed to be joining the sleepers; he would find it more difficult to approach if there was light spilling down the staircase into the trees.
She stood for a moment listening, after the lights were out, but everything was quiet and still, not even a thread of song drifted to her across the water. She lay down on the bed in her grey and white housecoat to wait patiently for Francis.
She was close to sleep, for all her resolution and eagerness, when the expected tapping came at the glass door on to the verandah. She leaped up gladly, switched on the small bedside lamp, and ran through the sitting-room to whisk aside the curtain and fling the door wide.
The maiden arose, and let him in…
The faint light from outside gilded a wet, glistening outline, the shape of a man tall against the sky. The little gleam from the bedroom lit upon the pallid hand that rapped at the glass, and the black stone in the remembered ring on his finger.
The breath congealed in Maggie’s throat and the blood in her veins.
This was not Francis, this pale, tense face and shimmering wet body slipping silently into her room, with slow drops coursing down his temples and hair plastered like weed against his forehead. Not Francis, but a drowned man come back out of his grave, out of the lake, out of the past, just when she had allowed herself to be tricked into believing herself rid of him for ever. The rank scent of lake-water and death came over the sill with him, drifting over her in a wave of faintness and nausea. She gave back before him a few steps, and then was stone, unable to move or speak. She was cold, cold, cold as death.
Then everything began to slip away from her, like flesh peeling from her bones, all her delusions of hope, all her belief in the future, any future, even her passion for her own gift. All illusory, all drifting away like dispersed smoke, leaving her naked and lost and damned after all. The world and time came toppling upon her, closing in until there was nothing left but this moment, which was her death.
He came towards her slowly, smiling his pale, drowned smile, his hands held out to her. For what had he come up out of his grave if not to claim her? The hands touched her breast, and cold as she was, she felt their icy chill sear her to the bone. Cold, wet arms went round her and drew her down, down into green depths…
Her lips moved, saying: ‘Robin!’ but made no sound. There was a voice whispering in her ear, soft and distant through the darkness that was beginning to wind itself about her:
Aufs Jahr sollst du mein Eigen sein.
Mein Eigen sollst du werden gewiss
Wie’s Keine sonst auf Erden ist,
O Lieb… auf grüner Erden…
Within the year you shall be mine… mine as never bride on earth can be… No, none on this green earth… How could she have disregarded the end? Mine in my house across the heath, the last dwelling of the drowned… the house of green turf…
His face drew near to her, floating through the gathering dark, smiling. When it swam out of focus his lips touched hers, and cold and dark burned into one absolute and overwhelmed her. She sagged in the arms that held her. She experienced death, the death that gave her back to him.
Stooping, the dead man hoisted her slight weight to his shoulder, and carried her away…
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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Bunty Felse sat in the gallery at the Alte Post until past eleven o’clock, watching the fun and waiting for George to come home.
For two days, ever since the poacher and the police had fished Friedl Schiffer’s body out of the lake, Bunty had been on her own. It was all very well for George to conduct his mild investigations in private, so long as he was merely keeping an eye on two English people apparently involved in something mysterious and possibly dangerous, but not known to be in any way criminal; but murder was quite another matter. So George had gone to the local police with his part of the story, and Bunty had been left to take care of herself from that moment on. What they had made between them out of their pooled information was more than she could guess, but its result had been to provide George with an English-speaking plainclothes-man and a car, with carte blanche to shadow Francis Killian’s movements as he thought fit. As for the girl, she was safe enough at the Goldener Hirsch; the hotel was under police surveillance, and she had showed no inclination to try to go anywhere, except for a walk into the town to have lunch, surprisingly enough, with her compatriot at The Bear, a meeting which could hardly have been as unplanned as it appeared. And even there they had been directly under George’s eye, whether they knew it or not. Bunty hadn’t seen him since he walked into the restaurant on Maggie’s heels, and left his wife to slip back alone to the Alte Post, before either of those two caught a glimpse of her.
She arrived just in time to relieve the lunch-time loneliness of the elderly Englishwoman who had accidentally got herself included in a predominantly young party, at this tag-end of the holiday season, and found herself ruthlessly shaken from their every activity. To be honest, she was a bore, and Bunty had a certain amount of sympathy with the young people; but since there was no chance of being useful to George for the rest of the day, she resigned herself cheerfully enough to filling a gap for someone else.
The elderly Englishwoman was fascinated and repelled by the wedding party, which was a great deal more rumbustious and well-lubricated than any at which she had ever been a guest. The enormous energy of those young men and their strapping girls seemed to her slightly indecent, and even the lustiness of the music had a strongly earthy flavour about it. The boys might all be in their best dark suits and dazzlingly white shirts, but they still looked as ebulliently fleshy and muscular as in their everyday leathers, and the pointed town shoes pounded the wooden floor as solidly as local hand-made mountain boots. And that awful man who seemed to be cheer-leader and master of ceremonies, the one with the beery paunch and the brick-red face who had always a girl in one hand and a two-litre stein in the other, such a man as that, totally uninhibited, simply could not happen in England. The elderly Englishwoman had, Bunty had discovered, run through two husbands, and one of them had been a butcher and the other a brewer, which made her views rather more surprising. Either the quality of English butchers and brewers was in decline, or she was remembering them rather as she would have had them than as they had been.
The master of ceremonies was, in fact, rather a splendid figure, over six feet high and nearly as wide, with a roaring laugh and the true mountain bass voice, straight out of a square mile of cavern.
He was the one who kept leading little forays out into the mild evening, to see if it had yet stopped raining. If it cleared, he would have them all tumbling out to the hotel boat-house, with arms full of food and hands full of bottles, to embark with their musicians and their instruments and their inexhaustible energy on the pewter surface of the Scheidenauersee.
The bride and ’groom had long departed, seen off with the maximum of noise and every traditional joke. The elderly Englishwoman said good night and went off to bed, but the party showed no sign of ending as long as food, drink and breath held out. Now Helmut was charging out by the garden door for the fiftieth time, and out there one of the girls was hallooing that it had stopped raining and the moon was out. There was loud and hilarious conference, and the musicians began to pack up their music and stands. Might as well see the aquacade set off, Bunty thought, and went up to her room over the lake.