Idalia/Volume 1/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
"SOUFFRIR EN ROI."
Heaven forbid that the Principalities should be better governed: they would be like all the rest of the world in no time. They may be ruinous to themselves very probably, and a nest of internecine discord for Eastern Europe, but they are delightful for the stranger, and the bird of passage should surely have one solitude left wherein to find rest; regions where the refined tortures of the post cannot reach; where debts can be defied and forgotten across the stretch of those dense pine-woods which sever you from the rest of mankind; where the only highway to your quarters is a rapid surging river, with a timber-raft drifting down it; where, whirled along by gipsy horses and gipsy drivers through vast wooded tracks, you halt and wake with a pleasant wonder to find yourself in the broad streets and squares of a populous city, of which, though you are not more geographically ignorant than your brethren, you had not the haziest notion, and whose very name you do not know when you hear it, waking at the cessation of the horses' gallop and the gipsey Jehu's shouts, to open your eyes upon the clear Moldavian or Wallachian night, with the sound of music from some open casement above. Regions such as these are the Principalities, and who would not keep them so, from the Danube to the Dneister, from the Straits of Otranto to the Euxine, for the refuge of necessitous wanderers who have an inconvenient connection, a tiresome run upon them from the public, or a simple desire for a paradise where a woman will not follow them, where letters will not come, where the game districts are unbeaten, and the deep woods and wild valleys as yet unsketched and unsung?
Through the Principalities, Erceldoune travelled in as brief a time, from the early dawn when he had left Paris, as mail trains, express specials, rapid relays of horses, and swift river passages could take him, across Tyrol and Venetia, Alps and Carpethians, Danube and Drave, calling at Belgrade with despatches, and pushing straight on for Moldavia. Every mile of that wild and unworn way was as familiar to the Queen's Messenger as the journey between London and Paris is familiar to other men. Where steam had not yet penetrated, and there was no choice but between posting and the saddle, he usually rode; if the roads were level, and the route unsighly, he would take the luxnrioiis rest of a "Messenger's carriage," and post through the nights and days; but, by preference, hard riding carried him over most of his ground, with pace and stay that none in the service could equal, and which had made the Arabs, when their horses swept beside his through the eastern sunlight, toss their lances aloft, and shout, "Fazzia! Fazzia!" with applause to the Giaour. He rode so now, when, having passed direct from Belgrade across the lower angle of Transylvania, and crossed the Carpathian range, he found himself fairly set towards Moldavia, with only a hundred miles or so more left between him and Jassy, which was his destination.
The Principality was in ferment; Church and civil power were in conflict and rivalry; England, France, Austria, and Russia were all disturbing themselves after the affairs of this out-of-the-way nook, conceiving that with Greece in insurrection, and Italy in a transition state, and Poland quivering afresh beneath her bonds, even Moldavia might be the match to a European conflagration, and open up the scarce-healed Eastern question; and an English envoy was then at Jassy, charged with a special mission, to whom the despatches which Erceldoune bore carried special instructions, touching on delicate matters of moment to the affairs of central and eastern Europe, and to the part which would he played by Great Britain in the event of the freedom of the southern states, and the success of the liberal party in Athens, Hungary, or Venetia. This one bag, with the arms of England on the seal, and the all-important instructions within, was all that he carried now, slung round his neck and across his chest by an undressed belt of chamois leather. He was wholly alone; his mountain guides he had dismissed at the foot of the Carpathians, for he had gone through the most dangerous defiles and thief-invested passes all over the world, caring for no other defence than lay in his holster pistols. He had been stopped two or three times, once by the "Bail-up!" of Tasmanian bushrangers, once by a Ghoorka gang in Northern India, once by a chieftain who levied black mail in the rocky fastnesses of Macedonia,—but his shots had always cleared him a passage through, and he had ridden on with no more loss than the waste of powder and ball. He was too well known, moreover, in both hemispheres, to be molested, and the boldest hill-robbers would have cared as little to come to close quarters with one whose strength had become proverbial, as to get themselves into trouble by tampering with the State courier of a great power.
It had been a splendid day in the young autumn, and it was just upon its close as he went through the forests, his mare, a pure-bred sorrel, scarcely touching the ground as she swept along, swift as a greyhound or a lapwing. The air was heavily scented with the fragrance of the firs; the last lingering rays of light slanted here and there across the moss through dark fanlike boughs, cone-laden; aisles of pines stretched in endless and innumerable lines of paths scarce ever trodden save by the wolf, or the wild boar, or the charcoal-burner, barely more human than the brute; and, in the rear, to the westward, towered the Carpathians, with their black rugged sides reared in the purple sunset, the guard of the Magyar fatherland.
Now and then, at rare intervals, a little hamlet buried in the recesses of the forest, whose few wretched women wore the Turkish yashmak, spoke of Moldavia, or he came on a camp of naked wild-eyed gipseys of the country; but as evening closed in, and Erceldoune advanced into a narrow rocky defile, the nearest passage through dense pine solitudes, even these signs of human life in its most brutalised phase, ceased wholly. There was only the rapid ring of his mare's hoofs, given back by a thousand hollow echoes, as he swept down the ravine, with high precipitous walk of rock rising on either side, while the river thundered and foamed beside him, and the trees closing above-head made it well-nigh dark as night, though beyond, the summits of the Hungarian range were still lit by the last rays of the sun gleaming golden on eternal snows. Sitting down in his saddle, with his eyes glancing, rapid and unerring as a soldier's, on either side where the shelving rocks sloped upward in the gloom, Erceldoune dashed along the defile at a pace such as the blood horses of the desert reach—the surging of the torrent at his side, the winds rising loud and stormy among the black pine-boughs above, the intense stillness and solitude around, that are only felt in the depths of a forest or the hush of a mountain-side.
These were what he loved in his life: these nights and days of loneliness, of action, of freedom, alone with all that was wildest and grandest in nature, under no law but the setting and rising of the sun, riding onward, without check or pause, a fresh horse ready saddled when the jaded one drooped and slackened; these were what suited the passionate need of liberty, the zest to do and dare, the eagle-love of solitude ingrained in his Border-blood, and as latent in him as in the chieftains of his name when they had borne fire and sword far away into stout Northumberland, or harried the Marches in their King's defiance.
The pressure of his knees sufficing for her guidance without curb or spur, the sorrel scoured the winding ravine, fleet and sure of foot, as though the rocky and irregular ground had been a level stretch of sward, her ears pointed, her pace like the wind, all the blood and mettle there were in her roused; she knew her master in her rider. Dashing onward through the gloom thus, suddenly his hand checked her; his eyes had seen what hers had not. Thrown back on her haunches in the midst of her breathless gallop, she reared in snorting terror; any other she might have hurled senseless to the earth; he sat as motionless as though horse and man were cast together in bronze.
Across the narrow and precipitous path lay the felled trunk of a pine, blocking the way. She rose erect, and stood so for a second, her rider in his saddle firm as on a rock—a sculptor would have given ten years of his life to have caught and fixed that magnificent attitude;—then down she came with a crash on her fore feet, while from the black barricade of the levelled pine, through the thick screen of stiffened branches, shone the gleam of half a dozen rifles, the long lean barrels glistening in the twilight.
The brigands lay in ambush waiting him; and the hoarse shout of arrest was pealed back by the echoes.
"Your papers—or we fire!"
And the steel muzzles covered him front and rear, while the challenge rang out down the vault of the hollowed rocks.
Swiftly as lightning his eyes swept over the rifles and numbered them—eight against one; rapidly as the wind he drew his pistol from his holster and fired among them; a shrill shriek pierced the air, a man reeled headlong down into the gorge of the river foaming below, and without breathy without pause, Erceldoune put the bay at the leap, trusting the rest to her hunter's blood, and facing the levelled death-dealers full in the front. The gallant beast deserved his faith; she rose point-blank at the barricade, and leapt with one mighty bound the great pine-barrier and the glittering line of steel. She landed safe;—a second, and she would have raced onward, distancing all shot and defying all pursuit; but with a yell that rang from rock to rock, the murderous barrels she had overleapt and cleared, covered her afresh; the sharp crack of the shots echoed through the pass, three balls pierced her breast and flanks, bedding themselves where the life lay, and with a scream of piteous agony she threw her head upward, swayed to and fro an instant, and fell beneath him—dead. He sprang from the saddle ere her weight could crash him, and, with his back against the ledge of granite, turned at bay; hope he had not, succour there could be none in those dense mountain solitudes, those wastes of vast unpeopled pine-woods; in that hour he had but one thought—to sell his life dearly, and to deserve bis country's trust.
The echoes of the conflict rang in quick succession on the stillness, thundered back by the reverberations of the hills, it was hot, close, mortal work in that narrow choked defile, Erceldoune, with his back against the granite, and his dead bay at his feet between him and his foes, had the strength and the fury of a legion, now that his wrath was up in all its might, and the blood-thirst wakened in him. A ball broke his right arm above the wrist; it fell useless at his side. He laughed aloud:
"Blunderers! why don't you hit through the lungs?"
And as he changed his pistol into his left hand, he raised it, and the man who had shot him fell with a crash— a bullet through his brain. He could not load again; his arm was broken, and the hoarse yell of men, infuriated to be defied, and exasperated at their comrades' loss, told him his minutes were numbered, as one cry alone grated on the night air from many voices; in Romaic, in French, in Venetian, in Hungarian;—varied tongues, but one summons alone.
"Your papers or your lift! Death, or surrender!"
There was a moment^s hush and pause; they waited for their menace to do their work without the bloodshed that they shirked from caution and from wisdom, rather than from humanity; and at that instant the moon, through one break in the black pine roofing above-head, poured its light through the pass. Round him in a half-circle, broken from their barricade and ambush now that his fire was spent, pressed his assassins, their faces masked by the crape drawn over them, their rifles covering him with pitiless purpose. With his right arm hanging powerless, and with the mare lying at his feet, the sole barrier between him and the cross-fire levelled at him, stood Erceldoune, reared to his fall height, motionless as though he were a statue.
"Death, or surrender!"
The summons hissed through the silence with a deadly meaning, a hoarse snarl such as the hounds give when the stag holds them too long at bay. Erceldoune stood erect, his eyes glancing calmly down on the semicircle of the long shining lines of steel, each of whose hollow tubes earned his death-warrant; a look upon his face before which the boldest, though they held his life in their hands and at their mercy, quailed; he knew how he should save his trust and his papers, though he knew that his life must pay the forfeit. He calmly watched the levelled rifles, and a half smile passed over his face;—they had brought eight against one!—it was a distinction, at least, to take so much killing.
"The devil will never give in!" swore with savage Hungarian oaths the farthest of the band. Seize him, and bind him!—we don't want his blood."
"Take the papers, and gag him. Carl is right; we want them, not him," muttered another, in whose southern German the keen ear of him whose life they balanced caught the foreign accent of a Gallician.
One who seemed the leader of the gang laughed—a rolling, mellow, harmonious laugh, which thrilled through the blood of Erceldoune as menace and challenge had never done: he had heard it a few nights before in the gaslit salon of the Parisian cafe.
"Basta, basta! 'Too many words, my masters.' Kill the Border Eagle and strip him afterwards! His beak won't peck when he's shot down!"
"Stop—stop!" muttered a milder Sicilian. "Give him his choice; we only want the despatches."
"The papers then, or we fire!"
The moon shone clearer and whiter down into the ravine, while they pressed nearer and nearer till the half-circle of steel glittered close against him, within a yard of his breast;—and the Greek who in the Cafe Minuit had lamented so softly the prosaic fate of the violet bonbons, pressed closest of all. He stood quietly, with no change in his attitude, and his broken wrist dripping blood on the stone at his feet; the dark scorn of fiery passions had lowered on his face, stormy, dangerous, menacing as the wrath that lightens up a lion's eyes, while on his lips was a laugh—a laugh for the coward caution of his assassins, the womanish cruelty which compassed him with such timorous might of numbers, fearing one man unarmed and wounded!
"Death, or surrender!"
The cry echoed again, loud and hoarse now as the hounds' bay, baffled and getting furious for blood.
His back was reared against the rock; his left arm pressed against his breast, holding to him the seals that were his trust; his eyes looked down upon them steadily as he answered:
"Fire!"
And while his voice, calm and unfaltering, gave the word of command for his own death-volley, with a swift sadden gesture, unlooked-for and unarrested by them, he lifted his left hand, and hurled far away through the gloom, till they sank with a loud splash into the bed of the swollen rushing river, the white bag of the English despatches;—lost for ever in the deep gorge, and whirled on into darkness with the passage of foaming waters, where no spy could reach and no foe could rob them.
Then, as the ravenous yell of baffled force and infuriated passion shook the echoes of the hills, the report of the rifles rang through the night with sullen murderous peal, and Erceldoune fell as one dead.
All was still in the heart of the forest.
The snowy summits of the Carpathians gleamed white in the moonlight; the cry of the wild dog or the growl of the wild boar, the screech of the owl or the rush of the hat's wing, alone broke the silence; above the dark silent earth the skies were cloudless, and studded with countless stars, whose radiance glistened here and there through dense black shadow, on moss, and boulders, and cavernous gorges, and torrents plunging downward through the night. In the narrow channel of the defile, with gnarled pines above and waters roaring in their pent-up bed below, there lay the stiffened corpse of the mare, and across her body, bathed in her blood and in his own, with his head fallen back, and his face turned upward as the starlight fell upon it, was stretched the Queen's Messenger, where they had left him for dead.
The night had passed on and the hours stolen apace, till the stars had grown large in the heavens, and the morning planet risen in the east before the dawn; and he had lain there, as lifeless and motionless as the sorrel beneath him, through all the watches of the night which parted the sunset of one day from the daybreak of the next His right arm, broken and nerveless, was flung across the neck of the mare, as though, Arab-like, his last thought as he fell had been of the brute-friend whom he had lost, and who had died for him; the blood had poured from a deep chest wound, till the black velvet of his riding-coat was soaked through and through, and the mosses and the grasses were dyed with the stream that bore his life away; his face was stern yet serene, like many faces of the dead upon a battle-field, and only a deep-drawn laboured breath, that quivered at long intervals through all his frame, showed that existence had not wholly ceased with the murderous volley which had brought him to the earth, as his own shot had brought the kingly fearless strength of the golden eagle reeling downward to its fate. Either the aim of his assassins had been uncertain from the fury with which they had levelled and fired when they had seen their errand baffled, and the despatches flung beyond all reach into the mountain gorge, or they had been blinded by the flickering shadows of the moon, and the lust of their vengeance on him, for two shots alone had touched him out of the five which had been fired at him. One ball had pierced his breast, and brought him down senseless, and, to all semblance, lifeless; it had been aimed by the leader of the band who had trifled with his ice, and mourned over the conserve of violets in Paris a few nights before. The other bullet, which had struck him in the chest, and would have cut its way straight through the lungs, had been turned aside by the solid silver of his meerschaum, in whose bowl the ball was bedded, though the force of its concussion would have stretched him insensible without a wound. He had fallen as one dead, and they had left him for such in the narrow defile, hastening themselves to leave the pine-forest far behind them, and put the range of the Carpathians between them and Moldavia, taking their own wounded with them, and plunging into the recesses of the woods, where all pursuit could be baffled, all detection defied. Whether they were mountain banditti, or masked nobles, or insurgent conspirators, those vast solitudes would never reveal, since the deed would tell no tales and bear no witness; his assassination, if ever known, would be traced, they deemed, to gipsies or charcoal-burners, while the odds were a million to one that the fate of the English State courier would never be heard of, but would remain in the shroud of an impenetrable mystery, whilst he lay in the lonely and untrodden ravine, till the bears and the vultures left his bones to whiten unburied when they had sated their hunger on the sinewy limbs of the man who had fallen to avoid the surrender of his honour and his trust.
Darkness closes thus over the fate of many; he is "missing," and we know no more.
Nearly lifeless thus, Erceldoune had remained through the long hours where his assassins had left him; about him only the shrieking of the owls, the sough of the winds among the pines, and the distant roar of the beasts of prey, to whom his enemies had trusted for the completion and the burial of their work. Weaker men would have succumbed to less danger than he had often brooked and passed through scathless; and even now the athletic strength within him refused to perish. The flowing of the blood had stopped, a laboured sigh now and then gave sign of vitality, though not of consciousness; then, as the night was waning, a shudder ran through all his frame, and his eyes unclosed, looking upward, without light or sense, to the starlit vault above.
He remembered nothing.
The deep skies and "the stars in their courses" whirled giddily above him; the pine-boughs flickered in phantom shapes before his sight; the sounds of the winds and of the falling torrents smote dully on his ear; he had no sense but of suffocation from the congealed blood upon his chest, and the sharp agony of every breath; he wondered dimly, dreamily, who he was, and where he lay. An intense thirst parched his throat and oppressed his lungs—a thirst he suffered from without knowing what the torture could be—and the plunge and splash of the cascades in the gorge below filled his brain with vague thronging images of cool still lakes, of rushing brooks, of deep brown tarns among his native moorlands, and through them all he stood ever up to the lips in the cold delicious waters, yet ever powerless to stoop and taste one drop! The sweep of a night-bird's wing touched his forehead as it flew low under the drooped pine-branches; at the touch consciousness slowly and confusedly awoke; the night ceased to whirl round him in a chaos of shadow, the planets grew clear and familiar, and looked down on him from the dizzy mists circling above. By sheer instinct he sought to raise his right hand; it was powerless, and as he stretched out his left arm he felt the chill, stiffened body of his lost mare, and the grasses w«t with her blood and his own; then thought and recollection awoke from the mists of death, and he remembered all.
He knew that he was lying there wounded unto death, beyond all appeal for aid, all hope of succour, powerless to drive from him the frailest insect that with the morning light should begin the £ell work of oorruption and destruction, alone in his last hour in the desolation of the Carpathians, with no companion save the beast of prey, no watcher but the carrion kite.
Dread of death he had never known; there was no such coward weakness in him now, in his worst extremity, when he knew that he was dying, in the best years of his manhood, slaughtered by the baseness of treacherous assassination, alone in the pent defile where his murder had been planned, and where no human step would ever come, except it were that of some mountain plunderer, who would strip off the linen and the velvet that the birds of prey would have left untouched, while his bones should lie there through summer drought and winter storm unburied, unlamented, unavenged. Fear was not on him even now in his dying hour, but a mortal sense of loneliness that his life had never known stole over him as he wakened in the hush of the forest night, paralysed, powerless, strengthless, felled in his full force, slain, like the golden eagle, by a single shot. The heavens, studded with their stars, looked chill and pitiless; the rocks towered upward in the moonlight, shutting him out from all the peopled slumbering world; no sound smote the stillness save the distant sullen moan of the brutes seeking their prey, and the winds sweeping and wailing through the endless aisles of pines;—he died in solitude.
The night wore on; a profound and awful silence reigned around, only broken by the growl of wolves or the scream of foxes from their distant haunts; the ravening cry home on the blast of those who, with each second which passed away, might scent blood from afar off, and track it in their hunger, and come down to rend, and tear, and devour, finishing the work of slaughter. He heard that sullen bay all through the night where he lay, across the dead mare motionless; he could not have stirred a limb, though the fangs of the wild boar had been at his throat, or the wolves in a troop been upon him. Hope or thought of succour he had none; he was in the deep heart of the mountains, where none could come; and her knew too well the lore of desert and camp not to know that all chance of life was over, that his last hour was here, and that if the vulture and the bear did not track him out, he would die of the loss of blood alone; or that if his frame bore up against the exhaustion of his wounds through the day which would soon dawn, he would perish but the more slowly, and the more agonisingly, of famine and of thirst.
Time wore on; the stars grew large as the morning drew near, and his eyes gazed upward at them where he lay in the pass of the defile; a thousand nights on southern seas, in tropic lands, in eastern aisles of palm, through phosphor-glittering waters while his ship cleft her way, through the white gleam of snow steppes while the sleigh bells chimed, through the torchlit glades of forests while the German boar or the French stag was hunted to his lair, drifted to memory as the moon shone down on him through the break in the massed pine-boughs;—for he had ever loved the mere sense and strength of life; all
"the wild joys of living, the leaping from rock to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool river shock
Of a plunge in a pool's living water,—the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair."
And he knew that this glory was dead in him for ever, and that when those stars rose on another night, and shed their brightness upon earth and ocean, forest and sea, his eyes would be blind to their light and behold them no more, since he would be stricken out from the world of the living.
At last,—it seemed that an eternity had come and gone,—the day reached him, dawning from the splendour of Asia far away.
The light streamed in the east, the darkness of the shadows was broken by the first rays of warmth, the night birds fled to their roost, and above the clouds rose the sun, bathing the sleeping world in its golden gladness, and shining full on the snow peaks of the mountains. The forest-life awoke; the song of countless birds rose on the silence, the hum of myriad insects murmured beneath the grasses, the waters of innumerable torrents glistened in the sunbeams;—and, alone in the waking and rejoicing world, he lay, dying.
About him, where never sunlight came, were dank grasses, and the gloomy foliage of pines, but above-head, far aloft through the walls of granite, was the blue and cloudless sky of a summer dawn. His eyes looked upward to it heavily, and with the film gathering fast over them; in his physical anguish, in his sore extremity, there were still beauty and solace in the day.
Yet, as he gazed, the heavens were darkened, the sunlit morning became more loathsome than all the solitude and darkness of the night; wakened in the dawn and poised in air, drawn thither by the scent of blood, he saw the flocks of carrion-birds, the allies whom the assassins trusted to destroy all trace of their work, the keepers of the vigil of the dead! Cleaving the air and wheeling in the light, they gathered there, vulture and kite, raven and rock-eagle, coming with the sunrise to their carrion feast, sweeping downward into the defile with shrill and hideous clamour till they alit beside him, in their ravenous greed, upon the body of the mare, striking their beaks into her eyes and whetting their taste in her flesh, rending and lacerating, and disputing their prey.
Thus he had seen them, many a time, making their feast on the lion or camel of the East; and a sickness of loathing came upon him, and a horror unutterable;—bound in the bonds of death, and powerless to lift his arm against them, he must lie, half living and half dead, whilst the hungry hordes tore at his heart.
A cry broke from him, loud and terrible—a shout for help, where help there could be none. Its echo pealing from the rocks, scared and scattered the ravening birds one instant from their lust; they wheeled and circled in the sunlit air, then settled once more on their spoil.
A single vulture, driven from the rest, poised avove him—waiting. Looking upward, he saw the bird, with its dark wings outstretched, sailing in rings round and round in the sunlight glare, impatient and athirst, its glittering eyes fixed on him—the watcher and the harbinger of death.
By the sheer force of animal instinct, strength for the moment was restored; he sprang up to drive from off him the murderous beak that would seek his life-blood, the carrion-greed that would wrench out his eyes whilst yet they saw the day! He leapt forward, striking wildly and blindly at the black shadow of the hovering bird;—at the action the wound opened, the hemorrhage broke out afresh—he fell back senseless.