Under the Red Dragon: A Novel
when you have not a moment to lose?" she asked, almost with
irritation. "But hush--O, hush! here is some one."
At that moment Ivan Yourivitch, with excitement on his usually stolid
Russian visage, entered the room almost on tiptoe, and whispered
something to her in haste, while his eyes were fixed the while on me.
"Ah!--thank you, Ivan, thank you--that is well!" she said, and turning
to me, she added, hurriedly and energetically, "If you would be free,
and choose, it may be, between liberty or death, you have not another
instant to lose! Ivan tells me that the crew of an English man-of-war
boat is at this moment filling casks with water at the well of St.
Basil on the beach yonder. Thrice has that ship been there for the
same purpose; and I was watching for her when you came to me on the
terrace, as I heard of her being off Alupka this morning."
"Your thoughts, then, were of me?" said I, tenderly.
"For you, rather; but away, and God be with you, sir!"
I lifted the window softly, and across the moonlit park that stretched
away towards the seashore she pointed to where four tall cypresses
rose like dark giants against the clear and starry sky, and where, at
the distance of a mile or little more, the white marble dome of the
well could be distinctly seen between them, its polished surface
shining like a star above a sombre belt of shrubbery.
"There is the sound of hoofs! The Cossacks, your escort, are coming
Away, sir; you cannot miss the well, though you may the boat!" said
Valerie, with her hands clasped and her dark eyes dilated; and as she
spoke the clank of galloping horses coming up the valley (and, as I
fancied, the cracking of the whips carried by the Cossacks at their
bridles) could be heard distinctly in the clear frosty air.
"If I had but my sword and pistols!" said I, with my teeth clenched.
"You do not require them. Farewell!
"Adieu, Valerie--adieu!"
I passionately kissed her lips and her cheek, too, ere she could
prevent me, waved my hand to old Yourivitch, vaulted over the window,
dropped from the balustrade of the terrace into the park, and at the
risk of being seen by some of the household crossed it with all the
speed I could exert in the direction that led to where I knew that the
well--a structure erected by Prince Woronzow--stood on a lonely part
of the shore. More than once did I look back at the lofty façade of
the beautiful château, with its four towers and onion-shaped domes of
shining copper, and all its stately windows that glittered in the
light of a cloudless moon; and just as I drew near the belt of
shrubbery, I could see the dark figures of mounted men encircling the
terrace! A fugitive, in danger of losing honour and life together! Was
this the end of my daydreams in Yalta? Once more I turned, and
hastened to where the four cypress-trees towered skyward.
"Ahoy! who comes there?" cried a somewhat gruff voice, in English,
accompanied by the sound of a slap on the butt of a musket; and then
the squat sturdy figure of a seaman, posted as sentinel, appeared
among the bushes, with an infantry pouch, belts, and bayonet worn
above his short pea-jacket.
"A friend!" I replied, mechanically, yet not without a glow of sincere
pleasure.
"Stand there, till I have a squint at you," replied Jack, cocking his
musket and giving a glance at the cap; but I was too much excited to
parley with him, and continued to advance, saying,
"I am an officer--Captain Hardinge, of the 23rd, a prisoner escaping
from the enemy."
"All right, sir--glad to see you; heave ahead," he replied, half
cocking his piece again.
"Who commands your party?"
"Lieutenant Jekyll, sir," said the seaman, saluting now, when he saw
me fully in the moonlight.
"Of what ship?"
"The Southesk, sir, of twenty guns."
"Let me pass to your rear. He must instantly shove off his boat, as
the Cossacks are within a mile of us--at yonder house."
In a minute more I reached the party at the well, twelve seamen and as
many marines under an officer, who had a brace of pistols in his belt,
and carried his sword drawn. They were in the act of carrying the last
cask of water into a ship's cutter, which lay alongside a ridge of
rock that ran into the sea, forming a species of natural pier or
jetty, close by the white marble fountain.
I soon made myself known, and ere long found myself seated among new
friends, and out on the shining water, which bubbled up at the bow and
foamed under the counter as the oarsmen bent to their task, and their
steadily and regularly feathered blades flashed in the silver sheen.
The shore receded fast; the belt of shrubs grew lower and lower; and
then the glittering domes of the distant mansion, which was ever in my
mind and memory to be associated with Valerie Volhonski, rose
gradually on our view, with the snow-clad range of Yaila in the
background. But all were blended in haze and distance by the time we
came sheering alongside H.M.S. Southesk, the water-tank of which had,
fortunately for me, been empty, thus forcing her crew to have recourse
to the well of St. Basil, by which circumstance I more than probably
escaped the fate that ultimately overtook, but deservedly, the
luckless Hawkesby Guilfoyle.
In the morning, under easy sail and half steam, the ship was off
Balaclava, where I saw the old Genoese fort that commands its
entrance, the white houses of the Arnaouts shaded by tall poplars, and
the sea breaking in foam upon its marble bluffs; and there the captain
kindly put me ashore in the first boat that left the ship.
It was not until long after the Crimean war, that by the merest
chance, through an exchanged prisoner--a private of our 68th
Foot--when having occasion to employ him as a commissionnaire in
London, I learned what the fate of Guilfoyle was. En route to
Kharkoff, he was run through the heart and killed by the lance of a
Cossack of his escort, who alleged that he was attempting to escape;
but my informant more shrewdly suspected that it was to obtain quiet
possession of his ring--the paste diamond which had figured so often
in his adventures, real and fictitious.
CHAPTER LII.--BEFORE SEBASTOPOL STILL.
On the 28th of March, I found myself once more in my old tent, and
seeking hard to keep myself warm at the impromptu stove, constructed
by my faithful old servant, poor Jack Evans. I was received with
astonishment, and, I am pleased to say, with genuine satisfaction by
the regiment, even by those who had flattered themselves that they had
gained promotion by my supposed demise. I was welcomed by all, from
the Lieutenant-colonel down to little Dicky Roll, the junior drummer,
and for the first day my tent was besieged by old friends.
I had come back among them as from the dead; but more than one man,
whose name figured in the lists as missing, turned up in a similar
fashion during the war. My baggage had all been sent to Balaclava, the
railway to which was now partly in operation; my letters and papers
had been carefully sealed up in black wax by Philip Caradoc, and with
other private and personal mementos of me, packed for transmission to
Sir Madoc Lloyd, as my chief friend of whom he knew. Many came, I have
said, to welcome me; but I missed many a familiar face, especially
from among my own company, as the Fusileers had more than once been
severely engaged in the trenches.
Caradoc had been wounded in the left hand by a rifle-ball; Charley
Gywnne greeted me with his head in bandages, the result of a Cossack
sabre-cut; Dynely, the adjutant, had also been wounded; so had Mostyn,
of the Rifles, and Tom Clavell, of the 19th, when passing through "the
Valley of Death." Sergeant Rhuddlan, of my company, had just rejoined,
after having a ball in the chest (even Carneydd Llewellyn had lost a
horn): all who came to see me had something to tell of dangers dared
and sufferings undergone. All were in uniforms that were worn to rags;
but all were hearty as crickets, though sick of the protracted siege,
and longing to carry Sebastopol with the cold steel.
"How odd, my dear old fellow, that we should all think you drowned,
and might have been wearing crape on our sleeves, but for the lack
thereof in camp, and the fact that mourning has gone out of fashion
since death is so common among us; while all the time you have been
mewed up (by the Cossacks in the Baidar Valley) within some forty
miles of us; and so stupidly, too!" said Caradoc, as we sat late in
the night over our grog and tobacco in his hut.
"Not so stupidly, after all," I replied, while freely assisting myself
to his cavendish.
"How?"
"There was _such_ a girl there, Phil!" I added, with a sigh.
"Oho! where?"
"At Yalta."
"Woronzow's palace, or château?"
"Yes; but why wink so knowingly?"
"So, after all, you found there was balm in Gilead?" said he,
laughing. "You must admit then, if she impressed you so much, that
all your bitter regrets about a certain newspaper paragraph were a
little overdone, and that I was a wise prophet? And what was this
girl--Russian, Tartar, Greek, a Karaite Jewess, or what?"
"A pure Russian."
"Handsome?"
"Beyond any I have ever seen, beautiful!"
"Whew! even beyond _la belle_--"
"There, don't mention her at present, please," said I, with a little
irritation, which only made him laugh the more.
"If you were love-making at Yalta, with three lance-prods in you,
there was no malingering anyhow."
"I should think not."
"And so she was engaged to be married to that Russian bear, Tolstoff,"
he added, after I had told him the whole of my affair with Valerie.
"Yes," said I, with an unmistakable sigh.
"I think we are both destined to live and die bachelors," he resumed,
in a bantering way; for though Phil had in these matters undergone, at
Craigaderyn and elsewhere, "the baptism of fire" himself, he was not
the less inclined to laugh at me; for of all sorrows, those of love
alone excite the risible propensities.
"And so, Phil, the world's a kaleidoscope--always shifting."
"Not always _couleur de rose_, though?"
"And I am here again!"
"Thank God!" said he, as we again shook hands, "Faith, Harry, you must
have as many lives as a cat, and so you may well have as many loves as
Don Juan; but, _entre nous_, and excuse me, she seems to have been a
bit of a flirt, your charming Valerie."
"How--why do you think so?"
"From all you have told me; moreover every woman to be attractive,
should be a little so," replied Caradoc, curling his heavy brown
moustache.
"I don't think she was; indeed, I am certain she was not. But if this
be true, how then about Miss Lloyd; and she is attractive enough?"
At the tenor of this retort Phil's face flushed from his Crimean beard
to his temples.
"There you are wrong," said he, with the slightest asperity possible;
"she has not in her character a grain of coquetry, or of that which
Horace calls 'the art that is not to be taught by art.' She is a
pure-minded and warm-hearted English girl, and is as perfect as all
those wives and daughters of England, who figure in the volumes of
Mrs. Ellis; and in saying this I am genuine, for I feel that I am
praising some other fellow's bride--not mine, God help me!" he added,
with much of real feeling.
"You have heard nothing of the Lloyds since I left you?"
"Nothing."
"Well, take courage, Phil; we may be at Craigaderyn one day yet," said
I; and he, as if ashamed of his momentary sentimental outburst,
exclaimed, with a laugh,
"By Jove, now that I have heard all your amours and amourettes, they
surpass even those of Hugh Price."
"Poor Hugh! his lieutenancy is filled up, I suppose?"
"Yes--as another week would have seen your company, for we could not
conceive that you were a prisoner at Yalta. Awkward that would have
been."