Dariel: A Romance of Surrey

"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."

CHAPTER LVII

BUT NOT IN VAIN

In recounting my little adventures – as I am begged sometimes to do – upon coming to this particular part my general practice is to stop, as if I had no more to say. Whereas it is only that I want to know in which of the persons concerned my friends appear to take most interest. And to my pride, more perhaps than to my credit, their first question always is, not "What became of you, George?" but "What became of Dariel?" And that is more than I could tell for many a long day afterwards.

When the door of her cell was beaten in, she came forth as in a dream or trance, without any wonder, or fear, or question, possessed by one purpose alone, – to share the fate of her dear father. In the gloom of the tunnelled rock she glanced at the tall form of her brother, but the light even there was enough to show that this was not the one she wanted. And he, having reason from very early days to give a wide berth to the feminine form, drew aside gladly for a strange young lady to go her way without compressing him.

For this young fellow, Prince Origen, the son of Imar and Oria, the child who escaped by his fall into the drift (when Marva's genuine Hafer perished), being substituted for him, and brought up with plenty of chastisement, and strict privations, and a candid absence of affection, had never been encouraged to think, or act, or even to feel for his poor young self.

What then could be expected of him, when in a moment at one blow the whole of his world was cut from beneath him, his own identity plucked away, and not even a quiet corner left for considering who he was, or how he came to be? In such a case is it surprising that his head went round so rapidly that he might fairly be said to have lost it? Instead of attending to his new-found father, he had simply stood staring at the prostrate form, till moans of despair from that inner cell were brought to his ear by the chilly draughts of rock. Thereupon he rushed in, and while I kept the entrance, he used his great strength to such purpose that his unknown sister glided past him and hurried to their unconscious father. And truly it was a great mercy for me, as well as a glory to this grand young fellow, that, instead of waiting longer where he was not wanted, he ran out at once to obtain fresh air, and get some light shed upon so many marvels. Rapid action and muscular exertion, for which he found ample cause at once, probably saved him from congestion of the brain, and certainly saved me from perforation of the heart.

For why should I make light of my defeats, any more than extol my victories, which latter it would be hard to do by reason of their nonentity? Those Ossets had performed an exploit declared to be impracticable by all the bravest sons of Wykeham during my generation. That is to say, they had cracked my skull, which was not a piece of biscuit china, but of solid and heavy metal, sounder I trow than its contents. And those who have studied the subject tell me that the thicker the pot is, which nature has provided for our poor brains to boil in, the more ticklish the job is to make good the splinters. What tinker can patch an enamelled saucepan? And a queer saucepan must our brainpan be, if, after all the smut shed round it and the slow smoke under it, any steam of self-conceit still has a puff to lift the cover. Let any man who thinks himself a wonder get a bit of his skull (too small perhaps for a chick to pick up for the good of his gizzard) crumbled in upon the brain he is so proud of; and if he has the luck to meet with a friend who can get it out again, when he comes to know his own name once more, will he count it worth remembering?

But as for myself – because perhaps I had never thought wonders of it – trouble beyond belief was needful ever to make it sound again. When I came to know the facts – as I did at last – it may appear a singular result, but as true as I sat up in bed, the salt tears ran into my soup so fast that they had to give me another basin. Not through any weakness, as an ill-natured man might fancy, but just because I was so happy to come home to a world where loving folk were living, and people better than myself, who wished to keep me with them.