Dariel: A Romance of Surrey

CHAPTER XL

TWAIN MORE THAN TWIN

In spite of all anxiety, it was impossible to be anxious for the moment, in the company of this extraordinary fellow. Doubt is the most hostile and hateful element to all human pleasure; and doubt was at once kicked out from the society of Captain Strogue. Certainty stood in its place, as firm as – well, I might say as firm as Strogue's own nose, for I can think of nothing firmer. Short and thick and straight it was, like a buttress to support his bulky forehead, and keep his bright and defiant eyes from glaring into one another; for they had a little cast towards it. Certainty also in the strongest point of all – that whoever you might be, or wherever you had been, never till now had you come into contact – or collision, if you liked that sort of thing – with a member of your race so far above all little weakness, and yet so ready to participate in it, if you would pay the bill for him, as your new but true friend, Bartholomew Strogue.

"Imar is an exceedingly fine chap," he said, as he lit a long clay pipe, after a dinner which impressed me with the truth that the more a man sees the more he feeds; "you are too young, friend Cranleigh, to have any powers of reflection. But you may take it from me, that there are only two ways now of being fit to consider yourself a fine chap. Of course I don't talk of nincompoops, who think themselves wonderful always. What I mean is in common-sense; and there you can only be above the ruck, by despising the human race, as I do; or loving it, as Imar does. I have found nothing in them to admire, though I have seen the inner side of many celebrated men; and as for loving them – well, I suppose the Lord puts that into you, and bungs up your eyes. The man who can do it is the happiest of his race, and a great deal too good to be left among them. No fool can do it; for a fool always goes by facts."

"Sûr Imar is the largest-minded man I ever knew," I broke in upon Strogue with some indignation. "He looks at the best side, as all good people do. He likes human nature, because he judges by himself."

"Contempt is at the bottom of it. Amiable contempt, if you like to call it so. The contempt of an equitable mind, that knows the faults of its owner, and loving them, makes allowance for the like in others. Bless your heart, Cranleigh, I like people well enough; but I despise them, because I despise myself. Come now, that is fair play. I am not argumentative; no man of action ever is. But that view of the case is a puzzle to you."

"Not a bit," I answered, with a smile of modest triumph; "you despise mankind, because you think they are like you. Sûr Imar loves them, because he thinks they are like him!"

"Bravo! I like a man who tries an honest rap at me. Bat Strogue never takes offence at truth, because he very seldom gets the chance. But I did not fetch you here to argue with you. I believe that I can be of service to you, very good service, such as you have rendered me; though perhaps you would not have pulled me out, if you had known who it was you got hold of?"

"Yes, I would; and with all the greater pleasure. I thought that you were a decent Englishman; though I saw you in very bad company, that day!"

"A decent Englishman! One of the most celebrated travellers of the age! Such is fame. Wait until my book comes out. I might have been the lion of the season, if I liked. What are S. and G. and L.? What have they done in comparison with me? However, let them have it for the moment. Bad company, Cranleigh? You are quite right there. Many scurvy tricks have I been played; but none to come near what that blackguard has done. The fool, the besotted fool he must be. I was told you were far away in Yorkshire, and engaged to be married to a lady there. Nothing of the sort? If I had known that, I would have come down to see you. He thinks he has got everything his own way; and he has thrown me over on the strength of it. Much more than that – much worse than that. Oh, what a pretty mistake he has made! Nobody ever fooled Bat Strogue yet, without paying out for it. Things are gone far, very far, my friend; but we may be even with them yet. I see things now that I never dreamed of. But tell me first of your own share in them."

I told him briefly what had happened to myself. How after winning a pledge for life from Dariel, and the approval of her father, I had been suddenly called away to the wedding of my oldest friend, and had been kept there for several days by the sudden distress of the family. Then as soon as I could get away without inhumanity I had hastened home, and been utterly astonished to find the valley empty, and no message left for me, except that cold letter from the man who had been so kind. And then I told him also what I knew from Signor Nicolo, and his black suspicions as to Hafer's object.

"It is impossible for them to be too black," Strogue replied with an ominous smile. "Sûr Imar's life is not worth the lump of sugar melting under this glass pestle. Hafer's heart is vile enough, but a viler heart, and a brain ten times as resolute and as deep as his, are set upon poor Sûr Imar's death. I see it all now with the help of what you tell me. I took it in quite another light before. There is one thing still that I cannot understand. I fell out with that miscreant first, because I found that he wanted me to lend a hand to get you put out of the way, as if I were one of his tribesmen. What puzzles me beyond everything is that he never tried it."

"He did try it, and a very narrow shave I had. It was the very night after I saw you with him." Then I told Strogue the particulars of that cowardly and cold-blooded attempt, and Stepan's conclusion about it.

"It is impossible to doubt it. The murderous sneak! One thing I can tell you, young man; that marriage of your friend has saved your family the expenses of your funeral. Two days more in that part of the world would have sent you to your last account. He would never have shot at you again; such is their superstition, that he believes you invulnerable by bullet; but he would have put a long dagger into you, springing from a corner in the dark. At that game you would have no chance with him, even if you were on the outlook. You are stronger than he is, I daresay; but he is the most lissome fellow I have ever met, and I have handled a good many twisters and skippers in the way of savages. And to think that I should be almost trodden into dust, like the emmets in a hymn I used to learn, by a trumpery lot of common cockneys. It was contempt of the enemy that did it, a thing that generally ensures defeat. None of that now, that won't do now. Cranleigh, we shall have to do all we know; and the chances are that it will never be enough. It is not for Hafer, so much as that fiend of a woman, who stands behind him. One of the worst that ever walked this earth, and that is no small order, I can tell you. A bad woman is blacker than a man, as many shades as gas-tar is than Stockholm pitch."

"But who is it? Who is it? You have hinted that before. What woman in the world would hurt Sûr Imar, who looks upon them all as angels, in the reaction from his great mistake?"

"I will tell you who it is, by-and-by; and you will be surprised a little. But first a few questions; and very important. The luck has been terribly adverse. Most of all in this, that I should not have known, until it was too late to stop him, the scoundrelly schemes of this Hafer, and his abrupt cut-and-run. But if I have made a mistake, so has he. Bat Strogue is hard to beat, young man; though he thinks so little of himself. But now, first of all, is there any chance of catching Stepan? He is a thick, of course; as all faithful servants are. You could not make head or tail of him; but I know their scabby lingo. Do you know what ship he goes by?"

"Not I. The fact is that I was quite upset, and felt that being so thrown over I had no right to pry into their arrangements. All the heavy goods were going by some cargo-steamer. Blackwall was on the canvas-wrappings. That is all I know about it."

"Then we are too late for that. Those heavy boats sail on a Thursday. But the one point in our favour is that Sûr Imar goes first to Petersburg. He has good friends there; but in spite of that, if I know anything of Russian ways, it will take at least three months for him to get a stroke of business done. And he will not want to take his daughter to her new surroundings, when the furious winter rages there. His enemies thought to settle him, this side of Christmas, and have three months to gorge him and hide the spoil, while all the passes are blocked with snow. But they have overplayed their game, and they never dreamed of that stroke of his, which may give us time to save him. He has no idea of their plot, of course, but has acted with his usual simplicity. One more question – can we obtain any idea of what goes on there, through Nickols, or any of his jolly miners? I am sorry for them. What a dance they will have on Kazbek, with frost-bitten toes! But they can't get away now, that's one comfort."

"How can I tell? I know nothing about communication with those deserts. That is more in your line, and you know the country."

"There are not many countries beyond my knowledge," the British Pioneer replied, with a gaze as if the whole world lay before it; "but even I cannot always quote all the breaks and jerks of wire and post. However, I can easily find out. They were laying a line to Kutais, I know; but I don't know whether it is working, and if it is it won't help us much, when all the tracks are impassable. One more question; young man, excuse it, but are you still nuts upon that lovely girl, who is too good for any but an Englishman? I don't hold with matrimony, mind. So you need not mind saying if you have slipped off."

"I wish she were equally nuts upon me," I replied with a glance of contempt, which should have pricked him. "But she has vanished without even a good word. I shall never hear anything more of her."

"Stuff! Remember – 'faint heart,' etc. She has been humbugged with lies about you. And I know the pride of all that race. You shall have her yet, if you show pluck; and you won't be like yourself, if you fail there. But you want to know who the dark enemy is, the one who is resolved to have Sûr Imar's life, as well as everything else that belongs to him. Very well, it is his own twin sister, Marva."

"What! Marva, the widow of Rakhan, that rascally Prince of the Ossets, whom Imar very justly slew! So justly, that even he felt no compunction. Marva, who knew of her husband's falseness!"

"That's the woman, and a nice specimen she is. I know one or two fine things about her, from what Hafer, her own son, let out. Ah, she is a deep one. It is a lucky thing for Imar that she sent Hafer, instead of coming to manage the whole affair herself."

"You forget one thing, Captain Strogue," I interrupted, for this view of the Princess did not tally well with Sûr Imar's own account. "She pitied him, there can be no doubt about that, after his terrible calamity, though as yet she did not know the worst. She pitied him, and proved it by her distress at the death of his little boy Origen. And when a woman once lets pity in, there is no room for malice in her breast. I read that the other day, in a very great writer."

"I don't know anything about that. I only know that she hates him. All the wreck of her life she ascribes to him, because he would not pay her portion. She has been brought up very differently from him, you must remember. And when she was so kind about that poor little devil, she had not the least idea that her husband that very day had fallen by the hand of Imar. Very likely she loved her husband all the more, without knowing it herself, for his behaviour to her. Some women do, there is no question about that; and there is queer morality in the Caucasus. She hates Imar, with all the power of her heart, which is anything but a weak one; and even if she loved him, she would be bound to kill him; for the blood-feud is between them."

"You talk of it as if you were counting coppers; whereas it makes my blood run cold, cold and then hot, as if it boiled with a shudder."

"Ah, but I have seen the world," said Strogue.

"Very well, then tell me this. In the name of common-sense – if such a faculty is known among such brutes – why did not Hafer put a bullet or a dagger into Imar, as he has had fifty chances and more of doing, instead of taking a steady but unlucky pop at me? Explain that, Captain, if you can."

"Nothing is easier, friend Cranleigh. In the first place, he is not the one to do it, without ruin to their scheme; for though he might marry Dariel, after that there would always be something between them. And what would make it useless for him to do it, is that the blood must be shed, as you might say, for the sprinkling of the doorstep. To kill him in England would not count, because nobody would be sure of it. Hafer might have made a hit, but he could not have scored it, and the revenues would not have fallen in for years."

"It makes me sick to hear you talk." I had no intention of being rude; but to see this man making balance of lives, as a grocer puts chocolates into the scale, was beyond my gifts at present. "Strogue, you make me hate you."

"My dear boy, you should not do that. I admire fine British indignation; and I had a lot of it at your age. I am not free from it now, by any means. But it must be governed and guided, when we deal with inferior races. A Frenchman never discovers this, and therefore he cannot colonise. He lets out his natural ardour at brutality, while we accommodate ours, and fetch it into better purpose. You must not suppose that I sympathise with a savage, because I do not shoot him."

I begged his pardon; for I knew nothing of such things. And he made allowance for my outburst; while I thought that I would rather play the French than the English part, in such a case – which was far from my usual sentiment.

"You need not make a fuss," he said, "all these things are an allegory. The wisest of men has been young and green at some time. Bat Strogue is not the boy to sing for starch in bibs and tuckers. Cranleigh, you may look at me, and some day you will tell your grandson – 'Ah, you should have seen Bat Strogue! An Englishman of the old sort he was. Forty-six inches round the chest, and not a lie to be found in him.' Give me your hand, young man, I like you."

It occurred to me – so mean our nature is – that the brandy-and-water, which he quaffed like milk, was beginning to perturb a spirit even so ubiquitous. But his gaze was clear and bright as it had not been in the morning, and his voice impressive.

"You have only to go home, and wait. I have a friend who is on his way at this moment to St. Petersburg. I shall telegraph to him to-morrow, to keep his eye on Sûr Imar. He will have no trouble about that, the man being so conspicuous. I shall know when Imar thinks of leaving, and then we must look sharp indeed. You want to save him; so do I. And more than that, to blow to pieces the plans of this vile Hafer. He has treated me infamously; I will not bother you with that now. He little knows what Bat Strogue is. I might have starved, but for Jemmy Nickols. Just for the present I am in cash; but money never sticks to me. If the sinews of war fail, I shall not scruple to ask your help, though I know that you are not a millionaire, George Cranleigh. But I am a man of honour, sir. Though not a swell, I am no sponge. And I have some chance of a good windfall which is keeping me in London now. 'Never say die,' is my motto, sir; and if I get what I ought, I will lend you a hundred pounds as soon as look at you. Strogue is of Yorkshire family, sir, and a Yorkshireman always does what he says. But that Hafer is a cur, as mean a cur, and as fierce a cur, as was ever begotten by Cerberus. He made a scoundrel rob me of five hundred pounds, by false cards; as I found out just too late, and they split the swag between them. A burglar is a trump in comparison with them; and he has taken out young Petheril instead of me. Cranleigh, do you ask me why? Then I'll tell you in two words; because he can get him cheaper, sir, and because he has got no principle. Strogue must travel like a gentleman, as he is by birth and behaviour, and all that; Strogue maintains his rank, sir. You try to shove him into any skunky corner to save a few copeks in passage-money, and he lets you know – ay, you soon find that out, and you won't forget it in a hurry. But this fellow Petheril, that's his name, he would make any skunk's hole skunkier; and you wouldn't care to touch him with a pair of tongs. And another reason I can tell you too, Petheril doesn't know the little things about that beauty of a Marva, which have come to my ears, though I never saw her. Shows what my reputation is – 'Bartholomew Strogue, The World,' would find me from any post-office in it. Though when you send me a hundred-pound note, it would be as well to be more precise. But I am not proud of that; it is a nuisance to me. I open a hundred letters, when I find myself in the humour, and there is not a penny in one of them; but they all want me to do something."

Fearing that he was becoming inclined to go off on the rove, as great travellers must, and being in a hurry about Stoneman and Grace, I asked him to say in a few words how Prince Hafer came under his charge in London.

"Simply because of my taking a little turn into the Caucasus," Captain Strogue replied, as if he had gone off into a side-walk in some Hampstead villa garden. "I was tired of the monotony on the northern side of the Caspian, where the people are too much alike, with plenty of barbarous customs; but when you have seen one, you know them all. There is not the variety which can be found in the mountain regions only. In a very rugged land, the human race cannot get so confoundedly chummy as to take the variety out of them, like peas in a pod perhaps a thousand miles long. The Caucasus is quite a small affair, compared to the Andes, or Himalaya, or half-a-dozen other mountain-chains. But it beats them all in this, that it was peopled earlier, or at any rate more thickly. And there the fellows are; no two lots at all alike; and if it was the cradle of the human race, as the ethnologists used to tell us, it was lucky that we tumbled out of it. Mind, I don't run them down; there are some of the noblest samples, so far as the body is concerned, that you could find on the face of the earth. And many of noble intelligence too, but with little chance of increasing it. As a rule, they hate work, both of body and of mind; and without proper work, we all relapse into monkeys, or advance into devils. You say, 'Strogue, then which are you?' You were longing to ask it, but too polite. Very well, Cranleigh, I am neither. I have done as much hard work as any man living. And I hope to do more, if my life holds out, although my joints are getting rickety. But my rule is – either work, or play. And I never mix the two together."

"But," I inquired, to bring him back to the point, for he seemed to be rather fond of talking about himself, "what was the reason that Hafer, if he was sent to fetch his uncle back, was not despatched to the camp at once, the old place in the valley, I mean, where his countrymen had taken up their abode. That would have saved all the London expenses, and the need for a guide and interpreter, and a lot of other trouble, as well as kept him out of mischief."

"True, my son; but it would have ruined the whole scheme. Hafer's nature would soon have shown itself, for his temper is simply horrible; kinjals would have flashed in the Surrey sun, and no Dariel would there have been for him. Even as it was, he contrived sometimes to make himself unpleasant to her. You remember our catching your little friend Allai, and putting some strain upon his loyalty? That was to learn a few useful facts from him, especially one about the lady and her father, and some points as to your proceedings. If you had not interfered, we should very soon have succeeded, for there is no great power of endurance in them. No, no. His mother knows too well what Hafer is, to quarter him on a quiet gentleman. And he never would have stood it. He came here to have his fling, quite as much as to carry out her plot – and a jolly wild time he has had of it. There is no steady love in a man like that, any more than there was in his father Rakhan."

"Foul scum of the earth, low blackguard! How dare he come near Dariel?" For the moment I lost my self-command. "How can I wait, Strogue? Am I to sit and count the time, while Imar and his daughter are going to their doom? Why not set off for Petersburg and try to keep them there? Or at any rate warn them, and go back with them, if they must go, and face that wicked woman and her despicable son. That seems to me to be the better plan by far. It would cost a lot of money; but I would beg, borrow, steal – "

"Won't do. You must follow my directions. In the first place, you forget what a cloud you are under. Probably Sûr Imar and his daughter would refuse to see you if you followed them. Or if you got over that difficulty, would they listen to your story? You know nothing about Marva's scheme, except through me, and I have no proofs. It is all suspicion, or inference from little slips of Hafer's and so on, and what I have heard since he departed. Mind you, I know it, as well as if I saw it; but there is nothing I could lay before Imar, to convince him that his sister intends to have him murdered, and to make her son the Master of Karthlos, and Chief of that branch of the Lesghians. Be in no hurry, my good young friend. I shall prick you up quite soon enough. It is the jerking that spoils everything. We were a nobler race five hundred years ago than we are now; because we took our time to think, and mind kept time with body. These fellows also take their time. They learn it from the way the snow falls; and they know that the snow tells a deeper tale than fifty thousand thunderstorms. In the Caucasus a tragedy – and they have no such thing as comedy – goes into ten acts at least, and lasts for generations."