CHAPTER XXIX
THE PRISONERS AT SETCHEVO
Gavin heard the tap of the blind man's stick as the old Chevalier felt his way from the bare vaulted room in which a scanty supper had been served to them; and a fit of despondency coming upon him, more bitter than ordinary, he buried his face in his hands and uttered his heart-stricken complaint aloud.
"What are they all doing, then—why has Chesny broken his promise. Good God, Arthur, have we no friends at all? Is there no one who has interested himself in our story? I can't believe it. It isn't the English way. They must find out sooner or later. It can't be for all time."
Arthur, whose arm and shoulder were bound up in a garment that might have been a Moorish bernouse, smoked his pipe quietly and did not for a little while know what to say. Bitterly as he had paid for that which he called a "little trot to the Balkans," the English spirit forbade the utterance of any reproach, or even a word that his friend might take amiss.
"My people never trouble about me," he said. "They know me too well. You see, I've only a couple of uncles and a maiden aunt to go into hysterics; and my lawyers won't advertise while they can bank my dividends. It's different with you, Gavin. I'll bet your people were on the scent long ago; and that's to say nothing about Evelyn. Of course, she has not held her tongue. No woman does when she's in love with a man; and sometimes she can be eloquent when she is not. Oh, yes, I'll go nap on Evelyn all the time. She must know that we shouldn't stay in this cursed country for three months if we had the train fare to get out. Of course, she'll cry out about it—and if she cries loudly enough the Government will act. Not that I believe much in Governments—they generally weigh in when the corpse is buried."
Gavin smiled but did not raise his head. A fire of logs burned in the grate before them and filled the room with a haze of heavy smoke; the tapping of a man's stick had ceased, and the house was without sounds and void. In the hills above them a wild wind scoured the clefts and sent whirling clouds of snow to cover all living things below. The torrent beneath the drawbridge had become a monstrous scala of icy steps, a ladder with glistening rungs which none but the eagle dared.
"Three months—is it really three months?" Gavin exclaimed in a tone of unspeakable weariness; "three months in this awful den. Three months listening to that blind devil and his insults. God, I would never have believed that a man could go through so much and live. And you, Arthur—not a word from you since the beginning. That's what hits me. If you'd only speak out and tell me what I ought to hear, it would be easier."
Arthur laughed and stooped to light his pipe by the fire again.
"What's the good of talking. A pal asks you to come and you go. Is it his fault if a wheel comes off the coach? Let me have five minutes alone with that blind scoundrel and I'll be eloquent enough. Otherwise I intend to make myself as comfortable as I can under the circumstances. There's no fun in boxing scimitars—as we both of us have discovered."
They had discovered it, indeed. From the first day of their captivity in the mountains, insult, foul, oft-repeated, revolting insult had been their daily punishment. Coarse food, filthy rooms ... these they could have suffered; but the blind man's tongue, the lash of the whip his servants wielded, might have driven braver men to that last resource which faith in God alone can question or deny. The very wound which Arthur Kenyon made light of had been the first fruits of their English temper. A gypsy had lashed him across the shoulder with a riding whip and he had answered with an English left, straight and unerring. But the blow had scarcely been struck before a wild horde filled the room, its knives unsheathed, murder in its eyes—and from murder the terrible voice of the blind man alone withheld it. So the two comrades spoke of fighting scimitars, that was no jest at all.
"You are a friend in a hundred thousand," Gavin exclaimed as one who spoke from his very heart. "I'm not going to thank you, Arthur. What is the good of words between you and me? Here we are, worse than dead, by God ... and not a ray of light, not a speck anywhere. How will it end? How can it end? You heard him tell me this morning that Evelyn will marry his rascally son in ten days' time. Well, to-night I'm just in that humor which says, it may be true, he may have tired her out, lied to her, promised her God knows what, my liberty perhaps and her father's happiness afterwards. It might be that, Arthur. I try to put it fairly, and yet I must say that it might be so——"
"There are a hundred things that might be so, old man. This house might fall down the hill and the eagles carry you and me to the tree-tops. We might have pâté de foie gras for supper and eighty-four champagne to wash it down with. There's no greater rot than the might-be-so. Tell me how to get out of this cursed den and I'll listen with both ears. As for Lady Evelyn—she's too much a woman to do any of the things you talk about. For all you know some sham tale has been told her—telegrams sent in our name, or something to lull her suspicions. When a man is travelling a thousand miles from home, people don't get alarmed about him for a month or two. But this I'll stake my existence upon, that once Evelyn guesses it's not all right with us, she'll move heaven and earth to know the reason why. That's what keeps me sane. I should kill this old man and myself afterwards if it were not that I believe in my friends. Doing so, I just sit down and wait like the Spaniards for to-morrow."
Gavin heard him in silence. This great room had become their prison-house; refectory by day and dormitory by night. For an hour each morning, they were permitted to go out into the court, where a vista of the sky spoke to them of liberty and the massive portcullis of the drawbridge mocked the idle word. "Until the Englishwoman is my son's wife," had been the sentence pronounced by the old Chevalier; and he repeated it day by day, tapping his way to their great bare cell, striking at them with his stick, cursing them—a very fiend incarnate, mad with the lust of money and the desire of revenge. And against such an enemy they were doubly powerless—not only by reason of his blindness, but by the knowledge that unseen eyes followed him to their room and that his allies, the gypsies, hidden in the house of Setchevo, were ready to do his bidding did he but raise his voice to call them.
Brave men, who do not know fear in a common way, may bend and break before such torture as this ... the torture of impotence and of unseen presences about them. Gavin had come to declare that he would sooner a man had burned his hand in a flame than compelled him to listen each day at dawn for the tapping of that stick upon the floor and the coming of that terrible sightless figure. Even in his sleep the old Chevalier would visit him, approaching with his claw-like hands extended and his eyes seeming to shine as live coals in the darkness. Never had he imagined that so much malignity, cunning, and vermin could be the fruits of imagined wrong or be united in one personality. And all his fine notions of retribution and reconciliation, of the old man's visit to England and the Earl's reception of him there—how vainglorious they had been and how childish, he said. Justly had such folly been overtaken and punished. He realized that his knowledge of human nature was pitifully small.
"Evelyn will help us if she can," he said at length, poking the fire restlessly and listening as of habit for the dreaded beat of the blind man's stick upon the stone floor without; "she will help us if she can, but what can a woman do? Let's regard that view of it as out of the question. What I would ask—what you have been asking—is just this—why does Chesny do nothing? He must know that if all had been well, we should have written and let him hear it. His Government could have these rats out in five minutes. Why does he do nothing? He's an old Winchester boy and could see us through if he knew. I can't think that such a man as Chesny would sit on his back and just ask what's happened. He's moving somewhere—pity it isn't on the road to Setchevo."
"Perhaps it is, and they've lost the road," rejoined Kenyon with a sarcasm he could not conceal. "Don't you see, Gavin, that these devils will have been clever enough to have taken care of themselves. Of course, they will. They give it out that we are making for the Castle of Okna which may be any number of miles you like from Setchevo. The escort—God save the mark!—knows better than to blab. Likely enough Chesny has heard that we crossed the frontier into Servia. Those poor devils who were killed are unlikely to be important enough to be searched for. Life is cheap hereabouts—and what is a Turk more or less? Chesny says we are all right and goes picnicking. Evelyn waits for our letters and doesn't a bit understand why they don't come. We must be patient, old chap—patient and brave. Nothing else will save us."
Gavin assented, though he could admit to himself that the common heroics of the nursery were the poorest food for a man in his situation. His days of waiting, patience, and bravery were so many hours of exquisite torture, like none he had imagined a man might suffer and live through. Evelyn, what of her, he asked himself waking and sleeping. Would the heritage in her blood deliver her to the bondage prepared for her; or had she, in his absence, the will to conquer it? He knew not what to think; his brain wearied of conjecture and wakened only when, as now, the blind man's stick tapped the bare stones and the sightless eyes looked into his own.
"Do you hear him, Arthur; he's coming to say Good-night to us."
"I hear, old chap—my God, if the man could only see——"
"Better blind—you would have killed him but for that, Arthur."
"It's true, Gavin, I would have killed him."
"And then—his friends. Better blind, Arthur."
Arthur said "Hush," for the sound of footsteps drew very near; and now they could hear the old Chevalier panting and shuffling and plainly approaching them. When he entered the room they perceived that something had occurred beyond the ordinary. The hand upon the stick quivered and trembled—the muscles of the forehead were twitching; there were drops of sweat upon the man's forehead, and his voice echoed the tumult of passion which shook him.
"One of you has written a letter to Bukharest," he cried hoarsely; "by whose hand was that?"
The two men looked at each other amazed. Neither had written such a letter nor knew aught of it.
"By whose hand?" the Chevalier continued, his anger growing as he spoke; "silence will not serve you, gentlemen. By whose hand was that letter written?"
Gavin now laughed aloud with a laugh that expressed both contempt and defiance.
"Had I written it, I would not have answered you," said he; "as I have not, your question merely arouses my curiosity."
Arthur did not answer at all; but he stood up as though fearing attack and his hand rested upon the back of the heavy oak chair—one of the few ornaments of that dismal room. His silence provoked Georges Odin as no words could have done.
"Let your friend speak," he cried, advancing with stick upraised. "I will know the truth; my servants shall flog it out of you—do you hear, I will have you whipped—answer me, who wrote that letter?"
Kenyon said not a word; and now the old man struck at him with his stick wildly and blindly, in a paroxysm of anger. One heavy blow fell upon Gavin's shoulder and he stepped back with an oath; but the young man's temper could not brook the new insult and he flung himself heavily upon the Chevalier and they fell to the ground together.
"Arthur—for God's sake——" cried Gavin.
"It's all right, Gavin; I won't hurt him, but I must have that stick."
He staggered to his feet, the bludgeon in his hand; but the blind man did not move. Fearing he knew not what, dreading the sudden apparition of the gypsies who spied upon their every movement, Gavin snatched a log from the fire, and, stooping, he held it up that he might look upon the old man's face.
"He is dead," he said.
Arthur did not speak. The log blazed and crackled and ebbed to darkness and still the two men did not move. Without, in the courtyard, not a sound could be heard. The House of Setchevo might have been a tomb of the living.
But the Englishmen knew that it concealed their hidden enemies and that the dawn would bring them to the room to avenge the man who had been their patron and their friend.