CHAPTER VI.
A FATAL PROOF FOUND.
Food and wine were placed before him; he recoiled from the former, but drank the latter like one who had been long athirst.
After all he had undergone, and all he had done, to preserve and deliver in safety these unlucky despatches, this, then, was the grim and degrading welcome that awaited him in the camp of the allied Servian and Russian armies?
What did it all mean? Some dreadful mistake, or a false and malicious accusation, which time must soon unravel. Meanwhile, how difficult it was to be patient or calm under the circumstances; and he asked himself again and again, would Fortune never be tired of persecuting him?
Would he ever forget, he had thought, that mauvais quart d'heure in the place that so nearly became his grave? and now he was in peril as great again.
'A traitor,' had been the epithet applied by Count Palenka towards him. In what way could he ever be so? Was he to be made the victim—the scapegoat of some dark political game, between the Servian prince he served, and the general of the Russian army? 'You may see Siberia yet, if you escape death,' had been the menace of the latter, who actually owed his life at his—Cecil's—hands. He recalled the words, and knowing all of which these men were capable, and all they had the power to do, with all his natural courage, could not but feel appalled.
The room to which he had been consigned was on the upper floor of a house in the little town of Deligrad. It had little other furniture than a wooden divan, that ran round it, and whereon were spread the bear and wolf skins on which he could seat himself, or repose at night.
Its windows were little more than narrow slits, and through them he could see the camp, spreading over the low-lying eminences which bound, on the east, the Valley of the Morava—the long streets of tents and huts, and little tentes-d'abri, the smoke of the fires at which the soldiers cooked their food; and the Servian tricolour flying on a huge earthen redoubt, formed on the summit of the most commanding height, and armed with heavy guns, pointed grimly towards the point from which the Turks might be expected to approach.
Amid these streets of tents, drums were beaten and bugles sounded all day long; orderlies spurred their horses to and fro, and Servian peasants drove waggons drawn by white bullocks, or led long lines of laden ponies, and itinerant sutlers and vendors of grapes and apples, sardines, tomatoes and tobacco, etc., went incessantly about, together with itinerant fiddlers and bagpipers.
Beyond all this, he could see the road winding away to Belgrade, near two long, low, whitewashed edifices, the abodes of suffering and death. On each a white flag with a red cross was displayed to indicate that they were hospitals, on which no shot or shell must fall, even if the infidels succeeded in storming the heights of Djunis, which overhang the other side of the Morava.
Daily Cecil watched all this from his windows, till his soul sickened at it all and of inaction, after the fierce excitement of recent events; but after a week had elapsed, the clash of arms, as the two sentinels at the door accorded a salute to some visitors, followed by the clatter of spurs and steel scabbards on the wooden staircase of the house, preceded the entrance into Cecil's room of an officer in the uniform of the Servian staff, the provost-marshal and a gentleman in civilian costume, who announced himself as the deputy minister of police from Belgrade, and who was attended by a subordinate in a kind of uniform.
'Police?' replied Cecil, in an inquiring tone; 'it is, then, some civil—error that I am accused of?'
'No error at all, Herr Lieutenant; but of a crime against the State,' replied the civilian—a black-bearded man, with the ribbon of the Takova cross at his lapelle—in a somewhat gruff manner. 'Information has been lodged with the authorities that you have, or have borne about you, papers of a treasonable nature.'
'Lodged, by whom?'
'Captain Mattei Guebhard.'
Cecil laughed, but angrily, nevertheless.
'Herr Lieutenant,' said the provost-marshal, a grim-looking old sabreur, 'you may find this a hanging, and not a laughing, matter!'
'Thus,' continued the deputy minister of police, 'we have orders to examine your person for secret papers, if, by the delay foolishly accorded to you, they have not been destroyed.'
'Papers—what papers?'
'That, as yet, can only be known to yourself.'
On this his attendant made a pace towards Cecil, who haughtily motioned him by his hand to pause, ere he laid a hand upon him.
'You delivered the despatches of General Tchernaieff to the King at Belgrade?' resumed the police official.
'To the King—yes.'
'Don't repeat my words, please!'
'Mein Herr?'
'I say, don't repeat my words!' exclaimed the other, who manifested rather a disposition to bully. 'You tarried unnecessarily at the castle of Palenka?'
'I met with an accident, of which the general is, I presume, fully aware, though the count seems somewhat dissatisfied,' said Cecil, in whom this questioning excited surprise and indignation, rather than alarm.
'There you met Captain Guebhard?'
'To my sorrow, and no small disgust, I did.'
'And though unable, as you averred, to proceed, you refused to give him the documents; but conveyed them in a contrary direction from the camp, with what purpose is best known to yourself; and but for the circumstance of your meeting an escort of Servian troops, the general would never have received them at all?'
'This statement is false in its tenor,' replied Cecil, haughtily; 'and I am utterly in the dark as to your inferences.'
'Ah—indeed! Permit me to examine your sabretache.'
'It is empty.'
'We shall see,' replied the official, as he unbuckled the accoutrement so named, and which was suspended by three slings from the waistbelt. 'What have we here?' he added, as he drew from an inner pocket, which Cecil never knew it possessed, a small parchment document, and uttered a genuine cry of astonishment; 'here is enough to hang a battalion!' he added. 'Herr Lieutenant, here we find you in open communication with the Pretender, Kara Georgevitch!'
'Who the deuce is he?' asked Cecil, with equally genuine surprise.
'Do not pretend ignorance, and thus add to the crime for which you will be so severely punished, that I am actually sorry for you,' replied the deputy minister of police, regarding Cecil with great sternness nevertheless. 'Here is your commission as colonel—bearing your own name—to raise a regiment of Montenegrin deserters, for the service of Kara Georgevitch—the exile—the outlaw—the Pretender to the Servian throne, to whom, no doubt, you intended to convey alike the King's despatches and the general's plan of the campaign!'
'Impossible—you are under some delusion,' said Cecil, with anger now.
'I need scarcely ask you to look upon what you know already exists,' replied the other, with some indignation, and then holding the document before the eyes of Cecil, who saw plainly and undoubtedly that it was all he stated it to be, and his name written there as 'Cecil Falconer,' and that, among other signatures, that of Kara Georgevitch was appended to it.
So completely was he bewildered by this strange circumstance, that he permitted the document to be taken away before he had farther examined it; and while a drawn sword was placed against his heart, the pockets of his uniform, and even the lining thereof, were roughly examined for other treasonable papers, after which his visitors retired, and he was left—astounded—to his own reflections.
He was the victim of a deep-laid scheme by Guebhard. He saw it all, and in his suppressed passion could scarcely breathe—yes, he saw it all now; but how to prove it? Failing to abstract or obtain by fair means the despatches at Palenka, for the information of this Kara Georgevitch, with whom the fact of having this—probably blank—commission proved him to be in communication—he had beset the way, and finding that Cecil baffled him, had now brought this false accusation against him.
He remembered the warning of Margarita, and that he had detected Guebhard meddling with his sabretache. Could he doubt, now, that he had intended to abstract the despatches on one hand, while concealing in it this perilous and already prepared document on the other?
It was not until a day or two more had elapsed that Cecil understood his peril fully or what the involvement meant, and that there were two claimants to the Servian throne—Milano Obrenovitch the successful one, now reigning, and Kara Georgevitch, a pretender. It was a position exactly the same as if some one in Scotland, in the days of 'the Forty-Five,' had been found with a commission to raise a regiment of Highlanders for 'King James VIII.;' and thus Cecil found himself, as yet, in a predicament of no ordinary magnitude, in which those for the prosecution would have it all their own way, and the defence, conducted by himself, must seem weak indeed.
Again and again, Pelham, Stanley, and one or two other kind-hearted Englishmen, who, in search of a 'new sensation,' were taking a turn of service against the Turks, endeavoured to visit him, and to take some measures for his safety; but all were bluntly refused access to the prison in which he lay, for so closely was the house guarded, that it became a prison in reality now.
He lost heart—his spirits began to sink under the rigid confinement to which he was subject, and his doubt and anxiety as to the future issue of the whole affair. He had about him a confused and dazed feeling, such as he had not possessed since he had been in the castle of Edinburgh, and the time of the fatal ball; and as the hours passed by him in solitude, and the detested details of his room—the pattern of the paper on its walls, the divan that bordered them, the skins that lay thereon, the cracks in the ceiling and the bare planking of the floor—seemed to become photographed on his brain, and the senseless jingle of silly airs, the words of absurd rhymes, recurred to him again and again with that provoking but persistent reiteration so common to all—at least to many—when their minds are tortured by doubt or calamity.
Seated there in that prison-room, hearing the sounds of the adjacent camp by day, and by night only the measured tread of the Russian sentinels without, as they trod silently and monotonously to and fro on their posts, Cecil—looking back through the receding vista of the past, and the latter and most bitter portion of his career in which Mary Montgomerie bore a part, was often on the point of asking himself whether it was not a dream rather than a reality, that brief and happy reminiscence of their love; and whether it did not pertain to a life in past ages and under some different phase of existence. In short, his thoughts, under the high-pressure put upon him, became rather wild and incoherent at times.