'You are right, Herr,' said the count, who overheard him; 'they are the last of a present the Emperor gave my father—and I have just begged Tchernaieff to accept, from me, a dozen—they are all of the first brand, and from the grapes of Hegyallya.'
Other officers now came to share the count's Hungarian wine—Russian Hussars in sky-blue dolmans, Servian dragoons with queer forage caps, like Scotch glengarries, and baggy red breeches; and a picturesque group the whole made, Palenka being the most striking figure there. He was very handsome, and would have formed a fine study for a painter. He had a visage naturally pale, but embrowned by exposure, a dark, martial, eagle-eye, and black moustache, with a general daring, undaunted and fiery air about him—in aspect, curiously between a man of fashion and a reckless Free Lance; a man who in thought and habit had much of the old heyduc in him, and was perhaps a little behind this unromantic, unmoved, and unheroic age.
Beside him sat Pelham, a brave and reckless fellow, but of a very different mould—under the middle size, yet a winning and aristocratic-looking Englishman, about thirty years of age, with blue eyes, and a general and genial sunshiny smile in his face.
'And where, now, is she to whom I owe so much—Mademoiselle Palenka?' asked Cecil in a low voice, when occasion served, and feeling the necessity, in common politeness at least, to remember the fact of her existence.
'She has left the camp,' was the curt response of the count, over whose face a shade fell for a moment; for some rumours—some suspicions of his sister's interest in the questioner—must have reached him, and he knew that the impulsive Margarita was difficult to control; so Cecil said no more on the subject, and, changing his place to another part of the noisy and laughing group, became somewhat silent.
He had ample food for reflection, certainly.
It was impossible for him not to think with positive wonder on all the strange complications that must have arisen had the count, and those who accompanied him, been but a very little later in coming to announce that he—Cecil—was free; and that if he had availed himself of the disguise brought by Ottilie, and reached the appointed spot where Theodore awaited him with the horses, and too probably Margarita too (indeed he could not doubt she was there), and had he taken, with her, that flight which the detection of the deserter's forgery rendered unnecessary, the whole future of both their lives must have been changed from that hour; for it was evident that she had meant to cast her lot with him, and for all she knew or could foresee, her one life against a censorious world.
'We must never meet again—I must see her no more!' was his thought again and again, and he was conscious that the count was looking at him scrutinisingly from time to time. The usually heedless and unobservant Pelham detected this, and said to Palenka inquiringly:
'Why do you look so gravely—so sadly at our friend, with whom you were laughing but a few minutes ago?'
'Sadly—do I? Well, sooth to say, I feel somewhat sorry for him.'