What did it all mean? Some dreadful mistake, or a false and malicious accusation, which time must soon unravel. Meanwhile, how difficult it was to be patient or calm under the circumstances; and he asked himself again and again, would Fortune never be tired of persecuting him?
Would he ever forget, he had thought, that mauvais quart d'heure in the place that so nearly became his grave? and now he was in peril as great again.
'A traitor,' had been the epithet applied by Count Palenka towards him. In what way could he ever be so? Was he to be made the victim—the scapegoat of some dark political game, between the Servian prince he served, and the general of the Russian army? 'You may see Siberia yet, if you escape death,' had been the menace of the latter, who actually owed his life at his—Cecil's—hands. He recalled the words, and knowing all of which these men were capable, and all they had the power to do, with all his natural courage, could not but feel appalled.
The room to which he had been consigned was on the upper floor of a house in the little town of Deligrad. It had little other furniture than a wooden divan, that ran round it, and whereon were spread the bear and wolf skins on which he could seat himself, or repose at night.
Its windows were little more than narrow slits, and through them he could see the camp, spreading over the low-lying eminences which bound, on the east, the Valley of the Morava—the long streets of tents and huts, and little tentes-d'abri, the smoke of the fires at which the soldiers cooked their food; and the Servian tricolour flying on a huge earthen redoubt, formed on the summit of the most commanding height, and armed with heavy guns, pointed grimly towards the point from which the Turks might be expected to approach.
Amid these streets of tents, drums were beaten and bugles sounded all day long; orderlies spurred their horses to and fro, and Servian peasants drove waggons drawn by white bullocks, or led long lines of laden ponies, and itinerant sutlers and vendors of grapes and apples, sardines, tomatoes and tobacco, etc., went incessantly about, together with itinerant fiddlers and bagpipers.
Beyond all this, he could see the road winding away to Belgrade, near two long, low, whitewashed edifices, the abodes of suffering and death. On each a white flag with a red cross was displayed to indicate that they were hospitals, on which no shot or shell must fall, even if the infidels succeeded in storming the heights of Djunis, which overhang the other side of the Morava.
Daily Cecil watched all this from his windows, till his soul sickened at it all and of inaction, after the fierce excitement of recent events; but after a week had elapsed, the clash of arms, as the two sentinels at the door accorded a salute to some visitors, followed by the clatter of spurs and steel scabbards on the wooden staircase of the house, preceded the entrance into Cecil's room of an officer in the uniform of the Servian staff, the provost-marshal and a gentleman in civilian costume, who announced himself as the deputy minister of police from Belgrade, and who was attended by a subordinate in a kind of uniform.
'Police?' replied Cecil, in an inquiring tone; 'it is, then, some civil—error that I am accused of?'
'No error at all, Herr Lieutenant; but of a crime against the State,' replied the civilian—a black-bearded man, with the ribbon of the Takova cross at his lapelle—in a somewhat gruff manner. 'Information has been lodged with the authorities that you have, or have borne about you, papers of a treasonable nature.'