And rebel to the end, fell prone and beat upon the floor with her fist, in helpless rebellion at the trickery fate had practised on her.
Then suddenly her weeping stopped. As suddenly as though a stroke of fear had been laid across her bowed head. Her pummelling hand stilled.
Her head came up. She was bated, she was watchful, she was crafty. Of what he could not tell. She turned and looked behind her at the window, in dreadful secretive apprehension.
"Nobody shall take you from me," she said through clenched teeth. "I'll not give you up. Not for anyone. It's not too late, it's not! I'm going to get you out of here, where you'll be safe- Hurry, get your things. We'll go together. I have the strength for the two of us. You're going to live. Do you hear me, Lou? You're going to live--yet."
She sidled up beside the window, creeping along the wall until she had gained an outer edge of it; then peered narrowly out, using the slit between curtain edge and wall. He saw her nod slightly to herself, as if in confirmation of something she had expected to see.
"What is it?" he whispered. "Who's out there?"
She didn't answer. Suddenly she drew her head back sharply, as if fearful she had been detected just then from the outside.
"Shall I put out the lamp?" he asked.
"No!" She motioned to him horrified. "For God's sake, no! I was to have done that. It will be taken for a signal that--it's over. Our only chance is to go now, and leave it still on, as if--as if we were here yet."
She came running back to him, yet not forgetting even as she did so to throw still another backward glance of dread at the window; she settled down beside him with a billowing-out of her dress, took hold of his untended foot, raised it, while he still strove valiantly with the first.
"Quickly, your other shoe! There, that's all-- No time for more."
She helped him quit his sitting position on the edge of the bed, held him upright on his feet beside her, like some sort of an inanimate mannikin or rigid toy soldier that would fall over if her hands quitted him for just an instant and left him to himself.
"Lean on me, I'll help you. There ! There! Move your feet, that's it! Oh, Lou, try this one time more. just this one time more. You did it before. This time we're together, we're going together. This time it's our love itself that's running away--for its very life."
He smiled at her, as the floor slowly crept by beneath their tottering feet, inch by painful inch.
"Our love," he whispered bravely. "Our love, running away. Where are we going ?"
"Any train, anywhere. Only let us get out of this house-"
She struggled heroically with him, as though she were the spirit of life itself, contesting with the spirit of death that sought to possess him. Now holding him back when he inclined too far forward, now drawing him on when he swayed too far backward. Out the room door and along the upper hall. But on the stairs once she nearly lost him. For a moment there was a terrible equipoise, while he hung forward, threatening to topple downward, all the way downward, head first, and she strained her small body backward to the last ounce of its strength, striving to regain the balance that had been incautiously lost.
Not a whimper came from her in that frightful moment, and surely had he gone downward to his own destruction, she would have clung to him to the end, gone down with him to her own, rather than release him. But a strength came into her arms that had never been in them before, and slowly her squeezing pull, her embrace of desperation, righted him, drew him back against her, and equilibrium was regained.
And then, as they rested half-recumbent against the rail a moment, she with her back to it, he with his head pillowed on her breast, she found time to stroke his hair back soothingly from his brow and whisper: "Courage, love. I will not let you fall. Is it very hard for you ?"
"No," he murmured wanly, rolling his eyes upward toward her downturned face above him, "because you are with me."
Downward once more then, more cautiously this time, step by mincing step, like a pair of ballet dancers locked in one another's arms, pointed toe following pointed toe in a horrid, groping, blinded sort of pas de deux.
As they neared the bottom, were within one last step of it, she suddenly stopped, frozen. And in the silence, over the rise and fall of their two breaths, they both heard it.
There was a low, urgent tapping going on against the front door. Very stealthy it was, very secretive. Meant only to be caught by a single pair of ears, no other. A pair forewarned to expect it, to listen for it. Two fingers at the most, perhaps only one, kept striking at the woodwork; scratching at it, scraping at it, it might almost have been said, so softened was their impact.
A peculiar whistle sounded with it. Also modulated very low, very guardedly. Little more than a stirring of the breath against a wavering upper lip. Plaintive, melancholy, like the sound, of a baby owl. Or a lost wisp of night wind trying to find its way in.
It was intermittent. It waited. Then sounded again. Waited. Sounded again.
"Sh, don't make any noise!" He could feel her arms tighten protectively about him. As if instinctively seeking to safeguard him against something. Something that she understood, knew the meaning of, he didn't. "The back way," she breathed. "We'll have to go out by there- Hold your breath, love. For the love of heaven, don't make a sound or--we'll both be dead in here where we stand."
Cautiously, straining against one another, as much now to insure their mutual silence as before now it had been to maintain his uprightness, they quitted the stairs, crept rearward on the lower floor, into the dining room. She halted him there for a preciously spared moment, to reach for a decanter of stimulant, give it a twisting shake, extract the glass stopper and moisten his lips with it, while she still continued to hold him within the curve of her other arm.
"I'm afraid to give you too much," she mourned. "You are so spent."
"My love's beside me," he promised, as if speaking to himself. "I won't fail."
They moved on into the unlighted kitchen beyond, swimming submerged in the blue tide of night, but with the curtained glass square of its door, the back way out, peering at them, distinguishable in the dimness.
He heard the bolt scrape softly back beneath her diligently groping fingers. Then the door moved inward, and the coolness of escape was grateful in their faces.
The last sound behind them, traveling through the whole length of the house from its front, was that low tapping, recommencing again after a grudging wait. A little more hurried now than before, a little more insistent. And with it the whistle, with its secretive message, that seemed to say: "Open to me. Open. You know who I am. You know me. Why do you delay?" A little sharper now, a little more importunate, as its patience shortened.
He did not ask her who it was. There were so many things in life it was too late now to ask, too late now to know. There was only one thing he wanted to know, he needed to know, and that at long last had been told him: she loved him.
They floundered out into the backyard of their house, and out through the gate that led into it, from the lane that ran behind the backs of all these houses; down that to its mouth, and from there onto the sideward street. Then along that, and around the turn, and into the street that ran behind the one their house had faced upon.
"The station," she kept saying. "The station-- Oh, try, Lou. It's just a few short streets ahead. We'll be safe, if we can only reach it. There's always someone there, day or night-- There are lights there, no one can hurt us there. A train-- Any train, to anywhere-"
Any train, his heart kept saying in time to its desperate pounding, to anywhere.
On and on and on, two lurching figures, breaths sobbing in their throats; reeling drunken, yes, drunken with the will to live and love, in peace. No eye to see them, no hand to help them.
It was in sight already, across the open square ahead, the station square, the hub of the town,--or so she told him, he could no longer see that far before him--when suddenly the combination of their overtaxed strengths gave out, her arms, her will, could do no more, and he fell flat there in the dust beside her.