"Imar and the lovely maiden," he said; as he struck his heel on rock, and Nickols told me what he meant, "are a hundred feet beneath us now. If you could drive an iron down, it would pierce the roof above their heads. But lo, one man has been slain already, condemned in the holy weeks and kept till now. A traitor, and an extortioner, by the black stake driven through him. The corpse is out of sight from the judgment yard, though I can see it plainly. By the dress he was of the Western races, such as you yourselves are; but a small man, weak, and of no account; perhaps an English slave purchased for his own use by Hisar.
"Now see, my son, where that horn of rock stands forth. When the wise men put their heads together, by this rope we will let thee down, if trembling cripple not thy strong limbs. The fighting men will not behold thee, because of the folding of the crag; the heads of men that are white with wisdom will be bowed into that of the wealthiest, while they whisper to one another death. And the woman will abide unseen within the tent. Therefore do thou quickly thus. As soon as thy feet are on the moss, cut the rope, stop not to untie it, fall on thy breast, and crawl into that hole – my finger shows it now – where slab of stone leans unto stone, and the body of a large heart may lie hidden. I saw it in the twilight before they caught me; but like a fool I went not in. Within twenty yards, thou wilt see the iron bars where Sûr Imar will be shackled to receive the death. Keep thy head below the brim, even as the salesman scrimps his bushel, and thine eyes as deep as his, when he seemeth to heed nothing. Thine own strong head and heart will guide thee, when it comes to stabbing. At the sight or the sound of thy downstroking we will shoot; and the Captain's force will rush up the valley. Bear in mind that thou hast chosen this; and death comes only once to man; and by the God on high, thou shalt be avenged on the wicked men that slay thee."
This ought to have been warm comfort to me, according to all great writers, and the general practice of mankind. But it failed to kindle one fibre of my system, and I dropped my eyes that the heartless slayer of many bears, and men thrice as many, might not behold the affliction in them which he would be sure to take amiss. It was not terror (I would wish to think), so much as pity for my father and dear mother, and Grace, and Harold, and the farm, and the horses, and the dogs I loved, and most of all for Dariel; also a good deal for myself, who went hand in hand with her in every thought of mine. But the less I thought and felt, the better; for the time was now to act.
We crept unseen to the spur of rock which Usi had called a "Horn;" and there they made the rope fast around my chest, and I passed a handkerchief round the breech of my revolver, and slung my kinjal and toorak securely, for I had taken kindly to that native weapon, made of the long horn of a mountain-goat, laden with lead, and bound with leather. Then at the proper moment when the judges or the jury – whichever they were – had gathered in a ring to consummate their farce, from the lip of the cliff I was let down softly, and lowered so skilfully in the buttress corner of a crag, that I reached the bottom with both feet ready, and only a little skin gone from my thumbs. There I cut the rope, and fell flat among the moss, which grew to the very plinth of cliff, and wormed my way, with the slab for a screen, until I dived into the hole at its base. Here I rubbed my knees, which had received a bruise or two, and began with great caution to survey the scene. For the little pit into which I had crawled was scarcely more than a yard in depth, but protected at the top by a smaller slab of stone, which rested with a wide slope against the upright rock, as the spur of a wooden fence is reared above the ground, and splayed against the post, to steady it.
At the lip of my refuge a grey plant grew with woolly leaves, something like mullein, and although it had not got much growth yet, it afforded me precious shelter, when I raised my head to peep around; for it partly closed the three-cornered gap, between the upright and the sloping stone. It is not in my power to make a list of all that I saw, being in so quick a terror; but the things that I was able to twist my neck to were enough to make me sorry for the colour of my hair.
In the butt-end of the cliff, which I had just dropped down, I beheld a wide door of dark metal, and the gleam of it was more of bronze than iron. What the metal truly was, no man would stop to ask himself, but rather stand in wonder, and be overcome by the solid mass and magnitude, and the strength of ancient times. All the sons of Caucasus might have come together, and done their very best for a century – if nature allowed them such length of strength – but even with the Genoese smiths to help them, they could never have built such a door as that. A door I call it, though I may be wrong; others would take it for a gate perhaps. But being all in one plane and flat, and having no frame in sight, to me it was a door, and a marvellous door, beyond our power to make or even to break open. On either side of it were two long loop-holes, like the lancet-windows in our church at home, but carved in the solid rock, too narrow for even a child to squeeze his little shoulders through. And I knew that in the chambers (quarried thus by Roman steel eighteen centuries ago), waiting for their doom, were the chief whom I admired, and the lady whom I loved.
There was nothing more to be made of that; not even a sign that Sûr Imar knew what the savages outside were doing. But as I thought of him, labouring for years, girding up the slack folds of a life, from which all the gladness of the world was gone, simply for the benefit of these wretches, – genuine indignation filled me, and I longed to shoot a tribe of them. This it was, and no true courage, which enabled me to regard the whole, with a calm heart and a solid head, like the oak, which is our emblem.
CHAPTER LV
AT THE BAR
How long those ragged elders carried on with their pretence of trial, is beyond my power to say. I only know that my joints began to stiffen with cramp, and to ache with crush, and my brain to hum like a factory wheel. Even the relief of descrying Usi or Jack Nickols, on the bristly brow of cliff a hundred feet over the dungeon-gate, was more than they dared to afford me now; though I tried to persuade myself once or twice that I espied the glint of metal there. Neither was there sound or sign of life within the rocky jail, so far as watchful eyes and ears could learn; while the cackle of the greybeards some fifty yards behind me resembled a drone of bagpipes enlivened by a cherry-clapper.
At last I beheld a stately woman advance from the cover of the private tent and take her seat in the chair of law, to receive the verdict of her puppets. Then some hypocritical farce ensued, as if she were shocked, and pleaded with them, and mourned to find them so inexorable. My heart burned within me, and my fingers tingled to pull trigger at some of them, such a fierce and dirty lot were they; but I said to myself, "Let Hisar come, the fellow that broke the lovebird's leg." Then as if the scene that could not be avoided was unfit for such gentle eyes, the Princess, with a bow of resignation, retired into the sable tent.
I lay close, and drew my head in, while four or five of the fighting men followed the hoary villain who had acted as chief-justice to the door of heavy metal sunk in the dark embrasure of the cliff. The old man drew forth a key as long as a toasting-fork and much bigger, and with brawny arms thrusting in both directions, and a screech as if from wounded rock, the valves of the door slid back into their bed, as the damper of a furnace slides. But one broad bar of metal spanned the opening horizontally, about five feet above the iron threshold. The Osset warriors stooped their white head-dresses under this heavy bar, and disappeared in the gloom inside. That they would not slay their prisoners there I knew, from Usi, and from Stepan's tales.
Presently they appeared again with a figure in the verge of sunlight, towering over their woolly gleam.
I saw Sûr Imar's noble face, as calm as when he smiled on me, and blessed me with his daughter. His hands were roped behind his back, his silvery curls uncovered, and his broad white chest laid naked; except that the red cross hung upon it, in which he wore some of his dead wife's hair. Two of the men stretched spears behind him, as if he would shrink from the steps of death; but he walked as if he were coming to welcome some expected visitor, bowed his head without a word, and laid his breast against the bar. There they cast a broad shackle round him and made it fast behind his back; while a pompous dotard stood forth the door, and read (or made believe read) the verdict of his brother idiots. As he finished, my pistol muzzle lay true upon the foremost of them; the man who first put hand to kinjal would never have put it to his mouth again.
Then to my surprise, they all withdrew, cackling in their crock-saw throats, while that old fiend showed his gums like a rat-trap, grinning through his rheumy scrub. And the sound of tongues up the valley ceased; and the blowing of horns, and the shrilling of fifes; and the only thing that I could hear was the slow beat of a sheepskin drum, to call the savages to the death, and the rapid thumps of my own heart.
Listening for the fatal step, I fixed my eyes once more upon the bound and helpless victim. Perhaps to reduce his well-known strength, or to lower his high courage, the affectionate sister had kept in his body just life enough to last till he should be killed. His ribs stood forth, and his cheeks were meagre, and the eyes looked worn and sunken; but there was not a sign of fear or flinching, no twitch or quiver in the smooth white forehead, and not so much as a palpitation in the broad breast laid against the bar. Like a fool I raised my hand a little and tried to attract his notice, but he kept his calm gaze towards his foes; until a low heart-broken wail from an inner cell of the caverned rock told of a sorrow beyond his own. Then for a moment he turned his head, and spoke some words of comfort perhaps, or of love and long farewell, to the one who could not come to him, or perhaps not even hear him; and I hoped in the Lord of mercy that she could not see her father. At the thought of that possibility even, hot as I was, my blood ran cold. Could any woman exist who would set such a sight before a woman?
Suddenly a glow of deep amazement shone in Imar's haggard eyes. With a wrench of his mighty frame he shook the steel bar like a ribbon, the shackles on his chest gave way a little, and his grand face issued from the gloom of granite into the testimony of the sun. Then the strong aspect and vivid lines – as firm as the cliff to confront their doom – relaxed and softened, and grew bright, as if memory forgot its age, and went back upon its years, to have a play with tender visions.
"Oria, come at last!" he cried, with a smile to tempt her nearer; "my Oria sent to call me home! The God, who has done this for me, will take care of my daughter!"
Before him stood – betwixt him and me, although I had heard no footsteps – a tall young figure in a long white robe, timid as a woman, and as graceful; but with supple strength quivering for the will to man it. On the left hip hung a heavy sword; but the right hand had fallen away from the hilt, and the shoulders lay back with the sudden arrest. "My son, my son, it is just," cried Imar; "slay me, as I slew thy mother."
Then the shackled man turned his head away, that his eyes should make no plea for him, and nature's dread could be seen in nothing but the quiver of his long arched throat.
But the young man stood as if carved in stone, with both arms stretched to his father, unable to take another step, unable to do anything but wonder.
But betwixt their gaze a dark form leaped, quivering with fury, and wild for blood, too ravenous for slaughter to have formed a proper plan of it. And this was a very lucky thing for me.
For while he danced between them thus, with his hateful face on fire, in the voluptuous choice of murder, there was time for me to leap out of my hole, and get my cramped limbs flexible; not a moment, however, for any kind of thought, and whatever I did was of instinct. What it was I know not, nor does anybody else; it can only be told in a whirl as it befell.
Hisar, I think, made a jump at Hafer, before he saw me, and smacked his face (as if he had been a child), and tried to snatch his sword, but was thrust back, and then drew his own, and flew with it at the shackled Imar's heart. But another was there – thank the Lord in heaven – I caught the flame of Hisar's eyes on mine, as his blade went straight for Imar's breast, and dashed it into splinters with my toorak. Then he hurled the stump at me, drew his kinjal, and sprang, as if he were made of wings, at my breast. I stepped aside quicker than I ever moved at cricket, and as he passed me he ran against so hearty a whack upon his wicked temples, that no more sin was concocted there.
Down he went, like a thistle at the ploughshare, and threw up his long legs, and lay dead, with a tuft of bloody moss between his teeth. I took the stump of his sword, which had struck me in the breast, and cut Sûr Imar free, and hurried him inside (for he was lost as in a vision), and stood with my revolver in the doorway, ready for the onset of the fighting men. These being taken with astonishment hung back, as if they had none to lead them; until the great lady appeared from the tent, to receive the tidings of her brother's death.
Marva came forth in her majestic manner (having turned away her face, perhaps with sisterly compunction), sweeping her black robe along the ground, and framing her handsome features to the proper expression of regret. Now the desire of her life was won. Paramount of the Eastern Ossets, and the Western Lesghians; quit of the brother who had thwarted her, and his son whom she had stolen for revenge and guile; nothing remained but to make her own son the heir, – for he was born in wedlock, though not of it, – marry him to the Lesghian heiress, and herself enjoy all the power and the wealth, while he took his pleasure in the western world. She despised all the ignorance and superstition round her too loftily to act down to it; and perhaps looked down upon herself a little, as she took her seat in the chair of stone. None the less she did it with a royal air, more impressive to us from a woman than from man.
To recover my breath, and be ready, I drew back in the shadow of the prison entrance, where Hafer was standing by his prostrate father; and much as I longed to see all that happened, for the moment I was out of it. Not that I should have been much wiser even in the midst of them, knowing nothing of the Osset tongue, which sounds like a chorus of bull-frogs, bagpipes, pigs under a harrow, a cock in the roup, and a hooter at the junction, even when the men are calm and keep the women silent. However, those who understood them tell me that they reported thus.
"Oh, lofty lady, mother of thy tribe, widow of the great Prince Rakhan, the sentence hath been given according to thy will, and carried out even as the Heaven hath decreed."
"Wise men, speak not of any will of mine; whatever hath been done is good and righteous, to establish justice, and avenge the wrong. The barb of the arrow of the Lord flies straight; never can it fail by any crookedness of men. Yet the great Prince who has fallen was the nearest of all flesh to me. I will be content with your testimony. I cannot gaze upon him."
"But – but we know not how to say it, so as to mingle truth with pleasure. Oh, lofty lady, it is not our enemy, Imar of the Kheusurs, who is dead. Rather is it sorrowful indeed for us to speak. Would that the Lord had made us liars, when He hath cast the truth into the breast of evil!"
"Wise men, what is it? Or am I to call you fools, if ye could not even execute your own decree aright?"
"It is no deed of ours. It is a spirit from the tombs, the tombs that were made before the world itself. Let the high lady come and see."
She was girding up her long robe while they spoke, and the jewels on her shapely feet flashed forth. With a gesture of disdain she waved the old men back, but a score of wild warriors followed her, as she strode towards the dungeon, to see her brother's corpse. Instead of that, she stood before the body of her son, and a loud shriek proved that she was still a woman. From the gloom of my shelter, I saw her proud eyes aghast, and her arms thrown up, and her tall form quivering. Then she controlled herself, and looked around.
"To weep by-and-by, – to avenge him first," she shouted (as they told me afterwards), and such is the power of another's passion that I felt like a murderer, and went forth with an impulse of shame to surrender myself. For I had never slain a man till now.
"Idiot, get back!" cried a voice from the cliff, the voice no doubt of Jack Nickols.
"Slay him, – shoot all of you, shoot, shoot, slay him!" the lady called out, and herself seized a gun; "shoot him, though it be through my own body!"
This order was beyond my understanding; but I saw at least a score of muzzles looking at me, and I had not even the wit to move.
"Which will first reach me, the sound or the bullets?" That I should thus ponder shows clearly enough that fear had overcome all sense of terror.
"Now then; cut it short," I said, according to Jack Nickols, – though I cannot remember a word of it, – and the fellows were surprised, and drew their clumsy fingers back, and went down on their knees with superstition. But the Princess Marva drew near to me, and the butt of a gun was against her hip. She saw that I stood unarmed and nerveless, and she could not help playing with the joy of her revenge. To be shot by a woman! I had no power left. I could only stare, and wait for it.
"But I know him, I recognise my dear friend," she exclaimed in French, while she fingered the trigger, with the muzzle not two yards from my breast; "it is the gentleman desirous of my emeralds. Ah, thou shalt have them! How many? Ten?"
To prolong my agony, she began to count, with glittering eyes and a courteous smile, tapping my time on the trigger; and would you believe that I could not stir, and could only keep my gaze fixed on her? Then as she cried Seven, a white spot leaped – as it seemed to me – from the palpitant surge of her bosom. Her dark robe opened, and her musket dropped, as the roar of a gun rang overhead, and the Princess sank, with her lips still smiling, as dead as a stone, into low-born arms.
"Usi, the Svân, hath his revenge!" a shrill cry from the crags proclaimed; "Wolf's meat hath choked the Queen of Wolves."
Fear fell on all of us, as if the sky had opened; and the warriors grounded their guns upon the moss, and crowded round one who had an image on his breast. Then with one accord they began a mournful howl, of a quality to come from the bowels of the earth, or send all her inhabitants into them. My presence of mind was restored by this; and with scarcely a wound I leaped back into my shelter, recovered my weapons, and determined to die hard.
CHAPTER LVI
HARD IS THE FIGHT
What right had I to be out of breath, after standing stock-still no one knows how long, like a cardboard dummy to be shot at? But there seemed to be a hollow where my heart in its duty should have been staunch and steadfast; and my brain (having never been wrought up like this) must have lost its true balance and standard. Otherwise could it have shocked me to know that a career of cruelty and wickedness was brought to an ignominious close?
"Marva is dead," I kept on saying; "the greatest woman of the age is dead! Not the best, not the purest, not even a true woman. But how grand was her attitude, and how she disdained me! And now a wretched Svân has shot her!"
Let any one despise me as he likes, with reason on his tongue and humanity in his eyes. For the world at large it might be better to have such a woman stretched beneath the turf; but a man with his heart in the right place – which the muzzle of her musket knew too well – could not help feeling for her grandeur.
However, it was not for me to lay down the law, or even to stand up for it against this crew of savages. To keep out of their way was my one desire, and at first there seemed to be some chance of it, with their leader a corpse, and superstition frowning at them from the dungeon-gate. Hoping thus, I stood back in a niche of granite, while a bullet or two sang along the vault, and I strove to recover the spirit of a man, by thinking of my country and the luck we have in turning the corner of situations, where others would lie down and breathe their last.
The bar to which Sûr Imar had been bound was still in place; but he was not in sight, neither could I see his son, the gentle youth sent to assassinate him. Then I heard the sound of heavy blows, and concluded that the younger man was striving to release his sister, while the father lay half-conscious still from brutal cruelty and want of food. There was none but myself to guard the entrance – for Usi and Nickols had not appeared – until our friends at the valley's mouth should have time to come to the rescue.
Glad was I to think, as I did at first, that the savage warriors, scared and puzzled, and without a leader, would now hang back; as they had done when the Lesghian chief brought their Prince Rakhan to account. And so it would have been, by their own confession, but for the ferocity of one young man, Karkok the brother of Lura, and the chief friend of that Hisar whom I had struck down. Karkok cannot have been stirred up by love, or loyalty, or any other noble motive, – for who could have regretted Hisar? – but by ambition of the meanest sort, and a dash at the mastery of the tribe, for he was now the last relative of Rakhan.
This upstart fellow brought the fighting men together; and they laid aside the bodies of Queen Marva and her son, in fear of their being trampled on; and then (with a screech that must have set all the teeth of the flintiest echo aching) at the prison-gate they rushed, and the valves being back there was only my poor body between them and the helpless inmates.
When I saw those fellows advancing upon me, capering, and flinging hairy arms about, and tossing white sheepskins, and flourishing long muskets, beyond any denial I was frightened, and would have given every penny I was worth to be in my own little saddle-room once more. My hand shook so badly that the blue revolver revolved without any mechanism; and the prudence which has been implanted in us all suggested that the bravest man must value his own bacon. When a friend assures me that I was gloriously brave, it would be a rude thing to contradict him; but what a different tale my conscience tells!
In a word, just presence of mind enough was left me to show that I must fight it out. To make a bolt of it was useless, for whither could I go? Anywhere across the cave would bring a bullet into me; and as for slinking along the dark wall, where would that take me, even if I could contrive it? Into the very arms of Dariel, – a truly sweet refuge, but not for a coward. All I could do was to say to myself that the lines were hard, but the Lord had made them so, and I must trust in Him to deliver me.
Whether it were faith, or sense of justice, or the love of woman, or something far lower than any of these, the brute element inborn in the sons of men, – no sooner did I see hateful eyes agoggle with lust for blood glaring at me, and great mouths agrin for a grab at me, than the like spirit kindled in myself.
"Blood you shall have, but it shall be your own first," I shouted in English, and leaped at them from the mouth of the cave, like the demon of Kazbek. They took me for that great power, and fell back, while a ball slit the tip of my ear off, and before they could rally there were two as dead as stones with bullets in their heads, and two more fell upon them with their skulls cracked by the swing of my toorak. "Want any more?" I asked, having two charges left, and many of them showed the better part of valour. But a kinjal was thrown at me down a lane of cowards, and stuck in my breast, and that rallied the crowd. Three or four made at me from behind, and I know not how it was, but down I went from a terrible whack on the back of my head, at the very same moment that I shot their new chief.
A very lucky shot, and one that governed all the issue. But of that I knew nothing until weeks had passed, my latest sense being of a white flash across me, and a plunge into a bottomless abyss of some one, who might be anybody. "There let him lay," as a great poet says – and never would he have stood up again, if his skull had been of Norman growth.
But a mighty champion just in time had rushed into the thick of it, and scattered a storm of sword-flash, as the lightning fires a forest. Two ruffians, poised for the final stab at my defenceless body, swung backward with their arms chopped off, and the blade that should have drained Sûr Imar's blood revelled in the gore of his enemies. For the fury of the mild and gentle "Hafer" (now that he had learned his wrongs and guessed his father's) swooped on those sheep-clad fiends, as a whirlwind leaps upon a drying-ground of tallow candles. Would that I had only kept sufficient sense to see, for they tell me that it was magnificent. Heads that are full of hate should have some of it let out, and several of the worst were stopped for ever from receiving any more misanthropy. All who knew anything about it said that Rakhabat himself, the worst man-hater of all the demons of Kazbek, was seen to come down with the wings of a black eagle, and enter the vesture of the white "Lamb-angel." That was the Osset name for this poor Prince; and now having broken bounds, he proved the irony of his claim to it. For soon the chief-justice of the court went down, and so did the foreman of the jury, and a pair of clerks who sought nothing but their living, and others who had come to see things out without any view to their own exit. Among them raged "Hafer," like Hector of Troy, with twenty years, and more than that, of goodness to let out; and no man could shoot straight at him, because he was in the right, while all their guns were crooked.
Nevertheless the force of numbers must have been too great for him, – for the conscience of Ossets still requires to be formed, – but for the rapid and resistless charge of Stepan and Strogue, and the Lesghians, and the miners, down the long valley, and over the moss reeking already with more blood than it could staunch. At the same moment Usi, the Svân, and Jack Nickols, who had been hampered by some tangle of the rope, shouting to their comrades, fell in upon the flank; and the noble tribe of Ossets, or at any rate that branch of it, split up and fell asunder like an unroped fagot. There can be no certainty of justice in this world; but even the races connected with them by the tenderest ties of co-robbery found it in their hearts, when the facts could not be altered, to pronounce the only verdict – "Served them right."