CHAPTER XI.
A DARK PREDICTION.
It is perhaps impossible to describe adequately all that passed with the speed of thought through Cecil's mind when the group of Servian officials approached the room in which he was confined.
He had heard the drums beaten at sunset, and somehow deemed the falling in of the pickets—though a usual circumstance—a prelude, perhaps, to his own execution, or a hopeless and degrading transmission to some fortress, he knew not where; and where, too probably, he would never be heard of again, but pass through life chained to a heavy shot, with a number painted on his canvas caftan.
Well, death, however sudden, was better than such a fate!
For a moment or two his blood had stood still as the comers drew near, and the noise of their swords and spurs was heard on the stair. The unlocking of the door found an echo in his heart.
He nerved himself, with a prayer on his lips, to hear the worst they had to tell him—desperation and resignation curiously mingling in his mind.
'Oh why,' he muttered, 'are we born—why do we live only to endure, to suffer, and to die?'
Then he thought of the poor girl who shrunk close to him in her disguise, and a great fear for her was added to his own agony of soul.
Thus, he was rather surprised to find himself politely saluted by the minister of police, by Count Palenka, and the provost-marshal, both of whom had been so severe and sharp with him when last he saw them.
'Herr Lieutenant,' said the deputy minister of police, 'we have the pleasure of announcing to you that you are a free man—free without a stain upon your honour, and may, when you choose, return to your post.'
'His Excellency General Tchernaieff has commissioned me personally to restore to you your sword, which I do with profound pleasure,' said Count Palenka, advancing in turn, and handing to the bewildered Cecil his sword and waist-belt.
'To what do I owe this change in my affairs?' he asked in an unsteady voice, as if unable to realise the situation.
'The discovery of the true character of that villain, Mattei Guebhard!' replied Palenka.
'Guebhard—who has now deserted to the Turks, and for whose head the King now offers a reward of a thousand ducats,' added the police official.
'And when was this discovery made?'
'At noon to-day, Herr Lieutenant.'
'By whom?'
'By my sister, Margarita, who has more legal acumen than all of us put together,' replied Count Palenka; 'she asked to see the commission found upon your person, and old Tchernaieff bluntly refused to show it even to her. But you know how lovely she is, and the spell of her power and presence—her polished insouciance and cultured as well as natural fascination, and how she unites the witchery of a girl to that of a woman of the world. All this proved too much for our old Cossack,' continued the count, laughing; 'he yielded—put the document in her hand, and almost immediately her quick eye detected the forgery.'
'Forgery?'
'Yes, the partial—for it was only partial—erasure of his name and substitution of yours. A touch of some chemical acid, applied by the Herr Deputy of Police, proved the truth beyond a doubt; and a rumour of this reaching Guebhard in his tent, he fled, and is now safe in the Turkish lines. So Margarita has saved you!'
'Margarita?' repeated Cecil, almost mechanically. Why, after all this discovery and removal of all suspicion of his honour, did she still mean to carry out the intended scheme of flight—even to the last moment, sending him the disguise by her maid Ottilie? To secure him to herself—could he doubt it? It was a strange and wayward idea; but any way, as matters stood now, she had loaded him with a debt of gratitude which he never could repay.
'You saved my life, as well as the life of Tchernaieff, Herr Lieutenant,' said the count, taking his hand; 'I must never forget that, and henceforward you may command me as you will.'
Cecil could not help remembering that the count's mind had been a little oblivious of the circumstance at their last interview; but, to do him and Tchernaieff justice, they were both generous and profuse in their apologies.
The minister of police was not long in detecting the sex of the terrified Ottilie as she attempted to leave the apartment, wherein her presence and disguise led to the immediate suggestion of an intrigue—which was so natural with a girl so pretty—and after some laughter and quizzing, she was glad to let them all adopt the idea and make her escape.
So ended this somewhat melodramatic situation, of which, like Margarita, Cecil had seen many with lime-light and orchestral accompaniments, but he never thought to undergo the horror and bitterness of heart consequent to being an actor therein on the stage of real life.
So, with an emotion of gladness all the greater and more keen from the revulsion that took place in his mind, he buckled on his sword and once more went forth a soldier and a free man; his gratitude to Margarita mingling with a fierce and most unholy longing to be once again face to face with Guebhard, a chance not unlikely to be soon afforded to him by the fortunes of war.
'Welcome again, my dear fellow! glad indeed to see you!'
'By Jove! we feared it was all up with you in that cursed affair!'
Such were the greetings, with a warm shake of the hand, which Cecil received from Pelham and Stanley when he visited them in the infantry camp, which was chiefly in a wood near Deligrad, and where he found them with some other officers seated near a fire, whereat a suddenly improvised meal was in process of being cooked by their Servian servants, and which consisted simply of a turkey, coated with clay and roasted in a hole covered with hot ashes; which, together with potatoes and tomatoes, was to be washed down with German beer.
'Life here is not exactly the life of flies in amber, or that of lotus-eaters,' said Pelham, laughing, after he heard the story of Cecil's misadventure; 'but even here, where we have Montenegrins and Bashi Bazouks in plenty, we don't often come across so accomplished a scoundrel as this Mattei Guebhard.’
'But, Falconer, old fellow, though a genuine Scot, brave as a lion and obstinate as a mule, he nearly proved too much for you,' said Stanley, proffering his cigar-case, 'and would have done so in the end, but for your fair auxiliary. By Jove! that girl must be a regular brick!'
'You gave the Turks an alerte at Alexinatz after I left the camp?' said Cecil, to change the subject.
'Your branch of the service, the cavalry, did,' replied Pelham; 'we came on with the infantry supports, and, as we had to keep our faces quite as often to our men, in leading them on, as to the enemy (you know what cowardly beggars the Servians are!), I nearly had my dorsal fin carried away by a carbine bullet. But here comes our turkey, done to time; and now to dinner with what appetite we may.'
'We have had no fighting since Alexinatz,' said Stanley, 'and our camp-life seems tame after what has gone before it.'
'Like claret on the top of champagne.'
'Man alive! for days we have had nothing better to drink than German beer, and Pelham consoles himself by expatiating on Moselle as if he had been weaned on it.'
It was as music to Cecil, hearing once again the pleasantly modulated and frank English voices of Pelham and Stanley, who made him so welcome to share their humble repast—humble in its mode of production and appurtenances—but both declared themselves sick of Servia and its army, and after another battle or two, as the novelty had worn off, they had resolved to resign and return home.
Cecil thought that he would gladly do the same; but he had no home that he knew of to return to.
He knew nothing of the round sum so kindly offered and paid by Stanley and Pelham for accounts of his safety, and the generous fellows, of course, never mentioned it to him; but neither of them knew that it eventually led to Guebhard—acting on the information of the wood-cutters—tracking him as he did to Palenka, and from thence through the forest.
It was the evening of an autumn day, late in the year. A golden light lingered on the mountain-slopes, and a soft, silvery mist rose from the oak and pine forests that clothed them. The salmon were leaping from rock to rock in a tributary of the Morava, that flowed through the camp, and cattle were herding peacefully in the valleys under the shadow of Mount Mezlanie; and the fields of Indian corn, rice and maze were being reaped in places where the wild Turkish Timariots had many a time in the days of old swept in furious bands from Thrace to Belgrade, slaying the stalwart and young, the aged and helpless; sparing the lovely alone as their spoil; and where, in later times, the standard of Black George had led so often to victory, but never to defeat.
It was a glorious autumnal evening, and, seated there by the camp fire with pleasant English comrades, and enjoying what had long been a rarity to him, a good cigar, Cecil felt all the joyous impulses of the time—a change or relaxation of mind, after all he had so lately undergone.
'Here,' said Pelham, as he lounged on the grass at full length, a tawny beard of imposing aspect flowing over the breast of his brown infantry tunic, and smoking his briar-root with the marked laziness that follows a day of hard work and excitement, for he had been foraging in the vicinity of the enemy—'here we have to do without the thousand and one trifles that seem so necessary to one's existence in the atmosphere of Tyburnia and Belgravia; and yet, somehow, we don't seem to miss them.'
'Your rescue of Tchernaieff and Palenka in the cavalry charge, and your decoration with the Takova cross, and so forth, have all been duly chronicled in the London papers,' said the dapper little correspondent (before mentioned) to Cecil; 'and doubtless they have been the means of sending a thrill through the breasts of the listless, nil admirari and languid snobs of society.'
Has she heard of all this? was Cecil's only thought; and the dear old Cameronians, too?
As these heedless spirits had got hold of Margarita's name, and knew—but not how far, exactly—she had been woven up in the network of Cecil's late adventures, he had to undergo some raillery on the subject, and somewhat to his annoyance.
'It is an established fact in fiction and in real life—in history and in poesy,' said Stanley, twirling his long moustache and adopting a sententious tone, 'that a fellow must inevitably fall in love with the pretty girl who nurses him after a spill in the hunting-field, after a wound received in action, and more especially if she actually saves his life; and this girl did yours, and she is downright lovely! I saw her in the iron church, on the day that Tchernaieff distributed so many crosses and medals to the troops. And you know, as Sancho Panza says, "as days go and come, and straw makes medlars ripe," in the fulness of time we may expect to see——'
'Stanley, how your idle tongue wags!'
'If it wags, it cannot be idle, Cecil; and if you are destined to marry this fair Servian, and found a race of heyducs, or whatever the deuce they are called, I suppose it is no use attempting to run away from her.'
Cecil, who knew more of what had passed between himself and Margarita than the heedless speaker had the least idea of, felt his secret annoyance increased by this banter. Owing her the most profound gratitude, as he did, and painfully aware of her rash, wild, and ill-concealed but ill-considered regard for himself—a regard by which he felt himself imperilled, rather than charmed or flattered—he could not, with patience, hear her name mentioned in this way by these thoughtless fellows—blasé waifs from the society of 'the West End.'
'By Jove, how pink he grows!' exclaimed Pelham; 'but no doubt she hopes to finish her maidenly career with you, Cecil.'
'Hush!' said the latter, with open irritation, yet laughing to conceal it if possible; 'here comes her brother.'
Wearing a very handsome Russian uniform—a green tunic faced with black velvet and laced with gold, and with several decorations glittering on his breast, the count, on foot, with his sword under his arm, approached the camp fire, and touched his flat round forage cap in salute.
'Herr Lieutenant,' said he to Cecil, 'I knew that I should find you here. I have a message to you from the general, which I know you will receive with pleasure.'
Cecil started to his feet and bowed.
'To reward you for all you have undergone, his excellency means to give you a new opportunity for distinguishing yourself,' continued Palenka, smiling. 'You are to reconnoitre, about dawn, the country between Mount Mezlanie and the Timok river, about twenty miles from this; observe its features, what you may see, and report thereon. The picked men of your troop—your own, as yet without a captain—to the number of twenty sabres, will parade at midnight, in front of the general's quarters.'
Cecil was still on the staff, but he accepted the duty assigned with pleasure, and felt the hint conveyed, that his troop was as yet without a captain, as the latter had been killed at Alexinatz.
'I can stay with you but a few minutes, gentlemen,' said the count; 'and meantime will join you in a glass of some wine my servants have brought, in honour of the Herr Lieutenant and his victory over the jade Fortune.'
'Tokay!' exclaimed Stanley, in a low voice, as he saw with interest a Cossack extracting the tiny cobwebbed bottles: 'Tokay, by all the gods!—such wine as can't be got for money, I have no doubt.'
'You are right, Herr,' said the count, who overheard him; 'they are the last of a present the Emperor gave my father—and I have just begged Tchernaieff to accept, from me, a dozen—they are all of the first brand, and from the grapes of Hegyallya.'
Other officers now came to share the count's Hungarian wine—Russian Hussars in sky-blue dolmans, Servian dragoons with queer forage caps, like Scotch glengarries, and baggy red breeches; and a picturesque group the whole made, Palenka being the most striking figure there. He was very handsome, and would have formed a fine study for a painter. He had a visage naturally pale, but embrowned by exposure, a dark, martial, eagle-eye, and black moustache, with a general daring, undaunted and fiery air about him—in aspect, curiously between a man of fashion and a reckless Free Lance; a man who in thought and habit had much of the old heyduc in him, and was perhaps a little behind this unromantic, unmoved, and unheroic age.
Beside him sat Pelham, a brave and reckless fellow, but of a very different mould—under the middle size, yet a winning and aristocratic-looking Englishman, about thirty years of age, with blue eyes, and a general and genial sunshiny smile in his face.
'And where, now, is she to whom I owe so much—Mademoiselle Palenka?' asked Cecil in a low voice, when occasion served, and feeling the necessity, in common politeness at least, to remember the fact of her existence.
'She has left the camp,' was the curt response of the count, over whose face a shade fell for a moment; for some rumours—some suspicions of his sister's interest in the questioner—must have reached him, and he knew that the impulsive Margarita was difficult to control; so Cecil said no more on the subject, and, changing his place to another part of the noisy and laughing group, became somewhat silent.
He had ample food for reflection, certainly.
It was impossible for him not to think with positive wonder on all the strange complications that must have arisen had the count, and those who accompanied him, been but a very little later in coming to announce that he—Cecil—was free; and that if he had availed himself of the disguise brought by Ottilie, and reached the appointed spot where Theodore awaited him with the horses, and too probably Margarita too (indeed he could not doubt she was there), and had he taken, with her, that flight which the detection of the deserter's forgery rendered unnecessary, the whole future of both their lives must have been changed from that hour; for it was evident that she had meant to cast her lot with him, and for all she knew or could foresee, her one life against a censorious world.
'We must never meet again—I must see her no more!' was his thought again and again, and he was conscious that the count was looking at him scrutinisingly from time to time. The usually heedless and unobservant Pelham detected this, and said to Palenka inquiringly:
'Why do you look so gravely—so sadly at our friend, with whom you were laughing but a few minutes ago?'
'Sadly—do I? Well, sooth to say, I feel somewhat sorry for him.'
'Why—what the deuce is up now?'
'I am rather an acute physiognomist,' replied the count, looking down and affecting to select and manipulate a cigar, 'and think I can see—can read in his face, by a certain gravity of expression there, that he will—after all he has escaped—die a violent death.'
'A violent death!' repeated Pelham, with an expression of surprise in his face; 'from what do you gather this?'
'I cannot say—a kind of prescience—an intuition of destiny—that I have no control over; but I have rarely been mistaken.'
'Well,' replied Pelham, 'I might predict as much about many of us; we may perhaps be engaged to-morrow, and some that are above the turf just now, may be under it soon enough.'
The count gave an inscrutable smile, and began to smoke; and Pelham was glad only that Cecil—going, as he was so soon to do, on a duty of some peril—had not overheard a prediction so strange and gloomy concerning himself.
'Destiny—prescience—bosh!' thought Pelham; but the count's face and manner impressed the volatile Englishman, who had only come to fight in Servia as the means to a 'new sensation.' He became perplexed, silent, and when Cecil spoke, his voice seemed somehow to stir a painful chord in the breast of Pelham.
'A violent death!'
This strange prophecy gave him some cause to think. Did the count refer to the chances of war, or that Cecil was fore-doomed prematurely, and had his destiny—his kismet, like an Osmanlie—written on his brow? Or was it that he resented, with all his apparent candour and generosity, some love-passages between his sister and the late prisoner, and meant to have the latter cut off?—a matter easily achieved in that lawless land.
Pelham was restlessly uneasy on the subject, and sat reflectively sucking at his briar-root in silence, till the bugles sounded for lights and fires out—for silence in camp, and all retired to their tents or huts.
At midnight, punctually, Cecil, cloaked and armed, rode to the headquarters of Tchernaieff, in front of which he found his troop mounted, and a sergeant calling the roll by lantern-light, the rays of which fell feebly on the dark faces and darker uniforms of the Servian troopers, who were all in light marching order, without valises or other encumbrance, save forage-nets, sponge-bags and spare shoes. By lantern-light he opened the ranks and inspected them; the pistols and carbines were loaded. From Palenka he got a written memorandum of the path or route he was to pursue, though much was left to his own discretion.
The party, consisting of twenty sabres, broke into sections of fours.
'Shagoum-marche!' (walk-march) was the first command, and they got into motion.
'Rishu!' (trot) cried Cecil, and away they went, and quickly left the camp behind them, looking somewhat ghost-like amid the starless gloom, as they glided noiselessly over the soft turf, on which, as yet, the hoofs of their horses made no sound.