LOVERS MAKE MOAN
Now when I had read Sûr Imar's letter, which I hastened to do by the
light from the west at the very spot where he had told his tale, there
was nothing (at least to a clay-headed fellow) affording definite answer
to the questions which concerned me most. The first of these was--why on
earth had my friends broken up and departed so hastily? And the
second--no less of a puzzle to me--what had I done to give fatal
offence? All Sûr Imar wrote was this, wherein I found that although he
spoke our language so well and fluently and with better command of it
than I have, he was not quite so familiar with the mysteries of our
spelling. But let that pass unheeded.
MY DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,--So I desire to call you still, because I am
old, and an old man has learned that he must not listen to
everything, neither yield without proof to assertions which
contradict his own experience. My belief is that you are as full of
honour as I was at your time of life; and it is always most hot in
the young, until they are taught that justice is the first thing to
be aimed at. And I have a firm belief from my observation of you,
that any mistake you may have made was caused by the influence of
the moment, and without any intention to do wrong.
I am grieved that I shall have no opportunity of meeting you again
in England. We are obliged to depart at once, having heard of an
adverse incident, which threatens all my prospects of success.
Probably we shall never meet again; and perhaps you will not desire
it. But Englishmen go everywhere, even to the inhospitable
Caucasus; and I would try to prove to you that the epithet is
undeserved, if you would afford me the chance, and show that you
still think kindly of your old friend,
IMAR, the Lesghian.
Vexed as I was with painful wonder as to the charge against me, I could
not help admiring the large and peaceful nature of this man. He thought
that I had wronged his child, the hope of his days, and the heart of his
life; and yet not a bitter word did he employ, nor even show a sign of
scorn. Not in vain had he passed through the mill of tribulation. By
loss of faith in woman's goodness, he had lost all the delights of love,
of family bliss, and home, and comfort for the residue of his time on
earth. And the lesson it had taught him was to doubt of evil in mankind,
or at least in those whom his friendly nature led him to approve and
like. Oh! why was not his daughter of an equal trust and largeness? Not
a word had she sent me, not even one reproach, which might have told me
that her heart was sore. If after all her knowledge of me, all the proof
which her eyes alone must have rendered to her mind, one lying tale,
whatever it was, had been enough to scatter to the wind all her faith
and all her love, then none of it was worth having. So I reasoned, and
yet in vain. The stronger my conviction grew, the less was I convinced
of it. My heart was all with Dariel still; and let the mind argue as it
would, had logic ever looked at her? Any cold dribble may be crystal
clear; but the current in the veins of man should be warm and red and
glowing.
Under that sudden cloud could I rest without looking up to inquire what
it was? All I could do was to guess and guess; but I had no guilty
conscience, which is the quickest of all conjecturers. If for one moment
of charm, or caprice, any lure of the eye, or bewitchment of a smile, I
had gone astray from my one true love, the memory would have come up at
once, and suggested to my shame that I was served aright. But there had
been nothing of the kind. I had only done what seemed at first the
simple duty of friendship, and after that sunk my own delights in the
stress of deep affliction. If for this, and no more than this, I was to
be treated as a scoundrel, I had a right to know who had put that twist
upon it.
Therefore, on the following day, I took an early train to London, and a
cab from the terminus to Hatton Garden, and found Signor Nicolo
finishing at leisure a delicate and skilful breakfast. He received me
very kindly, and unpinned the napkin from his Italian velvet coat, and
offered me a glass of something fine, which proved a great deal too fine
for me. My impatience seemed to please him, and he was in no hurry to
allay it. And his first words seemed to me to contain some rather
impertinent assumption.
"The great point is to be calm, Mr. Cranleigh. To be quite calm, and
look at things quietly--ah, yes!"
"I scarcely know what you refer to, Mr. Nickols. What is there to
prevent my being calm? I am simply come to ask about some friends, as
a--as a matter of business. You were kind enough when I was here
before----"
"Come, come now. This won't do. We are not having a deal for a diamond.
I know all about it, as well almost as if I had been in the thick of it.
Ah, yes! But you find yourself bothered, don't you?"
"Certainly, I don't like it much," I answered, as his black eyes flashed
at me, and a merry smile lifted his long moustache. "I did not expect to
be treated thus. And I was strongly attached to Sûr Imar."
"And to _Kuban_ and _Orla_. Ah, yes, I see! And to Stepan and Allai, and
all the rest. What a pity there were no ladies there! You might have
become attached to them as well."
"I call it very kind of you to spare me so much time," I answered rather
stiffly, for I would have no vulgar chaff about Dariel; "I was almost
afraid of encroaching upon business."
"Duke of K---- at eleven o'clock, Serene Highness of L---- at twelve,
King of the Malachites at half-past; and a bigger swell than all of them
put together to a devilled bone at 1.30. Therefore we must touch the
point. You want to know why our interesting friends have bolted so
suddenly; and still more, why they did it without ta-ta to you. That
last point I am not clear about, though I have some shrewd suspicions.
But I think I can tell you why they made a brief adieu to the
neighbours who never came near them. You will acknowledge that they
could not be expected to stand on ceremony there."
"You have got the stick by the wrong end altogether," I broke in, for
the sake of justice; "we let them alone, for the excellent reason that
we knew they wished to be let alone. No Englishman ever endeavours to
push through a gate that is always bolted. Our neighbourhood took no
notice of them, because it was known from the very first that they came
there for that purpose. And living in a wilderness of ivied ruins----"
"You appear to have turned against them, even more than their behaviour
warrants. But for all that, Sûr Imar is a really great man. He looks at
things differently from you and me; and it is not for us to judge him.
For, like all men who go in for what we don't care about, he is set down
as a crank, a dreamer, a man with a tile off, a fellow you would like to
toss for sovereigns with, and everything else that a cad of the gutter
pities and sucks up to. But I can tell you that the Lesghian old man, as
the idiots would call him at forty-five, may defy a Polish Jew to cheat
him. For I don't call it cheating a man, when he knows it, and lets you
do it, because he scorns you and the cash alike. When you cheat him you
are like a man who steals his house-water from a horse-trough, and you
deserve to get glanders for it. But what I call fine cheating is to get
twice the value of a thing out of a wiry old screw, whose money is his
life, and his life all money. Oh, yes! There is some joy in that."
Signor Nicolo rubbed his hands, and then put them into the feeling of
his pockets, with a warmth of some rich memory--not very old, I daresay.
"But you would never do such a thing as that?" I asked, with a little
doubt quivering in the question. "You would be far above all such
ideas?"
"Would I? Of course I would, when I couldn't get the chance. And I would
never get the better of a real friend, beyond twenty-five per cent at
maximum. And he would make seventy-five on that at the West End. But
when a man I hate with a fine religious strength, comes here to get the
best of me, screwing up his mouth, and looking righteous, and as
cordial as a stewed Spanish onion--'oh, dear, how lovely! A little flat
in the culet--would be perfect but for that milky spot below the zone,'
and so on; for what did the Almighty make a man except to chisel such a
curmudgeon? Ah, yes, I have done it a hundred times, and hope I may be
spared to do it a thousand more. It is not for the money, it is the
intellectual triumph. Everybody knows what I am. Come to me fairly, and
I treat you fairly. Must have my living wage, of course. But no more,
unless you try to rob me. Then you have got the wrong pig by the ear.
And it's the very same thing in love, Mr. Cranleigh. Have you tried to
take a rise out of Dariel?"
This would have made me very angry with at least nine people out of ten.
But I knew that I had a queer character to deal with, and that he meant
no harm, but only to get to the bottom of the matter. So I told him that
if there was anything of that sort, I thought it was rather the other
way. And then I was quite in a fury with myself, for putting it as if
she could have done a shabby thing. And I praised her ninefold, and
could have gone on for an hour.
"You are all right," he said, "that is clear enough; you are as
infatuated as a Goddess could require. We have all been so, some time or
other. But you should have seen her mother, ah, yes, ah, yes! Signora
Nicolo cannot bear to hear her name, though she ought to be grateful,
for it kept me good, and plunged me, I do believe, into matrimony. A
sweet woman never knows the good she does, any more than an impudent
flippant one can measure her own mischief. For the sake of that noble
Oria, as well as of Sûr Imar, who saved, my life, I would go anywhere
and do anything, to be of service to Dariel. And for her own sake too, I
can tell you, for she is a most charming creature, though a little too
soft, like her father. Ah, that's where the mischief will come in! How
can you save a man from himself? After all the lies he has suffered
from, and the wreck of his life--I know all about it now, though I
didn't when I saw you--would you believe that he is spoonier than ever
about doing good to those cursed fellows? Saving their souls! Why,
they've got none; or if they have, what are ours to be called? As
different as quartz from opal, which are much the same thing though in
different form. And as for their bodies, they are big enough already,
and dirty enough, and as hard as nails. Let them all kill one another,
is what the Lord intended, and Nature does her best to help him. Why,
the country ought to belong to us; we could do some good with it. It
should have been ours long ago."
"No doubt of that," I replied, for that seems to be the duty of every
land; "I knew that Sûr Imar meant to go, and for years he has been
preparing to civilise his people; but what has made him go so suddenly?"
"Well, I think it was through a tall young fellow, who has been prowling
about for a long time. 'Prince Hafer' he calls himself, Prince of the
Ossets, who are next-door neighbours to these Lesghians, when they have
any door at all, I mean. I won't pretend to know much about him, but
what I have heard is rather shady. He bore a most wonderful reputation
among his own niggers, if I may call them so, for the Ossets are rather
a dusky lot--never had there been such an Angel seen; too good, too
benevolent, too holy. But Apollyon, the Prince of this village of ours,
has been too many for our Mountain-Chief; and he has carried on rarely
at the Hotel Celestial, and other sparkling places. If he had not been a
Prince, they would have had him up at Bow Street; but he talked about
Russia, and they thought he was too big. Moreover, our noble Policemen
saw that there was nobody likely to interpret him; so they took it out
in coin, according to the custom of the Country. He paid for a mirror
and three electro-plated pots; and with mutual esteem they parted. But
what a fiend of a temper he must have! For he never gets drunk to make
us sponge him with our tears."
"That is most unjust on his part. I have seen him twice, and nearly felt
him once. But never mind that. I shall square it up, some day. I beg
pardon for interrupting. But how can Sûr Imar ever listen to him?"
"When you are as old as I am, Mr. Cranleigh, one thing alone will
surprise you. To wit, that you were ever surprised at the folly of the
wisest of mankind. But I have no time for a homily. You want to know how
I have learned these things. Have you ever heard of a certain Captain
Strogue?"
"Yes, and I have seen him. And I formed a strong opinion, though all my
impressions seem worthless now, that Captain Strogue is a man of honour.
In his own way, I mean, and according to his views."
"Not a man who would try to pot you in the dark? I believe that you are
quite right so far. Strogue is a man of honour, according to his lights.
But, alas, an inveterate gambler; and that saps the foundations of
honesty. God made honesty, and man makes honour, and shapes it according
to the fashion of the day. Strogue has been here, he has sat in that
chair, with his head in his hands, and shivering; for he is also a very
hard drinker. I am well known all over Europe, as a purchaser of fine
diamonds. Strogue had given an I. O. U. the night before for £500, which
he could not redeem. He had been fleeced, and he knew it too well, by
paltry little all-round dealers, hucksters at the very bottom of the
trade, who have only one test for gem from paste. If your brother Harold
were a bit of a rogue he might have a fine game with them. But Strogue
had the wisdom at last to come to me. Poor fellow! He has a very fine
nature. He absolutely burst into tears, when he saw all the value he had
thrown away. 'Signor, I am very hard up,' he said--which is just the
right way to begin with me, though the very worst with any other in the
trade; 'this is the last and the best of my jewels. A good judge has
told me it is very fine. Unless I can raise £500 to-day, I shall have to
put a pistol to my head. How much will you give me for this affair?'
"I examined it well, though a glance was enough. Then I tested him as to
his ownership, to keep him on the tenterhooks, as he richly deserved;
and then I said, 'Captain, I will take it, at a thousand pounds. But
only upon one condition.' You should have seen his eyes. It was a
lamentable sight to discover such joy in the face of a man, who had done
such wonders in his better days. 'My condition,' I proceeded, for he
could not speak, 'is that you shall sign a pledge prepared by me.'
'Anything, anything you like,' he answered; and in two minutes he had
signed an undertaking upon his honour to abandon every form of
gambling. Whether he will keep it is another question; but so far he has
kept it, and I think he will hold fast. That is what I call doing good.
And the stone was well worth the money."
I thought that it would have been still more beneficent, if the stone
had not been worth the money. But who could expect that, and of whom?
Signor Nicolo looked for praise, and I gave it warmly.
"But you did not pump him, on the strength of it?" I asked; and meeting
an indignant glance, I qualified my question. "What I mean is, you did
not exactly endeavour--your duty towards Sûr Imar, and your desire to
protect him from the schemes of that other fellow did not induce you to
inquire, I suppose, what this pair of rogues could be driving at? I am
not sure that I should have let him go without that."
"To a limited extent perhaps I did," Signor Nicolo answered with a
candid smile; "not that I put any temptation in his way to make him turn
traitor to his master. But simply that casually, as things came about,
he cast away in some degree that cowardly veil of caution, which is
always so abhorrent to our better feelings. Nine people out of ten would
have cross-examined him. But I did nothing of the sort. Only from some
things he let slip I gathered a fair general idea of the game those two
are playing. Or rather that other fellow; for to Strogue it can make no
difference, unless the bargain is--no play, no pay. Hafer's game is to
get possession of the lovely Dariel, as you must have suspected long
ago; not for her beauty--those fellows out there pitch-and-toss for that
kind of thing--but for the start it will give him, in the universal race
of robbery. You must not be mild enough, Mr. Cranleigh, to suppose that
you have seen any sample of the Caucasus in the noble Sûr Imar, and his
sensitive daughter, or even in the model henchman Stepan. If the camp in
your valley had been of the general type, you would not have had a sheep
left long ago, much less a cock with a crow in his throat. 'Ragamuffins'
is the proper name for most of them. And although these Lesghians, take
them all in all, are about the pick of the basket, you would be in the
wrong box altogether, if you took them for sweet innocents. They are
simply under their chieftain's thumb; and by ancient tribal law, he can
chop off their heads when he pleases. This keeps them in order; and they
pay for their milk, instead of lifting cattle. Prince Hafer, however, is
not under any fealty to Sûr Imar. So far from that, his great aim is to
be Lord of the Ossets, and the Kheusurs too, and Karthlos Tower, which
is a noble place, and might defy an army for a twelvemonth. Hafer is
cunning, but has too much temper; and worst of all, he has not steered
clear of the many traps set by civilisation for a young savage with his
pockets full. He has fallen among a bad lot, a company of young rakes,
contemptuous of women, and yet thoroughly in their power."
"What! would he venture near Dariel, after being in such vile company?
We have heard that he was almost too good to live. She gave me so grand
an account of him, that I thought it was all up with my poor chance. But
what a falling off is here! The Prince of all virtues, the paragon of
modesty, the hero of all chivalry--and now he won't even sham! Can you
explain it, Mr. Nickols?"
"No; that's no business of mine. Nature does it. But I shall hear more
about it soon, and get a flood of light let in. In London you never know
anything well, from hearing such a lot about everything. But it is not
quite the same in the Caucasus. You don't hear much there; but you
attend to it. And now you will be surprised to be told, that after so
many years of hearing next to nothing of that part of the world, and
never seeing one of their celestial peaks, except in a dream, I am
likely to know more about them than when I lived there. Ah, if I hadn't
got a wife, and three daughters,--and I have let out so much, like a
jolly fool, that they won't have French stuff on their birthdays,--I
should be ready to be off again; though I could never do the _djedje_
now; and the love of sport is not in me, as it is in all true-born
Englishmen."
He looked regretful, and perhaps remorseful against his mingled
parentage; for there was a vein of the Israelite in him, which saddens
and deepens the outlook, without showing any sport, except a gold disc
to shoot at.
"Never mind," I answered him, though sorry to have to do it; "you get
your little excitements, in your way. And although they are not like
ours altogether, they pay ever so much better in the end."
"Let us come back," he said, thinking in his heart, perhaps, that he
could do very well without my sympathy; "my proceedings only bear upon
your case in an odd sort of way, which may come to nothing. You remember
that I told you of my Russian friend, whom I met at Odessa, twenty years
ago, or more. Through him I first went into those savage parts, where he
lost his life; and it was a narrow shave that I survived to tell of it,
for which I have to thank Sûr Imar. You may have forgotten, but I think
I must have told you that my Russian had a brother, an officer in the
army then closing round the forces of Shamyl. Very well, who should call
upon me a few days after I told you about that, but the very same
Russian officer, now second in command of the Caucasus Division, General
Stranglomoff himself. He was in London, about some military business,
and knowing my intimacy with his poor brother, he did me the honour of
calling to hear some particulars of the sad occurrence. I described it
as well as I could; and then he said, brushing up his English, as I
brushed up my Russian, whenever there was a gap between us--'I am not a
jeweller, Signor, and of precious stones I have not any knowledge; but
place thine eyes upon this, is it good?" He wore a white glove of soft
rat-skin, and upon it was the rich green light of the finest emerald I
have seen since I was at Warsaw.
"'Plenty, plenty, twenty, fifty--ten, a thousand! I pray you to accept
this pebble, Signor, for my brother's sake,' he said with a very
graceful bow; 'he was taken away through these, and I desire no
advantage of them.' And with that he shed a tear, which made me think
how much we undervalue that fine race. There is no kinder-hearted man on
earth, and no more perfect gentleman, than a Russian of the highest
order.
"Well, sir, I sent my own nephew out--Jack Nickols, a wonderfully plucky
fellow; not much eye for a stone; but sure to stick to his orders, and
tell you the truth. If you can't be satisfied with that, good-bye to
your chance of keeping anybody very long; for the sharp ones will soon
begin to rogue you. Jack is as good a bit of English Metal as you could
pick up from the lias to the granite. And not too clever. In fact, Mr.
Cranleigh, you remind me of him, at every turn."
I bowed very deeply at this lovely compliment, with a glance which I
meant to be ironical. But Signor Nicolo was too busy with his thoughts
to perceive the stern justice he had done me.
"Emeralds are going up," he proceeded, as if I were one of them, "and I
should not be surprised if the true grass-green became the rage for the
next few years. There are only three gems that will always hold their
own, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The rest go up and down, according
to the fashion; and emeralds have been unduly in the shade. But now they
are worth looking after again; and my nephew is the boy to do it. Hit or
miss, he will do his best; and we have made an arrangement with the
Russian General, under which he is bound to back him up. Jack is not
very strong at letter-writing, and the post is not too brisk out there.
But he has been on the spot for some time now, and he has made a very
good beginning."
All this to me was little more than cold and cloudy comfort. Here was
the winter close at hand, the winter of the frosty Caucasus; the friends
I loved become strangers to me, and lost to my sight among savages; my
own fair fame in some mysterious manner assailed and blasted; and the
only hope of further tidings, or redress, yet visible lay in the chances
of a roving jeweller's commission! Nickols might take it all quite
calmly. His heart was set, and cemented--as one might almost say--upon
precious stones, and hard enough, as it seemed to me, to grind them for
trade purposes. But in my impatience I wronged him there.
"You must try to make the best of it, Mr. Cranleigh," he went on, as if
he understood my thoughts. "You have been horribly slandered, no doubt;
and the sweet young lady has swallowed wicked lies, all the more readily
because she is a sweet young lady, and for that reason credulous and
jealous. But there are a lot of things in your favour still, if you
will let me set them before you. I have not the least idea what you are
charged with, any more than you have. But whatever it may be, the charge
will grow fainter, and the faith in it weaker, as time goes on; and the
inventor of it will become more hateful. Probably Hafer has invented it;
and even while she listens to it, her heart will turn against him. I
know what a good woman is, because I have had to deal with them. A man
who runs women down, is either a bad lot himself, or a most unlucky
fellow. Moreover, she dislikes that cousin of hers, if he is her cousin,
for his violence, and roughness, and haughty ways. All that will
increase, when he gets home again, and contrasts all their hard and
uncivilised life with the luxuries and joys of London. She will turn
against him more and more; and her father will never compel her to marry
against her wishes. Moreover, there is likely to be some time yet before
his schemes come to a head. My young savage has overthrown his cast, or
that of his mother Marva. In his urgency to get them back straightway to
the land of the mountain without the flood, he has sent them round by
St. Petersburg. He insisted so much on the peril they were in of losing
all their Lesghian rights, that Sûr Imar resolved, very wisely as I
thought, to assert them at headquarters. So Stepan and others were left
behind to take the heavy goods straight to Poti perhaps. This was a
floorer for Prince Hafer, and he gnashed his teeth, which he dyes
yellow; for he is the Devil, and no mistake, when he can't have his own
way. You don't consider me a suspicious man, Mr. Cranleigh, do you?"
"A little too much the other way; as is the case with all fine natures,"
I replied, according to my thoughts; for he was evidently taking my part
now.
"In that case, listen to my firm belief. I am not at all up to the tone
and style of what those mountaineers do now. And of course I may be as
much behind the age, as Sûr Imar wants to be in front of it. But to my
mind men are men always, and you can't improve them suddenly. A lot of
sham comes in with some races; but not with stubborn chaps like these.
Sûr Imar may print a million copies of the Sermon on the Mount; but it
won't go down with them. Or it goes down, and never comes up again. You
may as well pour gold into a cesspool. My firm belief is that this
Prince Hafer intends to get our noble friend out there, marry his
daughter, and then shoot him, and combine that heritage with his own.
Ah, yes!"
Nickols had a very quiet and even pleasant manner of imparting the most
atrocious thoughts, that could ever drive another man out of his mind. I
looked at him to ask whether he could mean it; and he smiled and
answered, "You may take it for a fact."
"But his own sister, his twin sister, the darling of his
childhood--Marva! How could all such wickedness go on without her
knowledge? It is impossible to imagine that she would allow it."
"She sent her son to England for that very purpose," Mr. Nickols
replied, in a tone of deep conviction. "It may not sound sisterly; but
it is true. There is the blood-feud between them. That they have been in
the womb together only makes it deadlier. I know what I am talking of."
If he did--and he spoke as if it were an ordinary matter--I can only be
certain that I did not. My brain was quite stunned with such horrible
ideas; and I almost felt as if Dariel herself would be too dear, at the
price of any connection with such vile and blood-thirsty savages. Then I
felt bitter reproach at blaming a sweet, gentle darling for what she
could not help; and after providing for quick communication, I hurried
away, with my heart in a whirl.