THE CAMERONIANS.

  A Novel.


  BY

  JAMES GRANT,

  AUTHOR OF
  'THE ROMANCE OF WAR,' 'OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH, ETC.



  IN THREE VOLUMES.
  VOL. III.



  LONDON:
  RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
  Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.

  1881.

  [_All Rights Reserved._]




  CONTENTS OF VOL. III.



  CHAPTER

  I. NEWS AT LAST!
  II. THE COINCIDENCE
  III. EAGLESCRAIG ONCE MORE
  IV. THE DIVIDED PAIR
  V. A STRANGE ACCUSATION
  VI. A FATAL PROOF FOUND
  VII. CECIL'S VISITOR
  VIII. BAFFLED!
  IX. CROSS PURPOSES
  X. THE TELEGRAM
  XI. A DARK PREDICTION
  XII. THE RECONNAISSANCE
  XIII. THE WAYSIDE CHAPEL
  XIV. THE BATTLE OF ZAITCHAR
  XV. A RIDE FOR LIFE OR DEATH!
  XVI. WHAT THE 'TIMES' TOLD
  XVII. MARY'S LETTER
  XVIII. THE HEIGHTS OF DJUNIS
  XIX. WOUNDED
  XX. SAVED!
  XXI. 'THE END CROWNS ALL'




THE CAMERONIANS.



CHAPTER I.

NEWS AT LAST!

From such terrible episodes and scenes as those that close our last
chapter, and from such a land of wild barbarity, we gladly turn
homewards for a time.

It was summer; and the season had scattered its roses and their
leaves lavishly over the old Scoto-French garden of Eaglescraig, for
such it was, with its closely-clipped privet hedges, its long grass
walks, balustraded terraces, mossy sundials, and parterres, where
deep box-edging was alternated by flower borders running along the
paths, and where wall-flowers, sweet-williams, and tiger lilies, with
moss and Provence roses, were varied by espaliers that in the coming
time would be laden with fruit.

The summer was in its glory, but there was not much brightness within
the house of Eaglescraig.  So Cecil, who had latterly met with such
scanty kindness from Sir Piers, was actually his grandson, and the
honours of the old line were perhaps neither to die out, or pass to a
far-away branch, after all!

John Balderstone had proved all this, and great were the content and
glee thereat among the old visitors of the mansion; there being no
regrets for Hew being 'scratched,' as he called it, 'and out of the
running now,' for his general bearing had rendered him obnoxious to
every one.

'So the whirligig of time brings about its revenge,' said old Tunley,
the butler; 'pride always goes before a fall.'

'Yes!' coincided John Balderstone, with an angry smirk on his face;
'now, Master Hew may go to Hecklebirnie!'

'Where is that?'

'Three miles beyond--well, a very warm place, as our Scots proverb
has it,' added the factor, as he drained a stiff jorum in Mr.
Tunley's pantry.

Mrs. Garth rejoiced openly at the change that had come to pass.

'It would have been unnatural indeed,' she said, 'that a girl so
sweet and sensitive as Mary should have been mated to Hew, whose
actions, nature, and habits would have jarred on her softer nature
perpetually.'

And Sir Piers heard her, ever and anon, making such remarks as this,
without according the angry response they would once infallibly have
elicited; while to Mary the relief was inexpressible!  But meantime,
where was Cecil now?  This question was ever in her mind, causing an
aching, gnawing anxiety there, amounting to positive physical pain;
and she heard it daily on the lips of all around her, Hew excepted;
and once in his cups the latter expressed to John Balderstone a
fierce hope that the absent heir might be----'

'Stop, sir!' cried John; 'where?'

'Oh, anywhere,' replied Hew, with an angry gloom in his
bilious-looking eyes; 'I am not particular as to climate, or
locality.'

So far as Mary was concerned, his occupation was gone, like his hopes
of everything now; and, gentle and tender though she was, Mary,
remembering all the past, could feel no pity for him.

'Dear old Snarley!' she once exclaimed, catching up her pet terrier,
and then talking at Hew; 'you, at least, have always loved me for
myself alone--no thought have you of fortunes or acres, of rent-rolls
and bank-notes; you would rather have a marrow-bone, than
all--wouldn't you, my darling doggie?'

And Hew eyed her, and the dog too, viciously.  He could no longer, as
before, coarsely and vulgarly, taunt Mary with the obscurity of
Cecil's birth, now that it was proved beyond all doubt to be superior
to his own; neither could he avail himself now, as before, of the
general's countenance and support, since his rival was the real heir
of line and entail; while he was but a penniless dependent.

How bitterly and unwillingly, again and again, he anathematised the
hour, in which that--to him--fatal packet was so inopportunely
discovered by John Balderstone, and its blighting contents brought to
light!

Had it only, by fate, been left forgotten, unknown in its place of
concealment, for a year or so more, all might have gone well with
him; but now--now--he could only curse heavily and grind his teeth in
the impotency of his wrath and the deep bitterness of his
disappointment.

'All the world's a stage, and the men and women only players;' but he
who had played the deliberate villain in the drama of Cecil's life as
yet, was still unmasked, and Hew grinned with malicious triumph as he
thought of that.

The generous Sir Piers felt that he owed Hew some reparation for the
loss of his Indian appointment, and the heavy blight that had fallen
on all the prospects once before him; and he hoped that if Hew would
only settle down to work and study, that something--he knew not
precisely what--might be done for him yet; but Hew, exasperated by
the trick fortune had played him, and the humiliating change in his
position, had taken heavily to the bottle of late, and his naturally
savage nature became at times inflamed to the verge of madness.

Mary was inevitably lost to him now; and that which he deemed much
more important--her money!  But if Cecil could be
removed--crushed--destroyed--thrust out of his path and of this life
too--he, Hew, would again be the heir of entail--heir to Eaglescraig
and the baronetcy.

But where was Cecil now?

Could he but discover him--could he but cross his path, he would not
be over particular about how he got rid of him; and at such times
dark and terrible thoughts possessed him.

To drown care, and as a source of excitement, he had plunged deeper
into his dissipations; he had become a more frequent visitor at
race-courses, where a very little of his own money went into the
pockets of others, while a good deal of the money of others accrued
to him, by some mysterious process.  He also stuck to his card
playing--écarté being, as of old, his favourite game; and unless each
rubber thereat represented a sum larger than he deemed sufficient to
give zest to the game, even écarté had no charms for him.

Some of his escapades drew upon him the indignation of the general,
and feeling himself all but discarded, his absences from Eaglescraig
became longer and more frequent; so that none there knew precisely of
his haunts or whereabouts, till the portly Mr. Tunley brought the
startling intelligence one day that 'after a terrible bout of
delirious trimmins, Master Hew was--or believed himself to be--dying,
at the Montgomerie Arms Inn,' where he prayed the general in pity to
come and see him once again.

Accompanied by a medical adviser and old John Balderstone, Sir Piers
at once rode to the old posting-house indicated; and there, pale,
wan, hollow cheeked, and with eyes unnaturally sunk and bloodshot, he
found his once favoured protégé in a state that shocked him.

Hew was far from dying yet, as the doctor averred; and Sir Piers
too--he 'had seen too much of that sort of thing up country, not to
know all about it;' but, in his lowness and perturbation of spirit,
Hew firmly believed that the hour of his demise was close indeed; and
clinging to the hand of Sir Piers, while moaning and sobbing, he
confessed how he had cheated and swindled often, and how he had
maligned Cecil in many ways, and more than all, the cruel trick he
had played him, on the night of the ball, by drugging his wine.

He uttered a veritable howl of dismay, and fell back in his bed, when
he saw the sudden expression of horror, rage, and shame, that mingled
in the face of the honourable old soldier, in whose heart there
swelled up a great emotion of pity for Cecil.

He fiercely withdrew his hand from Hew's despairing and tenacious
clutch, and started back a pace from the bed whereon the culprit lay.

'It is well that we have all heard this confession of a crime, as
black as assassination--a confession which I request you both to
commit to memory, and you, John Balderstone, most carefully to
writing.  As for you, sir,' he added, with a withering glance at Hew,
'I shall never look upon your face again, and now leave you with the
doctor and your own conscience, if you have such a thing about you!
Order my horse,' he concluded, as he rang the bell, and quitted the
room without glancing again at Hew, whose wasted face was buried in
the pillows, among which he was groaning heavily.

Buried in deep, anxious, and angry thoughts--angry with himself
too--the general rode slowly home.

So--so--this was the secret and true character of Hew Montgomerie--a
blackleg--a cheat--the perpetrator of a great villany, on an innocent
man!  'When anything in which we have most believed, grows shadowy
and unreal, we are apt to grow unreal to ourselves;' and the general,
who had once believed greatly in Hew, now knew not what to think.

'Jealousy and avarice are the meanest of passions,' he thought, and
terribly had Hew given full swing to both.  'Jealousy, I know, has
driven people to incredible acts of deceit; but this act of Hew's has
been, beyond all calculations, infamous!'

'It has been just as my heart foreboded!' said Mary to Mrs. Garth,
when the revelation reached them, and the measure of her horror of
Hew was now full.  She then thanked Heaven for her wealth, that she
might share it with the bruised and the fallen; but whither was he
gone?

Alas! no one could find the smallest clue to it.

After the revelation, which fear of death had wrung from him, Hew
recovered rapidly, and made many a solemn promise 'to eschew
horseflesh and bits of painted pasteboard;' but it was only a case of
'the devil was sick,' etc., for when well he plunged into his old bad
courses, far exceeding the allowance the general so generously made
to him, and then he disappeared for a time.


Autumn had come now; the crops had been gathered, and the gleaners
were busy on the upland slopes and fertile braes of Cunninghame and
Kyle; the last of the high-piled wains had gone homeward over the
furrowed fields and through the leafy grass lanes that led to the
picturesque rickyard; the fern and heath-covered wastes were in all
their beauty, the great gorse-bushes in all their golden bloom, and
the woodlands wore many a varied hue, from dark-green to russet-brown
and pallid yellow.

Since the discovery made by John Balderstone, and the revelations of
Hew, the general had been rather a changed and broken-down man; but
he now clung to Mary Montgomerie more than ever, and daily she drove
him in her pony-carriage--the same in which Cecil was wont to
accompany her, wrapped cosily up in the skins of animals he had shot
in India--handling the ribbons so prettily with her gauntleted little
hands, and always comporting herself so sweetly and tenderly to him,
and just as a favourite daughter would have done.

He felt that a great crime had been committed against one who was his
own flesh and blood; and that, in ignorance, he had condoned that
crime; and, more than all, in society had visited it with all the
acrimony he deemed due and proper to the occasion.

'I have again been guilty of rash judgment--of indiscretion and of
cruelty!' he said again and again to himself in secret; and his mind
drew painful pictures of the ruined Cecil, a wanderer or outcast,
perhaps in penury, misery, and despair, driven, it might be, to
suicide; and, remembering the real or fancied vision he had seen in
time past, had a nervous and childish fear of perhaps beholding
another.

Already had the father been wronged; and now, how much more deeply
the son!  Was a curse coming upon his race--a curse like that which
blighted the Campbells of Glenlyon, and more than one other family,
for some crime committed in ages past?  It almost seemed so; and he
had no language wherewith to express his loathing of Hew, and the
cunning and cowardice of the latter.

Tidings of Cecil or how to trace him, were the daily thought of all
at Eaglescraig, and the general wrote again and again, but vainly, to
Leslie Fotheringhame, to Dick Freeport, Acharn, and other members of
the corps on the subject; but none could afford the slightest clue to
the mystery that enveloped his disappearance.

The presence of friends, if not avoided, was certainly not courted at
Eaglescraig now; even the general forgot his reminiscences of India
and the Cameronians in this new anxiety, and the days passed slowly,
gloomily, and monotonously on, till Mary bethought her of Annabelle
Erroll, who she knew had a sorrow of her own, and pressed her to
visit them again.

The curiously and mysteriously worded advertisements inserted by John
Balderstone in the second column of the _Times_, concerning Cecil,
and seeking some knowledge of his whereabouts, never reached him by
the banks of the Morava, or beyond the slopes of the Balkan
mountains; and fears began to gather in the hearts of those who loved
him, that if not gone to the Antipodes, he must be dead!

'I am breaking up, John,' he would say querulously to his old friend,
'and am about as much use now as a Scotch M.P. or a third wheel to a
field-piece!'

Yet, as we are all creatures of habit, he adhered to his old ways
mechanically.  As an Indian veteran, accustomed to be up at gun-fire
and when the cantonment ghurries clanged, he was always wont to be
abroad early; and there was one morning, which he never forgot, when
he was up and about earlier than usual.

He had been through the stables with Pate Pastern, the groom, and
seen the carriage-horses, his own roadster, Mary's pad and her
ponies; he had been with old Dibble, the gardener, about potting the
flowers, though he scarcely knew a daffodil from a rhododendron; had
seen the shepherd off to look after the cattle, and now came the
postman with the letters and papers; but he tossed them all aside and
muttered:

'What can interest me now?'

But Mary always had the power of rousing and interesting him, and,
breakfast over, she began to read the morning paper aloud, as she
often did, for he loved to hear her silvery voice.  She turned, as
was her wont with him, to the Indian news, though many a hearty laugh
he had at her haphazard pronunciation of Hindostanee names and words;
and, after giving him all the news from Simla, Calcutta, and so
forth, her eyes fell on those from the Danubian provinces and the
East; and she was in the act of reading, when her voice broke; as a
swelling came into her throat she stopped, and, while tightly
clutching her paper, fell back in her chair, with her face deadly
pale.

'Mary, my darling, you are ill; what is the matter?' exclaimed Sir
Piers, starting from his easy-chair and ringing the bell furiously.

'News of Cecil!' she replied, faintly.

'News of Cecil--when--how?'

'See, see! oh, heavens!' she exclaimed, smoothing out the paper and
then pushing back her hair from her temples.

It was the special correspondent's detailed account of the battle by
the Morava, and the singular gallantry of 'the British volunteer, Mr.
Cecil Falconer,' in rescuing and remounting General Tchernaieff,
after a brigade of Cossacks had given way; of his promotion and
decoration with the Takova cross, and all that the reader already
knows.

Tremulously the general read the notice again and again, with a glow
of pride and joy in his old face--joy in which Mary did not fully
share, for dread of the perils surrounding the absent one was her
immediate second thought; but all suspense--all uncertainty were
ended now.  The absent, the wronged, and the lost one was discovered,
but oh how far away!

'My boy's boy! my boy's boy!' muttered Sir Piers, wiping his
spectacles, which had become covered with moisture.  'Tunley, call
Mrs. Garth--the chief of my household staff--she must hear of this at
once.  Quick, she is in the compound!' he added, referring to the
garden, as an Anglo-Indian never rids himself of his old
associations.  And motherly old Mrs. Garth, who was looking just as
we saw her last, with her grey hair thick and soft, and with keen
bright eyes under a pair of shrewd Scotch eyebrows, heard with
genuine joy the sudden tidings of Cecil, for whom she had always had
the strongest regard.

The day was passed in surmises and plans for the future, and Mary
hurried away to her own room, to find perfect seclusion at last--away
from all!  She locked her door; threw off her dress as if it stifled
her; donned her robe de toilette; let down the masses of her hair for
coolness, threw them over her shoulders, and sat down with her
dimpled chin resting in the pinky palm of her left hand, to
think--think--think it all out.

What should she do!  Write!

She threw open her desk and blotting-pad; but her brain was too
excited--her poor heart beat too fast and too painfully to permit her
to steady her thoughts, and she paced to and fro, so wearily.

'Thank heaven, dear Annabelle is coming!' she exclaimed more than
once.

This battle by the Morava had been fought, by the date given, more
than a month ago.  A whole month!  What might not have happened since
then?  In what fresh perils might not Cecil have been plunged?  And
much had happened, such as the gentle mind of Mary could not have
conceived, or deemed possible, in this age of the world.

Now the news of the Servian war--a war to her hitherto unknown or
devoid of interest--became suddenly invested with a new and terrible
importance.

The regiment, of course, heard betimes of Cecil's exploit and the
honours awarded him; and, as may readily be supposed, the mess had
quite an ovation in consequence.

For certain cogent reasons of his own, Hew Montgomerie heard the
tidings with unmixed satisfaction.

'In Servia--fighting in Servia, of all places in the world!' he
muttered; 'if he only gets knocked on the head, I may find my old
place at Eaglescraig again!  But he may escape and come safely home.
Why should I not go to Servia, and mar his future in some fashion?'
he added, as a dark and cruel expression stole into his shifty eyes;
'but how to get there--and where the devil is Servia?'

Hew's ideas on geography were decidedly vague, and even Bradshaw
failed to show how he could get there; but, intent on his diabolical
thoughts nevertheless, he continued to think and to mutter:

'Fighting, is he!  A bullet may rid me of him--rid me all the sooner
that, no doubt, he sets little store upon his life now.  Anyway, I
should like it soon to be settled whether I am to have Eaglescraig
after all!'

And he began to consider intently how he could reach Servia before
Cecil could hear of his changed fortune; in what capacity he could
act when there; what was the language spoken; where was the money to
come from with which he was to travel?  And for some days he resolved
himself into a species of committee of ways and means, combined with
many dark, cruel and malignant thoughts.




CHAPTER II.

THE COINCIDENCE.

On her way to Eaglescraig, Annabelle Erroll proceeded by way of
Glasgow, and had barely taken her seat in the compartment of a
first-class railway carriage, when a gentleman entered, and took his
place at an opposite corner.  Then the train glided out of the
station; smoky Tradeston on the right, and the dense masses of the
ancient Gorbals on the left, were quickly far behind, and the view on
either side became more open, as it sped on its way; and ere long
Annabelle forgot all about her companion, in watching the estuary of
the Clyde, the rock of Dumbarton, the mighty blue mass of Ben Lomond,
and the glorious panorama of the hills of Argyle.

Her companion had leisurely opened a courier bag, and taken therefrom
various serials, without offering one to her, as she sat with averted
face, intent on the scenery.  He seemed one of those composed
travellers who can hear unmoved the scream and whistle of any number
of engines; the startling shout of 'Change here!' as the train pulled
up at some confusing junction, from where travellers branched off in
all directions--some the right, but many the wrong; and where
leisurely and indolent porters spent the stirring yet monotonous day
in cramming passengers and portmanteaus into carriages, to get rid of
them as fast as possible for the next batch of portmanteaus and
passengers, without caring whither they went or what became of them.

He could see, by furtive glances over the top of his paper, that his
companion was a tall and elegant girl, faultlessly attired in a rich
sealskin, with gold ornaments; with feet and hands which--when the
latter left her tiny muff--were well-shaped and small.  There was a
haughty grace in the carriage of her handsome head; she wore a smart
hat, and a thick black veil tied over her face effectually concealed
her features.  He took in all this at a glance as he settled himself
to his newspaper, while she scarcely dared to breathe, as in him she
had now recognised Leslie Fotheringhame!

Where was he going--what was he doing here, in 'mufti' too?  The
calm, high-bred face, to which the dark eyebrows and thick, black,
heavy moustache imparted so much character--the face that was ever
dwelling in her memory was before her again.  In repose, she thought
it seemed older than it should have been, or was wont to be; and when
eventually he did venture to address her, when he smiled, it grew
young and bright again, like the face she remembered in the pleasant
time beside the Tay, and the last season at Edinburgh.

She saw that he had still at his watch-chain a tiny gold locket,
which she remembered well; for it had been her gift to him, and
contained a microscopic likeness of herself on one side, and a lock
of her golden hair on the other--or _had_ done so, when she saw it
last.

Did it contain them now, or had they given place to memorials of--of
that other woman--a hateful and humiliating thought!

How she longed for an excuse or opportunity to get into another
carriage, or for other passengers to come in, ere he recognised her;
but the train was an express one, and no addition could be made to
their number for some time to come.

Secure, as yet, behind the mask of her veil, she watched him, while
her heart beat with lightning-speed, and swelled with unavailing
regret.  Intent, apparently, on his paper, he had not recognised her.
He had, of course, ceased to care for her, she thought, when he had
learned to love that other one; and so now, her coming, and her
going, her joy and her sorrow, were nothing to him--were less than
the snow of last winter!

Yet she was woman enough to love him now, when breathing the same
atmosphere with him--seated within a yard of him--to love him, in
these the days of his biting indifference, even as she had done in
those when a smile of hers could bring him so winningly to her side.

'What a fool I am!' she thought; 'oh, I hate myself!  Would that I
were a man--they can so easily forget!'

At that moment one of her bracelets became unclasped and fell at his
feet.

He picked it up, and not sorry, perhaps, for an excuse to address
her, said simply: 'Permit me?' and clasped it round her white and
shapely wrist.

'Thanks,' she replied as briefly; but her voice, though low,
instantly stirred a chord in his heart; the memory of her figure
rushed upon him; he gazed keenly at the fair face half hidden by its
veil of lace.

'Annabelle--Miss Erroll!' said he, in a strange voice, while lifting
his hat, and half offering a hand: a motion which she ignored, and
felt herself grow pallid in being discovered at last--pallid with
something of anger too, for, with all her natural sweetness,
Annabelle had a heart of pride.

'We are old friends,' said he, with some confusion or emotion of
manner; 'at least we can be that?'

'Not even that, I fear,' said she, with affected firmness; and then
added a little irrelevantly: 'would that I had never come here; an
express train, too--how provoking!'

'Is my company so hateful--or are we to be enemies now?'

'As you please,' she replied, with growing irritation, for, her
secret sentiments apart, the sudden situation exasperated her, after
all that had occurred.  'To meet you here was, at least, the last
thing I could have expected.'

'Or wished?'

'I have no reason for not replying in the affirmative--yes.'

He sighed, and for a moment looked out of the window at the
past-flying landscape, across which the white cloud of the engine
smoke was whirling.  After a pause, he asked in a tone of assumed
indifference:

'Are you going far by this train?'

'Far or near cannot possibly interest you, Captain Fotheringhame; but
I may mention that I am going to Eaglescraig in Cunninghame.'

'Eaglescraig!' he exclaimed, forgetting his pretended calmness of
manner.

'And you?' she inquired, for she had a tender interest in him, in
spite of herself.

'I am going there too,' he replied, with the slightest twinkle of
mischief in his handsome eyes.

'By invitation?' asked Annabelle, aghast, conceiving that her friend
Mary had formed some scheme concerning them.

'No; I have volunteered a visit to the general, out of my friendship
for Cecil Falconer--or Montgomerie, we must call him now.  I have
seen several notices concerning him in the public prints; I know all
about his changed fortunes, and I want to be of service, if I can, to
him and the old general.  Thus I took this train, by a singular
coincidence.'

'One I would have avoided, could I have known, foreseen, what was
thereby involved.'

'Do not say so, I implore you,' said he.

She made no response to this; but sat with her face resolutely turned
to the carriage window, while biting her cherry nether lip, and with
difficulty restraining tears of vexation behind her veil; while
Fotheringhame, as he looked at her, thought just then that no woman
could compare with her--not even Mary Montgomerie--in his eyes; and
he longed to see her face unveiled, but dared not, in her present
mood, venture to hint of such a wish.

As his presence seemed to give her such extreme annoyance, he felt
half inclined to relinquish his plan of visiting Sir Piers; but then
he had written to the latter, announcing his intention of coming, and
had obtained two or three days' leave for that special purpose.

The recent tidings of Cecil in the public prints--the brilliant
exploit he had performed in the war in Servia--'in Servia, of all
places in the world,' as Fotheringhame said--fortunately gave this
luckless pair of travellers a kind of neutral ground on which to
meet--a neutral subject on which to converse, apart from themselves;
but in no instance can a man and a woman who have ever been _more_ to
each other than friends meet, after parting under any circumstances,
without having emotion of a deeper kind--be it love, or be it
hate--than ordinary individuals.  Thus, ever and anon the
conversation of these two manifested a decided tendency to take a
personal and explanatory turn; yet they sat rigidly apart, each in
their own corner of the carriage.

'Poor Cecil!' said Fotheringhame; 'he may have tired of treading
life's dull road ere the report of his good fortune reaches him--the
heir of an old baronetcy and an estate.'

'With the affection of a dear girl like Mary Montgomerie too!'

'True,' added Fotheringhame, with much sadness of tone; 'she does not
forget, as some so readily can, what Motherwell calls "the love of
life's young day."

Thinking that, if not acting, this remark conveyed a taunt, Annabelle
said:

'You seem somewhat changed in way and manner since we saw each other
last.'

'If so, I have had good reason therefor.'

'You were once gay enough, and happy too.'

'Happy when you made me so; but Heaven knows, Annabelle,' he
exclaimed, with sudden emotion, 'that gaiety and pleasure have long
been strangers to me.'

'So duplicity brings about its own punishment,' she replied,
pointedly and pitilessly.

'Duplicity?' said he, looking up with a surprise that seemed at least
genuine; 'I do not understand--you slighted my visits--returned my
letters----'

'Good reason had I to do so.  I had hoped we might avoid this
subject----'

'Reason?' he queried, as her voice broke.

'Remember your mysterious friend,' said Annabelle, bitterly; 'she was
_not_ Blanche Gordon; so who was she--what was she?  But I despise
myself for asking!'

'She was then what she is no longer now--an unhappy creature,' was
the enigmatical reply, from which Annabelle, whose pride revolted
from making further inquiries, drew all kinds of singular deductions.

And now, at this crisis in their conversation, the train stopped, and
as an influx took place of those fresh passengers so longed for by
Annabelle a short time before, it could not be resumed in any form,
and the rest of the journey was performed by them in silence, or
nearly so.




CHAPTER III.

EAGLESCRAIG ONCE MORE.

Mary, in the general's snug and well-appointed old family carriage,
with a stately hammer-cloth and heraldically bedecked panels, awaited
Annabelle at the railway station; and though expecting Leslie
Fotheringhame at the same time, and quite prepared to welcome him
warmly as Cecil's friend and whilom brother officer, and though not
surprised to see him arrive, she was certainly surprised to find that
he and Annabelle had come _together_, and clapped her little ungloved
hands merrily, as she received them, in a childlike way that almost
provoked the latter, who was a proud and rather reserved girl.

She coloured deeply and with positive vexation, even under the eye of
her dearest friend, for thus arriving at the same time, by the same
train, and in the same carriage, with Leslie Fotheringhame; and this
emotion made her more shy, more resentful to him apparently, and more
resolved to keep as much as possible aloof from him.

And he, piqued by this, of which he was speedily conscious, conceived
a vague and direful jealousy of some person as yet unknown, and it
coloured his manner accordingly.

For the first time, on this occasion, he saw fully the soft fair face
of Annabelle, as she raised her veil, and her velvet-like lips met
those of Mary.  Would they ever touch his again?

The weather was duly discussed, and the advent of Snarley gave them
something to talk of, as that much-petted cur was nestling cosily
under the skin of a man-eater that would have gobbled him up at a
mouthful; and he now welcomed both with much yelping and effusiveness.

Mary felt the situation of her friends to be an awkward one, and
exerted herself to make both feel at ease, as they drove under the
evening sunshine to Eaglescraig, where both were welcomed by Sir
Piers in the grand old dining-hall, the oak panels of which were
nearly hidden by ancestral portraits, and from the tall windows of
which there was a noble view of mountain and coppice, of rocky cliffs
and the far-stretching Firth of the dark blue Clyde; and at the elbow
of the host stood old Tunley, with a silver salver of decanters and
glasses.

'Too late for tiffin and too early for dinner, Fotheringhame,' said
the general; 'just a nip to keep the cold out, and then the
dressing-bell will ring, and Tunley will see that you are attended
to.'

Tunley, like most of the old servants, many of whom had been born on
the estate, had but one creed--the welfare of the family of
Eaglescraig.  Their sorrow had been sincere when 'Master Piers come
to evil,' with his father; and it had been renewed now by the strange
story of Cecil, which had, of course, taken a powerful hold of their
fancies; thus he and they all viewed the advent of Fotheringhame with
the deepest interest, believing that he was in some mysterious way to
restore the wanderer to his home, and was, indeed, but the forerunner
of that event.

One word more about Tunley.  The poor man felt ashamed of one feature
in his past blameless life, and daily intercourse with the general
and Mrs. Garth made him feel it keenly; for this most respectable of
British butlers had never served, even for an hour, in the
Cameronians, and this he deemed somewhat of a blot upon his scutcheon.

'Mrs. Captain Garth, of course, you remember,' said the general to
Fotheringhame (who was imbibing a liqueur glass of mountain-dew),
indicating the old lady, who was seated in an easy-chair, holding a
hand-screen to shield her face from the glow of the fire; 'widow of
my old friend Garth of Ours--and now, I think, we all know each
other.'

Sir Piers had some vague idea that there had been a flirtation--a
lovers' quarrel, or some such folly--between Leslie Fotheringhame and
Annabelle Errol; but that was nothing to the old man--they would
square it, no doubt, if they were so disposed.  And he thought only
of making welcome his guest--a Cameronian too!--friend of his
grandson, who had been so horribly used; and as for Annabelle, Mary
would look after her.

Dinner duly came, and passed with the usual commonplace conversation;
the presence of the servants precluding all from talking freely, and
conversing on the matter nearest their hearts--the volunteer in
Servia.  But Fotheringhame, from his place by Mary's side, had but
one thought--how surpassing fair looked Annabelle!  Her dress was a
plain and simple muslin one; a blue flower of some kind was amid the
masses of her golden hair, and the brother of it nestled amid the
soft lace in the swell of her bosom.

After the ladies had returned to the drawing-room, the object which
had brought him to Eaglescraig seemed half forgotten for a time, and
his thoughts had followed her; but now the hospitable general was
pushing the decanters to and fro; Tunley had withdrawn; and anon
Fotheringhame roused himself, for he was full of joyous enthusiasm at
distinction won by his friend in a foreign service, though he
cordially wished that he had never been driven to seek it there--a
service in which he had been driven by desperation to seek a new
home; and Fotheringhame quite won the heart of the general, who
now--in all that Cecil had done and achieved--was assured that he saw
but the reflection and reproduction of his own character, vaguely
known as 'a chip of the old block,' and that it was from him that
Cecil inherited all this fire and spirit.  He became quite jovial,
and ere the evening was over began to sing, in a very quavering
treble, snatches of 'the old Subadahr.'

'At the mess, we knew not what to think of his disappearance,' said
Fotheringhame, playing with his walnuts; 'some hinted of California
and the Rocky Mountains, others of Ballarat, the Diamond Fields of
Natal, the Cape war and the Zulus, and everywhere else that the
desperate and the broken----'

'The desperate and the broken!' sighed the general, setting down an
untasted glass.

'Yes, Sir Piers--go to mend their fortunes, to seek excitement,
oblivion, and too often to end their lives; but certainly no man
among us ever thought of Servia!'

'It was most kind of you to volunteer this visit, Fotheringhame, to
assist me with your advice and knowledge of a European world that is
somewhat new to me now,' said Sir Piers, grasping his hand.

'Not at all, Sir Piers; I would do anything to serve Cecil.  I
thought two heads might be better than one; I am younger and more
active than you--

'But, egad, I have seen the day!'

'And so, I thought, we must talk the matter over at leisure, yet
without delay.'

'All right--the decanters stand with you.  And now, Fotheringhame,
you are aware of how he was a victim of a vile scheme--how his wine
was drugged by a scoundrel whose attested confession I possess?'

Aware of how deep had once been the general's interest in Mr. Hew
Caddish Montgomerie, Fotheringhame merely bowed an assent; and, after
a few minutes' silence, inquired where he was now?

'None know, and none care,' replied the general, hotly; 'he has
disappeared altogether--let us hope for ever.  But if life lasts me,
by the Heaven that hears me, I shall set the honour of my boy right
and clear before the regiment, the Horse Guards, and the world, or
lay my commission at the foot of the throne!'

'In an affair of jealousy----'

'Jealousy!' exclaimed the general, with a fierce grimace; 'we settled
these, and other affairs, differently in my time, before the service
went to the dogs.  Egad!  I knew a fellow, when I was a sub at
Vellore, who was shot for declining to dine at a certain mess-table.
Did you ever hear the story?'

'No, general!'

'Well, you see, it happened in this way,' began Sir Piers, who,
having obtained an audience, fell back at once into his old Indian
train of thought.  'We were cantonned at Nussirabad, in the wild
black province of Ajmir, with the 76th Bengal Native Infantry, when
there came from England, to join that corps, a Captain Evelyn, a
quiet and gentlemanly young fellow, whom all liked, save some of the
76th, who, sooth to say, were nearly all fiery rackety Irishmen, and
by no means good examples of the Emerald Isle; for cards,
brandy-pawnee, and incessant uproar were the order of the day, and of
the night too, in every bungalow in their lines, generally finishing
at a very late hour by breaking each other's heads with the
billiard-cues, and shying the balls out of the windows; while they
were born-devils at pig-sticking, horse-racing, and not a pretty ayah
was safe within ten coss of them.  Such were the officers of the
_Moriartie-ka-Pultan_, for the corps had been raised by an Irishman,
and bore his name.

'Evelyn declined to join their mess, not on that account, but because
he wished to live economically, being engaged to a young lady who was
coming up country, chaperoned by Mrs. Erroll, the mother of Mary's
friend, then a young and lovely matron--a mere girl in fact, and
travelling _dawk_, as we all did in those days; and with the utmost
politeness he explained all this to the president of the mess
committee.  That personage, a certain Captain Darby O'Dowd, swore
that this was a distinct affront to the whole corps, and that Evelyn
must be paraded about gunfire.  The mess consisted of sixteen, and as
he could not fight them all, they leisurely cast lots, and the task
fell to O'Dowd, who challenged Evelyn, with the intimation that if
he--the valiant Darby--fell, the next in seniority would take his
place.

'Evelyn was too high-spirited to decline this outrageous challenge,
and they met at gunfire, in the open plain, while the sun was as yet
below the hills of Ajmir.  I remember it all as if it were yesterday,
for I had the mainguard.

'Evelyn, thinking, no doubt, of the girl who was far away, and whom
he might never see again, standing with his second, worthy John Garth
of Ours, pale and sad, yet resolute in aspect, on one hand; on the
other, O'Dowd, with his second, a Captain O'Spudd, and all the mess
of the 76th, anxious to have their turn in the shooting, grouped
close by, and pale and bloated enough they looked in the cold, half
light of the unrisen sun as it stole across the plain, and all shaky
enough with their over-night potations.

'"Having no personal injury to redress, gentlemen, I decline to
fire," exclaimed Evelyn, in a loud, firm voice.

'"Plaze yourself, me boy," replied the relentless O'Dowd as he fired;
and, shot through the heart, poor Evelyn fell dead on his face!

'Even in those days there was a devil of a row about this remarkable
duel, and it was a close shave with O'Dowd escaping being hung for
it; but a verdict of "Not guilty" was returned, and he was killed
soon after in action by a grape-shot; and O'Spudd died of a sunstroke
in the jungle, and was buried there in his blanket.'

The general followed up this by many other stories, all more or less
bloodthirsty, till his guest became somewhat silent--bored by them,
no doubt; and then he said:

'Fotheringhame, the sherry stands with you--just "a white washer,"
and then we shall join the ladies.'




CHAPTER IV.

THE DIVIDED PAIR.

Mrs. Garth was dozing dreamily before the fire, and the two girls
were at the piano, when the general and Fotheringhame entered the
drawing-room.

They were idling over the instrument, before which Annabelle was
seated, and over the keys of which Mary was occasionally running her
fingers, as if apparently to conceal a little confidential
conversation that was in progress between them.

'You'll have a turn with the guns to-morrow, Fotheringhame,' said the
general, 'but you must excuse my absence; my day is past for that
sort of thing.  The rocketers I once could bring down, pass over my
head contemptuously now; and bullfinches seem much bigger in the
hunting-field than they used to be, so I funk them entirely, and seek
a quiet gate, as I don't like to come a spread eagle into the field;
and, by Jove! the doctor has already hinted about a respirator.
D--n! fancy a fellow at the head of a brigade with a respirator!  I
was nearly drowned the other day, and would have been but for Mary,
when landing a twenty-pound pike from Eaglescraig Loch; so it is time
I gave over these little vanities, and left them to my juniors and
successors; though, Heaven knows, that if I was anxious about my
estate in this world just when it is time to be thinking of the
other, it was not for myself, but for those who are to come after
me,' added the general in a softened tone, for now much of the
peppery nature of the old stock-comedy guardian had left him.  'Fond
of music, Fotheringhame?' he asked, after a pause.

'Very.'

'Ah; dare say we shall find you something in that way.  Mary is no
bad performer.'

'Pray excuse me--to-night,' urged Mary.

'Then I won't excuse Annabelle,' said the general, patting the
shoulder of the latter, while Fotheringhame drew near; 'do favour us
with the little song I have so often heard you sing with such extreme
sweetness and pathos.'

'Which, Sir Piers?'

'What is it? oh yes--"Love me always, love me ever," or something of
that kind.  There must be some tender association connected with it,
I am sure,' continued Sir Piers, in utter ignorance of how his
remarks cut two ways, like a double-edged sword.

'I have not the music--and--and I have quite forgotten the words,'
replied Annabelle, growing painfully pale, and wishing that the floor
would open and swallow her up, conscious that Leslie Fotheringhame
was standing at her back.  The latter saw the ill-concealed emotion
that pervaded her whole frame, and he felt keenly for her.

'Is this girl to be, for good or for evil, my destiny after all?' he
thought, as he regarded with his old admiration the beauty of her
refined face and her brilliant complexion--that dazzling and
wonderful fairness which almost invariably accompanies the possession
of golden and auburn hair.

Annabelle did not leave the piano; it afforded her a pretext for
keeping her face turned from those around her, and, impelled by some
new emotion, she sang in succession some of her gayest and most
effective songs, while Fotheringhame hovered near, leaving to Mary
the task of turning the music, and steadily and keenly he regarded
the singer.  Was this gaiety real, or was she acting a part? he
thought; and seeing that he came nearer, Mary withdrew.

'You regard me with surprise,' said Annabelle, finding his eyes fixed
on her, and feeling a desperate necessity for saying something.
Indeed, they had scarcely spoken since leaving the railway carriage.

'Certainly, I am surprised,' said he; 'I did not expect to be
standing by your side thus, and hearing your voice again.'

Full fell the light of the chandelier on the lovely upturned eyes
that did not soften in the least, as he hoped they would do, at his
slight allusion to the past.

'Captain Fotheringhame,' said Annabelle, quite calmly, and in an
ordinary tone, 'you look at me as though I were somehow changed.'

'Oh, you are not in the least changed, he replied, in a low voice,
and with a bitter smile; 'you are volatile and--cruel as ever.'

'Cruel!' she repeated, under cover of a musical crash, while the
colour rushed to her cheeks and delicate neck; but she disdained to
say more, and thus, to one or two half-broken utterances of his,
finding that she made no response, Fotheringhame drew back and
rejoined the general.

How long was all this to go on? was Annabelle's bitter thought.  In
the old time, by the silver birches on the Tay-side, they had met,
loved, quarrelled, and parted, she thought, for ever; but to meet and
quarrel again with just cause on one side, with the prayer in her
heart that they might never look in each other's faces again, and
here they were now, by an unexpected coincidence, a strange freak of
destiny, under the same roof, and in the same room, compelled to meet
at least as mutual friends!

Thus, when they parted for the night, his voice was as calm and his
smile and bow as coldly polite as her own.  Then he and the general
withdrew to the smoking-room, to talk over Cecil's affairs, and
scheme out some plan for his future, and the girls gladly sought
their rooms, which adjoined each other, and plunged at once into
gossip and hair-dressing.

For weeks and weeks past Mary's life had been one of dull routine;
she had fed her pet birds, her pigeons, watched her flowers, and
watered her ferns, as usual; it was such a relief to do, or be doing,
anything: but now that Annabelle Erroll had come, she felt almost
happy in her companionship--for both had enough to talk about.

'Have you met as acquaintances merely?' asked Mary, with eagerness.

'Yes; but acquaintances of a peculiar kind, certainly.  How could it
be otherwise, after all that has passed between us?  I must
studiously ignore the past,' continued Annabelle; 'nor shall his
strange and sharp allusion to it move me, save in the way of
annoyance and surprise.'

To her it seemed very strange and unaccountable that Leslie
Fotheringhame should adopt an indignant tone with her, as if _he_
were the wronged party, and that she had nothing to complain of in
reference to his conduct with the unknown lady.

'Why did he so studiously, so cruelly deceive me?' she exclaimed, on
the verge of tears; 'but that I inherit the spirit of my father, the
old colonel, he would have broken my heart--I loved him so!'

'Poor Annabelle!' said Mary, caressing her; 'twice engaged, and twice
separated--you are a curious pair.  Let us hope that the third time
may prove successful and irrevocable!'

'Never!' exclaimed Annabelle.  'Did he not openly tell me that
she--that woman--is happy now?  What did he mean by that?--for there
was something of mournful exultation in his tone!'

'It is all very strange,' said Mary, in perplexity; 'can there have
been some simple, yet perhaps inexplicable, mistake at the bottom of
this unhappy business?'

'No, Mary--I tell you no!' replied Annabelle, with angry energy; 'the
woman in the matter was a fact palpable enough.  And what can the
unexplained mystery of his interest in her be? and is it not to him
degradation, and to me insult?'

'Unexplained; it might not have been.'

'How?'

'You forget the rejected correspondence--the last unopened letter.'

'Anyway,' replied Annabelle, with a forced laugh, 'unlike the Grande
Duchesse, I shall no longer dote upon the military.  I'll look out
for an easy-going parson, or plain country gentleman, and, as Hawley
Smart says, "more weddings take place from pique than the world
wotteth of," and Hawley is right.'  Then, dropping this tone, she
twined her white arms round her friend, and, gazing into her soft
face, said, 'Dear Mary, how poorly you are looking!'

'Well, have I not had much cause for anxiety, and tears too, think
you?'

'No man, I believe now, is worth the grief that robs a woman of her
peace and rest.'

'Oh, Annabelle, the thought of Leslie Fotheringhame embitters you;
but I sorrow for Cecil--and there are men and men, remember.  How
strange it seems that now I must think and speak of him not as
Falconer (his mother's name), but as Cecil Montgomerie!' she added,
with a soft smile, gazing on vacancy.

'I thought,' said Annabelle, after a pause, 'that I should have died
when dear old Sir Piers so awkwardly asked me to sing that stupid
song to-night--died of shame and mortification!  Surely no woman has
ever been more thoroughly humbled than I!  How unfortunate all this
is!' she added, almost weeping with vexation; 'mamma knew of our
engagement, and that he is my cousin.  She knows how shamefully he
treated me after the night of that most unlucky ball; and all about
that--that person--the woman with the golden-hazel eyes; and how
shall I be able to convince her, proud, resentful, and
justly-suspicious as she is, that our meeting here is a miserable
coincidence--a circumstance beyond my control?'

'It looks like Fate, my dear Belle.'

'Fate?  How can you romance so after all that has happened?'

'What happened may be a mistake--a coincidence, too--explainable
perhaps, though I have not much hope of that.  If dear Cecil were but
home, he might clear it all up for us.  Home! when will that be?
Soon, I hope--oh, so soon!' she added, as she kissed her friend and
sought her pillow.

Annabelle lay far into the night awake, revolving endless schemes and
conversations in her busy little head.  She naturally longed to be
gone from Eaglescraig, and nothing but a sure knowledge that
Fotheringhame's leave was for a very brief period, pacified her at
all.  That they should be in the same house, and meeting perpetually
at the same table, was intensely awkward under the circumstances of
their changed position.

Annabelle felt this keenly, and thus she sedulously avoided Leslie
Fotheringhame, who felt conscious that she did so, and misconstrued
it either into an aversion for himself, or a regard for some other
man--a regard inspired, perhaps, by pique, or wounded self-esteem.




CHAPTER V.

A STRANGE ACCUSATION.

Meanwhile how fared it with Cecil, and what was now his fate?

He had permitted the cold, damp earth to be heaped upon him, only
moving sufficiently--unseen in the gloom of the night and of the hole
wherein he lay--to keep his body, though partially buried, from being
so entirely; fortunately, the would-be assassins were satisfied that
they had effectually concealed him from the troops, who were
certainly in motion close by, and then retired for a time, intending,
as they stated, to return shortly, and make sure of their prey.

The moment they were gone, though scarcely daring to breathe, and
oblivious of many a sore and bruise, of which he became conscious
hours after, Cecil rose, clambered out of the hollow, shook his
clothes as free as possible of the soil that had covered him, secured
his pistols in his belt anew, and on looking to his sword, thanked
heaven that, in his fall, the steel scabbard had saved the blade from
injury.

Drawing a long breath, a sigh of relief, he prepared for immediate
flight, though giddy, bruised, and weak.  Lights were flitting to and
fro in the farmhouse close by, and he could actually hear the voices
of Guebhard and his Montenegrins, so not a moment was to be lost in
retiring.  Even the farmer and his people were to be sedulously
avoided, and though Cecil did think of his horse, it was chiefly with
reference to the impossibility of recovering it.

A sound made him shrink behind a bush, and then he saw one of his
late assailants creeping towards the hole, softly, slowly,
stealthily, on his hands and knees, with a yataghan in his teeth, and
his eyes turned more than once towards the house from which he had
stolen on deadly intent, to anticipate his leader and companions, by
finishing off their victim if any life remained in him, and obtaining
the valuable diamond ring of Palenka, the despatches and other
plunder.

A moment he paused in his progress, irresolutely, for the voice of a
cuckoo, roused by the recent noise, was now heard in a tree close by;
and the Black Mountaineer, affrighted by an idea of the _vila_, which
often assumes, as the Servians also believe, the form of that bird,
let the yataghan fall from his mouth.

Ere he could pick it up, Cecil, whose blood was now at fever-heat,
passed his sword twice furiously through the body of the wretch, with
his foot spurned it head-long into the hole (where, to the
bewilderment of Guebhard and his ruffians, it was found some time
after), and then, animated by a species of despairing energy, he
hurried, breathless and panting, stumbling heavily at every step,
into the thick wood that lay near, intent only on immediate escape
and concealment for a time--at least till day broke, and he could
look about him; nor did he pause in his flight until he felt assured
that some miles lay between him and his enemies.

A great weariness, the result of long and over exertion of mind and
body, came over him; and on finding a dry and sheltered place, under
the branches of a great laurel bush or tree, he fell fast asleep,
fearless of the wild hogs, of which vast numbers feed in the woods.

When he awoke, stiff and benumbed, a silvery mist was rising from the
dark green foliage of the forest, and above the mist was the blue sky
and the clear bright morning sunshine, as he began to search for a
path, which he hoped might lead him to a highway, though such he
knew, in Servia, were only to be found in the neighbourhood of towns.

The sound of a cavalry trumpet at no great distance caught his ear.
It gave him a species of electric shock, and he remembered, that to
the fears expressed by Guebhard of troops being in the vicinity, he
no doubt owed his life.  He pressed eagerly, anxiously forward in the
direction whence the sound had come, the rabbits scuttling briskly
out of his way, as he hurried along a narrow track; and at length he
was rewarded by reaching a regular beaten road, on which was a long
string of horses and mules laden with provisions, forage, and stores,
proceeding under an escort of Russian Lancers from Belgrade to the
front--direct to Tchernaieff's headquarters, as the officer in
command--a _capitan_--informed him.

The latter, a handsome man, kid-gloved and glazed booted, wore a very
dashing uniform; a green tunic, piped with scarlet, faced with black
velvet and laced with gold, and on his breast glittered the medals he
had won in the expeditions to Khiva and elsewhere, with the orders of
St. Andrew and St. Vladimir.

Cecil made his position, his wants, and his recent troubles known in
French, which the Ruski spoke fluently.  The latter summoned a
sergeant, who procured a horse and some food--_i.e._, biscuits and
brandy--for Cecil; and now his heart grew lighter as he rode on and
felt himself in perfect safety, but not the less intent on having
public or private vengeance upon Captain Mattei Guebhard.

He saw once more the Morava, and after a few hours' riding, was
thankful when the escort passed the outposts of the Russo-Servian
army at Deligrad, and he could proceed without delay to the quarters
of General Tchernaieff.

Inspired more than he had ever been since he came to Servia by the
sights and sounds around him--the tents, the huts, the batteries of
artillery with their limbers all drawn up wheel to wheel; the
cavalry, their horses picketed in close ranks or at exercise upon the
plateau; the strains of a magnificent Russian band playing the 'Blue
Danube,' and then the 'Manolo'--he ceased to think or question
himself, like Mr. Mallock, 'Is life worth living?'  He was too young
yet to find that there was nothing in it.  Since that bright summer
day when Warren Hastings, 'then just seven years of age,' as we are
told, 'lay on the bank of a rivulet, which flows through the old
domain of his house to join the Isis,' and registered a vow that he
would, one day, be lord of Daylesford, how many vows of anticipated
honours, wealth and greatness have been registered, that may never
have been fulfilled!

But some such emotion--some such hope of a brilliant future, swelled
up in the heart of Cecil, as he dismounted from his horse at the door
of an edifice, two sentinels before which, and the Russian flag
flying thereon, indicating it to be the headquarters of General
Tchernaieff.

Officers and orderlies belonging to every arm of the service, horse,
foot, artillery, engineers, hospitals and ambulances, were passing in
and out, when Cecil sent in his name to the general, who had just
come from vespers in the little iron church, which had been sent to
him by the ladies of Moscow, and in which he had been depositing two
or three standards recently taken from the Turks, prior to their
transmission to the Emperor at St. Petersburg.

Cecil's jaded aspect, his tattered uniform, soiled, sodden, and of no
particular colour now, for the brown of the tunic and the scarlet of
the facings and braid were all of one dingy hue, attracted some
attention among the gorgeous, and almost fantastic, costumes of the
Russian staff and cavalry officers in the ante-room, through which he
was quickly ushered into the presence of Tchernaieff.

The latter, who wore a short, brown shell-jacket, with a rolling
collar laced with gold, and crimson overalls, was smoking a huge pipe
and seated at a table littered with papers and printed journals, from
which he started up as Cecil entered, and, drawing himself up to the
full height of his short pudgy figure, while all his short, stubbly
hair seemed to bristle, and his wiry moustaches to stick out like
those of a cat, he eyed him with considerable sternness, indignation,
and surprise, mingled in a face that was never at any time a very
handsome one.

Count Palenka, who was writing at the table, laid down his pen and
eyed Cecil with cold hauteur, even hostility, and did not accord him
the vestige of a recognition.

'What on earth can be in the wind now?' thought the latter, as his
late bright hopes vanished into thin smoke.  Mechanically he took the
despatches from his sabretache, and said respectfully:

'I have the honour to deliver to your excellency these documents,
entrusted to me by his Majesty the King.'

'His Majesty the King does not owe you many thanks for the haste you
have made!' replied Tchernaieff, as he somewhat rudely snatched the
papers from Cecil's hand, while his eyes literally glared at him.

'I do not understand this bearing of yours, general,' said he,
haughtily.

'You may understand, however, Herr Lieutenant, that you loitered for
many days idly at Palenka.'

'A dislocated arm--dislocated when fording the Morava--detained me
there.'

'A likely story, truly,' said Tchernaieff, with growing indignation;
'why ford a river that has bridges, and why the devil ford it at all,
before coming to the town of Tjuprija?'

'I lost the direct road and fell into the river in the night.  The
family of the Count----'

'Knew not that they were harbouring a traitor,' said Palenka, grimly.

'A traitor, Herr Count!' exclaimed Cecil.

'I have said it; so don't repeat my words.'

'There must be some strange misconception in all this,' replied
Cecil, more bewildered than indignant, perhaps; 'the way was
beset----'

'By Captain Mattei Guebhard,' interrupted Tchernaieff.

'You know it!'

'From his own lips.  He is now in camp, and very properly and duly
reported to me that he had done so; but that you escaped him, he
knows not how, after killing one of his men, and causing, by
misadventure, the death of another.'

Cecil was more and more bewildered by the strange candour of Guebhard
in acknowledging the outrageous conduct of which he had been guilty;
but the injurious treatment now so unexpectedly accorded him, after
all he had undergone, filled him with just anger and indignation.

'Who dares to accuse me of wrong, or even of error?' he demanded.

'That you will discover in time.'

'Of what am I accused?' he continued.

'That also you will learn in time; and in time you may see the mines
of Siberia, if you escape death!  Meanwhile you will withdraw, and
remain under close arrest.  Count Palenka, take his sword.'

'The officer of the nearest guard can do that.  Your excellency must
hold me excused,' was the haughty and contemptuous reply of Palenka;
and a few minutes afterwards Cecil found himself disarmed and a
prisoner under close arrest, with special sentries guarding the door
of the house, in an apartment of which he was left to his own bitter
and confused thoughts.

That he was the victim of some strange and malevolent report made by
Guebhard to the general and Count Palenka, he could not doubt; but of
what nature could that slander be?  Palenka had called him a
'traitor.'  He could only be so to King Milano Obrenovitch, and he
felt certain that no act of his own could draw such an epithet upon
him, so to Guebhard now did the whole tide of his fury turn.




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.




CHAPTER VII.

CECIL'S VISITOR.

From the monotony of his moody and irritating reflections he was
roused one day by the entrance of a visitor, and he started on
finding himself face to face with Margarita Palenka, who had come to
the camp on horseback, escorted by old Theodore, the veteran of
Sadowa.  Her eyes were full of unshed tears, as she gave Cecil her
hand, and it was impossible for him to behold this beautiful girl's
sympathy unmoved.

'How can I ever thank you,' said he, 'for all this deep and kindly
interest in me--almost a stranger?'

'I fear the worst, from what my brother says,' she replied in a low
and husky voice.

'The worst--death?'

'Better that than--Siberia!'

'So say I,' was Cecil's grim response; and then he added hotly: 'I am
a British subject; how dare they menace me with such a fate?'

'A British subject once--a Servian soldier now,' said she, gravely.

Cecil thought of the old Cameronians, and his heart seemed to swell
painfully, while he eyed with some contempt the brown sleeve of his
Servian tunic.

Margarita had come to Deligrad, we have said, on horseback; thus a
brown riding-habit--almost claret-coloured in tint, out of compliment
to the Servian uniform, and like it faced with scarlet and laced with
gold--set off her magnificent bust and figure generally.  A smart hat
encircled by a white ostrich feather, with white riding gauntlets,
made up a costume that was altogether very effective, and became the
brilliant and striking character of her beauty.

At her left breast she wore the bright ribbon of St. Catherine of
Russia, procured for her by Tchernaieff, and given to ladies of rank
alone.

'Think not ill of me for this visit,' said she after a pause, and
when he led her to a seat on the divan; 'I have come to comfort you,
when none other dare attempt it--to save you if I can, and none other
dare attempt that either, or is perhaps inclined to do so.'

She felt the peculiarity, the delicacy of her position; and Cecil
felt it too, with a rush of gratitude in his heart--all the greater,
no doubt, that she was so beautiful in person, and winning in manner.

Intensely interested as she had found herself to be in the fortunes
and safety of a young stranger; knowing the wiles and the vengeance
of which he was assuredly the victim, and all that he had to
apprehend in the present and in the future, sleep had almost deserted
the eyes of Margarita for some nights past, and thus their lids were
inflamed and her face looked wan.  For hours, without retiring to
bed, she had been wont to sit musing by the windows of her room,
watching the stars as they shone above the dark woods of Palenka, and
listening to the distant roar of the Morava, till inaction became
torture, and she made up her mind to ride to Deligrad, to discover
the truth of all the alarming stories that had reached her and the
old countess, and also what she could do to serve--if possible to
save him.

Hence her most unexpected visit to Cecil.

'When you warned me to beware of Mattei Guebhard,' said he, 'I could
little imagine, or anticipate, all he can be capable of.'

'And I little thought, when we parted at Palenka, to see you again,'
said she, with something pathetic in her voice; 'and less than all,
under such circumstances as the present.'

'But you do not believe--you cannot believe----'

'About the commission?  No--of course not: the idea of your being
colonel of a regiment of such wretches as the Black Mountaineers is
too absurd!  Savages whose tastes for strong waters, the property of
their neighbours, and the noses, ears, and even the skulls of their
enemies, are proverbial,' she added with a shudder.  'Besides, I
understand that you never even heard of Kara Georgevitch?'

'Never before.  I knew not there was such a person in existence.'

'How singular!  I have met him often at Vienna; danced with him at
the palace on the west side of Innerstadt, and know that he--admired
me very much,' she added, with a little smile.

'His commission had my name in it, my accusers assert.'

'I do not yet understand the mystery of that--though how it came into
your possession is plain enough to me.'

'And to be accused of killing a couple of Montenegrins----'

'Who would have killed you if they could!  The concealed paper was a
_dernier ressort_, in case you escaped them.  Oh, it is all so like
the subtle and elaborate villany of Mattei!'

'And how absurd is the accusation that I meant to carry away the
King's despatches for the service of Kara Georgevitch or the Turks,
when I risked life to defend them!'

'Time will unravel all this--meantime, I shall watch over you, if I
can,' said she, almost tenderly, holding out her hand to him
ungloved, with a pretty yet imperious air, as if to show its
whiteness and beauty, for she was a coquette to the tips of her
fingers.

He touched it very lightly, but instead of retaining it, as she
doubtless expected, drew back--as if to avoid temptation, she seemed
to think, for she said haughtily:

'You forget yourself, sir, or me!'

'Would that I could do so!' said Cecil.

The gentleness of his tone, the sadness and bewilderment of his air,
touched her; she took his hand deliberately in both hers, and kissing
him on the forehead with warm and throbbing lips, said:

'My brother's preserver and my brother's friend!  I repeat that I
have come to serve you and save you, if I may--to see you and comfort
you at least, in a land where you are so utterly friendless.'

Her voice broke a little.

'By whose permission did you reach me?' asked Cecil hastily, and
apparently oblivious of her emotion.

'That of Tchernaieff--he could not refuse me.'

'Who that looked upon your face could refuse you anything!' he
exclaimed, more in a spirit of gallantry than anything else.

'I detest compliments; so seek not to flatter me.'

'Nay, flattery exists not in paying praise due to beauty or merit,
but in praise misplaced.'

After a pause, Cecil said with a smile:

'Surely you never, at any time, loved this man Mattei Guebhard?'

'I never did so,' said she, emphatically; 'but, I once said before, I
could not help him loving me.  I have never loved anyone; and
moreover I shall never--marry!'

Now Cecil had known and seen enough of the world to be aware that
when a handsome young woman declares her intention of never marrying,
it becomes one of the broadest hints a man can receive; and, under
all the circumstances, he heard her now with a perplexity that
bordered on irritation.

At such a time cold reason might suggest that Mary Montgomerie, and
his country too, were lost to him for ever!  In Servia was his new
home; Margarita was beautiful, anxious to serve him and to win his
gratitude--too evidently his love, if she could.  Just rage at
Guebhard invited him to meet her half-way; but the image of Mary came
before Cecil, and he thought:

'Montrose was right in his song--"Love one, and love no more!"'

He was perfectly conscious that some time or other, at Palenka, he
_had_ spoken of love to Margarita; but was then referring to his love
of Mary Montgomerie; while she had believed that he was in some
curious way pleading his own cause with herself.

There was even now a struggle going on in the heart of Margarita,
between her mind and her affections; and though eventually it seemed
as if the latter would conquer, some sense of propriety, of what
society and training inculcated, and the moral force of her own
spirit, did battle against them; and then, moreover, she was not
without some dread of her brother the Count of Palenka.

Despite all this, and her recent coquettish announcement that she
could never love, and would never marry any man, Cecil found her
coming to the point with him and taking the initiative, piqued
perhaps that he was the only man she had never yet subdued; and so,
before he knew very well how it had all come to pass, or by what she
had prefaced it, he was startled by her saying in her most dulcet
Servian:

'So you think, dear Cecil, I could make your life a happy one?'

She asked this softly, yet a little imperiously, while flicking the
skirt of her riding-habit impatiently with her switch, and with
downcast looks, as Cecil paused in perplexity, thinking, 'What had he
said to draw this forth?'

'Surely I am not so uncivilised; I don't ever paint and powder, like
all the English girls I saw at Vienna!' she added.

'But,' said poor Cecil, who thought he had perils enough to
encounter, without thus being 'run to earth,' and having this
perplexity added to them, by an impulsive girl, who probably had
something Hungarian and Italian in her blood, inherited from the old
heyduc; 'but they don't all wear paint and powder--and one girl I
knew at home certainly did not do so.'

This was, to say the least of it, an unfortunate speech.

'One,' said Margarita, with a flash in her eyes; 'who was she?'

'One of whom you remind me--at times,' he replied, thinking to
compliment her by saying that which was simply untrue.

'_Who_ was she--who _is_ she--one you cared for?'

'Not as I care for you,' replied Cecil unwisely, yet truthfully
enough; 'but long ago--ah, how long ago it seems--she passed out of
my life, and I out of hers.'

'She is dead, then?'

'Yes--to me.'

'To the world, you mean--so she is in a convent, then?' said
Margarita, readily adopting the idea suggested by herself.

'You have no need to be jealous of her,' said Cecil.

'Nor am I,' replied Margarita proudly, and still switching her
riding-skirt.

'Was she like me, as you say?'

'Handsome, with perfect features--_mignonne_ face, and----'

'Enough--let us talk of ourselves now,' said Margarita softly, and
then Cecil found himself adopted and placed--he feared--on the
footing of an accepted lover, without having attempted to play the
character, in any way.

What might be the result, if this too evident regard for him turned
to hatred under his coolness?  He remembered the well-known couplet
in Congreve's 'Mourning Bride,' and became filled with positive
apprehension, if it be true that there is 'no fury like a woman
scorned.'

Platonism was evidently a _rôle_ she did not understand; and when any
suspicion of his doubts or hesitation occurred to her, her full proud
lips curled, her dark eyes flashed, and a flush crossed her cheek.
But how was he to indulge in love-making--and still more in affecting
such, environed by perils as he was then.

It was but too evident that Margarita, like most coquettes, had
fallen a victim to herself at last, and was actually pining for a man
who had never spoken to her more than words of the merest friendship
and thanks; and but for the memory of Mary, and a sentiment of
chivalry that mingled with his love for her, Cecil, under all the
circumstances of his position, might have yielded to the temptation
that beset him, and at all hazards have become the lover of this
Servian girl, whose wild impulses came to her with the mixed blood of
more than one fiery race; and who, hence, could not be judged of by
the same standard as an English girl of the same position.

At last she rose to retire.

'I cannot conceal from you, that, from all I hear, your peril is very
great,' said she, nervously attempting to button her riding
gauntlets, a task which Cecil hastened to perform for her.

'I shall demand a court-martial!' he exclaimed.

'Palenka tells me that such will not be accorded to you.'

'What then?'

'By the fiat of the King, through the minister of police, you may
be--will be--I cannot speak it,' she continued in a broken voice, as
her tears fell fast, and her head drooped for a moment on his
shoulder; 'rather let me aid you to escape, and fly this place for
ever.  Have you money?'

'None.'

'That shall be my care--and horses too, by which to reach the
frontier of Bulgaria, about fifty miles from this, where you will be
comparatively safe.  But how to get you out of this place--and how to
elude these Russian sentinels at the door, are the difficulties that
appal and bewilder me!'

'Margarita, the idea of flight is most repugnant to me--it looks so
like timidity and confession of guilt.'

'They are determined to deem you guilty, I fear, under any
circumstances.  You have but yourself to consider, and--me.'

'But without a guide----'

'Fear not for that--I shall provide you with a guide too,' she
replied with a bright and tender smile; and so ended this strange
interview, which, for a little time at least, had served to lure him
from his troubles, yet had added to his perplexity; for he felt that
if Margarita saved him from impending peril--and that she would do so
at all hazard he never doubted--that circumstance would load him with
a debt of gratitude which the devotion of his future life could--in
her estimation--alone repay!




CHAPTER VIII.

BAFFLED!

There could be no doubt that Cecil had interested Margarita tenderly
and deeply.  She had studied him closely; she was acute, and had
gathered, from much he had mentioned incidentally at Palenka, that he
had been unfortunate already in life, young though he was, and that
he had 'a history,' as Mary Montgomerie and Annabelle Erroll had
surmised before.

She guessed that his boyhood and youth had not been quite happy, and
this, more from his reserve concerning them than from confessions
made.  She gathered, too, that over his early years no father's love
or protection had been thrown; that he had no brother or sister, but
had possessed a mother on whose memory he doted, and at the mention
of whose name she saw the expression of his eyes soften, and heard at
times his voice grow tremulous; and she loved him all the more for
the little halo of mystery that seemed to surround him.

And she had remarked, with pain, how the rich gloss had left his dark
brown hair, and that there were haggard lines about his eyes and
mouth; and that much of the soldierly _débonnaire_ frankness and
manner in his bearing was gone now.

Empowered by the possession of Tchernaieff's signed permission 'for
the bearer to visit the prisoner,' and encouraged by the absence of
her brother Palenka at the headquarters of General Dochtouroff, she
came again at noon to make final arrangements for his escape and
flight.

'But how to get out of Deligrad?' said he, after their first
greetings were over; and here we may mention that, literally, _grad_
means a fortress in that part of the world.

'That will be my task,' replied Margarita.

'But to fly, like a coward, or a criminal!'

'I wish you could fly like a bird,' said she, playfully.  'Heed not
scruples--what scruples have these people with you?  There is no
shame in such a flight.  Believe me, Cecil, I do not speak
unadvisedly.  If you would be a living man--at the least an
unfettered prisoner, being taken you know not whither,' she
continued, in a voice that suddenly broke, 'you must be out of
Deligrad to-morrow night.  Let us not waste time.  Listen, and obey
me; I will find the occasion, the means, the guide, a sure means of
escape, if you will but avail yourself of them.'

Did she mean to accompany him in his flight?  He half feared so, not
knowing how far the wild impulses of this fair continental might
carry her; but he was not left long in doubt.

'Once clear of Deligrad and the advanced posts,' said she, 'you will
proceed by Banga and Nissa, but that town must be avoided, as it is
fortified with ramparts, palisades, and closely-watched gates; then
by Mustapha-pacha or Glana; but that being a fortress, must be
avoided too; and once beyond Stolo, oh, Cecil, we shall be safe!'

'_We?_'

'I must accompany you to ensure your safety; it is only some fifty
miles; and if my share in your flight is discovered, as it is sure to
be, what will be my fate?  Then Bulgaria or cold Britain must be my
abiding-place, after all.'

'_Nous verrons_,' was the dubious response of Cecil, as he took her
hand in his, and her eyes drooped.  'And your plan?' he asked, with
an ill-repressed smile.

'Ottilie--you remember Ottilie; she is a tall girl; and will come
hither about dusk, armed with a pass, and wearing the cap and capote
of a Russian officer.  Clad in this costume, you take her place and
pass out; she will give you the parole, when I get it.'

'Leaving her here?'

'Yes.'

'And what will be her punishment?'

'Palenka will save her, I have not the slightest doubt.'

'Could he not, then, save you?  Is there no other plan?'

'Listen to me,' she continued, impetuously.  'To give each of the
sentinels a cup of drugged vodka would be easy enough, and doubtless
they would drink them to the last drop.  I have seen such things done
on the stage at the theatre in Vienna, and read of such things again
and again in romances; but they would be discovered asleep on their
post, ere you were clear of this--so the disguise is the most perfect
plan, and the darkness will favour it.'

As they spoke their hands were fondly linked for a time--his, in a
spirit of purest gratitude; hers, passionately--there was no
concealing that!

'You will give the parole,' she continued, in a low voice, 'and pass
on to the group of cottages lying yonder in the hollow on the right
of the camp, and there old Theodore will be waiting with horses when
the evening gun is fired.  No more; you know all, and now I must be
gone.'

'Farewell, Margarita; to me you are a protecting angel--yet, ere you
go----' he bent down and kissed her, as her face fell on his neck.

'Regard me as a sister,' she faltered: and in a moment more he was
alone, with a confused sense of not having exhibited sufficient
gratitude or regard for one who was risking so much for him.

After she was gone the hours passed slowly, while Cecil remained sunk
in thoughts that were far from being pleasant.

Times there were when he felt sullenly and doggedly resigned to the
inevitable, whatever it might be--to await what fate had in store for
him.  His essay in a new country, a new service and field, for
laudable ambition, had proved a miserable and total failure, and life
seemed to have no prize for him now that was worth consideration.

Other times there were when a fierce gust of impatience and
indignation possessed him, and he paced his room like a caged
lion--impatience of coercion and just indignation at the severe
treatment to which he was subjected, the unjust suspicion under which
he lay, and the dangers which menaced him at the hands of the
ignorant, prejudiced, and uninquiring officials at whose mercy he
found himself.

Thus he fell the more readily into Margarita's scheme of seeking
safety in flight, and so ending all connection between himself and
the Servian army.

'Death or Siberia--death or Siberia!  What manner of death?' he would
ask of himself; 'a soldier's, surely?'

He felt sometimes, in his over-tension of thought, that peculiar
emotion which many must have experienced--as though he was not
himself, but had two separate identities; and that the old self was
far away from that prison room, before the windows of which the two
Russian sentinels seemed to tread for ever to and fro, with their
bayonets glittering within arm's length of him.

Were misfortune and he to go for ever hand in hand?  He deemed that
already he had offered up hostages, bitterly, to evil destiny, when
he was thrust out of his beloved regiment, when he lost Mary, and was
cast, nameless, on the world; and lo! the hand of fate was on him
again, and more heavily than ever.

And ever and anon a gust of rage at Guebhard shook his breast, with a
longing for just vengeance upon him.  Guebhard was evidently one of
those strange and pernicious creatures who crop up at rare times in
all phases of society, and have existed in all ages of mankind--one
of a miserable band of men who, according to an essayist, resemble
the lowest animals of creation, and are far more pitiless when their
hate or hunger are raised.  'They are as crafty as they are cruel;
they watch, wait, and see whom they can destroy, and outrage every
feeling dear to the majority of mankind; and to call such men brutes
is to throw scorn upon creatures who may be considered superior to
them in every way.'

Such a man was Mattei Guebhard!

Cecil could punish him, certainly, by carrying off Margarita, and
taking her for ever beyond his reach; but how was he--Cecil--a
fugitive in Bulgaria, without a ducat in his pocket, to subsist
there, and with a beautiful girl on his hands, unless he offered his
sword and his services to Osman Pasha, whose army was ere long to
advance upon Plevna?

Anything--any risk--he thought, was better than utter inaction.  The
suspense of his position was intolerable; and it would be easier, he
imagined, when the worst had come, whatever it was, when it was
faced, and all was over for ever!

So the day passed slowly on towards evening; the sounds in the busy
and crowded camp began to lessen and nearly die away; sunset drew
near, and the in-lying pickets were beginning to fall in with
greatcoats and knapsacks, and Cecil looked from time to time towards
the group of white walled cottages, shadowed by dark cypresses, in
the hollow near the camp, where even now, perhaps, old Theodore
awaited him with the horses, and his heart leaped when suddenly the
evening-gun boomed from the earthen rampart on the summit of the
position, and the Servian tricolour came fluttering down the staff as
it was struck for the night.

Steps sounded on the wooden stairs, and a personage entered, clad in
Russian uniform, ushered by the serjeant of the guard.  The moment
the latter withdrew, Ottilie, for it was she, divested herself of a
false beard and moustache of grizzled hair, and it seemed strange to
see suddenly the smooth and handsome face, the dark laughing eyes and
pouting lips of the pretty Servian girl.

She wore the deep peak of a flat Russian forage-cap well down over
her face, which was also further hidden by the high fur-collar of a
long regimental grey capote, which reached nearly to the ground, and
in them she proceeded at once to invest Cecil, saying that Theodore
awaited him at the appointed place.

Obedient to the will of her mistress, Ottilie, poor girl, seemed to
have none of her own, and had no fear for herself save in disobeying
the orders of Margarita.

Cecil, even now, lingered in adopting the costume she brought
him--lingered with mingled repugnance and rage at having to adopt
such a _rôle_.  Then came an emotion of disgust at a service which
forced such a _rôle_ upon him, mingled with a longing for the freedom
proffered, and so close at hand.  Already, in fancy, he seemed to be
in the open air--the free breezy atmosphere, at liberty, and in the
saddle, galloping on and on towards the Bulgarian frontier; already
he seemed to feel the horse under him; to be inhaling the perfume of
night, the fragrance of the pine-forests by the broad-flowing Morava;
but then he thought of the girl whom he was to leave in his place,
and his heart died within him!

She covered her face with her hands, and, while she wept bitterly,
exclaimed, in broken accents:

'Oh, Herr Lieutenant, I have destroyed you!  I have forgotten the
pass-word!'

'Perhaps it is as well,' said he, with stern composure; 'but don't
weep, my brave girl, and, hush! cloak yourself again, some one is
coming.'

Steps, voices, and lights were all on the creaking stairs without,
and the guard on the house were now under arms in front of it.  Who
were coming?  What had caused an alarm?  Had the plot of Margarita
been discovered.

'Quick, disguise yourself and begone--you have not a moment to lose,'
exclaimed Cecil, compelling Ottilie to resume her costume and prepare
to withdraw; and it seemed to him that while life lasted, if for
thirty years, as it might do now only for thirty minutes, he would
never forget the memory of those voices and steps on the staircase,
or the glare of light that streamed under the door across the bare
floor of his room.

The idea of resistance, mad and desperate, of shooting down the first
man who entered (for Ottilie had given him pistols), occurred to
Cecil; but only to be relinquished, as he thought of the poor girl
whom he might involve in ruin if he shed blood; and, throwing the
weapons to the other end of the apartment, he drew himself proudly up
to await whatever fate had in store for him now; and he did not doubt
that it was terribly close and finally arranged, when, among the
group who entered, he recognised his former grim visitors, the deputy
minister of police, and the provost-marshal of the camp!




CHAPTER IX.

CROSS PURPOSES.

'Good morning, Fotheringhame,' said Sir Piers, as his guest entered
the breakfast-room betimes, in shooting-costume, and ready for the
preserves; 'I trust that Eaglescraig air and Eaglescraig claret and
whisky brought you pleasant dreams.'

'There are other and better adjuncts here to suggest pleasant
dreams,' replied Fotheringhame, as his eye rested for a moment on the
two young ladies, and he gave his hand to Mrs. Garth, after which an
animated discussion about sport ensued between him and the general,
while Mary and Annabelle idled over their letters.

Leslie Fotheringhame was one of those kind of men of whom little is
usually seen when staying in a country house; thus, short though his
visit was to be, and important the object which brought it about, all
the day subsequent to his arrival he was beating the covers, and
after the partridges, with old Sandy Swanshot the keeper.

Was Annabelle disappointed in this? we are forced to admit that she
was piqued by it, however.

Like many social monomaniacs, Mrs. Garth considered herself an able
tactician, and thought to set matters right between these sundered
twain; but in this instance she failed signally, especially with
Annabelle; there seemed something mysterious in the quarrel, their
relation to each other, and their mutual sentiments, which the old
lady could not fathom.

Annabelle was very bitter on the subject.

'His presence here is an insult to me, Mary,' said she, after
watching him cross the lawn, and disappear with the keeper and the
dogs; 'and every time his eyes meet mine, they seem to be examining
me, as if to learn how I bear his defection.'

'If I can read eyes aright, they wear a very different expression,
Annabelle,' said Mary; 'but his presence here with you is indeed a
singular coincidence.'

'After what happened in Perthshire, Mary, I made myself too cheap in
Edinburgh, when we met again; and truth to tell you, darling, though
I cannot hate--but love him still,' she continued, with her eyes
flashing through unshed tears; 'I must hate myself for doing so--and
despise myself for my infatuation.  That my regard should be too
lightly, too easily won, and re-won, by one who valued it not!  But,
if his majesty thinks he has but to throw the handkerchief, he is
mightily mistaken,' she added haughtily.

'To me it seemed as if his eyes wore almost an imploring look as he
bade his adieu to you and left the breakfast table,' urged Mary, in
her gentle manner; but though the idea was pleasant and soothing to
Annabelle's angry pride, she replied that she felt only astonishment
and indignation at his _hardiesse_ in looking at, or addressing her
at all.

'Am I to be a fool like the fair Elaine, who wasted all her life in
caring for one man?  But then there are no Sir Launcelots of the Lake
now.'

Yet Annabelle, while sedulously schooling her heart to be
indifferent, felt to the full, as far as Leslie Fotheringhame was
concerned, how, mind and manner apart, 'one human being is felt to be
more attractive for mere bodily reasons than all the rest of the
world besides.'

Though a little provoked that he had gone forth to shoot, and waste,
as she deemed it, a precious day in the coverts, Mary was grateful to
Fotheringhame for the object which brought him to Eaglescraig---his
interest in Cecil Falconer--or Montgomerie, as she had taught herself
to call him now.

In her mind he was every way associated with the days when life
became to her an Eden--when loverlike she discovered that secresy and
silence were sweet to cultivate; when the garden, the woods and
fields, the moon, the stars, the sky, had all new charms, beauty, and
brightness they had never possessed before, and her intercourse with
Cecil became a system of emblems, metaphors, parables, whispers, and
pressures of the hand.

How far away that delicious period of her life seemed now; and
he--where was he?  In a land to her less than half known, wholly
barbarous, and where he was hourly menaced by a violent death.

'How large your ring seems for you now!' said Annabelle, as she toyed
with Mary's hand.

'How much smaller my finger has become since Cecil placed it there!'
replied Mary, turning the diamond engagement hoop wistfully; 'I am so
afraid of losing it, that I wear mamma's wedding-ring as a
guard--many have done that.'

Fotheringhame returned late from the coverts, and long after the
keeper had brought in his bag.

'Did you lose your way?' asked Mary.

'No, Miss Montgomerie; but I lost a locket from my chain--a locket
that I would not lose for any sum of money.'

'And you found it, I hope?'

'Yes--here it is--but after a long hunt among the gorse and brake.'

'Is it so valuable, then?'

'To me it is.'

'May I ask what it contains?' asked Mary, laughingly, as she saw it
dangling from his watch-chain.

'Well--a lock of hair--and----'

'What more?' she continued, archly.

'If you insist on knowing, the likeness of my--future wife,' said he
in a whisper, yet not so low but that it reached the ears of the
startled Annabelle; and Mary was so shocked, so pained and full of
pity for her, that she grew very pale indeed, and questioned him no
more, and he laughingly retired to dress for dinner.

'So--so,' thought Annabelle; 'the locket I gave him actually contains
the portrait of a woman--doubtless, she of the hazel eyes!'

Fotheringhame felt that he loved, or had loved, this proud girl
earnestly and deeply; and that she with equal earnestness and depth
resented something on his part which had, perhaps, driven her to
loving some one else; thus the new emotion of jealousy was infused in
his mind, imparting a constraint to his manner, while Annabelle felt
that she had been merely the plaything of his idle hours.  Thus each
shut up their real feelings; and to a greater extent than either
knew, they were at cross purposes.

Annabelle thought that she had overheard and discovered enough to
cure her even of regret, and to steel her heart and make her seem
what she wished to be, studiedly calm and indifferent to all
appearance; but this resolution was rather severely tested when after
dinner, instead of joining Sir Piers in the smoking-room,
Fotheringhame came lounging deliberately out to the terrace before
the house, where she was lingering alone, with a Shetland shawl
thrown over her head, and when he joined her, and--as she thought
with singular coolness and effrontery--made some commonplace remarks
upon the warmth and beauty of the autumnal evening, to which she
assented coldly and briefly.

'Chance has thrown us together again--a chance for which I had ceased
to hope,' said he, in a low and earnest voice; 'and, Annabelle--if
you will once more permit me to call you so--I would wish to talk
with you calmly and dispassionately over that estrangement which has
been a source of great bewilderment and the keenest sorrow to me.'

She was amazed at his hardihood; but said, quietly and gently, while
keeping her face averted, as he continued to walk by her side:

'If you are disposed to take a philosophical view of what has
certainly crushed my pride--if I ever had any--and sorely wounded my
self-esteem--nay more, has caused, I am willing to own, a great pang
to my heart--so am I, Captain Fotheringhame.  Our acquaintance, to
call it by its least name, has been a most unfortunate one; so, if we
talk at all, perhaps we may find another subject.'

And she continued to look straight before her, with her face half
averted, and thankful that she had a veil--at least the Shetland
screen--to conceal the proud and passionate tears that welled up in
her blue and handsome eyes.

Meanwhile Mary, remembering Fotheringhame's awkward revelation so
recently, was watching the pair with more anxiety than hope or
exultation, and was perhaps a little surprised to see them gradually
quit the terrace and descend to the shrubbery walk in the garden
below.

'When will our consultation about Cecil begin!' she thought, a little
petulantly and impatiently.  'If a separation from one we love,
though short, is hard to bear, what must such as mine from Cecil be?'

He might die in that distant land--how dreadful to consider such a
contingency!--and in dying, never know of the good fortune that
awaited him at home, of who his family were, and the bright hope that
now smiled upon his love for her!

Meanwhile those she had been watching were now in a sequestered walk.

'You have suffered, Annabelle,' said Fotheringhame, in an agitated
voice, as he turned and confronted her; 'I can read it in your face.'

'If I have suffered, sir, it has been through you.'

'Oh, say not so,' he exclaimed in a prayerful way.

'Sir--your manner--your mode of conduct, bewilder me!' she exclaimed,
as she was about to sweep away, when he strove to take her hand, but
she withdrew, it sharply and defiantly.

'Annabelle!' he said reproachfully.

'How dare you--how can you be so persistently cruel?' she cried
haughtily, while cresting up her head.  There were no tears in her
eyes or voice now.

'Cruel, Annabelle?'

There was the old charm in his voice, and she could not resist it.

'Why was that letter--my last to you--returned to me unopened?'

'Because, Captain Fotheringhame, I thought it right to do so.'

She was gazing at him now steadily and defiantly.

'Had you read that letter it would have explained all.'

'Who the mysterious "F.F." is, or was.'

'Yes,' said he sadly, with a peculiar inflection of voice.

'Enough of this,' said Annabelle, haughtily; 'I leave you and all
your interests to the--the lady whose likeness is in your valued
locket.'

'You do?  If I have been guilty of aught, in your eyes, you will
certainly forgive me when you look upon her face.'

'Your intended! permit me to pass, Captain Fotheringhame--surely I
have been subjected to mockery and insult enough to satisfy even you!'

With tender and observant eyes, Leslie Fotheringhame was watching her
soft features, and saw them all quiver over, as if with a sudden
pang, and his heart was moved, for a lovely face was hers.  With much
of reverential tenderness he detached the locket from his chain,
opened it, and then Annabelle beheld a likeness of herself--simply a
finely coloured photo, forgotten by her, but evidently treasured by
him.

Annabelle was startled on seeing this, but not disconcerted.

'And so, sir,' said she, 'while loving another woman, you have in
mockery, and perhaps for the amusement of your mess-room friends,
dared to carry my likeness about with you!'

She spoke firmly, and with difficulty restrained a passionate fit of
tears--of wild weeping, in fact.

'I never loved another woman--or any one but you, and you alone,
Annabelle, as I can swear to you with truth,' said he, earnestly and
tenderly.

'And who, then, was the woman whose initials were the same as your
own, or nearly so, with whom you had mysterious
meetings--correspondence, and all that appeared to be part and parcel
of a deep and concerted intrigue!  But it is beneath me now to
inquire!' she added bitterly.

'Annabelle, the returned letter would have told you all--my sister.'

'Your sister!' repeated Annabelle, in a breathless voice, and with
some incredulity of manner.

'My only sister Fanny--the runaway wife of a husband who is now in
India, and to pay whose debts I sold my troop in the Lancers.  You
have surely heard of your cousin Fanny Fleming.  She had no friend in
the world but me.  I thought to conceal her existence from you and
others; but you have wrung the secret from me.  A false wife--a
helpless, hopeless creature; but her sorrows, her repentances and all
are ended now, and she is in her grave.  God rest her!'

There was a silent pause, during which, he could see how the bosom of
Annabelle heaved with every respiration.

'And this was all your mystery?' said she, looking up with her eyes
full of tears, and her lips quivering.

'All! and more than enough.  It was to me a source of great horror,
shame, and sorrow, to find my beloved sister--one whom many women
loved, and all men admired; whose breast was the mansion of goodness
and purity once--she, my gentle and loving sister, the child of the
same father, nurtured by the same mother! and could I forsake her
because she was in adversity, in sorrow, and repentant, and from whom
all else in the world turned?'

'Oh, Leslie!' she exclaimed, as she frankly placed both her hands in
his, and he drew her towards him, saying tenderly:

'Annabelle, let me prove my faith to you--forgive me----'

'I have nothing to forgive.'

'Then let us forget the miserable past.'

She felt his breath upon her half-averted cheeks, and his low and
earnest whisper in her little white ear; and then, while weeping
heavily, she fell on his breast.

'My darling,' she said in a broken voice, 'if I had only known of
this--how different all would have been--how much spared us!  Why did
you not tell me--your sister----'

'I was not aware how much appearances were against me; and with you,
I became jealous of some imaginary person.  I shrunk from the task at
first, and you--you returned, unread, the letter which would have
explained all.  But you are glad now, dearest?'

'Glad!  O Leslie, to any other than you, I might refrain from
admitting that I have never--since the day we parted--ceased to love
you; and have now learned to love you more than ever.'

'And I love you, Annabelle, with the passion that comes only once in
a man's life-time!'

And so, for a time, it may be inferred that this pair were pretty
oblivious of the absent Cecil in Servia, and his interests at home.




CHAPTER X.

THE TELEGRAM.

In her joy and impulsiveness, Mary actually embraced Leslie
Fotheringhame, and kissed him when she heard from Annabelle of the
reconciliation, and explanation of all that seemed so unpleasant and
mysterious.

'Had she not loved you--yes, loved you dearly--do you think she would
have felt all this so much--so keenly and so bitterly!' said Mary to
Fotheringhame.

And hearty were the congratulations of the general, who was pleased
that Eaglescraig should be the scene of such an event, though love
and lovers' quarrels were somewhat beyond his sympathies now; but he
liked Fotheringhame, as a friend of the absent Cecil, and he had a
strong regard for Annabelle, the only daughter of an old and valued
Indian comrade; so the episode immediately brought to memory one of
his inevitable 'up-country' reminiscences.

'Talking of lovers' quarrels,' said he, as they idled over the
dessert; 'egad!  I remember one which was not without some strange
features.  When we were in Lucknow, under Inglis--just about the time
of the first outbreak of the mutiny--a pair of lovers met, who had
quarrelled in some jealous pique at a ball in Chowringhee.  Olive
Vane was a pretty brunette, daughter of an old Sudder judge, and her
Romeo was Bob Acharn--cousin of Acharn of Ours, a lieutenant of the
Bengal Native Infantry.  There was not a better fellow at
pig-sticking, or shooting, in all India than Bob; and I remember
that, at Jodpore, he watched and waited for days and nights to pot a
man-eater that had made a whole village desolate.

'As people don't lose time in love affairs in India, it was fully
arranged that--the quarrel made sweetly up--the lovers should be
married on the 31st of May, though many there were who said that the
time was not one for marrying or giving in marriage, for the rising
of the Pandies at Meerut, some time before, had sent a thrill of
terror through every European breast in India, and at Lucknow, as
elsewhere, it was uncertain when the secret hate of the natives might
burst into a flame.

'The bridal party gathered, and at the very moment the clergyman was
asking the bride if she was ready, a musket-shot entered the room,
and she fell, mortally wounded.  It had entered her chest, and then
ensued a scene which I cannot describe.

'A company of Acharn's regiment--the 71st Bengal Native Infantry--had
been brought in from the Muchee Bawn for disaffection some days
before.  They refused all obedience, and in vain were the black silk
colours they had borne at Sobraon displayed to them.  It was deemed
imprudent to coerce them; and the result was that on that eventful
evening--the 31st of May, the _budmashes_, or armed mob of Lucknow,
rose, six thousand strong, crossed the Goomtee in wild tumult by a
ford--a dark mass amid which there were thousands of glittering
steel-points, rushing to join the mutineers.  From one of the latter
came the shot that struck down Olive Vane.  We turned the great guns
of the Residency upon them, and, after an hour's heavy firing, the
insurrection was suppressed for a time; but a time only.

'During the attack and repulse, poor little Olive Vane lay motionless
on a sofa, with young Acharn bending over her, weeping like a boy,
and striving to staunch the blood that welled from the terrible wound
in her bosom--a wound which the doctors declared she could not
survive above an hour.  When she recovered consciousness and learned
the truth, her courage never quailed, but she said:

'"Bob--dearest, kiss me once again.  If I am to die, I shall die
worthy of you."

'"And I shall not survive you long, my darling; but there is yet time
for us to be united.  Come, sir, we are ready," said he to the
clergyman, who, like all the rest of us, looked on with strange and
haggard eyes.

'The girl's pale cheek flushed, but she was almost too weak to speak,
for mental joy seemed to struggle for mastery with physical pain.
What a strange sight she presented, lying there, her white bridal
dress all stained with her blood, her beautiful dark brown hair all
dishevelled, and looking so wan, so helpless, yet so resigned to die!

'Bob Acharn took her hand, and the chaplain proceeded with the
ceremony.  Thrice the quivering lips of Olive parted ere she could
articulate "yes," and when she did so, it was the last word she
uttered; and then a little foam came over her lips, for she was in
her parting agony.  And as he concluded the ceremony the sobs of the
chaplain, who hid his face in his surplice, were echoed by those of
Acharn, and the old judge her father.'

'A terrible story!' exclaimed Annabelle.

'And Acharn--what became of him?' asked Mary.

'He fought against the mutineers, with what animus you may imagine.
Seeking death daily, he seemed to have a charmed life, till the 5th
of September, when the enemy made their last serious and desperate
assault, and he was blown to pieces when they exploded a mine near
Apthorp's post, and strewed the garden around it with corpses.'

Anxious that Fotheringhame should confer with the general about
Cecil, Mary had listened to this Indian story, though she heard it
for the first time, with some impatience.

'I do believe,' she said, laughingly, to Annabelle, 'that when the
dear old man can't get an audience he tells some of his Indian
stories to himself!'

'And now, Sir Piers,' said Fotheringhame, influenced by a glance from
Mary, the import of which he read aright, 'about the matter which
brought me here, and the subject of your many letters to Dick
Freeport and myself--what is to be done about my friend Cecil?  We
can't leave him to risk life and limb in a wretched affair like the
Servian war.'

'Of course not--of course not, my dear fellow,' replied Sir Piers:
'this self-imposed exile must be ended; he shall be restored to his
regiment and to us all.  I must see him again--my boy's boy--once
again before I die!' he added, with sudden emotion.

'Do not speak thus,' implored Mary, caressing him.

'I have a great reparation to make, Mary--great reparation, to the
dead as well as the living.  I have been a vain, selfish,
hard-hearted man; but I see my errors now, and shall make reparation,
I say.  Why should not I go to Servia in search of him?' exclaimed
the old baronet, as his eye sparkled, and then he added sorrowfully:
'but I am stricken in years, and am almost as much use in the world
now as a gun without a lock, or a Scotch M.P.  But we can set the
wires to work, and write to the Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs.'

'The world is a small place, after all, now; people are always
rubbing up against each other,' said Fotheringhame, cheerfully; 'then
there are the railways.'

'Not in Servia,' said Mary.

'Well, the international post; and it will go hard with us if we
don't trace the wanderer out.  Besides, if the colonel gives me
leave, I may start for Servia myself.'

'You!' exclaimed Mary and Annabelle simultaneously, but in tones so
different that Fotheringhame laughed; for the voice of the first was
expressive of joy and gratitude, and of the second, ill-concealed
alarm and dismay.

We have elsewhere shown how the sister of Count Palenka was scheming
out the journey of Cecil to the frontier; so, pretty much about the
same time, another journey with reference to him was schemed out by
poor little Mary at Eaglescraig.

Nothing as yet was defined as to the movements of Fotheringhame, if
he did adopt the idea of setting out in quest of his friend; for he
had his commanding officer to study, and Annabelle, who was of more
importance to him now than the F.M. commanding at the Horse Guards.

But Mary, assisted by John Balderstone, chalked out his route, as she
conceived it must be, from London to Vienna and Buda-Pesth; from
thence to Belgrade by steamer, as she supposed.  Oh! it seemed all
very plain and easy, seated over the map, which she could span with
her tiny hand.

How she longed to go thither herself!  So great was her impatience
that not even the enchanted carpet of the Arabian tale, which
transported its proprietor through the air to wherever he wished to
be, in an instant, or the enchanted bridle of the famous Ayrshire
'Deil of Ardrossan,' the possessor of which could make his steed
perform such wondrous feats of speed, would have sufficed her.

She was full of schemes now for communicating with Cecil, for
discovering his exact whereabouts, and more than all, for bringing
him safely and quickly home; while the general thought chiefly of his
restoration to his former rank and position in the regiment.

Mary had seen in Robertson's charming little drama of 'Ours,' how the
heroine made her way to the Crimea, amid the winter tempests, and
found the wretched hut of her lover, Hugh Chalcot.  Why should she
not go to Servia and bring home the wanderer!  Mrs. Garth would go,
of course; and might not Fotheringhame and Annabelle, with whom
matters were progressing so far now, make their wedding trip, if
solicitors and guardians would only look sharp about contracts and
settlements!

It would be quite a joyous journey if the general would only consent,
for were not she and Cecil as solemnly engaged as a man and woman
could be, and with the full consent and sanction of him, her only
guardian!  And the girl's heart seemed to go out to him, the absent
and the suffering, with a futile and passionate longing.

Oh yes--yes; she saw it all, and had thought it and planned it so
cleverly, with dear old John Balderstone!  So they would go, by
London, Vienna, and Belgrade, to--she continued, as he bent over the
map--to where Cecil was, for they would never--never come home
without him; and in anticipation, she imagined the joy, the wonder,
and the whole excitement of their sudden meeting.

But one thing did provoke her a little!

It seemed as if, in the presence of Annabelle and the new phase of
their love affair, the primary object of Fotheringhame's visit took
somewhat of a secondary place, till the latter, like the whole
household, was terribly startled one morning, when the wishes of all
were frustrated and their hopes crushed by an appalling and
bewildering Reuter's telegram, which Fotheringhame strove, but in
vain, to conceal from Mary, and which ran thus:


'The ex-British officer who is now a prisoner in the camp at
Deligrad, and under sentence, it is believed, of death for treason to
King Milano (as the Prince of Servia names himself) and treachery to
General Tchernaieff, is now known to be the same who so lately and so
gallantly saved the life of the latter in the battle on the banks of
the Morava, when Guebhard's troop of Lancers gave way and fled.'


'Now what on earth does all this mean?' exclaimed Fotheringhame, in
blank dismay, as he read this over for the third time to Mrs. Garth,
while Annabelle, who thought only of Mary, clung to his arm with her
eyes full of tears.

'It is a sad--sad tragedy this of ours,' said the old lady, folding
Mary to her breast; 'but, my darling pet--it may be some mistake; let
us pray that it is so, and that light may come out of the darkness
yet.'

'This is torture upon torture.  O my God--is life worth living?'
wailed Mary in her heart, asking unconsciously the question of a
brilliant essayist.




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.




CHAPTER XII.

THE RECONNAISSANCE.

Young soldier though he was in some respects, Cecil knew well the
importance of the duty assigned to him, and the great circumspection
requisite in the mode of executing it; all the more as Circassian and
Egyptian cavalry had been but recently heard of in the vicinity of
Rajouz, a village about five miles from Deligrad.

Whatever Cecil did, he usually gave his heart to; and he was doubly
anxious to prove himself worthy of the renewed trust and faith
reposed in him by Tchernaieff, and to stifle the qualms of disgust he
had begun to feel for the Servian service, and which usually rise,
sooner or later, in the heart of every Briton at any foreign service,
and which was the more likely to influence Cecil by the memory of
late events.

As his party rode on at a leisurely walk, after quitting the vicinity
of the camp, the hoofs tramping out the rich odours of the fallen
leaves and aromatic plants, he gave strict orders that there was to
be no smoking (lest lights, even so small, were seen), and that there
must be no talking or singing--that utter silence must pervade every
movement.

His party had food for three days; thus he halted and fed the horses
at every two leagues, so that they should always be fresh and fit for
duty, taking care to halt in thickets, or at a distance from all
roads, and using every precaution to preclude surprise while the
feeding was in process, and the horses consequently unbitted.

He was furnished with a guide, whom, however, he kept ignorant of the
route indicated to him by Tchernaieff--the line of country towards
the Timok river.

He knew, too, that an officer, be his rank what it may, can never,
with honour, decline the perilous duty of a reconnaissance, as the
honour is amply made up by the importance of the expedition, which
frequently proves of the utmost consequence in the operations of the
future.

Thus, when day began to dawn, and he found himself traversing the
fields and forest lands on the eastern slopes of Mount Mezlanie,
while moving with the utmost care and circumspection, with two
advanced troopers some distance in front, riding each with loaded
carbine on thigh, he began his notes and task of surveying, by
minutely examining the face of the country, the hollows and vales,
whether stony or swampy; the grass and the watercourses; the line of
the principal roads, their turnings, breadth, and capability for the
passage of artillery; the situation of farmhouses or villages, and
their capabilities for defence; the bridges, etc.--and all the
memoranda thereon he extended and corrected during the halts for
refreshing the men and horses.

Particularly had he to note where grass, hay, and corn could be
procured, in case of an advance in that direction; with the proper
ground for camps, with fuel and water in the vicinity, and so forth,
omitting nothing that might prove of value to his leaders.  And in
this new species of employment the first day passed without event,
and the approach of evening found his party preparing to halt for the
night in a thicket of oaks and pines, under the shadow of some lofty
and impending precipices, the fronts of which glared redly in the
western light, above the deep green of the forest trees.

A line of silvery haze, exhaled by the evening sun, winding among
them, indicated the course of the Timok river, which descends from
the south side of Mount Haiduchki, of the Balkan chain in Servia, and
flows along the confines of Bulgaria till it reaches the Danube.  So
the river was almost in sight, and as yet neither Cecil nor his
troopers had 'felt' the Circassian or Egyptian cavalry; and
everywhere the country seemed quiet, the peasantry attending in peace
to their agricultural avocations.

Near the halting-place lay a deep pool surrounded by cedars and
pines; rich boughs drooped into its water, on which the snow-white
lilies floated, and there the horses were unbitted, and they and
their riders drank thirstily.

By dawn next day all were in their saddles again, and the
reconnaissance was resumed.

Sharply observant, though naturally unsuspicious, Cecil had, ere
this, begun to remark that an armed peasant, with a large black
beard--but all men were armed there, and then especially--who had
questioned the advanced file of men and obtained from them a light
for his pipe--appeared to dodge or watch his party, which rode at an
easy pace, and from time to time he saw this peasant appearing on the
crest of one slope, as they began to descend another.

Disliking this, he sent a corporal back at a trot to question this
fellow and demand his object or purpose; but the latter eluded this
by disappearing in a thicket, only, as it eventually proved, to
follow still, but unseen and more warily.

As the road traversed one of those warm valleys where, in Servia, the
cotton-plant is raised in great quantities, and where the plantations
present so pleasing an appearance, the glossy dark green leaves
contrasting so finely with the white globular flowers scattered over
the tree, Cecil's party overtook three mounted persons--a man and two
females--who, after a consultation among themselves apparently,
checked their horses to let his troopers come up with them.

As they drew near them, Cecil felt his pulse quicken.  There was no
mistaking the brown habit faced with scarlet, the smart hat and white
ostrich feather, and the graceful figure of the wearer, or the
old-dragoon seat of her male attendant.  For here was Margarita,
accompanied by old Theodore, and the third mounted personage was the
pretty Ottilie.

'Margarita again--and here!  By Jove! there _is_ some fatality in all
this!' thought Cecil; and he spurred in advance of his party, and
joined the trio, two of whom at once reined their horses back; and
one of them, Ottilie, coloured very deeply, for she was not ignorant
of the grotesque rumours that had been current concerning the
disguise in which she had been found.

'You here, Herr Lieutenant!' exclaimed Margarita, with genuine
surprise, while placing her whip in her bridle-hand, she presented
the other to Cecil; 'here northward of Mount Mezlanie?'

'I am reconnoitring--and you?'

'Am _en route_ for Palenka; then via Belgrade for Vienna.'

If she thought to interest him by this intelligence she failed, for
he said:

'I am glad to hear that you are leaving this district, for we know
not which way the tide of war may roll: and the fact of your being
here without an escort is most rash, as patrols of Circassian and
Egyptian horse have been seen between the Timok and the Morava!'

'We are now within ten miles of Palenka, and have seen nothing as yet
to alarm us,' she replied.

Palenka was in a safe district; but who could count on what might lie
between?  Why should he not escort her so far, when he was free to do
so, as his command was a roving one? and Palenka lay on the west side
of the Timok, and in the district he was to examine.

Her eyes sparkled and her colour heightened as he announced his
intention; and they rode slowly on together, he the while, with all
the interest that he could not help feeling in her, wishing in his
heart that she was safe in Belgrade, Vienna, or anywhere else than by
his side.

She thanked him for the proffered escort.

'Say nothing of that,' said he; 'I owe you so much more than I can
ever repay.'

'You owe me a debt, I know; yet it might be best adjusted by our
forgetting--as if we had never known--each other.'

'Margarita, who that has seen and known you will ever forget you?' he
asked, with truth in his voice and eye.

'Many, I have no doubt.'

Her manner was somewhat bitter and weary, and from under her long
dark eyelashes she looked at him, from time to time, with a kind of
passionate pain.

'One fact I shall never forget, at least--that you saved me from
great and deadly peril, by your acumen and superior intelligence.'

'By my suspicion of Guebhard and general knowledge of his character,
and of what he is capable--say, rather.'

'And thus you rendered my flight from Deligrad unnecessary.'

'Yes,' she replied curtly.

On that point he said no more.  She coloured for a moment at his
reference to it, and then became pale again; but paleness was the
normal condition of her face.

This brilliant woman loved him, and had not cared much to conceal
that she did so.  What was he to say to her--what to tell--how to
explain all?  It was impossible for him to put in clear, cold words
before her the mortifying fear that he could not--should not love her
in return, because he was affianced--so hopelessly, as he
supposed--to another.

Could he ask her to take back a heart he certainly had never sought?
It was in every way a perplexing and grotesque situation.

'You have become very silent,' said she, in a tone of pique, while
switching, and then checking her horse.  'Of what are you thinking?'

'That if some of those wild Circassians, of whom I have been told,
were only to appear now----'

'Heaven forbid! why?'

'That I might empty a saddle or two, and risk in your service the
life you saved, and thus make an atonement----'

'I want no such risk run; and what,' she asked a little sharply, 'do
you mean by atonement?'

'Only this, that you saved my life, Margarita, and may claim its
whole future, if you will,' said he, while Mary's face came
reproachfully to memory, for the speech was disloyalty to her,
however gallantly meant to Margarita, whom the peculiarity of its
tenor irritated rather than flattered.

'This is an idle speech, and I know its value.  I thank you for your
escort, but we shall part at Palenka, and as another day will see me
on the road for Vienna, we shall never meet again; and you may become
to me, what I shall never be to you--a dream, without pain perhaps.'

This was one of her many strange and passionate speeches, his general
or vague replies to which always piqued her.

'Youth and pleasure are a dream,' said he.

'And life itself, say some.'

'But these metaphysicians do not tell us where or how we shall wake
to find it so--unless in death.'

'Enough of a subject so gloomy and abstruse,' said she sharply, for
Cecil's strange indifference galled and piqued her keenly.

Though a fashionably-bred woman, and as a girl accustomed to the best
society in Vienna, in wild Servia she was certainly rather
untrammelled by the bonds of conventionality.  Her life from young
girlhood had been full of gaiety, variety, vivid colour, and very
rational pleasure.  She had been the object of much adulation,
admiration, and love, too; she had been amused or bored by all, but
won by none till now, when Cecil, the wanderer, the soldier of
fortune, with no inheritance but his sword, had won her regard
without seeking it.

She was assured now--bitterly so--that he would never kneel to her as
a lover; yet she was loth that he should ever free himself from the
power of her fascinations, if she could make him feel it.  Fain would
she have won that heart which seemed so fresh and guileless, so
unlike any she had yet met--so unworn and prone to have good faith in
all men.

There was a certain languor and then occasional fiery carelessness in
Margarita that must have come to her with the blood of the old heyduc
of Palenka, and his bride--some odalisque, perhaps, won by the edge
of his sabre amid the plunder of a pasha's household, and hers was
the disposition, the passion and the situation, that so often lead to
blind and bitter hatred, ending in crime and sorrow.

She knew the power of her beauty over all men, and she knew also the
claim for special gratitude over this loyal, dauntless, and grateful
heart, and hoped that she knew how to use both; thus many a time she
looked at him with her bright, languid eyes, the colour of which was
often difficult to define, with an expression which seemed to say:

'I saved your life and honour--therefore you ought to belong to me,
and to no one else!'

And Cecil found it impossible to deny, even to himself, the knowledge
and certainty that this woman, so dazzlingly fair that few women ever
saw her without jealousy, and fewer men without admiration or
passion, had been ready--and was now ready--to risk shame, suffering
or danger, and fly with him, seeking obscurity and exile in Bulgaria
or anywhere else.

'Was ever man more tempted!' thought he, as he saw--with
satisfaction--the gilded vanes and cupolas of Palenka glittering in
the sunshine above the green-wooded bank of the Morava, and he reined
up his horse to bid her farewell.

'You will surely ride up to Palenka, and bid mamma adieu?' she said,
her eyes dilating with reproach.

'To visit Palenka, or anywhere else, is inconsistent with my duty;
and the count your brother viewed my sojourn there with unconcealed
displeasure.'

'As you please,' said she, coldly.  Then, after a pause, she added,
'We have resolved to leave Servia, mamma and I, for a time--my
brother wishes us to do so.'

'I would fain see you once again,' said he, with an access of
tenderness, suited, however, to the occasion; 'but it may not be.
To-night I shall halt in the wood near Tjuprija, and to-morrow go
back on the spur to Deligrad.'

'The wood near Tjuprija--that is close at hand; so if we who have
been so strangely thrown together are parted to meet no more in the
future, and you would care to see me once again--just once--at noon
to-morrow be by the wayside chapel on the rocks above the ruin--the
chapel of Lazar--and--' she paused, as a spasm of pain made her proud
and beautiful face quiver, 'and I shall be there.'

'At noon, then, to-morrow,' said he, bending over her gauntleted hand
and kissing it, after which she rode off at a quick pace, followed by
her two attendants, while Cecil fell back and rejoined his troopers,
who made all haste to put out and hide the pipes in which they
had--in defiance of orders--been indulging during his recent
preoccupation in front of them.

At the same time a man--the bearded peasant before-mentioned--who had
been concealed among some laurel-bushes, and had overheard the
parting, crept stealthily away, with an expression on his face that
would have startled Cecil had he seen it.

'To what end, or to what useful or wise purpose, under all the
circumstances, can this assignation be? and in such a lonely place?'
he thought.  'But what could I say--how decline the last request of
one to whom I owe so much?'

Yet he wished it all well over, and anticipated, with genuine British
dismay, something of a painful scene.


The night was passed by his troopers peacefully in the solitude of
the wood referred to, under the stars.  Morning came in bright with
ruddy sunshine, and after such a humble repast as soldiers prepare
under such circumstances, Cecil ordered them to unbit and unsaddle
their horses, groom them, and re-examine all their ammunition--not
all at once, but by fours at a time--and after patrolling the woods
in the vicinity, and finding all quiet, he halted them again in the
wood, and set forth to keep his appointment at the chapel, which was
on a rocky steep about a mile from it.

He crossed the Morava by an ancient bridge, supposed to be the work
of Roman hands, and began to ascend the steep and rocky bank that
overhung it, till he overlooked the windings of the river and the
woods that half-concealed them, and attained the summit of a species
of pass in which stood the wayside chapel--merely a rough species of
altar, whereon was painted a rude and half-defaced effigy, surmounted
by a projecting pediment or roof of red tiles.

Masses of wild vines flourished in luxuriance all around it, with
other creepers, and from amid these there peered grotesquely
forth--with its metal halo sorely faded--the effigy, which was
supposed to represent the Servian _Krall_, Lazar, who was taken
prisoner in the last great battle on the plains of Kossava (which
ended in the subjugation of Servia), and whose relics, after his
murder in the camp of the Sultan Amurath, have wrought so many
miracles, according to the superstition of his country, and now lie
in the monastery of Ravenitza, which he founded; but Cecil thought
nothing of all this, and probably knew nothing about it, as he looked
about him anxiously and in haste for Margarita.

It was past the time of noon now; but she was not there.  A sheer
cliff of vast height, the base of which could not be seen, descended
on one side; on the other was the narrow walk by which he had mounted
to the wayside chapel.

He heard no sound but the voices of the birds, and he looked in vain
for her figure--her drapery floating between the stems of the trees.

Why had she failed to keep her tryst? a kind of keen disappointment
occurred to him now; he looked at his watch again.  Time was long
past now, and he thought of his troopers and the homeward march to
Deligrad!

Then, as he looked about him, his eye fell on two objects that gave
him a shock, a bracelet and a handkerchief.  The former lay imbedded
in the turf, as if trod upon; the other fluttered on the stem of a
wild vine.

He took up the former, a Turkish rose-pearl bracelet, which he
remembered to have seen Margarita wear; so she must have come to the
meeting-place and lost it.  But why had she come and gone so soon?

The handkerchief, a white silk one, he examined, and on a corner
thereof saw the name of 'Mattei Guebhard.'

Guebhard--then he too had been there; had in some way anticipated
him!  And now he saw that all the turf about the narrow path bore the
indentations of feet, as if a struggle had taken place, and a great
horror of--he knew not what--fell upon the heart of Cecil.

He thought of the Circassian and Egyptian patrols, who were said to
be scouting between the Morava and the Timok, but he thought not of
the peasant who had dogged his party yesterday.

Had Guebhard succeeded in carrying her off--in abducting her beyond
the Turkish lines?  If so, in these days of Bulgarian atrocities,
Cecil could but fear the worst, and his heart died within him as he
returned, slowly and reluctantly, and with many a backward glance, to
the road, where his troopers awaited him.

There was no time given him for inquiry, no time for further delay,
and at a rapid trot the homeward march began.




CHAPTER XIII.

THE WAYSIDE CHAPEL.

On the morning of the same day, Margarita was surprised to receive a
note, purporting to be from Cecil, whose handwriting she had never
seen, requesting her to be at the wayside chapel of Krall Lazar two
hours before noon, as the exigencies of the service required his
presence elsewhere at the time formerly appointed.

This note had been give to Theodore by a man attired like a peasant,
who promptly disappeared.

'Sooner than noon!' thought Margarita; 'perhaps he is impatient to
see me.  He does love me--he must love me.  But perhaps some dread of
Palenka fetters his tongue; or can it be--but let me not think
_that_!'

Never had Ottilie found her mistress more difficult to please in the
mode of dressing her beautiful hair, than on the morning of this day,
in the selection of a costume and the choice of colours; but at last
she was attired to her own satisfaction, and when the time came, left
Palenka by a garden-gate, and took the path that led to the wayside
chapel, or altar, for, though named the former, it had rather the
character of being the latter only.

Like Cecil, she, with all her hopes and wishes, had more than once
questioned herself as to the end or utility of this meeting which it
had been--she felt it--so unwomanly in her to invite.

She could not yet bear the idea that he should pass out of her life,
or he out of hers.  She dreaded an unknown rival, as she had never
been baffled before; and over that rival, if such existed, she hoped
in the end to triumph by the power of her beauty and fascination of
manner, and to win him, without pity, to herself; and, full of such
thoughts, she trod lightly the steep and winding way that led to the
shrine of Krall Lazar, and softly sang to herself the little Servian
song of 'The Wishes,' which elsewhere she had sung to Cecil.

The morning was a glorious one, and in the poetry of her nature
Margarita felt all the softening and exhilarating influences of it.
The heavy fragrance of the great fir forest, on which the night-dew
lingered, loaded the air, and the rays of the sun fell aslant them
here and there, through the flat and fan-like boughs, from which the
great, over-ripe cones, brown and full of seed, were dropping ever
and anon.

A sea of pines, dark-green and sombre, seemed to spread in spiky
conical peaks up the steep mountain-slopes, as she proceeded by the
narrow pathway to the appointed place, her heart beating hopefully
and happily in anticipation.

At last she reached the vine-covered shrine; it stood alone; no one
was there.

'Cecil!' she said softly, and listened.

Then came a sound as of branches crackling, and a man clad like a
Servian peasant started from behind the edifice and stood before her;
but through the disguise, now minus the beard, and with close-shaven
chin and well-trimmed black moustache, she knew the pale face
of--Mattei Guebhard!

'You here?' exclaimed Margarita, shrinking back.

'Yes, I,' said he, grimly; 'you got a note----'

'From--from the Herr Lieutenant.'

'No; from _me_.'

'You?'

'In his name,' said Guebhard, laughing softly; 'could I have lured
you here, else?'

'Decidedly not,' she replied, with perplexity and anger.  'But how
knew you that I was to be here?'

'Every movement of yours is known to me.'

'And your purpose?' asked Margarita.

'I scarcely know--punishment--revenge!' he replied, incoherently and
a a little wildly.

As he surveyed her now he saw not a vestige of her soft, persuasive,
and caressing manner, or the witchery of her sovereign smile.  Her
face expressed only deep anger, profound disdain, and utter
indifference by turns; yet he attempted to take her hand, but she
wrenched it away and waved him back, with a grandeur of gesture that
compelled him to obey, while her eyes flashed with unspoken
indignation.

It was at this moment that the rose-pearl bracelet fell from her
wrist, but both were too preoccupied to observe it.

'You visited the English cur in his prison?' said he, after a pause.

'Who told you so?'

'Heed not who told me so--suffice it that I know you did.'

'What then?  Am I accountable to you for my actions?'

'This morning you are.'

'Fool--you forget yourself!'

Guebhard looked into her cool and defiant face, and read but too
plainly an expression of hatred in her beautiful eyes.  He saw the
curl of careless scorn on her sweet red lips, and a sigh of rage
escaped him, though for a moment--but a moment only--his eyes sought
hers with an anguish of entreaty.

'Perjurer and deserter!' said she defiantly and bitterly; 'the
soldier who is false to his colours--the man who is false to his
country--is beneath rebuke; but not beneath vengeance.'

'You saved the man's life on one hand,' said he, hoarsely; 'on the
other, you exposed me, compelling me to anticipate an old intention
of joining the Turkish standard, which must prevail here and
elsewhere.  You saved his life and won his gratitude and love; but
neither will avail, for by the God who hears us, you shall never see
him more!'

'Who will separate us?'

'I shall!'

'Stand aside, Captain Guebhard!' said she haughtily, and now dreading
every moment to hear the step of Cecil ascending the path; 'stand
aside--from this day you and I must be to each other as the dead.'

'As the dead--yes--be it so.  I know you hate me now--though once you
did not do so.'

'I never even valued you as a friend, though you flattered yourself
that you stood even higher than a friend in my estimation; and now as
a deserter from the Servian cause----'

'I am more Bulgarian than Servian in my blood, perhaps more Italian
than either,' said he, hotly.  'Milano omitted to give me the cross,
though I had won it in our first battle, so I have assumed the
crescent in its place; that is all--and the crescent will prevail in
the end.'

'Never! we shall live to see the crescent thrust into Asia or the
sea; but as I did not come here to talk politics, I have the honour
to wish you good-morning, Captain Guebhard, and trust that our
comedietta is over.'

'It is a tragedy, as you may find,' was the grim and menacing
response.

'What do you mean, sir?'

'Simply what I say.'

'Insolent!  But I fear you will never make your fortune as a Romeo.'

Oaths never rose to the lips of Guebhard; he was--though a finished
villain--too polished a man to indulge in such: but terrible was the
hatred that baffled passion was now raising in his lawless breast.  A
dark and angry red shot for a moment across his usually pallid face,
and his eyes gleamed with a vindictiveness of expression that made
the heart of Margarita throb wildly, and with sudden apprehension;
but she could not pass him.

Behind her was a precipice, and before her--barred by him--lay the
path which she must descend to elude him.

Like a heroine, who is described in a recent novel, 'she knew well
enough that forgetfulness was a treasure for evermore beyond the
reach of those who once loved her.'  Guebhard had loved her, she
knew, and this love had well-nigh maddened him--and now Guebhard, in
his tiger-like nature, was beginning to hate her--nay, hated her
already!

He grasped her delicate wrist with a force she could not withstand.

'Listen to me,' said he, with calm yet sad ferocity in his tone and
eyes; 'I am not the first, among many, whom your beauty and your
wiles have fooled and beguiled--for few women have had such
Circe-like power as you--but I shall be the last on whose face you
will look.'

'What do you mean?' she asked, in a low and agitated voice.

'That you will soon learn--come here,' he continued, hoarsely;
'here--and look down,' he added, dragging her to the giddy verge of
the beetling cliff, at the base of which, spread out like a map, was
the woody landscape stretching away towards Katadar, with the Morava
winding through it like a silver snake.

'Have pity, Guebhard!' exclaimed Margarita, shrinking back, while a
mortal terror seized her now, for the expression of his eyes froze
her heart.

'Pity--it is too late--too late!' he replied, yet with something like
a sob in his throat.

'Forgiveness is saint-like, Guebhard,' she urged piteously.

'But I am no saint, Margarita--I am only a humble mortal.'

'Mortal or not--man or devil--why have I to seek forgiveness of
_you_?' she exclaimed, as a gust of indignation and pride came to her
aid, and she strove to break away from him; but finding that all her
efforts were vain, and that he was too strong for her, she shrieked
out wildly, 'Cecil!  Cecil!'

The name seemed to madden him.  Stung to frenzy, he drew a pistol
from his belt; but replaced it, and grasped his yataghan; that, too,
he declined to use, lest it might elicit a shriek again and bring
succour, for with all his frenzy, there was a method in his madness,
and his next thought was--strangulation!

The proud and lovely neck she would not have permitted him to kiss
was now to feel the tiger-like clutch of his long, lean and felon
fingers, as they closed round her snow-white throat.

'Mercy, Guebhard--mercy!' she gasped; 'I am too young--too
young--perhaps too wicked--to die!'

Fate was upon her, and Guebhard was no longer a reasoning being.
There were tears in her starting and bloodshot eyes, and clamorous
fury gathered in Guebhard's heart, while his infernal gripe grew
closer; her arms fell powerless by her side--he felt the tumultuous
heavings of her bosom against his own.  Sense had not left her; she
could not doubt the desperate character of his attack, and though she
ceased to struggle, her eyes spoke, and with such a language that
Guebhard dared not look on them again--they seemed so mournfully to
implore his mercy--but his heart, blazing with the insensate hate
that springs from baffled love, knew none!

In vain; his gripe grew tighter upon her delicate throat, that was
all symmetry and whiteness: a terrible spasm convulsed her frame;
then he knew that all was over, that she was dead in his hands, and
daring no more to look upon her, he flung her over the awful cliff
close by; and that he might not hear the sound, if any, that came
from below, he sank on his knees, and covered his ears with his hot
tremulous hands.  So perished Margarita!

Her death was not the first that lay on Guebhard's soul, no doubt;
but, for a minute, he scarcely seemed to breathe, and his wild
glaring eyes seemed to wander stealthily in the air, in the woods,
and on the ground beneath him, as if to avoid the last glance of
appealing despair, that seemed to confront him everywhere now.

The leaves of the trees seemed to become eyes--then tongues that
whispered, he knew not what.

'Margarita!' said he involuntarily, and, to his overstrained fancy, a
thousand echoes seemed to give back the name of the dead--the dead
girl that, though mangled and lying far down below, was not yet cold.

'Margarita!' he said again, but in a lower voice, the name breaking
from him in the instinct of the awful time, rather than in conscious
utterance.

Suddenly the sound of approaching footsteps met his ear.  A man was
ascending the pathway to the shrine, and Guebhard, who, in the agony
and frenzy of the time, had forgotten all about Cecil--for it was he
who was coming--dashed into the copse-wood and fled from the spot
like a hunted hare, seeking the gloomiest spots with that loathing of
the light which it has been averred some murderers feel.




CHAPTER XIV.

THE BATTLE OF ZAITCHAR.

'How misfortune seems to dog me, and all in whom I have ever had a
passing interest or regard!' thought Cecil, as he rode on in rear of
his returning party, and recalled the words of Antonio:

  'I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
  A stage, where every man must play a part,
  And mine a _sad one_.'


His thoughts went backward over the few but ever-varying years of his
own life; his wanderings with his mother in Italy and elsewhere; his
service in India, so full of adventure, change, peril and vivid
colour; marches over dusty and arid plains, and through desert
jungles, where luxuriant vegetation had run riot for ages; the
pleasures of cities; the careless times in camp and barrack, with
Leslie Fotheringhame, Dick Freeport, Acharn and others; pig-sticking
and fighting wild hill tribes; of long balmy nights on the starlit
Indian or Arabian seas, while the crowded transport ploughed on with
her living freight; the good fellowship of the splendid mess; the
love of his men, and though remembered last, perhaps, not least,
honest Tommy Atkins, with the proffer of his savings; of all that had
been, and never could be again; of gay nights and balls; and, last of
all, the ball that ruined him; of Mary Montgomerie, and all the loss
of her meant to him; and again his thoughts would revert to
Margarita, and to what had been--what could be now, her fate!

Into that fate--if, as it seemed too probable, some tragedy or
catastrophe had happened--he had neither time nor opportunity given
him to inquire.

What could have come over her?  was his ever-recurring thought.
Surely--even in that land of atrocities--Heaven would be too merciful
to let a hair of her head be injured, she was so good and pure, so
proud and true to herself and all.

Betimes he rode into Deligrad, where the tricolour waved on the armed
rampart, and the busy camp, with its streets of tents and huts, still
covered all the ground beside the Morava.

He proceeded straight to the winter quarters of the staff, circular
huts formed of logs, planked and plastered with mud externally, and
thatched with straw and reeds, and in one of these miserable abodes,
before which two sentinels paced, he found Tchernaieff and a couple
of officers, in rich Russian uniforms, smoking cigars, and making
themselves as comfortable as they could under the circumstances.

He presented his papers, sketches and memoranda, and made his report
as to finding all the country quiet, and seeing nothing of the
enemy's scouting or patrol parties; and was warmly complimented by
the grim old Muscovite, who shook him by the hand and presented him
with an acceptable bumper of wine, saying the while, 'Deo Gratios!'
and signing the cross in the Russian fashion, with three fingers from
right to left.

'I sent you again on a perilous and important duty into a strange
country,' said Tchernaieff, 'and you accepted the hazard as readily
as you have performed that duty.'

'I am not used to weigh hazards or danger, excellency,' replied
Cecil; 'I am the native of a country that never nurtured fools or
cowards, and now have my home here.'

'In every land brave men find a home; and for these memoranda I thank
you, for I have to send troops through that very district towards
Zaitchar.  But you have run greater risks than you are aware of, for
Circassian troops were concealed in some of the woods through which
you passed.'

Cecil thought of the disappearance of Margarita, and the evidence of
the deserter Guebhard's presence at the Krall Lazar; but he only
replied:

'I have not set much store on my life, since I came to Servia, at
least.  Besides, general--of what need was thought--I had your orders
to obey--the King to serve.'

'Right; and now, good-morning, Captain Falconer.'

It was so; Cecil found that he had been made captain of his troop,
and was warmly congratulated on this unexpected promotion by his
English comrades Pelham and Stanley, whose society he preferred to
all others in camp, and the former said laughingly to the latter,
whom he had taken into his confidence:

'Either the count is--as I hope--a false prophet, or Falconer's fated
time is not come yet; he has returned scatheless from this duty, at
all events.'

The field was soon to be taken by a portion, if not by all the army;
more fighting was to be seen, and Cecil, in the overcharged state of
his mind, welcomed the chance of new excitement with a strange
species of grim joy.

But now came tidings that, when returning for the headquarters of
General Dochtouroff, Count Palenka had fallen into the hands of a
Circassian patrol, been made prisoner, and carried, whether to death
or captivity, none knew; so that he, anyway, was ignorant of the
crime, or catastrophe, that had darkened his home.

At this time, some twelve battalions of Turks occupied the town of
Zaitchar, which lies seventy miles north-eastward of Deligrad, on the
river Timok, and in the attack on which, on the 18th of the preceding
July, Colonel Kireef, one of the bravest officers of the Russian
army, fell, after receiving four wounds in succession.

This position was now watched by only a brigade of Servians, under
Colonel Medvidovski, a young officer concerning whose movements and
rashness Tchernaieff became apprehensive; thus he desired General
Dochtouroff to repair to that place for the purpose of aiding the
colonel with his advice and experience, and soon after he reinforced
him by a few Servians, among whom was Cecil's troop of cavalry, which
was ordered to proceed by the Bovan Pass, up which his troopers
toiled slowly in an autumn evening, and from the summit of which a
vast expanse of woody country could be seen, wearing all the varied
tints of the season.  A twelve miles march brought him to Banja,
where he halted for a time, and then resumed his route over the
mountains, by a path sometimes so narrow that he had to reduce his
sections of fours to files, but all pushed on unwearyingly and full
of enthusiasm, as a battle in the vicinity of Zaitchar was
confidently anticipated.

In the ranks of the army against which they were marching now was, no
doubt, his bitter enemy, Mattei Guebhard, commissioned and with rank,
probably, because of his defection, and Cecil knew that in close
quarters the rascal, if possible, would be sure to seek him out.

'Well,' thought he, 'he is right welcome to do so;' aware that if
once he got Mattei Guebhard covered by his pistol or within reach of
his sword it would go hard with him if one red fez was not struck to
the dust.

The smoke of burning hamlets, which had fallen a prey to bands of
Bashi Bazouks, curled up here and there through the russet, green and
yellow of the woods, on either side of the line of march, indicating
the close approach to the vicinity of the enemy, whose troops were
mustering near the Timok, after crossing which, by a wooden bridge,
Cecil could see the white-walled houses of Zaitchar shining in the
sun; but from thence he had to proceed, by marching in the night,
into the valley of Krivovirski Timok, where he overtook the troops
under General Dochtouroff, to whom he instantly reported himself, and
Colonel Medvidovski, pushing on for the great business of the day.

The cavalry cloaks were rolled up and buckled to the saddles, girths
and bridle reins carefully inspected, the edges of the swords tested,
and the loading of all revolvers and carbines looked to.

A drizzling rain had fallen overnight, and a dim, silvery haze was
floating up from the dark woodlands and the deep valley through which
the Timok was rolling away to meet the Danube, and the occasional
boom of a heavy gun pealing through the murky morning air, followed
now and then by a sharp rattle of rifle-muskets, indicated that the
column of Count Keller, who was acting in concert with Dochtouroff,
and had already got into action, had been partially repulsed, and was
retiring.

'Push on!' was the cry on every hand.

'_Rishu_ (trot), _galloppe!_  (gallop)' were the orders for the
cavalry, and in sections of fours that arm of the service went
quickly to the front, and with loud cheers, though to the infantry
was assigned most of the grim work to be done that day.

Cecil, in India, and more recently in Servia, had been too often
under fire to feel any novelty in the situation now.  Rather
reckless, he had no particular anxiety so far as concerned his own
safety or ultimate escape.  He had but one distinct idea: that rather
than be disabled by a wound, and thus rendered helpless, homeless,
and penniless, he would prefer death outright!

He felt for a time a little tightening of the chest as the hollow
boom of the cannon on the left front became louder and louder; but
even that sensation passed away, and he rode on with much of
indifference, varied at times by that emotion which a true
soldier--especially a soldier of fortune--can never be without--a
desire for distinction and honour.

The whole scene around him was inspiriting and full of the highest
excitement.  Heavily laboured the horses of the artillery to get the
guns and ponderous waggons up the steep ascents that overhung the
river.  At each recurring rise the drivers flogged and spurred, and
the gunners pushed behind, or with sinewy hands urged round the
spokes of the wheels; horses stumbled, and traces strained to the
verge of breaking, till the hill crests were won, and the downward
progress began.

Fifteen thousand Servians and Russians were forming in columns for
the attack, and the bright sheen of bayonets and swords flashing in
the morning sun came out of their sombre masses of brown, grey, and
dark screen.  Over the former waved the tricolours of Milano
Obrenovitch; but the black eagle and tricolour of the 'Monarch of the
Snows' were displayed by the latter.

Zaitchar was to be the centre of the operations, and to maintain that
position were sixteen thousand Turks or more, who had covered it with
earthworks and batteries for three miles in front of the town,
defending it in the form of an arc.

Many of the Servian regiments were armed with old muzzle-loaders and
smooth-bores, while the blue-clad Turks, whose fezzes in long scarlet
lines dotted out the position, had breechloading Snider rifles and
Krupp cannon; so the two armies were far from being equally matched,
either in appointments or valour.

Count Keller's column, descending from the mountains on the south
coast, was to co-operate with Dochtouroff against Zaitchar;
Medvidovski's column formed the centre, and other brigades and
columns, led by leaders who have no connection with our story, and
whose barbarous names would only puzzle the reader, made up the force
which menaced the little town of Zaitchar in the form of a
semicircle, at an average radius of seven miles.

The cracking of rifles and the white spurts of smoke starting up from
fields, green hedges, and other enclosures, indicated the
commencement of the attack, as some companies in skirmishing order
were thrown out on right and left, and then came the thunder of the
Krupp guns from Veliki Izvor, the chief point of the Turkish position.

In their brown tunics and blue, glengarry-like caps, the Servian
columns were closing steadily up, with loud hoarse cheers and cries;
but louder and higher above them rang the 'Allah-Allah Hu!' of the
more confident and resolute Turkish infantry.

From a five gun-battery on the right, Herzberg, a skilful officer,
was throwing shells with great precision among the latter, and Cecil
viewed with growing interest a column of Servian infantry deploying
from that point with greater skill and order than he had seen in
Servia before, as it was led by two brave and well-trained British
officers, Pelham and Stanley.  Down the hill this column came at a
rush under the fire of the Turkish gunners, who from amid the dim
smoke on Veliki Izvor threw shells thick and fast among them; but the
column was under the shelter of a wood, amid the russet and yellow
foliage of which it disappeared, until it emerged again to open fire
upon the enemy's lines, now almost completely enveloped in smoke,
while the roar of rifle-musketry made the welkin ring.  But the
column which had deployed and advanced so well was repulsed by the
Turks, and fell back, disputing every inch of ground; nor could any
effort on the part of Pelham, Stanley, and other officers induce the
soldiers of it to reform and advance again: for the Servians are but
timid men at best.

Over dead and wounded men and horses, over ground torn, furrowed, and
cut up by bursting shells and artillery wheels, over gouts of blood
and pools of water, the Servians were now falling confusedly back,
after terrible losses, when Dochtouroff gave the order for the
reserve to advance.

'Up they jumped, without waiting for any second order,' says a
British officer in his narrative, 'and ran with great speed, firing
off their guns and cheering loudly.  There was only one fault to be
found with them, and that was that they unfortunately ran and fired
in the wrong direction!  In vain Dochtouroff shouted; in vain he
swore, but they only ran the faster.  I asked him to allow me to try
and compel them, with the aid of my sword and revolver, to halt,
front, and charge the enemy.  "No, no," said he; "they are not worth
wasting powder on.  Nothing can stop them, and the day is lost."'

On all sides now were heard the shrieks and half-stifled groans of
the wounded, the last sobs of the dying, and piteous entreaties for
water or for aid.  Faces paled by death and smeared with blood were
everywhere; the green grass, the purple violets of autumn that grew
wild, like the white cups of the arum lilies, were all splashed and
empurpled with the same ghastly tint.  The bodies in some places lay
across each other in piles, the swarthy, brown-clad Servian soldier
and the more swarthy Turk, with his red fez and his shining military
buttons, the badge worn by all ranks, from the Sultan to the
drummer-boy.

By some mistake the Servian artillery were prematurely ordered to
retire, and thus, as the supports had failed, the retreat became
general, and by three in the afternoon the action was over; but ere
this Cecil had been in one or two cavalry charges to check pursuit,
and to do him justice, General Dochtouroff left nothing undone by
personal example and by brief harangues in Servian and Russian to
prevent the retreat from becoming a headlong rout along the Lukova
road.

Outstripping the _Assakiri Mansurei Mohamediges_, as the regular
infantry of the Turkish army boast themselves to be, some of their
cavalry came on with wonderful _élan_.  At one point Cecil got his
squadron to form a front by going threes about, as a corps of Turkish
lancers came on, with swords jangling, accoutrements rattling, and
their green pennons--the holy colour--streaming straight out over
their scarlet fezzes.  A sharp, short word of command in Turkish, a
sharper note from a trumpet, the lance-points flashed in the air as
they came down to the charge, and the horses from a rapid trot rushed
on in a wild gallop, and in a moment there was a shock, a crash, and
a wild and terrible _mêlée_.

Saddles were emptied, and steeds and riders went down on every side;
but Cecil's Servians, despite his fiery example, could make no
impression on the Turks.  Resolute in aspect, beetle-browed,
keen-eyed, and hawk-nosed, they come on with heads stooped in full
career, their cries of 'Allah, Allah!' rending the air; and whenever
a Servian, sword in hand, attempted to close, their couched lances
bristled against his arm or his horse's breast; so the former pressed
on, in an invulnerable line, till Cecil's troopers fairly gave way,
and quitted the field on the spur with bridles loose, sweeping him
away with them, for Servian courage and Servian honour were sorely
tarnished on that day in front of Zaitchar; nor did the cavalry and
other fugitives fairly stop till they reached a place called
Balgivac, some thirteen miles from the field of battle, where
Medvidovski and his staff had halted.

Dispirited and disgusted with the result of the day--not that he had
any vital interest in it--but, wet, cold, weary and exhausted, Cecil
flung himself on the bare earth, like nearly all around him, without
food or rations of any kind; and thus he was found by Stanley, Pelham
and another English volunteer, who shared his brandy-flask with them
all, and they spent the remainder of the night in comparing notes of
the past day's heartless work, reviling the Servians, their want of
mettle and discipline, and drawing comparisons between them and 'our
own fellows,' that were far from flattering to the troops of His
Majesty King Milano Obrenovitch.




CHAPTER XV.

A RIDE FOR LIFE OR DEATH!

Cecil's troop, which had lost heavily in the encounter with the
Turkish lancers, escorted some of the wounded and sick to the camp at
Deligrad, passing through a beautiful valley, and skirting the slopes
of Mount Urtanj, one of the greatest hills in Servia.  The way was of
the roughest and steepest kind; his progress was slow, with a convoy
of blood-stained, tattered and dying creatures.  It was a march he
never forgot, and from one circumstance, perhaps, more than all.  He
met _en route_ the old village pope (or priest) of Palenka, mounted
on one of the shaggy, hardy little ponies, and from him--amid many an
exclamation of lamentation, sorrow and anathema--he learned distinct
tidings of the fate of Margarita, and that her remains had been found
by some woodcutters at the base of the cliff below the Krall Lazar
chapel, and a storm of terrible emotion swelled up in Cecil's heart,
as he listened to the broken accents of the priest.  Great was his
horror and great his pity!  He forgot all the vengeance he personally
owed Guebhard in this new, unthought-of and more terrible debt, and
sadly and touchingly the rare beauty of the dead girl and her
devotion to himself came back to memory now!

Full of thought that could take no coherent form in words, he rode on
as one in a dream, and almost oblivious now of all around him; of the
sufferings of those who formed his miserable convoy; of the dark
blood dripping through the straw, from half-dressed wounds, that
burst out afresh; of the groans and cries elicited by every jolt of
the clumsy ambulance waggons; of the monotonous rumbling of the
wheels that shook and jarred against ruts and stones; even of the
deaths that were occurring from time to time, leaving the dead and
the living side by side, while the forest birds of prey hovered over
his sorrowful line of march, and followed it, in anticipation of a
banquet.

He thought of Margarita, who, he felt assured, had perished thus
awfully through her love for himself, and through the assignation
made at the way-side chapel--an assignation of which Guebhard
must--by some unaccountable means--have become cognisant; and then he
thought of Guebhard, the half Bulgarian, and sighed in fury through
his clenched teeth--'Oh, to be near Guebhard, but for a minute!'

But the latter was nearer him then he could well have imagined.

For food and rest, and to have his wounded attended to, and the dead
taken from amid the living to a place of interment, he halted at a
village which was indicated in his 'route,' on the slope of Mount
Mezlani, just as darkness was closing in, and through the net work of
the forest branches the western sky glowed vivid with lurid light,
though darkness had fallen on the valleys far below the mountain
slopes, and a busy time he had of it, with a couple of surgeons, a
staff of soldier-nurses and orderlies, going from waggon to waggon,
and hearing but one reiterated story of suffering, one repeated
chorus of cries, moans and often curses.

Seeking the only _cafane_ in the place, he dismounted at the door,
had a dish of hot _poprikash_ and black coffee, dashed well with
brandy--of which, as his duty was not yet over, he partook standing,
and was in the act of lighting a cigarette, when a man, dressed like
a Servian peasant, but marvellously well mounted for such, approached
the door, and without quitting his saddle, asked in a low and timid,
or somewhat uncertain voice, for some refreshment.

The voice of the stranger gave Cecil a species of electric shock, for
'there is no instinct so rapid and so unerring as the instinct of a
foe;' and despite the voluminous dark beard and peasant garb, he
recognised the clearly cut features, the hawk-like nose with delicate
nostrils, and the black beady eyes of Guebhard!

The voice, the sight, the presence of this man after the awful
narrative of the village pope so recently told, and now acting
suspiciously as a spy in the interests of the enemy, roused Cecil's
blood to fever heat.  As a deserter, spy and assassin, this man's
life was trebly forfeited, and Cecil left his seat, slowly and
deliberately to avoid giving alarm, and feeling in his heart a grim
sweetness in the idea that the destroyer of Margarita was to perish
by _his_ hand!

But, as he moved towards the door of the _cafane_, the light of a
lamp fell upon him, and he was instantly recognised by the renegade,
who remained in his saddle outside an open window.

Guebhard started violently; a ferocious vindictiveness sparkled in
his eyes; his face grew paler with rage and alarm that were evidently
mingled with a panther-like desire to rush at Cecil.  He ground his
teeth; he quivered in every limb; and then, suddenly seized by a
panic of fear, fired three shots from a revolver at Cecil, wheeled
round his horse and galloped away.

Every shot went wide of its mark, and another moment saw Cecil in his
saddle, in hot pursuit, guided for a time only by the sound of the
flying hoofs.  Careless of whither he rode, even if right into the
Turkish lines, he dashed on, goring his horse with sharp rowels at
every bound.

'Halt, dog and scoundrel!--halt, or die!' he cried again and again.

Guebhard was now about a hundred yards ahead, but that distance
lessened fast as Cecil tore after him, his pistol levelled twenty
times ere he would risk a shot, as there was no time for reloading,
and the night-clouds were deepening fast.

They were in full race--pursuer and pursued.  Cecil fired two
chambers; but both must have missed, as Guebhard neither winced nor
fell, but fired at random in return.

'The fiend take him!' was the latter's thought; 'he baulked my
night's work once, and slew my Montenegrin comrade, and I have
already missed him, shot after shot!'

Without other thought than flight, Guebhard, aware that he was unable
to defend himself now that his pistols were empty, and knowing that
his personal strength and skill with the sword were inferior to those
of Cecil's, spurred wildly on and on, with every respiration tasting
all the bitterness of anticipated death in his coward heart,
expecting every instant to feel a shot pierce his back like a red-hot
bolt and stretch him there to feed the wolves and carrion crows.

Guebhard, perhaps, was not quite a coward by nature; but somehow the
panic of an utter poltroon possessed him now.  Was it the terrible
deed he had done at the chapel of Krall Lazar that unnerved his heart
and unstrung his sinews?  It must have been so.  The last glance he
had seen in the eyes of Margarita haunted him; and he thought of that
delicate and faultless form lying mangled at the foot of the cliff to
become the prey of vultures and wild animals now, when his own end
seemed so terribly close and nigh, at the hands of her avenger--the
man he had so often wantonly wronged, and who, he knew, would be
pitiless as a famished tiger.

If he had remorse, it was curiously mingled with an emotion of
jealous triumph, that to this man Margarita was lost for
ever--wrested from him by his hands, as we have said, and that Death
alone was her possessor now!

'Coward, rein up!--your sword--your sword to mine!' cried Cecil, more
than once; but neither taunt, sneer, nor threat availed him then.

At this time he felt in his heart much of that emotion which a writer
calls 'the religion of revenge, which had been sacred to his
forefathers, in the age when murderers were proven by bier-right, and
for wrong, the Fiery Cross of war was borne alight over moor and
mountain.'

Fiercely, high and tumultuously, coursed the blood through his veins.
Every muscle was strained, like those of a race-horse in the field,
for he had an awful penalty to exact, and Guebhard knew well that he
had a terrible debt to pay--one for which not even his life and the
last drop of his blood would atone.

Yet Guebhard, perhaps, could not have told whether he most loved or
hated the memory of the girl he had destroyed.

He knew that too probably, if steel and lead failed, if once in the
grasp of Cecil, the latter would trample him to death, choke him like
a viper with a heel upon his throat; and, sooth to say, such was the
terrible idea that occurred to the pursuer at times while, with fiery
exultation, he found himself gaining upon his prey.

The sweat of a great mortal agony gathered on the temples of
Guebhard; his mouth was parched; his breath came short and fast; and,
half-turning in his saddle, he could see, in the starlight, the white
set face of his pursuer almost within arm's length of him, and the
outstretched head of his horse more than once actually in a line with
his crupper.

The black beard had fallen off now.

'How,' thought Cecil; 'how came it to pass that this man, so full of
the common vulgar terror of mere physical peril, ever turned
soldier--even in name!'

He next thought it was fortunate that, owing to the slowness of the
past day's march, and the short length of it, his horse was tolerably
fresh; but that of Guebhard seemed to be in the same condition.

He recalled the assassin-like attempts on his own life; his being
tracked in the forest; wellnigh done to death and buried alive; he
recalled the forged document which brought, for a time, dishonour on
him and destruction close indeed; but more than all did he think of
Margarita, done to death so terribly; and Guebhard thought of all
these things as he rode wildly on, and the other as wildly and madly
pursued him.

He had wrested her from his enemy, and what he had done he would not
have undone even had he the power.  Since she would not, and could
not, be his, she was lost to the other--dead!--taken by his hand, and
yet he feared to die!

Whatever the wretch Guebhard felt when alone was given way to there,
in the darkness, to the full.  No spectator or chance visitor--none
of those with whom he had mingled in the Turkish camp--ever saw a
change in the pale, delicate, and immutable face of the destroyer, or
could have detected the dread secret his calm, soft smile concealed.

He had always feared, however, that sooner or later retribution would
come; that his desertion, if not his other crimes, would find him
out, and strike him down in the hour of fancied security, and
now--now it seemed that the time of fate had come!

Cecil's last shot had been expended; but as revolver-firing is always
dubious, and in certainty every way inferior to the old single or
double-barrelled pistol, that shot had only grazed the shoulder of
Guebhard, who was next aware that Cecil had drawn his sword, the
steel blade of which glittered blue and grim in the starry light!

Where were their horses taking them--towards the Morava, or the
valley of the Timok?

Cecil gave no thought to this, nor cared; down steep pathways, jagged
with rocks; through orchards, more than once; past fields of flax and
Indian corn; past walls laden with vines; past houses and farmsteads,
sunk in darkness and silence; past villages, where pariah dogs barked
and howled at them; through woods, where the interwoven foliage was
dense above, and the late violets grew thick and fragrant below, and
the wild acanthus spread its beautiful leaves.

Anon, down narrow gorges where the arbutus and laurel overhung the
way; then thundering along the worn pavement of some old Roman road;
now so close that they could hear each other breathing; and anon, a
horse's length asunder, as some obstruction--a laurel root or a vine
tendril--gave momentary hopes to the fugitive.

Of the way he went in this night ride for death and life--for
retribution and punishment--Cecil had no knowledge and took no heed;
he seemed to follow it, as we follow paths in dreams; yet he did so
unvaryingly, and unswervingly.

At last the darkness became so intense by the thickness of the
foliage overhead, in a deep and narrow way, that Cecil failed to make
out the figure of the fugitive for a time.

The sound of their own breathing and that of their horses, with the
crash of the hoofs, alone broke the stillness of the night--of the
world it almost seemed--where all things slept amid the utter
tranquillity that had fallen everywhere.

They rushed down steeps, where the loose and perilous stones emitted
showers of sparks when struck by the iron hoofs; the necks of their
horses were outstretched like those of racers; their flanks heaved,
and their bridles and breasts were covered with white foam flecks.

In the gloomy way, under the forest trees, Cecil--we have
said--failed to see the figure of him he pursued--but he could hear
his horse's hoofs crashing on before him, and he followed the sound.
He neared the animal, a grey, closer and closer, as now its speed
seemed to slacken; with a low fierce exclamation, he came abreast of
it, only to find the saddle empty, and the rider--gone!

But whether the latter had taken his feet out of the stirrups, caught
the branch of a tree and swung himself up into it, or threw himself
off amid some thick underwood and crept quietly and safely away,
Cecil could not determine.  But one fact remained; he saw no more of
Guebhard for that night!

His mortification and disappointment at being suddenly baffled thus,
were extreme; and his disgust was enhanced in no small degree by the
humiliating conviction, that the sooner he was clear of that
identical wooded way the better for himself, as he knew not from what
tree, or clump of underwood he might, at any moment, be covered by
the pistol of Guebhard, lurking in security and unseen.

Where was he now, and how to find his way back to where he had left
his convoy of ambulance waggons?

He had noted no land marks--taken no heed of the way he had come.  He
had seen before him Guebhard, and Guebhard only!  He must have ridden
many miles--how many he knew not, and now his horse was weary and
blown.

Fortunately for him, his orders were to halt at the village he had
left for the night, and to begin the next day's march at noon, or as
soon after as the wants of the wounded and sick had been attended to;
and steering his way chiefly by the stars, he rode slowly on his
return, with an irritating sense of annoyance, humiliation, and
disquietude, as, for all he knew, he might be close in the vicinity
of the enemy and fall into their hands.

He rode slowly and warily, and fortune favoured him; about dawn he
found himself near the little town of Kragojeratz, on the right bank
of the river Lepenitza, a tributary of the Morava, and there his
Servian uniform at once procured him a mounted guide to the village
he had left, and from which he was then about twenty miles distant.




CHAPTER XVI.

WHAT THE 'TIMES' TOLD.

Jaded and weary, Cecil began the homeward march, and strange to say,
the effect of the long and revengeful pursuit of Guebhard on his mind
was this: that he felt--if not less resentment and hatred against
that personage--a desire that when condign punishment befell him, it
might come from some other hand than his.

He felt somewhat soothed by a conviction of the abject terror and
deep humiliation to which he had subjected Guebhard; yet, ever and
anon, the narrative of the village pope gave his heart a pang of
positive pain.

Again in Deligrad, to him the scene of so much suffering and
unmerited degradation.

'What am I to do now with the remainder of this life that is left to
me?' he thought, wearily, as he dismounted from his horse, and tossed
the bridle reins to his orderly, leaving his painful convoy now to
the care of the doctors and nurses, though many were there who were
beyond all human care, and would only answer now to the reveille that
would be heard in the unknown land.

He gladly sought out the log hut shared by Stanley and Pelham, whose
regiment, with many more of the troops lately engaged in the assault
on the Turkish lines at Zaitchar, had now come into cantonments.  As
an abode, the hut was nearly as wretched as any of ours in the Crimea.

The soil of the floor was banked up in the centre and at the sides;
the former acting as the site of a fireplace, the latter for two
beds.  Four upright posts driven into the earth and boarded all
round, formed the chimney, and thereon hung swords, revolver cases,
field glasses, flasks, pannikins, etc.

A few boxes, bullock trunks and bottles full or empty, formed the
furniture, and upon a species of couch improvised from the former and
covered by a bear's skin lay Stanley, in half undress, with a cigar
in his mouth.  His figure was tall and slight, and it set off the
dingy brown uniform, more than the latter set off him.  He had the
upright military carriage he had won in the Household Brigade; he had
still the suppleness of youth, and eyes that had lost none of their
fine, clear and honest fire of expression.

He sprang to his feet as Cecil entered and gave him a cheery shout of
welcome.  Pelham was on duty, but Stanley duly did the honours of
their mutual abode, and produced from some mysterious receptacle
dishes, glasses, knives, cold ration beef with tomato salad (tomatoes
were plentiful in the camp at Deligrad), bread, wine and a box of
havannas.  He bustled about like a frank jolly Englishman as he was
now, and all unlike the _blasé_ frequenter of Belgravian ball-rooms
he had been, and would yet become again; but while listening to
Cecil's exciting account of his race over night, it was evident to
the narrator that he had in his face a preoccupied and perplexed
expression, though rather a bright one.

'What is up, old fellow?' asked Cecil, who had been observing him
narrowly; 'you seem as if you had something on your mind--something
cheery too.  Are you about to quit this work as not very
remunerative?'

'That I shall no doubt do in time, if some Turkish bullet does not
knock me on the head,' replied Pelham, as he carefully selected a
fresh cigar; 'but I have something in my mind--whether cheery or not,
I cannot say; but finish your meal--fill your glass again, and then
we'll have a talk about it.'

While Cecil satisfied an appetite the result of much recent exposure
and exercise, Stanley produced a worn, frayed and very tattered copy
of the Times--a copy that was now a month or two old.

'By Jove! when I look upon this paper, "how the old time comes o'er
me," as Claud Melnotte says,' exclaimed Stanley; 'and Regent Street,
the Row, the clubs with their bow-windows, the parks, the coaching
meet, the collar days at Buckingham Palace--the bank guard, pocketing
the guinea and punishing the port, the West End--how London, one and
all, with its beauties, comforts and luxuries appear in mental
procession, making one long to leave Servia and Servian affairs to
the care of the devil; for the lark is over--the game played out; I
for one have had enough of it, and home is now the place for me!'

Cecil sighed.

He had no--_home_!

'To what is all this the preface?' he asked.

'To nothing; it is only the expression of my own thoughts; but there
is a notice in the _War Office Gazette_ here--where the deuce--oh,
here it is.  I have heard you speak, more than once, quite
incidentally, of the Cameronians.'

'Likely enough--I knew some of them--once.'

Cecil winced as he spoke, for Stanley was eyeing him keenly, and then
said:

'Look here, old fellow, do you know anything of this--this
name--Pelham and I have been puzzling our brains over the
announcement.'

Cecil took the paper and gave a violent start, with a half suppressed
exclamation, as he read:


'CAMERONIANS--The name of the officer, the proceedings of the
court-martial on whom were cancelled, and who was re-gazetted to this
regiment in last week's _Gazette_, is Captain Cecil Falconer
Montgomerie--not Captain Cecil Falconer, as formerly.'


'Montgomerie--what can this mean!' said Cecil almost involuntarily,
and feeling intensely perplexed.  He was, beyond all description,
startled too, while a great rush of joy and hope mingled in his
heart, with the surprise that possessed him.  The notice--the
cancelled proceedings of the court-martial, and the name evidently
referred to himself, but whence came this addition--the surname of
Montgomerie?

Stanley was watching him silently.  Was all this the clue to much
apparent mental suffering, that Pelham and himself had suspected and
seen?  Was this the explanation of much in his manner that seemed
reserved and curt, when 'the service' was spoken of, though they both
suspected shrewdly that he had been in it--was 'an army man?'

'You colour painfully, Cecil, old fellow,' said he, patting him
kindly on the shoulder; 'but, if this gazette refers to you----'

'It does--it must--but why am I named Montgomerie?' exclaimed Cecil,
impetuously.  'I have the name of Falconer.'

'You have been in some scrape perhaps--who among us has lived a life
without pain, or who among us has been without reproach?'

'I have lived a life--latterly at least--that has had much of pain in
it; and if there was any reproach, it was unmerited--all!'

'I can well believe it, and congratulate you heartily,' exclaimed
Stanley, clasping his passive hand, while Cecil, still as one in a
dream, muttered about the name of 'Montgomerie?'

'By Jove,' said Stanley, as a sudden light broke upon him; 'I
remember your affair now, and the noise it made at mess-tables.
Well, well--court-martials are not infallible--neither are the Horse
Guards authorities, for the matter of that.  I remember when we were
lying in the Wellington Barracks, how a fellow in the
Coldstreams--but have another glass of wine!'

'Oh, Stanley,' said Cecil, in a broken voice, 'you do not know--and
never, never may you know--what it is, and has been, to live on day
after day, under the cloud that cast a gloom on my life!  To bear,
with a dull aching of the heart--to exist under a cloud and
unexplainable shadow, trying by some brilliant act, hoping by
well-done service, to redeem my name in this----'

'Well--in this devil of a country, to which Pelham and I came, for a
new sensation, in search of a spree, in fact.  I know the world,
Cecil--it is a cruel world, even to the strong; and the best of us
get into scrapes with it.'

'But I got into none--at least, none that I can understand or
explain,' replied Cecil, a little incoherently.

'Yet you were--were----'

'Dismissed!'

'Poor fellow--I remember well; and this notice?'

'Refers to me--it must--the sentence of dismissal has been cancelled;
though I cannot understand how, or through whom.  I thought I had not
a friend in the world--save one,' he added, as he thought of Mary.

'How did all this cursed evil come about?'

And Cecil told him all--at least so far as he knew.

'I see it all, as plain as a pikestaff!' exclaimed Stanley, when the
latter concluded; 'something has turned up--something new come to
light, and they've reinstated you.  You were dismissed generally, not
specifically, and so rendered incapable of serving Her Majesty again;
it makes all the difference in the world!  Another bumper of wine, to
re-wet the old commission!'

Cecil drained the glass like one who was sore athirst, for he was
then under considerable mental excitement.

Restored to his rank and to the old Cameronians--the cloud under
which he had left the service, and which so nearly broke his heart,
dispelled!  The proceedings of that most fatal court-martial, which
in his dreams had so often haunted him as a nightmare--cancelled, as
if they had never been; how had all this come to pass, and who was
the guardian angel that had brought it about?

A fever of impatience possessed him.  But he could not yet, with
honour, quit the Servian army, though he had the power of resigning
at any moment.  He had no official letter; perhaps the Horse Guards
knew not where he was--and letters, if any, for him, might be at the
bottom of the Morava, as a mishap had befallen the mail; and more
than all, a general action--a great battle, a decisive one for
Servia, was confidently believed to be upon the tapis.

Then he would think, if it should be all some mysterious mistake, and
this notice referred, by a blunder, to some one else--a mistake,
after all--after all! for he had been so long accustomed to the
frowns of Fortune, that he feared she would never smile upon him
permanently again.

'By the way, old fellow,' said Stanley, suddenly, 'there is a letter
for you, in the care of Pelham; it may throw some light on all this.'

'A letter--official?'

'No.'

'A letter--from whom?'

'How should I know?' said Stanley, laughing; 'it is all over
postmarks, anyway.  The dragoon bringing the mails from Belgrade was
shot by some Circassians, and fell into the Morava.  Some woodman
saved a bag or two, but the letters were nearly destroyed; and here
comes Pelham with yours.  We only got duns from London tradesmen, and
laughed as we lit our pipes with them here.'




CHAPTER XVII.

MARY'S LETTER.

Whether he thanked Pelham for what he brought him; how he bade the
former and Stanley adieu, and in what terms he did so, Cecil never
gave thought to, nor did he remember; he was only aware of one fact,
that the letter placed in his hand, crumpled, sodden, spotted with
blood of the Servian dragoon, and partly defaced by the water of the
Morava, was from Mary--from Mary Montgomerie; and oblivious of all
else the world contained, he rushed away, breathlessly, to the
solitude of his own tent, to peruse it.

Amid all it had undergone in transmission, the tinted paper on which
it was written retained a subtle, but faint perfume.  It was dated
from Eaglescraig, and nearly a month back, and was sorely defaced and
in some parts quite illegible.

A letter from Mary! he had opened it, hastily yet tenderly, with
tremulous fingers--for his hands, that never shook when holding sword
or pistol, shook now like aspen twigs, and as he held the paper
before him a mist crept over his sight; for he knew that her hand had
touched the paper and had written the lines that were there.

'My own little Mary!' he murmured; 'on earth I have nothing whereby
to be worthy of you--and I have won and retained your love!'

He read on quickly and nervously, only to return to the beginning,
and read over and over again; but in some places whole lines had been
obliterated.

'My darling, oh my darling!' he read in one place, 'we have traced
you at last, and learned from the newspapers that you have escaped
some awful peril, the details of which have not yet been made public.
Write to us soon, and that you are coming home--write to the general,
if you will.  Oh, how happy he would be.'

_He_--what mystery--what change was here?

'And oh! my own Cecil, you ...... and how can I tell it to you,
although I do so with joy, that now we know all--all about the
giddiness that seized you at the ball, when talking with me, and how
it was caused by Hew---Hew--the infamous and cruel, who, as he has
since confessed in writing, when it was supposed he was dying, that
he drugged your wine--unseen by all!'

Cecil paused and started to his feet, and passed a hand across his
throbbing forehead.

'Drugged--oh, villain!--villain--vile trickster!' he exclaimed, while
tears, hot and salt, came unbidden to his eyes.

'Sir Piers,' continued the letter, 'the general, as he will always
have himself called--the dear old thing!--went straight to the Horse
Guards about it, and saw the commander-in-chief personally.  You know
his position, services, and influence; and so, dearest Cecil, you are
again .....

'In the old corps,' said Cecil, as the letter here was again
illegible, 'as the _Gazette_ shows--Falconer--Montgomerie--why, and
under which name is the remainder of my life to be passed?'

A whole paragraph followed, so sorely defaced that, with all his
intense anxiety, Cecil could make nothing of it; and yet his future
life might hinge on all that paragraph contained or detailed.  But he
failed to decipher it, save a word or two here and there--among them
the names of 'father--mother--cousin--my own cousin,' and old John
Balderstone was again and again referred to, in connection with some
mysterious letters and documents he had found in some mysterious way
to all appearance, and the whole bewildering passage concluded thus:

'Sir Piers deplores in his inmost heart his harsh treatment of you
and your poor parents.' (My parents!) 'And craves earnestly that you
will return to your home--to Eaglescraig, and to _me_, dearest Cecil.
He is telling me a long story about India, and letters going by
_dawk_ (whatever that may be) as I write, thus I scarcely know what I
am putting upon paper ....  Oh, how we all miss you, Cecil--I more
than all; but you will soon be coming back to us now, thank God!
Long and drearily pass the days--the mornings and evenings now at
Eaglescraig; and I can but think of you, so blighted apparently in
life, so lost to your own world, so ruined and so far away from me,
in a land of peril.  I write this to you on the merest chance, and in
the prayerful hope that it may reach you; as we only learned your
present terrible whereabouts from a newspaper paragraph.

'In Servia! oh, my love! what took you to such an unheard-of place as
Servia?  .... I never open the piano now; I dare not trust myself to
sing.'

The sight of her writing sent ever and anon a thrill to his heart,
even as a touch of her gentle and delicate hand would have done.

'You will be delighted to learn that the quarrel or estrangement
between your friend Leslie Fotheringhame and my dear Annabelle has
all been explained away, and they are to be married in two months;
but in the meantime Leslie has resolved .... and to please me .... in
Servia.  Ah, dearest Cecil, I thought such strange things only
occurred in novels and melo-dramas as are occurring now to us!  Only
think of ....'

'Such strange things; to what does she refer?  More obliteration!'
sighed Cecil.

And now the letter ended, as such documents usually do, with many of
the sweet, if childish, endearing terms so appreciated by lovers, and
of which they never weary, as they are meant for their eyes alone.

How often Cecil read it, kissed it, and strove to fill up and draw
deductions from the fragmentary passages, we shall not pretend to
say; but great food was given to him for speculation and marvel.

What was this miraculous discovery of John Balderstone?  What event
had produced such a beneficial effect upon everyone, on the general
and himself in particular?  How had it turned the heart of the
general to him, and to 'his parents,' the ill-treatment of whom he
deplored?

That the general, a soldier and man of the highest honour, smarting
under a sense of Hew Montgomerie's treachery to an innocent man, had
done as he had, by putting himself instantly in communication with
the military authorities, and procuring his restoration, as the
victim of a conspirator, Cecil could readily understand and be
profoundly grateful for; but beyond that, all Mary's letter was to
him--chaos!

Mental questions occurred to him in tiresome iteration.

In the fever of his impatience and doubts of all he wished
elucidated, he drank some wine, but it seemed destitute of strength
and coolness; he tasted some grapes, and they failed to moisten his
tongue; he lighted a choice cigar, but its soothing influence was
gone.

Mary's letter, delicious though it was to receive, meant much more
than he could extract from it.  What was all this new mystery of
which he had so suddenly become the centre?  Would she write
again--and when?

He must write to her; but where might she be at that precise time?
At Eaglescraig, without doubt.  Their love was one that had made them
cleave unto each other in the teeth of all adverse circumstances, and
hope naturally began to brighten anew in Cecil's heart, as he turned
alternately from the puzzling notice in the _Gazette_ to Mary's
equally puzzling letter.

'Patience,' he would mutter; 'patience, and in a little time all will
be made clear.'

But nevertheless he grew more impatient than ever.

How much of caressing tenderness, as well as information of
importance, had been obliterated in Mary's letter by the envious
water of the Morava!  When would he obtain a key, a clue to it all?

The soft, bright dreams that are so frequent in our earlier years,
and form a part of our existence then, and which as time goes on
become greyer, duller, and farther apart, and less tinted with
sunshine, were coming back to Cecil's heart again, as he sat in his
tent alone, and striving to think it all out--the new mystery that
enveloped him.

He lost no time in writing to her in reply, a long and passionate
letter; all the longer and more passionate that he had heard nothing
of her for such a length of time, and had all the pent-up emotion of
his heart to pour forth.  Though he knew not what was meant by the
discoveries to which she referred, he tendered through her all his
thanks to the general for his kindness, and, in the exuberance of his
joy, felt that he could even forgive Hew for the malice he had
displayed and the terrible wrong he had done him.  Home! he would
start for home the moment he could hear from her again, or get some
details, some official letter of instructions, on the subject that
perplexed him; and he deplored that as matters stood he could not
just then, with honour, quit the army of the Morava.  _Why_, he did
not tell her--that the thunderclouds of a great battle were soon to
darken the air around Deligrad!

The rumour spread rapidly, with many exaggerations, that the 'Herr
Capitan' in Tchernaieff's own Dragoons was an officer in the British
army, and it greatly enhanced the importance with which Cecil was
viewed in the Servian camp.

If, ere he could leave that arena with honour, he was doomed to fall
in battle now, it seemed to him hard to have to quit life so
suddenly, when it became full of new value, and seemed more worth
living!

Often had he reflected that he had not yet seen his thirtieth year,
and that all the maturity of life spread out before him, and he felt
that he had the spirit, energy, and courage to carve out name and
fame for himself; but were either to be won in the heartless struggle
between Servia and Turkey?  He had always feared not; and now, with a
bright, glorious, and triumphant revulsion of feeling, he felt it
mattered not.  He had now a name and career elsewhere!

'I like this young fellow Falconer immensely,' said Stanley to
Pelham, as they talked over his affairs after he left them; 'but I
wish him well out of this camp and country too, especially if he has
new and brighter prospects at home.'

'Well,' replied Pelham, who, like Stanley, was a handsome fellow,
with much of that easy but indescribable air and manner of a man who
has seen all the world of life has to show, 'he has been down on his
luck--got court-martialled, it seems, in some row, and is now
reinstated in his regiment and rank--squared it with the F.M. at the
Horse Guards and all that.'

'With a girl he loved also--an heiress I expect; and yet he is going
in for the last of this campaign.'

'What of that--why shouldn't he see the end of the fun?'

'What of it?  This much! won't it be strange--very strange--if Count
Palenka's weird prediction comes true, and the poor fellow gets
bowled out after all?'

'By Jove!  I never thought of that.  What a fellow you are!  But I
don't believe in predictions of gipsies, jugglers, and things, don't
you know.'

But there was much in the memory and the time--the memory of the
count's dark grave face, his manner and expression--that impressed
even the thoughtless Stanley; so he dropped the subject, and smoked
on in silence.




CHAPTER XVIII.

THE HEIGHTS OF DJUNIS.

It was the morning of the 20th of October, and the bells of St.
Nestor's Monastery were just tolling for matins, when the deep hoarse
boom of the Turkish Krupp guns announced their attack upon Djunis,
the key of the Servian position, some almost impregnable heights
overlooking Deligrad and the valley of the Morava.

It was a wild and gusty morning.  The chill breeze was sweeping
fiercely through the groves and woodlands, casting their dark and
fitful shadows in the morning sunshine on the ground beneath.  There
the dead leaves were whirled in clouds to and fro, and the green
blades of the dewy and yet untrodden grass shone like steel or silver
in the sheen of the level sun.

Long ere this, the Servian and Russian troops--three thousand of the
latter had joined only two months before--were under arms, and all
moving into the various positions assigned to them; and the sombre
columns, in the brown uniforms of Milano, or the dusky grey capotes
of the Emperor, were marching in masses up the steeps and along the
slopes, with their bayonets and accoutrements flashing incessantly in
the sun, deploying, deepening, and extending, anon reducing their
front as some natural obstruction came in the way, to deploy in front
formation again, the tri-colours waving in the wind, while
occasionally the clear blast of a bugle was borne past on it.

Cecil's regiment, formed by squadrons of which he commanded the
leading one, had all the cloaks rolled and strapped to the pommel of
the saddles.  Baggage, valises, and all that might impede the men in
action, were left in camp, and the edge and point of the sword alone
were looked to for the work of the day, which was chiefly to support
a battery of guns and go wherever they were wanted.

'My God, I thank Thee!' thought Cecil, with high and pure enthusiasm
in his heart, as he leaped on his horse that morning; 'to-day,
whatever may happen--whatever fate may befall me--I am again a
Cameronian, a Queen's officer, one of the true old Cameronians who in
every fight, from the days of Dunkeld to the fall of Magdala, have
carried their colours with honour, and given place to none!'

And so he felt that it was as much in the character of a British
officer, as one in the service of Milano Obrenovitch, he drew his
sword in what was eventually to prove the last battle of the Servian
war.

The cavalry brigade to which he belonged moved off by fours from the
right of squadrons.

'_Shagaum-marche!_ trot--_à levo!_--nà préte!' (left wheel--forward!)
followed, and the column began to descend the Krusevac road, moving
to the left across a valley.

Here he passed the infantry corps of Pelham and Stanley, halted
temporarily.

'A cigar, Falconer,' said the former, holding out his case.

'Thanks--acceptable indeed in this chill atmosphere.'

'If I get knocked on the head to-day--' began Pelham, who was rather
a reckless fellow.

'A cheerful beginning!' said Stanley, sharply; 'I wish you would shut
up, old man.  But well, suppose you were so?'

'My tragic fate would be mourned sincerely, at least by many a
sorrowful West-end trader, in whose books my later annals have been
noted.  But, ta, ta, Falconer--there goes our bugle.  Advance!'

Shot dead by a Snider bullet in his heart, poor Pelham, within an
hour after this, lay cold and stiff on the slope of the Djunis, while
his regiment took up its position in front of the fast-advancing
Turkish lines.

With the three days' fighting that now ensued we shall not trouble
the reader, further than with that portion which cannot be
omitted--the part that Cecil saw, and that he bore in it, with what
befell him there.

Though Tchernaieff, on this day, placed the management of the troops
chiefly in the hands of General Dochtouroff, he seemed to be
ubiquitous, and was seen everywhere in rapid succession all over the
Servian position, assisting in the placing of brigades here and
there, on the most advantageous ground, and, as an officer who was
present has recorded, 'he placed the troops exactly where they were
most needed, for the Turks made their attack upon the very positions
he had fixed upon.'

'Good-morning, Herr Capitan,' said he, as he passed Cecil's squadron,
which had halted near some glassy steeps most difficult of ascent, in
rear of the Servian position; 'but it seems to me that the enemy has
got very correct information about all the points of our ground.'

'They have evidently been furnished with a plan, excellency,'
remarked a Russian aide-de-camp, whose breast was covered with
Crimean and Khivan medals.

'A plan!' exclaimed Cecil; 'how can they have got it?'

'How, but through the agency of that scoundrel Guebhard, the
renegade!' replied Tchernaieff, with a dark frown, and a Tartar-like
gleam in his eyes; 'but the seven gates of hell are always open, and
if he is here under fire, he may reach one of them to-night!'

'If not?'

'And if he ever falls into my hands, it will be an eye for an eye--a
tooth for a tooth--his wretched life against the many lives lost
to-day!'

He galloped on; the battle had begun in earnest now; fire and smoke
enveloped the whole position that towered skyward; the booming of the
heavy Krupp guns and the roar of rifle-musketry loaded the air, and
amid it all the Grim Sergeant was calling fast his ghastly roll,
while Cecil sat inactive, impatient in his saddle, and longing to see
some work cut out for the cavalry.

Wounded Servians and Russians came pouring past from the heights,
smeared with blood and dust--the bronzed and battle-hardened veterans
of old wars and the lad newly enrolled but a week before; some were
binding up their wounds as they limped past, and some fell on the
way, and lay there prone, dead or in a swoon, unheeded and
untended--a painful spectacle to look upon in cold blood.

So closely was the attack of the position pressed, and so mixed up
did the batteries of artillery and the brigades seem, that amid the
sulphureous cloud that enveloped them it was difficult to know,
sometimes, which were Servian and which were Turkish.

All day long around the steeps of the Djunis the cannon boomed and
the rattle of musketry continued, and great was the slaughter
everywhere.  Whatever might have been the shortcomings of the
Servians in previous battles, all fought well and nobly then, and the
din of battle all the livelong day rang between the peaks of the
wooded mountains, with a thousand hollow reverberations, drowning
every sound elicited by human enthusiasm, valour, suffering, or the
heavy hand of coming death.

The smoke seemed to mingle with the clouds, especially towards
sunset, where westward, beyond the mountain-tops, a red and
tempestuous sun was setting, filling all the vast expanse with
intense ruddy light, that threw up intervening objects in opaque and
distinct outline.

On many a face that had been bright with youth and health in the
morning the sunset fell now, and left it cold, white, and lifeless;
the dusk drew on, and still the terrible work of slaughter went
forward without ceasing.

As it deepened into utter gloom, the red, streaky, and incessant
flashes from hundreds of cannon burst forth incessantly; the infantry
sought each other's where-abouts by their mutual firing, pouring it
in almost at random, while on one side ever and anon burst forth the
deep, hoarse 'Hurrah!' of the Muscovite and Slav, on the other the
incessant and shrill high shout of 'Allah, Allah, hu!' till, as if by
mutual consent, the contest ceased, and both armies lay down, weary
and worn, to endure hunger, thirst, and cold, on the ground where
they had fought, and surrounded by all the agony and horrors of their
mutual carnage.

Many lay down on that night on the slopes of the Djunis who never
rose again.

Cecil passed it rolled in his cloak beside his charger, with a stone
for a pillow; but sleep was a stranger to his eyes, and amid the
incessant cries and moans of the wounded, who streamed past rearward
by twos, threes, or even scores at a time, he strove to think of
Mary's letter and all it suggested, to render him oblivious, for a
time, of all his terrible surroundings.

A sergeant of his troop shared with him the contents of a flask of
raki, fiery stuff, but very acceptable under the circumstances, for
Cecil was as great a favourite with his Servian troopers as he had
been with the Cameronians; and the act of the sergeant--whilom a poor
copper-miner in the mountains--recalled to his memory the faith and
generosity of his old Cameronian servant, Tommy Atkins, on the last
night he was under the same roof with the dear old regiment.

Cecil knew not how the fight had gone on the summit of the position,
but when morning dawned, among those who were still straggling,
crawling, and limping down from it came a man in a scarlet tunic.
Scarlet!  The sight of the familiar colour made Cecil's heart leap.
The wearer, who was severely wounded, proved to be a new aide-de-camp
of Tchernaieff's, a lieutenant of the 1st Hussars of the Russian
Imperial Guard, whose uniform is like the British.

He informed Cecil that a portion of the position, named the Crevet
Plateau, which Dochtouroff had retaken from the Turks, had afterwards
fallen again into the hands of the enemy; but he had sworn to retake
it or die there, and after a terrible conflict, in which men perished
by companies around him, he had failed to do so, though his troops
had got into that state of rage or frenzy which the French term
_acharnement_.

With dawn the work of death began again, and Cecil's troop, with some
other cavalry, began, by a circuitous route, to ascend the position.
Ere long shot began to fall and shells to burst among them,
scattering wounds, suffering, and death; but so much were the whole
heights involved in smoke that he could see little of what was going
on, and knew less of the great game that was being played, though the
hill on which he was ordered to halt commanded a view of the valleys
on both sides.

A regiment of Russian infantry, far away on the right, held with
resolute bravery a post assigned it by Dochtouroff, and the Turkish
masses with their scarlet fezzes and green standards, and their
incessant shout of 'Allah!' seemed to hurl their fury against it
again and again in vain.  On the left the smoke from three villages,
set on fire by them, rolled along the valley and veiled everything.
In one part of the field a Russian regiment, which had expended the
last of its cartridges, deliberately 'stood at ease' under the
Turkish fire, perishing where it was posted, rather than lose honour
by falling back!

Thick lay the dead and thicker the wounded on every hand, and the
medley of sounds that went up from the Crevet Plateau and the
eminences around it was appalling; and the evening of the second day
was drawing on.

Suddenly General Dochtouroff, pale and excited, but with flashing
eyes, dashed up to where Cecil was at the head of his squadron, and
sharply reining in his horse on the curb, said:

'A brigade of guns is getting into position to attack the flank of
yonder Turkish column on the left.  At the hazard of your life you
will support the guns!'

Dochtouroff then galloped away, and, as it proved eventually, Cecil
never saw him again.

'Here come the artillery!' cried a voice, as the guns came thundering
to the front--all Russian, painted green, guns and carriages alike.
Along the slope of the Djunis heights the brigade came in column at
full speed, withdrawn from some other position to act with effect at
the point indicated.  Crushing many a dead body, and splashing
through pools of blood, they went in wild career, the drivers using
whip and spur with a will; the fence of a flax-field was swept away
like a gossamer web, as the guns rushed to the front--six horses to
each gun and limber, three riders to each gun.

Over vineyard walls, fallen trees, through laurel bushes, every horse
straining at the gallop, every driver lashing his team and goring
with the spurs, while yelling, 'Dobro! dobro! hurrah! hurrah!' they
made a wonderfully impressive sight.

Sometimes the guns bounded up eighteen inches or more, as the
iron-bound wheels went over some rock or obstruction, but no man lost
his seat, and no horse failed in its pace--eight guns, eight
tumbrils, eighty horses, and a hundred men, all rushing on for life
and death to obey Dochtouroff, and get into position, the cavalry
galloping in their rear, and from a column of march right in front,
as they wheeled up into line, they formed to the left.

The guns were slewed round with their muzzles to the enemy's line,
the limbers were cast off, drawn rearward, and in hoarse Russian the
word was given to fire.  'Boom, boom, boom!' rang along the front,
shrouding all in smoke, and making terrible havoc in the ranks of the
Turkish brigade; but still went up the cry of 'Allah, Allah, hu!' the
concluding word of the Muezzin's call to prayer.

The guns were not charged with shot, but short-fuse shell, and the
roar of each explosion veiled for a moment all the other sounds of
battle.  The explosions were awful, and fast fell the fezzes to
earth, the corpses so mangled as to be scarcely recognised as human;
yet the brave Turks, incited by their officers, full of military and
religious ardour, seeing, perhaps, the glories of Paradise opening
before them and the dark-eyed girls waving their scarfs of green,
closed nobly in, and were making a forward movement as if to charge
the guns, still shouting, 'Allah, Allah, hu!'  And now came the time
for Cecil to go to work, to get clear of the brigade of cannon, and
form in front to charge, while the latter were reloaded; and even
after all he had undergone there now boiled up in his heart the
'rapture of the strife,' as Attila is said to have termed the fierce
excitement of battle.

'By half troops to the right turn--left wheel--forward--trot!' were
his orders.

'By half troops left wheel--form squadron!' he cried, raising himself
in his stirrups and brandishing his sword;
'forward--_gallop_--CHARGE!'

By this time, the Turkish infantry were confusedly endeavouring to
form square over the piles of dead and dying who had fallen before
the cannon.

Ere the final word had left his lips, Cecil had seen that his
squadron had advanced at a brisk trot to within fifty yards of the
enemy's front--that there were no closing and crowding of his files
to impede the free action of man and horse, and that the former kept
the latter well in hand, pressing forward by leg and spur when
necessary; and in splendid order, ere the square was formed, with the
force of a locomotive, the troopers were sword in hand among them,
hewing them down on right and left, the hurrahs of the Servians
mingling with the yells of the Turks.

'Fours about!' sounded the shrill trumpet, and away wheeling off to
the right and left, while the Turks were still struggling to form
square, he left the guns uncovered, and once more the plunging
fire--grape and canister this time--went with serpent-like hiss
through the swaying mass--tearing off legs, arms, and heads, laying
the dead and the dying in swathes above each other.

As he again formed his squadron, breathless now, in rear of the guns,
Cecil could see through the whirling and eddying smoke that it was no
longer a line, but a mob of men who were in front--a mob whose
shrieks, screams, and shouts rent the evening air, while the muskets
and bayonets seemed to sway helplessly to and fro.

Another round of these terrible guns from right to left, given with
such force and rapidity that the hot guns almost leaped from the
ground with the concussion, and the Turks in that quarter gave way en
masse, just as the fiery sun went down beyond the dark mountain
ranges.

Again Cecil led on his troopers, who had been straining like
greyhounds in the leash--on over the ground an acre and more of which
was covered by men mutilated in every way--corpses struck by four,
five, six bullets--yea, in some instances by a whole charge of
canister--and where every blade of grass was dyed red--on to the
charge once more, and, as there was no time to take prisoners, a
terrible havoc was made--a havoc at which his heart, even in the
thrill of what he thought was victory, began to sicken; but he had
received his orders to support the guns, and nobly had he done so.

At that point the strife was nearly over, when a cry of agony escaped
the lips of Cecil, as a bullet--the last shot of some wounded
man--pierced his chest like a red-hot sword-blade, and he fell
forward on the neck of his horse, clutching wildly at the reins the
while; at the same moment another Turk who lay wounded--an officer
apparently--by one slash of his sharp Damascus sabre, all but
disembowelled the animal, which uttered a snorting cry, and wheeling
round, quitted the field at a mad and infuriated gallop, with his
helpless rider clinging to the pommel of the saddle.  No one could
stop or intercept its headlong career, and in less than a minute the
luckless commander vanished from the eyes of his squadron!

Was Palenka's prediction about to come true after all?

Cecil had thought the field was won, yet it was not entirely so.  Had
the winning thereof depended on the fiery valour of one man,
Dochtouroff had been victor.  At the head of two hundred Russians he
charged with the bayonet right into the centre of the Turkish main
attack, with such fury that ere the rifles crossed the enemy wheeled
about and fled, and he saved the principal position--that of Djunis;
'but Krupp guns, Snider rifles, and better trained troops, in far
superior numbers, had done their work, and Servia was beaten!'

During the three days' fighting, the latter lost not less than nine
thousand soldiers, in killed, wounded, and missing; and of three
thousand Russians who were in the field, only seven hundred remained
untouched at sunset on the third day.

The losses of the Turks were never precisely known, but they must
have been terrible, as they were the attacking force, and had
assailed well-chosen positions that were deemed impregnable.

In Russia and abroad, bluff old Tchernaieff was blamed for
recklessness in his tactics, and doubtless he made mistakes which
ended in failures.  'And then,' says Captain Salusbury, in his work
on those wars, 'it must not be forgotten that he always expected
reinforcements which never came.  And again it is to be noted that he
had to operate with eighty thousand of not the very best troops in a
country that required, to command success, two hundred thousand
well-trained and thoroughly disciplined soldiers.  There is no doubt
that the men I saw under fire were a far inferior lot to those who
fought in the early part of the war.'

When the battle--the last of the strife--was fairly over, a requiem
for the dead was solemnly held, according to the Russian ritual, in a
tent upon the field, where numbers of ladies, the wives--and in too
many sorrowful instances the widows--of Russian officers were gliding
about like angels of mercy, ministering to the wants of the wounded.
While leaving Dochtouroff to hold the position, Tchernaieff withdrew
to the camp at Deligrad.


Meanwhile where was Cecil Falconer, or Montgomerie as he had been
learning to call himself now?




CHAPTER XIX.

WOUNDED.

Away rearward from the field, out of all range of musketry and
cannon, Cecil's maddened horse--maddened by the agony of a mighty
wound--swept at a furious rate, while he--blinded with equal agony
and unable to guide or control it--clung to his holsters or the
pommel of the saddle, as it bore him on he knew not whither; but it
rushed in its wild career down a wooded valley, actually treading on
its own entrails by the way, till it fell heavily with its rider in
the depth of a coppice, and there both lay, to all appearance, dying,
unseen by mortal eyes.

Down sank the sun beyond those mountains which are spurs of the
Balkans, a globe of fiery flame in an angry and cloudy sky; the day
was done, and with it many a human life!

Cecil fainted soon after being thrown from his horse, but ere he did
so there came over him a strange dreamy wonder of how the battle was
progressing, or rather how the tide of war was going, for in the
distance he could still hear the cannon on the heights of Djunis.

Anon the din of the battle passed away, and on his partially
recovering consciousness the stillness of death surrounded the place
where Cecil lay helpless beside his dead horse--a stillness broken
only by the voice of the vila, or when the damp dewy wings of the
night-birds brushed his cheek when whirring past him.

The snow-clad summits of the lofty hills that overlook the valley of
the Morava on one side, and that of the Timok on the other, shone
pale and white in the light of the uprisen moon.

At times, not far from him, he could hear the snort of a wild boar or
the cry of a wolf, scared by the recent din of battle perhaps; and
now he became conscious of the rush of a mountain runnel that ran
near him, but which, sorely athirst though he was, loss of blood had
rendered him too feeble to reach.

Close by him, with holsters, housing and gilded martingale, lay the
dead body of his caparisoned horse, the blood of which was freely
mingled with his own.

The hours of the night passed slowly on.  The moon waned; but the
stars grew brighter.  Tender thoughts of Mary and all their mutual
past, and of the future which now too probably would never be, came
to him at times; and in imagination he more than once thought that
her voice--but curiously mingled with that of Margarita--came to his
almost death-drowsy ear.

Cold and clammy fell the dew of night on his white and upturned face;
his breathing was long, deep, and laboured, for the ball that so
nearly finished him had deeply pierced his breast.  He lay well-nigh
lifeless.  Would he ever be found--on the farthest skirts of the
field as he was--till too late; till death had come first and claimed
his own, ere the birds of the air, the wolves and wild dogs made a
banquet of him?

The moaning of the night-wind in the giant pines was heard at times;
but it brought no sound, save the snarling voices of the beasts of
prey, busy perhaps elsewhere.  The flow from his wound had stopped;
he must have perished otherwise; a species of bloody paste had sealed
up the wound for a time; but Cecil's mind had become a chaos now, and
he could remember nothing but the agony in his chest and the
intensity of his thirst--an intensity to which the murmur of the cool
runnel close by added tantalisation.

Would a cooling draught ever moisten his lips again?  Even the
heavily falling dew had failed to do so.

At last he became alive to all the dire realities of the
situation--that he was lying in a lonely and untrodden spot, done
nigh unto death; far from aid or succour, unable even to drive away
the insects that, when morning came, would be battening in his blood,
and when his sole watcher would be the greedy and expectant carrion
crow.  It would be so.  He would die in solitude, and never find a
grave until even that might be found when too late!

Around him, at times, the solitude was awful.

He must have slept or been senseless, for after a certain space he
found the sun shining above the tree-tops, and some of the ravenous
kites, that were croaking and wheeling above him in circles, had
already begun to settle on the body of his horse, and dig their sharp
beaks into it--something of life and volition in his face alone
preventing them from assailing him, though they eyed him greedily,
viciously, and askance from time to time.

A cry of great horror escaped him.  Then his wound burst forth
afresh, and he became completely senseless and oblivious of all
around him.

After all--after all he had undergone, was he at last to find an
unknown grave under the eternal shadow of this vast Servian forest!


As the third day of the battle was drawing to a close, an
enterprising Briton, well mounted and armed with holster-pistols at
his saddle, was galloping with headlong speed along the road that led
from the north towards the camp at Deligrad; but evening fell ere he
reached the scene of operations, and only in time to see the last red
flashes of the loud artillery pale out in the darkness on the lofty
heights of Djunis.

The heavy odour of gunpowder pervaded all the air, and every yard of
the way now was encumbered by wounded men.

'I thought to have seen some of the sport,' muttered the horseman,
who was a well-built soldier-like fellow, with a heavy moustache, and
though clad in a coarse and warm tweed suit, wore a handsome Indian
helmet secured by a gilt chain under his firm and resolute-looking
chin; 'and now I have only arrived in time to be in at the death--the
death of thousands, no doubt!' he added with a sigh; 'I wonder which
way the day has gone, and who has won--Slav or Turk--not that it
matters very much to me.  A three-days' battle!  Pray God that _he_
may have escaped in them!'

In the moonlight he reached the entrance to the camp at Deligrad; but
there, and over all the ground that lay between it and the two
wayside hospitals above which the white flags with red crosses were
always flying, there were crowds of wounded and dying men, whose
moans, cries, and supplications loaded the air, and made the heart of
the stranger sicken.

At the entrance to the camp the word _Stoe!_ (halt!) was shouted in
his ear, and he was stopped by the guard which was under arms, and
allowing only ambulance waggons and men in uniform to pass--and the
stranger had neither the parole nor counter-sign.

'Are you in the service of Prince Milano?' asked the officer
commanding, in French.

'No.'

'You are a traveller, then?'

'Yes--monsieur--every man travels, nowadays,' replied the other,
tossing away his cigar.  He then inquired anxiously for the
head-quarters or where-abouts of General Tchernaieff and his staff;
but no one could say whether the gallant old Muscovite had, or had
not yet left the heights of Djunis.

'Have you come from Belgrade?' asked the Servian officer, raising his
voice, for the number and cries of the wounded were increasing every
moment.

'Yes--monsieur--on the spur.'

'Then, perhaps you have despatches from the King.'

'What king?'

'The devil! here is a fellow who never heard of the King of
Servia--Milano Obrenovitch!'

'A spy!' said several voices, in Servian and German.

'Spy, be hanged!' exclaimed the stranger.

'We have taken one already, and hanged he shall be on the
morrow---the rascal Guebhard!' said the Servian captain, exultingly.

'I know nothing about all this--I have my passports, which show that
I am an officer in her Britannic Majesty's service.'

'Bravo! can I serve you?' asked a wounded officer, who was limping
past, supported by a soldier.

'Thank God, here is a fellow who speaks English!' exclaimed the
stranger to Stanley, for the wounded man was the latter, come down
from the heights with a ball in his leg.

'And you wish to see the general?'

'I wish rather to see one who is, or was, on his staff--Cecil
Falconer, a brother officer of mine.  Allow me to introduce
myself--Captain Fotheringhame, of the 26th Foot!'

For he it was--brave, honest, and friendly Leslie Fotheringhame, who
had obtained leave, and come all the way to Servia in search of his
absent comrade.

'Ah--the old Cameronians!' said the other, as they shook hands.  'I
am Captain Stanley, late Foot Guards, and now, for my sins, Major of
the 5th Servians.  I know Falconer well.  He was with the cavalry
that went forward to support a brigade of guns.  Since noon, I have
seen and heard nothing of him--sorry to say so.  I am enduring agony
with my wound.  We have had a terrible day of it.  I came here in
search of a new sensation; and, by Jove, I have got it--this ball in
my leg!  The carnage has been great--and I doubt if poor Falconer has
escaped--all the more that--that----'

Stanley paused, and hesitated.

'What?'

'His death was curiously predicted.'

'Predicted!' repeated Fotheringhame in a tone of incredulous
surprise; 'by whom?'

'A brother aide-de-camp--an officer of rank.'

'The deuce--do you, an Englishman, think such things possible?'

'When you have been a few months in Servia you will think any devilry
possible,' replied Stanley, with a grimace as his wound stung him; 'I
wish you every success in your inquiries for Falconer, and I shall be
glad to hear of them from yourself at my hut in the lines.  Make your
inquiries where the cavalry charged on the right front of the
position, and--till we meet again--good-bye.'

And with his head reclining on the shoulder of the Servian soldier
who supported him, Stanley, who was evidently in great pain, limped
away, while Fotheringhame, knowing not exactly what to think of all
this--for, though he might have scouted any predictions at another
time, he could not fail to be impressed with doubt and dread, from
the terrible sights and sounds on every hand--took his way towards
the part of the field indicated by Stanley, walking his horse onward,
and upward, from the camp at haphazard in the darkness of a now
moonless night.

We need neither refer to fully, nor attempt to describe, the endless
scenes of horror that met the eye of Leslie Fotheringhame, as he
stumbled on vaguely over the starlit field of battle--the arena of
the three-days' conflict round the fatal heights of Djunis--scenes
which redoubled in their harrowing intensity as the cold grey dawn
stole in over the faces of the dead and the dying.

By industriously prosecuting his inquiries among the wounded and the
men of the ambulance corps who were conveying them, he discovered the
exact ground where the brigade of guns had gone into action, and
Cecil's squadron had charged.  The brown uniforms of 'Tchernaieff's
Own' were lying there thick, but thicker lay the awful heaps of the
Osmanlies, whom the fuse-shells, grape, and canister had mowed down
as a scythe mows the grass.

From a sergeant of Cecil's regiment--a sergeant who spoke German, and
was the same good fellow who had shared with him the flask of raki on
the night before the battle--he learned how his friend had been
wounded, as well as his horse, and how the latter had borne him out
of the field, and been lost to sight in the ravine that opened away
deep down on the rear of the right flank.

The prediction spoken of by Stanley seemed terribly near verification
now, as Fotheringhame searched all the woody ravine, with his heart
heavy as lead, for he remembered the farewell messages of Mary
Montgomerie, and how, when he left her, the kisses of intense
gratitude she bestowed on his cheeks were scarcely less tender than
those of his own Annabelle.

He searched all the valley, but beneath the deep shadow of the pines,
and amid all the wild undergrowth of years, he could see no sign of
man or horse--only some croaking kites wheeling lazily in
circles--and he turned away, thinking that it was among the
blood-splashed wards of the hospitals and ambulance tents, or by the
pits where the dead were to be interred, his sorrowful search could
only be prosecuted now.




CHAPTER XX.

SAVED!

We have said that when the kites began to assail his dead horse close
by him, a cry of great horror escaped the lips of Cecil.  Feeble
though it was, it reached the ears of Leslie Fotheringhame, just as
the latter was in the act of turning, sadly, to leave the wooded
hollow.

Moving his horse round a clump of wild laurel bushes, he saw a
caparisoned charger lying dead, and near it a man in uniform, to all
appearance dead also--he lay so motionless and still.

Fotheringhame drew near.  In the strange brown Servian uniform, with
his face pale as death could have made it, and obscured by blood and
mud, Leslie Fotheringhame had some difficulty in recognising the
young friend he had come so far to find--in knowing again the once
happy and merry face that, in times past, had been so often opposite
his own at the jovial mess-table; but when he did so, a
half-smothered ejaculation escaped him, and a great joy, mingled with
greater pity, gushed up in his breast, as he leaped from his horse
and knelt beside him.

Cecil's eyes were sightless now, and, though half-closed, fixed
glassily on vacancy.

'Cecil--Cecil Falconer!' exclaimed Fotheringhame, as he took in his
the cold and passive hand; but the sufferer heard him not.  'Life
yet, thank God!' he added, as he felt Cecil's pulse, and then his
heart, but withdrew his fingers covered with blood.

Folding the broad leaf of an acanthus into the form of a cup, he
brought therein some cool water from the adjacent runnel, and Cecil
drank thirstily again, and again; and then his head sank back, with
the eyes still unclosed, yet sightless--seeing nothing and
recognising nothing.

Fotheringhame took a flask of brandy from one of his holsters, and
poured some, with water, between the lips of Cecil, whose head he
pillowed on his arm.

Partially restored by this, after a time the sufferer attempted to
speak; but his utterances were unintelligible, and his head sank
lower: his eyes closed now, and his thoughts were
wandering--wandering away to Mary, and to the old regiment in
feverish dreams--dreams, perhaps, suggested by the voice of
Fotheringhame.

The latter found that the wound in the chest was deep, for there the
ball had lodged, and not a moment was to be lost in having it
attended to.  Galloping up to the plateau, he soon procured some of
the ambulance corps; a stretcher was improvised by a blanket and a
couple of muskets, and Cecil was speedily placed in one of the
waggons for conveyance to the camp at Deligrad; but so great was his
agony, that the vehicle had to be stopped from time to time, and the
contents of Fotheringhame's flask, by giving him artificial strength,
alone prevented him from fainting.

Yet strange visions haunted him.  Out of the gathering mists of
death, as he deemed them, he thought he saw the face and heard the
voice of his old friend and comrade; and with them the voice of
Margarita, singing the sweet soft song of 'The Wishes.'

Once he seemed to see distinctly the face of Fotheringhame, and his
eyes dilated with something of wonder and alarm in them.  Then he
closed them, muttering, 'Another dream,' believing it was an
unreality.

And now, as the ambulance waggon reached the road that led from the
camp to Deligrad, in the open ground Fotheringhame saw some thousand
troops, horse, foot, and artillery, massed in columns, forming three
sides of a hollow square, and his soldier-eye examined critically the
brown ranks of the Servians, and then those in Russian green, as the
bayonets were fixed, and flashed in the morning sun as the arms were
shouldered.

The fourth or open side of the square was occupied by preparations
for an execution, for there stood a man tied to a post, and before
him a firing-party, composed of twelve Bulgarian volunteers.  Deadly
pale looked the culprit, who was stripped to his shirt and baggy red
breeches--Mattei Guebhard, for it was he--taken prisoner in the late
action, by Stanley's regiment--baffled, checkmated, standing there in
dishonour, the centre of thousands of stern and unpitying eyes.

To this end had his life come!

Discipline alone kept the troops silent; but the crowds of Servian
peasantry and the camp-followers hooted and yelled at him, loading
the air with opprobrious cries.  No braggart was he then.

He made the sign of the cross repeatedly in the Greek manner,
mechanically, or in a spirit of latent superstition, for religion he
had none.

Fotheringhame heard only that he was a deserter and spy, yet,
checking his horse, he looked on the scene with breathless interest,
little knowing how prominent a part the culprit had recently played
in the life of his friend Cecil.

In attendance upon him was the old village pope of Palenka in his
bell-shaped black felt hat with long tabs floating behind, and a
venerable beard spread over the breast of his glittering vestments.
Guebhard smoked a cigar, and for a time preserved a bearing of
indifference, till the priest withdrew and the words of command were
given to the Bulgarians, who cocked their rifles, and his eyes were
bound.  Then, unable to stand erect from emotion or craven fear, his
knees gave way under him and his head fell forward, the lashings
which bound him to the post alone supporting him partially.

The death-volley rang sharply in the morning air; soon all was over,
and the troops were defiling past where the shattered corpse hung at
the post, their colours flying and drums beating merrily, and from
thence into their lines.

By this time Fotheringhame had conveyed Cecil to the hospital, and
with difficulty secured the attendance of a surgeon, for all the
medical men had their hands full.

The sights and sounds in the wards were more appalling than anything
he had seen on the field; and the surgeons, with their coats off,
shirt-sleeves rolled up, and red to the elbows in blood, looked like
veritable butchers.

'Horrible work this, doctor,' said he to a fat, fussy little German;
'cutting off legs and arms with knife and saw, quietly and in cold
blood.'

'_Ach Himmel!_ you think it is better done with a sabre, while
yelling like a devil broke loose!'

'In a charge--yes; but please look to my friend.'

Cecil was now stretched on a pallet, his tunic unbuttoned, and with
his breast a mass of blood, a piteous sight he looked.  A second
doctor now came, and while they conferred in German, Fotheringhame
felt his heart stand still.

'_Mein Herr_,' whispered one, looking up, 'there will be a crisis
soon.'

'When?'

'When we have the bullet out.'

'I trust you have hope?'

'There is always hope while there is life,' replied the doctor,
turning aside while he carefully wiped a probe; 'but he has lost so
much blood, and is so low, that if he rallies it will be little short
of a miracle.'

The other doctor deemed the case a hopeless one, and a cry nearly
escaped Fotheringhame when he saw Cecil's form convulsed by a spasm,
as the bullet was extracted, and a swoon came over him.

'If he should die in my hands--poor Cecil!' thought the kind-hearted
fellow, in great misery of mind; 'or if I am only taking him home to
die!  That prediction about a violent death, what did it mean?  Who
the devil made it?  Looks too deuced likely to happen!'

And so, while the soft and tender hands of the Sisters of Charity did
all those little offices about Cecil that no wife, mother, or sister
in blood could have done more ably or kindly, Fotheringhame smoked a
cigar close by, full of thought and anxiety, while a long and deep
sleep fell upon the patient, a sleep that was worth a hundred
nostrums.

'Poor fellow! he is down in his luck, certainly,' thought
Fotheringhame; ''gad, I shall rejoice to hear when the doctors think
him safe round the corner, and we may start for home.'


When sense came completely back to Cecil, he knew not where he was,
nor for some hours thereafter did he exactly comprehend all that had
lately happened to him and passed around him; he had lost so much
blood, and been thereby so giddy, weak, drowsy, and insensible.

His first recollections were of the battle--of supporting the
field-battery, and the charges he had led ere he fell; then the night
in the woody hollow--his thirst and the kites hovering over him!

Now he was in a handsome, lofty, and airy room, and on a pretty
French couch; a soft flower-scented breeze came through an open
window, the hangings of which were partly drawn; and he had also a
sense of a woman flitting noiselessly about him, and by her plain
black dress and the white band with the red cross on the left arm,
her crimped cap and spotless white apron, he recognised in her one of
the German nurses or Sisters of Charity, who, the moment she caught
his eye and saw him move, gave him a cooling and refreshing drink,
glad to find symptoms of recovery in a poor sufferer whose mutterings
alone had given her a clue to his wants, while she had felt her heart
touched by the utterance of the ever-recurring name of 'Mary'; but
her work was nearly done now, as she had nursed him back to health
and something like strength.

'Where am I?' he asked, with a husky voice.

'In Belgrade, _mein Herr_.'

'Belgrade! with whom?'

'Friends; kind friends, who will take care of you now that the
horrible war is all over.'

In a well-hung carriage procured by Fotheringhame from General
Tchernaieff, Cecil, all unknown to himself, had been conveyed more
than a hundred miles from the field of battle and from the crowded
and pestilential hospitals thereby, and was now comfortably quartered
in the Krone or La Couronne Hotel at Belgrade.

Cecil was greatly bewildered by hearing that he was in the capital of
Servia, and was disposed to ask more questions; but his nurse told
him that he must be patient, adding, while the tender light of a
sweet and womanly soul lit up her eyes:

'And you must not talk, it is bad for your chest, Herr Captain; drink
more of this--you cannot!  Then I must feed you with a spoon.'

'You?'

'Yes,' and tenderly the blooming little fräulein raised his head on
her soft arm, and made him partake of the medicated food the doctor
had ordered.

'Now go to sleep,' said she; 'sleep and feed--feed and sleep, you
naughty boy, and we soon shall have you in your saddle once more.'

He dozed off again, but tossed restlessly on his pillow, as dreams
came to him now more distinctly than before.

'He has youth and strength, and pure good blood--at least, what is
left of it,' said the doctor, smilingly, to honest Fotheringhame, who
was always hovering near; 'I believe in these--and such nurses as
you, Sister Gretchen, with plenty of jellies and
beef-tea--_ja_--_ja_!'


'Bravo, old fellow! you've turned the corner at last!' was the
exclamation of Fotheringhame to Cecil, some days after this.

'You think so, dear Leslie,' replied Cecil, in a weak voice, as he
held out a wasted hand to his friend; 'but I only fear that I am
getting near the end now--the end of a sad and broken life!'

'Now don't talk this way, or I'll be off like a bird and leave you!'
said Fotheringhame.

'How shall I ever be able to thank you for coming all the distance
you have done, to look after a poor waif like me?  And but for your
so miraculously finding me, I must have perished--inevitably
perished!'

'There was nothing very miraculous in it.  I traced out the position,
and by chance lighted upon an old sergeant, who showed me the way
your horse had gone; I followed the track, and, thank God, heard your
cry.'

'Another moment, that odious kite would have torn out my eyes.  Oh,
Heavens!  I shall never forget, my dear Leslie, the horror of that
helpless time!  After leading my fellows to the last charge in
support of the guns, I have no recollection of anything--I must have
gone down like a shot!'

Fotheringhame thought that now the time was come when he could safely
enlighten Cecil as to the change in his fortune, and elucidate the
mysterious portions of Mary's half-obliterated letter--that he was
Sir Piers's heir--her cousin, and that the obnoxious Hew had
disappeared from the family group; and, as may easily be supposed,
great was Cecil's bewilderment and wonder to hear of a discovery--a
_dénouement_ so singular.

Mary's cousin--the general's heir--heir to Eaglescraig and his
baronetcy!  Could such things be?

He had much to inquire about again and again, and much to think of
deeply now; and sedulously as his mother, in her widowhood and in her
pride of heart, had kept all knowledge of his family, and even of his
name, from him, innumerable things that occurred in their wandering
life took a tangible form now, and the cause of many an emotion and
occurrence, that had puzzled him in the past time became apparent
enough; and in his grateful heart a great pity mingled with the
yearning memory of his mother.

'And now about yourself and Annabelle Erroll,' asked Cecil on one
occasion.

'Only that we are to be married as soon as we get back, so make haste
and get well, old fellow!' was the laughing reply of Fotheringhame.

The war in Servia was virtually over now; and even had it not been
so, Cecil could have resigned now with honour, as Stanley did, who
was also _en route_ for England, with several other volunteers.

An armistice had been signed on the day after the last battle, and
the sword was sheathed in the valley of the Morava, and Milano IV.
remains still prince, but not king, of Servia and Bosnia.

With the struggle between Russia and Turkey, on the soil of Servia,
Cecil had done.  Of what the former for ages has looked forward
to--the destruction of the latter--a prophecy of extreme antiquity
foretells the accomplishment--a prophecy uttered when, or by whom, no
man knows; but eight centuries ago it was read on the brazen horse of
an equestrian statue, then ages old, when brought to Constantinople
from Antioch.

Though weak from the effects of his terrible wound, Cecil was
recovering fast; while love and fortune seemed to smile alike upon
him; and to him and Fotheringhame pleasant indeed was their journey
from Semlin, on the famous Danube, to Monaco, so famous in the
Hungarian annals for its terrible battle, and from thence homeward by
Vienna and the Netherlands.




CHAPTER XXI.

'THE END CROWNS ALL.'

A yellow autumn moon in a deep blue sky was pouring a flood of light
over the old 'Queen of the North,' throwing the giant shadows of her
rock-built fortress far athwart the dark valley below, and of the
ridgy masses of the old city of mediæval times, towering high above
the long white terraces of the New Town, when Leslie Fotheringhame
thankfully deposited his charge--the poor waif whom he had found
dying on the bank of the Morava--in one of the many stately hotels in
the vicinity of Princes Street; we say thankfully, for though Cecil
was recovering, he was still weak enough to render the prediction of
Count Palenka something unpleasant to remember.

'Now, Cecil, a bumper of Moselle, as a refresher after our long day's
journey, and then I go to meet those at the railway, whom, I suppose,
you will be right glad to see!' said Fotheringhame, ere he laughingly
took his departure in a cab.

Cecil drained the wine, and looked around him, half fearing that he
might be dreaming--and that the spacious room, the brilliant
gaselier, the Turkey carpet, the tiger-skin before the stately white
marble mantelpiece, the great mirror in which his own pallid face and
eyes unnaturally bright with long suffering were reflected, might
pass away.  How much had he seen of misery, how much bitterness of
thought, and how much peril had he undergone since last he had
surroundings such as these!

Could it all be real, that within an hour, perhaps, Mary's hands
would be in his?

He approached one of the tall windows and looked out upon the night,
and on the well-known scene, with all its familiar sights and sounds,
with the moonlight streaming over steeple, tower, and dome--St.
Giles's crown--the castle on its rock, so high in air that its lights
seemed to mingle with the stars, and from it came the sound of the
Cameronian drums, awaking the echoes of turret and battery--the drums
he would soon be following again; but the heavy sigh of supreme
gratitude that escaped him reminded him by a pang of the wound in his
chest, and he reeled giddily.

'I would that they were come,' he muttered.  'I knew not till now
that I was still so weak,' he added, as he looked at his wasted hands.

The shadow or outline of a man's figure standing in the broad iron
balcony without the window now fell suddenly on a window-blind.
Cecil drew it up--threw open the sash abruptly, and found himself
face to face with--Hew--Hew watching him!

He seemed shabby in dress and dissipated--his hair and moustache
untrimmed; his eyes were bleary, his nose pimply, and his whole air
and aspect were those of a sorely broken-down tippler.

Cecil, in utter repugnance, recoiled a pace, and an ugly expression
flashed in the shifty and bilious-like eyes of Hew.

'You, here!' exclaimed Cecil.

'Yes--and I saw your arrival.'

'Are you living in this hotel, Hew?'

'Well--I am, in a manner of way,' he replied, sulkily: 'I am the
billiard-marker!'

'The billiard-marker?  Have you fallen so far?'

'Yes,' he replied, with a fierce grimace.

'You did me an infamous and awful injury, Hew, as your own confession
has shown; but,' added Cecil, in the generosity of his nature and
under the impulses of the time, 'I forgive it all now.'

'Thank you--how good!' sneered the other.

'Let us forget our feud--your feud, rather; but never let me look
upon your face again.'

'Only children and fools, they say, forget.'

'And what have you to remember, pray?'

'All that you have come between, and me.'

'I have only come to my own.'

'Curse you!' exclaimed Hew, hoarsely and bitterly.

'You are a rancorous fellow--begone instantly!' replied Cecil, as he
closed the window; and, feeling somewhat exhausted by the emotions
this most unexpected interview stirred within him, he threw himself
upon a sofa to await the return of Fotheringhame with those who were
to accompany him, and after a time he forgot all about Hew and his
close vicinity.

Weary and weak, a drowsiness encouraged by the warmth of the room
stole over him, and, in spite of his efforts to keep awake, he fell
into a drowsy state between sleeping and waking; but his mind was
full of Mary, who would soon be with him--the real and imaginary so
blended in his vision, but indistinctly, with that vacuity which
makes the dreamer sigh when his fancies have become a memory.

Hew was still watching without, and unnoticed by the crowds that
passed and repassed in the lighted street below.  His heart was full
of the bitterest rancour, envy, and rage.  His mind was full of a
species of madness--but a madness with a great deal of method and
cunning in it.

He peeped in from time to time at the sleeper, with a gleam of
intense malice in his stealthy eyes.  Cecil was alone and unattended,
and he lay there apart from all, and quite unheeded amid the bustle
of the great hotel.

'There is not much life left in the fellow,' muttered Hew; 'a good
shake--a squeeze of the windpipe, or a few more drops in his drink
than I gave him at the ball, and Eaglescraig is mine!'

The door of the apartment was shut--if he would act, it must be done
promptly.  He would enter and leave the room by the French window,
and after all was over, leave the balcony by another apartment, and
repair at once to his usual scene of work, the billiard-room.

A blindness and giddiness, with a great terror, came over him for a
moment; as one in a dream, he looked at the crowds passing below--the
stars above; gave a last glance to assure himself that his avenue of
escape was clear, and then with a heart beating wildly, fired as it
was by envy, avarice, malice, and all uncharitableness, he again drew
near the window of Cecil's room and laid his stealthy hand upon it;
but, as he did so, a deep hoarse malediction escaped in a kind of
whisper, and shrinking back he stole softly away with all speed, and
quitted the balcony--for he had seen a tableau that baffled his
vengeance, and no doubt saved his soul from the perpetration of a
terrible crime!

A little delay might have changed the fate of more than one person
connected with our story; a great tragedy might have taken place
almost without discovery, for had aught occurred to Cecil, it might
have been attributed to his wounded and weak condition--so near was
the prediction of Palenka being verified, not on the field of battle
or in the carnage of charging squadrons, but in the quietude and
seclusion, of a fashionable hotel!

From the latter, the amiable Hew took his departure on the instant,
and it is very unlikely that he will ever cross the path of Cecil
again.

Dreams are usually independent of all details and coherency; but
Cecil, as he dozed on, seemed to become gradually aware of the dear
and familiar face, of one who smiled gently upon him, as she bent
over him--her very life--her treasure, and delicious was the thrill
the dream gave him.

The sense of a beloved presence became more vivid and defined.  He
heard his name called, and started to find Mary stooping over him,
her veil thrown back, and her eyes--soft and loving at all
times--softer now with an infinite yearning, as she saw how weak he
was, and how hard had been the struggle between youth and Death!

'Mary, Mary, let me hear your voice again!' he said, as he folded her
in his arms, yet with that expression of doubt in his haggard eye, as
of one who feared the joy around him might be a dream and pass away.

'Take her to your heart, my boy--the same blood runs in your veins!'
said old Sir Piers, all unused to act 'the heavy parent,' but his
keen bright eyes were as humid and moist as an old man's can well be,
as he took Cecil's face between his withered hands, and gazed into
his features as if he thought he could never look at them
sufficiently; 'my own boy's eyes!' he exclaimed, with a kind of sob
in his throat; 'my own boy's brow and lips--my poor Piers--you are
his son--his son!'

A soft kiss was now laid upon his cheek--the kiss of Annabelle
Erroll, and then the latter retired into the recess of a window, with
her tall, dark lover Fotheringhame, who had no doubt a vast deal to
tell her, and seemed to do so, very quietly and very softly, under
the shadow of the curtains.

'My darling, my darling!' Cecil could but whisper again and again.

'Oh, Cecil--Cecil, whom I thought I was never--never to see again!
How have I ever lived through all this!' she kept repeating; 'why did
you go to Servia?'

'What mattered it where I went _then_--at the time, I mean!'

He gave a short sigh, as even her beloved cheek on his wounded chest
made him wince.

'Egad, what a home-coming we'll have!' said the general; 'Rungeet
entering Lahore will be nothing to it!  Old John Balderstone, and
Mrs. Garth, widow of Garth, of Ours--you remember her, Cecil? will be
mustering the tenants and everybody--old Tunley too--what a Christmas
we'll have!  And there will be a bonfire on the old tower-head at
Eaglescraig, that will light up the whole Firth of Clyde!'

But the lovers thought only of the future, which seemed so close and
certain now.

Pillowed on Mary's breast--surrounded by friends and all the perfect
safety of home and assured position, there was--to Cecil--a calm and
delicious joy in existence now, after all the fierce whirl, the
aching disappointment, and the wild excitement of his life recently.



THE END.



BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS AND ELECROTYPERS, GUILDFORD.

_J. W. & Sons._