The Cameronians: A Novel - Volume 2 by James Grant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XX.
 CECIL COMES TO GRIEF.

At this very time yesterday he had been hanging over Margarita at the piano, and busy with the numerous buttons of her long kid-gloves; and then listening to her coquettish song of 'The Wishes.'

Now what a change had come! He was a fugitive, pursued by men who were veritable human bloodhounds!

'No doubt about Guebhard now!' thought Cecil. 'Fool that I was not to quarrel with him at Palenka as he wished; and shoot him on the terrace, or anywhere else. But a time may come; nay, must come—if I escape—if I escape!'

And a time did come, when they were to meet face to face, though Cecil could little foresee, then, when and where it was to be.

It was plain enough that this subtle and ferocious fellow, half an Oriental, in the first moments of supposing himself supplanted by Cecil—already so successful in the field and camp—had resorted to the deep scheme of cutting him off and obtaining his despatches; spurred on by the intensity of the twin passions, love and hate—love for Margarita, and hate for a supposed rival, in more ways than one; and if successful, there was no knowing what foul stories he might circulate to blacken the honour of the dead, with Tchernaieff—stories that might ultimately find their way into every print in Britain!

To Cecil there was a bitterness worse than death in the thought of this; but he could little conceive that it was not for Tchernaieff, or any other officer in Servia, the fatal despatches and plan of the future campaign were wanted!

Cecil looked from an eminence; his pursuers were still in sight, but looking faint and distant, amid the gathering gloom.

'If it comes to the worst, I would rather be shot down than captured—could I be assured of being shot dead,' thought Cecil, as he rode steadily on, he knew not in what direction; he could make out that his pursuers were five in number, and one was evidently Guebhard. 'Had I a good Enfield rifle, I could pick every man of them off at leisure from this, and then there would be a few less Montenegrins to trouble the world.'

These fellows had belonged, of course, to that Montenegrin contingent, five hundred strong, which had come into the camp of General Tchernaieff; but he being an officer as humane as he was brave, had been compelled to expel the whole force for their barbarous mutilation of the Turkish wounded, and many of them were now prowling about as idle freebooters.

These Montenegrins—men of the race which make such a stir in European politics at present—were literally savages of the Zerna-gora, as it is named, from the mountains clothed with darkest pine, which cover the greatest part of its surface—men inured to arms, hardship and cruelty from their boyhood—without religion or scruple, save in implicit obedience to their chiefs or leaders; and in camp and out of it they committed many an awful outrage, the report of which never found its way into the columns of the Glas Czentagora or official journal of Montenegro.

Cecil knew that when leaving Palenka, he had, at the utmost, only some forty miles to travel, with a horse that was fresh and active; but its shoes had been tampered with, he had been driven from his proper path, and the difficulties of that he traversed were now enhanced, as a storm came on.

Black and heavy clouds overhung the savage landscape—for savage it seemed, in its utter solitude. For the hour, the sky became preternaturally dark, and remained so till night deepened; and far in the hazy distance the ghastly green forked lightning flashed with weird splendour about the peaks of Mount Mezlanie, and the thunder boomed sullenly in the valleys below; and once or twice, when he obtained glimpses of the winding Morava, its current seemed increasing, as if in haste to leave the storm behind it.

Then the heavy smoke-like rain came down with a species of roar on the earth, crashing through the foliage of the trees, for hours after the time that should have seen our wanderer safe within the outposts of Tchernaieff; but wild though the storm, he welcomed it as a means of concealing him from his pursuers, for he felt that if overtaken, his arm was yet so feeble as to make him rather helpless. He was compelled to ride slowly now, and with a firm hand on a shortened rein.

The enormous pine trees towered skyward like giants, and seemed to assume something menacing in their aspect amid the gloom. Knotted and gnarled stems and roots also seemed to take the form of those grotesque monsters that figure in the forest through which Undine went; and in imagination perils mysterious and impalpable seemed to gather in the lonely path of Cecil, who was not without an active and fervid imagination.

At last he reached what appeared to be the border of the woodlands he had been traversing; the pathway grew broader; lights glittered out of the obscurity, and he could make out the form of a two-storied house, which he at once approached.

From the highway, as he supposed it to be, a modern gate gave access to a path through an orchard, as he eventually found, and in the centre thereof stood the house—the inmates of which, a Servian farmer and his family, received him with politeness rather than cordiality, and under the influence of the native distrust of all strangers, though he wore the brown Servian tunic of the patriotic army; but his pleasant and genial manner, and the fairness of his complexion won him favour, and while his horse was being stabled, he soon found himself installed before a wood fire, drying his sodden uniform, while the farmer's wife prepared some food, and her spouse endeavoured to describe the way he must pursue to reach the outposts of Tchernaieff, near Deligrad.

The house was a snug one. A tile-paved entrance-hall gave access to a room off it with four shuttered windows; it was floored with red tiles; an iron stove stood in a corner, and all round was a divan covered with rugs and cushions.

'Well,' thought Cecil, as some food was set before him, 'there are worse things in this world than taking pot-luck with a Servian farmer!'

Youth and hunger alone made him relish the plate of hot paprakash, or chicken soup with tomatoes dressed with hot pepper, bread, cheese, and black coffee à la Turque, served up in pottery, the form of which indicated a vast antiquity in its design—for the jars, vases, and plates, glazed white and green, were all Roman in style, and might have been used by the Emperor Trajan.

But little archæology was in Cecil's mind then; he was thankful to his hostess for the meal she gave him, and was intent on the host's description of the route he must pursue on the morrow, and was in the act of accepting from the hands of the former a tiny dish of the famous sweetmeat of Kirk-kelisie (near the Balkans), boiled grapes formed in a roll with walnut-kernels, when a strange sound like a distant 'whoop' caught his ear, together with the tramp of horses' hoofs. Then he felt his heart leap and his colour change, or fade.

'Horsemen are coming up the hollow way,' said a peasant, entering in haste.

'Horsemen!' exclaimed Cecil, starting up and looking at once to his pistols.

'Armed, too—Montenegrins—I saw them by a glimpse of the moon.'

'Guebhard and his gang—my pursuers. I am lost!' cried Cecil, leaping from the table and buckling on his sword, as he looked hurriedly around him for concealment, defence, or escape.

His evident emotion and admission that he had pursuers renewed at once the inborn mistrust of the Servian household, who all shrank from him. Despite his uniform and the gold cross of Takovo, they imagined he must be a culprit, and felt neither disposed to conceal nor defend him. Even the gentle hostess eyed him now with horror, mistrust and affright.

Cecil saw in a moment that he had nothing to hope for from his host, or the servants, among whom were four stalwart Servians; and just as he heard the noise of horsemen dismounting at the door, and the unmistakable voice of Guebhard summoning the house, he hurried away to the upper story, and locking two doors behind him, resolved with his sword and his pistols to sell his life as dearly as possible.

By the noise and din below he became aware that his pursuers had greatly increased in number, and now indeed a violent death seemed close to him—terribly so, and his heart beat wildly.

'One can die but once,' thought he; 'and why should we shrink from what we cannot shun?' he added, involuntarily quoting Byron. If he perished in that obscure and secluded place, who would there be to regret him, save Mary? And then he thought of his comrades of the old Cameronians; but none would ever know his fate. There was something very bitter in that reflection, yet the memory of the regiment, and of his comrades, seemed to nerve him anew at this terrible crisis.

In the dark he sought about for furniture to barricade the room-door, if it was forced, and to form a barricade to fire over. A chest or two, a table and chairs, he piled against it, and then examined the window—it was small, narrow, far from the ground, apparently; but all was obscurity and darkness without, and unknown to him, there was immediately beneath it a deep hole, formed by the farmer when digging for copper ore. But now two minutes had barely elapsed, when shouts and execrations fell upon his ears, together with the din of blows upon the first door he had closed.

It was speedily beaten in, and then the door of the room was assailed. It seemed stronger, and for a time resisted the blows that were rained upon it.

'He wears a diamond ring, the gift of Palenka, which will prove a fortune to whoever gets it,' he heard Guebhard say in a loud voice; 'and he has a plan of the campaign, well worth a thousand ducats to me, and more to Kara Georgevitch!'

But his Montenegrins scarcely needed these incentives to outrage and bloodshed.

Through a hole in the door Cecil, for a moment, saw them crowding and jostling in the narrow passage, by the light of a torch held by one of their number. Ferocious-looking they were, yet men of magnificent physique, in long white camises, open in front, with gaudy waistcoats below; their sashes filled with knives, yataghans sharp as needles, and brass-butted pistols; their faces inflamed by raki, their dark eyes gleaming like those of devils; their white teeth glistening; their wide blue petticoat-trousers reaching to the knee, and their feet encased in thongs and sandals of hide.

A gleam of light flashed inward, as an axe clove a rent in the door, and thereat, for a moment, he saw the gleaming eyes and pallid face of Guebhard, and he fired full at it; but with what effect he never knew.

He fired again and again, at a venture, through the door, and so did his assailants; but their chance bullets went wide of the intended mark; while more than one shriek and hoarse malediction announced that his fire had told on the group wedged in the narrow space without; but now the door was yielding fast, and Cecil, aware that when once it was broken down he would inevitably perish by a death too probably of protracted mutilation and torture, threw open the window and resolved to drop therefrom.

Firing all the chambers of his revolver at the door, through the splintered gaps in which a red light was streaming now, he lowered himself down, just as two of his assailants came rushing round a corner of the house, intending, no doubt, to cut off his retreat; and quitting his hold on the window-sill, he fell down—down—he knew not whither; but it was into the excavation already mentioned, and there he lay for some moments, stunned, confused, and well-nigh senseless, and incapable of further thought or action.

Round the hole, wherein he lay, his pursuers gathered.

'Here he lies!' exclaimed Guebhard, 'stunned or dead!'

'A single shot to make sure!' said one, cocking his long brass pistol.

'Not one!' cried Guebhard, imperatively; 'I hear cavalry moving through the wood—perhaps those we might be sorry to meet. He lies still enough—some of our balls must have hit him—I saw blood in the room.'

That was the case certainly; but it was blood from the wounds of some of his own followers.

'Hark!' he added, as the sound of a cavalry trumpet was heard close by; 'here are shovels—cover him up—and when the horse are past, we can return and get what we want, at leisure.'

Cecil heard all this; he never stirred—scarcely breathed; and now he felt shovelful after shovelful of earth thrown upon him, cold, damp, and moist, as they proceeded, not to bury, but merely to cover him up, with the intention of concealing, as they thought, the dead body for a brief space.

No groan, no sigh, no sound, escaped him, while this horrible process went on; yet he felt a horror and dismay no language can depict, as he knew not how much soil they might heap upon him.

Unseen, or unnoticed by them, he eventually felt himself compelled to move his head, lest his face should be covered as completely as his body was; and then suffocation would ensue.

At last a great mass was shovelled in; his head was entirely concealed, and then Guebhard and his Montenegrins withdrew from the spot.

END OF VOL. II.