Though named the castle of Palenka, the abode of the count of that name partook more of the character of a fortified house, as it had been built by his grandfather, an old heyduc, on the basement of a Roman or other ancient fortress, and had a legend connected with it, similar to that told of the castle of Skadra, that to propitiate the vilas, a beautiful young girl had been built up alive in the foundation of one of the towers; and Margarita, one day, showed Cecil the identical place in question.
All the rooms had parqueted floors, polished like a coach-panel. In the dining-room, or hall, was a large round table of massive form and baronial aspect, and a lofty oak buffet, full of shining plate, quaint crystal goblets, and quainter china.
The drawing-room was fitted up somewhat in the Turkish style or taste, for though it had a grand piano and orthodox European chairs, a low divan of yellow satin ran all round it, and many of the most beautiful objects of art that Vienna could produce adorned it. Trophies of arms hung everywhere, many of them very old, many of them collected perhaps by the veteran heyduc, who fought often in battle under Kara George, and who was impaled at Belgrade; for here we may mention that these heyducs were outlawed and deemed robbers by the Turks, and like the Scottish caterans, imagined that in setting law at defiance they were only combating for a principle of independence, and not acting dishonourably; and most of them, like old Michail, the Heyduc of Palenka, made it their boast that they robbed only the rich Moslem invaders, but were generous to the Servian poor; and for military services to the House of Austria, his son was created a count by Francis I., the ally of Britain against Napoleon.
Cecil's mind was made comparatively easy by the fact that Margarita had written to her brother the count, detailing the mishap which detained him at Palenka; but the letter was never received, so he knew nothing of the mystery that enveloped his disappearance at headquarters: and day followed day very quietly in that sequestered abode among the forests, and so far from any town.
The old countess, who had a truly Servian and holy horror of all strangers, thawed speedily to Cecil, and declared him one of the most delightful companions she had ever met, even in Vienna.
A thorough Servian of the old school, she was full alike of religion and superstition, and observed most scrupulously the numerous fasts of the Greek Church—the four annual terms of abstinence, and every Wednesday and Friday, and never uttered a holy name without crossing herself.
She was never tired of telling her beads, and if she awoke in the night when the wind was high, she trembled as she thought of the traditional vampire—a body which the Serbs supposed to be possessed by an evil spirit, which comes forth from the tomb of death to suck the blood of the living, till traced, taken, and burned to ashes. She believed in the existence of old Servian witches, who could steal away men's hearts, and close the wounds through which they had drawn them.
'I fear there are young witches in Servia who steal away men's hearts and leave the wound an open one,' said Cecil, who, but for the presence of Margarita, would soon have become intensely bored at Palenka, as the chief, if not only, visitor there was the pope or priest of the nearest village, a blue-eyed and long-bearded old man, who could only speak Serb, and whose demigod was the Archbishop of Belgrade.
Accustomed for months past to the misery and wretchedness of the Servian camp, to Cecil, the dinner-table with shining white cloth, plate, crystal and ivory knives, under a flood of light from a rose-coloured chandelier, seemed the luxury of Sybaris; and for several days he had his food cut for him by old Theodore, or by the pretty hands of the girl Ottilie.
Both mother and daughter were intensely loyal in the cause of Milano and Servia, and hated the Turks as bitterly as ever the old heyduc himself could have done.
'It was my brother Michail who recaptured the cross at Belina last year, as no doubt you know?' said Margarita.
'I was not in Servia then—what was the episode?' asked Cecil.
'It was in the famous battle of July. When the Turks ravaged Belina in Servia, they carried off a great cross from the altar of the church, and came on to the assault of our Servian troops, bearing it in front, and shouting, "You cannot fire on your God—you dare not fire upon your Prophet!"'
'And our poor Servians, rather than commit sacrilege, dared not fire, and stood perishing in their ranks!' said the countess.
'Till our Michail, at the head of a chosen band, burst, sword in hand, among the dense mass of red fezzes, recaptured the cross, and brought it into the lines of Milano, over heaps of dead and dying; and then—but not till then—did the Servians pour in a dreadful fire of shot, shell and rockets, beneath which the columns of the infidels melted away.'
When Margarita spoke, even with energy, as she often did, there was always something sweet and innocent about her, with a certain quiet dignity, and a touch of softness in her expression, which, when taken with the bright and lofty character of her beauty, rendered her wonderfully attractive.
She soon discovered that he was musical, and they sang frequently together, while she played the accompaniment; and when he gave forth the notes of the Master of Ravenswood's farewell to his lost love, and gave it with a power and pathos that, though she had heard many of the best tenors at Vienna sing the same air, yet none had seemed to do so with such tenderness and heart-broken despair—and when their eyes met, her heart began to thrill beneath the ardour of his gaze, for Cecil, when he sung thus, gave his whole soul to it, and thought of Mary—Mary Montgomerie only, or it might be the memory of the mother that taught him; but to the ear of Margarita every note seemed, as she once said, 'to be a lover's wail over a lost love.'
On one of these occasions, Cecil saw some pieces of dance music lying about, inscribed with the name of Captain Mattei Guebhard.
'The captain—he is a friend of yours?' he remarked.
'He was here on a visit to Michail once—yes,' she replied, with a shrug of her shoulders, and dismissed the subject. 'I grew weary of him; he was jealous as Jelitza!'
But Cecil observed next day, that all those particular pieces of music had disappeared.
Always fond of female society, Cecil found the daily association with this accomplished girl a source of the purest pleasure, and he strove, but in vain, to find traces and resemblances in her to Mary Montgomerie; for Margarita was larger, darker, more brilliant and colossal in her beauty, if we may use such a term.
She had quite a repertory of Servian legends, to which she recurred from time to time, and told with a piquancy which her foreign accent and foreign graces of manner enhanced; and one day she took him to a little lake—a dark and stagnant tarn, overshadowed by great trees, and near the Morava, which she affirmed to mark the grave of the jealous Jelitza, so famed in Servian song.
Remembering her reference to this personage when she spoke of Guebhard, he asked who she was.
'Oh, the very incarnation of jealousy!' said Margarita; 'she could not bear even the brotherly tenderness of her husband Paul for his young sister, and in order to alienate him, slew his favourite courser, and charged her with the act. But Paul gave credit to his sister's denial. Then she slew his falcon, and blamed his sister therefor; but Paul would not believe her. And at last she killed her little baby, and left in its tender body a knife which Paul had given his sister, whom he now slew in the wildness of his fury, by having her torn asunder by wild horses. But in the end, the jealous Jelitza perished by the same fate; and then we are told, "that wheresoever a drop of blood fell from her, there sprang up the rankest thorns and nettles. Where her body fell, when dead, the waters rushed and formed this lake so still and stagnant. O'er the lake there swam a small black courser; by his side a golden cradle floated; on the cradle sat a grey young falcon. In the cradle, slumbering, lay an infant: on its throat the white hand of its mother; and that hand a golden knife was holding." All these apparitions were visible here, once yearly, on this stagnant lake, till the days of my father, who had it blessed by the Archbishop of Belgrade, since when they have been seen no more.'
All the legends Margarita told him were wild and gloomy; yet the Servians seemed to Cecil a lively people, and together they often watched the reapers singing merrily in the fields, and dancing, to the fiddle and native bagpipe, when work was over, the kolo, the national dance of the people.
Both were young and both were handsome; the acquaintance so suddenly begun ripened rapidly: but Cecil, unmoved by the brilliant attractions of Margarita, and by the perilous influences of propinquity, never for a moment felt his heart waver in its loyalty to Mary, though he deemed her lost to him, and all other human love was dead in him now.
When the September evenings closed in, and the old lady, clad in costly velvet trimmed with beautiful fur from the Balkans, was reading her missal in a corner, Cecil and Margarita, if not at the piano, were generally seated close together—very close, an observer might have thought—at a tripod table of green marble, playing chess, he with his left hand, for the right was yet in a sling; and watching, which he could not fail to do, her lovely little hand, so white and delicate, a very model for a sculptor, pushing the pawns and knights about, while all was still without, save the flow of the Morava on its way to join the Danube.
Between these two, when the countess was not present, we are compelled to admit that the conversation sometimes waxed perilous, notwithstanding Cecil's resolute platonism, when the large liquid eyes of Margarita, under their thick dark fringes, met his, and her scarlet lips, which we have said were rather sensuous, quivered and smiled, with an expression all their own; and one of those perilous times was when, somehow, they fell on the subject of love—a natural one enough between a handsome young fellow and a beautiful woman.
'There are times,' said Cecil, after a pause, in reply to something Margarita had said, 'when men dare not love.'
'Dare not—when?' asked Margarita, as she made a false move, and had to play her king.
'I mean when to love is rashness, or would be presumption,' said he, thinking, as no doubt he was, of Mary and her vain old guardian.
'There may be rashness, but there is no presumption in any man offering his true and honest love to any woman—even a princess.'
'But would the princess accept it?' said Cecil.
'Perhaps,' replied Margarita, looking at him with one of her smiles, and then drooping her lashes; 'love is romance,' she added.
'Then I have lived the romance of my life,' said Cecil, a little bitterly, and perhaps unwisely, 'and have only its grim realities before me now.'
'Already—and you so young?' she asked, with dilated eyes.
'Already!'
'I trust you mistake, and that romance may come again,' said she, softly.
'It is utterly past, so far as hope goes now.'
'Does the grass of the grave grow above it?' she asked after a pause.
'In one sense—for my hope is buried.'
'I do not think any grave is so deep that we can bury in it all hope of another love and other happiness,' said Margarita, perhaps misunderstanding him, and making a rather leading remark, which Cecil—though not obtuse on such matters—failed, in his utter preoccupation, to perceive. Margarita bit her lip, and shoved her pawns about. She, accustomed to adulation and much admiration, was rather piqued by Cecil's coldness.
'All the world is alike to me now,' said he, rather absently; but she gathered the conviction that he was neither married nor engaged.
'Are you so much of a misogynist that you cannot even be the friend of a woman?' she asked.
'I have not said so,' said he; 'nor am I in any degree a misogynist,' he added, with animation.
'Then you can conceive a friendship?'
'Yes, and a most tender one—and go where I may,' he added, coming rather to the point, as Margarita thought, 'I shall never forget the friendship I have conceived for you.'
'That emotion is not always a lasting one.'
'Why—how?' he asked.
'Because it often ends where—love begins,' she replied, with a laugh and a downcast smile.
Cecil felt his heart beat quicker.
'Oh, by Jove!' thought he, 'this sort of thing won't do—what must I say next? This is making awful running, and I have only been a fortnight here!'
But at that moment the countess, who had dropped asleep over her missal, awoke, and the conversation changed.
Truth to tell, Cecil was beginning to be somewhat scared, rather than flattered, by the brilliant œillades and rash speeches of Margarita. He did not quite understand the romantic impulses that came of her half-wild Servian blood, though partly tamed and tempered by a fashionable European education. She was totally unlike any other woman he had met before, and he could not determine to his own satisfaction whether she had conceived a secret fancy for him, or was only seeking to entangle him in a flirtation, for her own amusement, as she had perhaps entangled Mattei Guebhard and others before him.