'Why—what the deuce is up now?'
'I am rather an acute physiognomist,' replied the count, looking down and affecting to select and manipulate a cigar, 'and think I can see—can read in his face, by a certain gravity of expression there, that he will—after all he has escaped—die a violent death.'
'A violent death!' repeated Pelham, with an expression of surprise in his face; 'from what do you gather this?'
'I cannot say—a kind of prescience—an intuition of destiny—that I have no control over; but I have rarely been mistaken.'
'Well,' replied Pelham, 'I might predict as much about many of us; we may perhaps be engaged to-morrow, and some that are above the turf just now, may be under it soon enough.'
The count gave an inscrutable smile, and began to smoke; and Pelham was glad only that Cecil—going, as he was so soon to do, on a duty of some peril—had not overheard a prediction so strange and gloomy concerning himself.
'Destiny—prescience—bosh!' thought Pelham; but the count's face and manner impressed the volatile Englishman, who had only come to fight in Servia as the means to a 'new sensation.' He became perplexed, silent, and when Cecil spoke, his voice seemed somehow to stir a painful chord in the breast of Pelham.
'A violent death!'
This strange prophecy gave him some cause to think. Did the count refer to the chances of war, or that Cecil was fore-doomed prematurely, and had his destiny—his kismet, like an Osmanlie—written on his brow? Or was it that he resented, with all his apparent candour and generosity, some love-passages between his sister and the late prisoner, and meant to have the latter cut off?—a matter easily achieved in that lawless land.
Pelham was restlessly uneasy on the subject, and sat reflectively sucking at his briar-root in silence, till the bugles sounded for lights and fires out—for silence in camp, and all retired to their tents or huts.