The idea was vague, uncertain, and wild, I know; but I had no other alternative save to halt, wheel about, and sell my life as best I could at terrible odds; while to prevent me eluding them, the Cossacks had gradually opened out their files into a wide semicircle, lest I should seek to escape by some sudden flank movement; and all kept their horses--wiry, fiery, and active little brutes--well in hand. Their leader was better mounted and kept far in advance of them--unpleasantly close on my flanks, indeed--but still his nag was no match for the noble English horse I rode; and so as the blue shadows lengthened and deepened in the snow-coated valley, I began to breathe more freely, and to think, or hope, there was perhaps a chance for me after all. Perhaps some of the Cossacks began to think so, for they dismounted, and, while the rest kept fiercely and closely in pursuit, levelled their carbines over their saddles, over each other's shoulders, or with left elbow firmly planted on the knee, and thus took quiet and deliberate pot-shots at me; and two had effect on the hind legs of my horse, tending seriously to injure his speed and strength; and as each ball struck him he gave a snort, and shivered with pain and terror. On and on yet up the mountain valley!
An emotion of mockery, defiance, and exultation almost filled me--the exultation of the genuine English racing spirit--on finding that I was leaving the most of them behind, and was already well through the vale, or cleft, in the mountains, the slopes of which were then as easy to traverse as if coursing on the downs of Sussex; and already I could see, some three miles distant, the waters of the Euxine, and the smoke of our war-steamers cruising off Yalta and Livadia. I looked back. The Cossack leader was very close to me now, and five of his men, all riding with lance in hand, as they had probably expended their ammunition, were but a few horse-lengths behind him. I could perceive that he had also armed himself with a lance, and felt assured that in his rage at having had so long and futile a pursuit, he would certainly not receive my sword, even if I offered it, as a prisoner of war; so I resolved to shoot him as soon as he came within range of my "Colt," the six chambers of which I had been too wary to discharge as yet.
Checking my panting and bleeding horse for a second or two, to let the galloping Russian come closer, I fired at him under my bridle arm, and a mocking laugh informed me that my Parthian shot had gone wide of its mark. Not venturing to fire again, I continued to spur my black horse on still; for now the friendly twilight had descended on the mountains and the sea, whose waves at the horizon were yet reddened by the farewell rays of the winter sun as he sank beyond them. Suddenly the character of the ground seemed to change--vacancy yawned before me, and I found myself within some twenty yards of a pretty high limestone cliff that overhung the water!
The hand of fate seemed on me now, and reining round my horse, I found myself almost face to face with the leader of the Cossacks; and all that passed after this occurred in shorter time than I can take to write it. Uttering an exulting cry, he raised himself in his stirrups, and savagely launched at me with all his force the Cossack spear. I eluded it by swerving my body round; but it pierced deeply the off flank of my poor horse, and hung dangling there, with the crimson blood pouring from the wound and smoking upward from the snow. The animal was plunging wildly and madly now, yet I fired the five remaining pistol shots full at the Russian ere he could draw his sword; and one at least must have taken effect somewhere, for he fell almost beneath my horse's hoofs, and as he did so his cap flew off, and I recognised Volhonski--whom, by a singular coincidence, I thus again encountered--Count Volhonski, the Colonel of the Vladimir Infantry! At the same moment I was fiercely charged by the five advanced Cossacks, with their levelled lances, and with my horse was literally hurled over the cliffs into the sea, the waves of which I heard bellowing below me.
Within the pace of one pulsation--one respiration--as we fell whizzing through the air for some sixty feet together, I seemed to live all my past life over again; but I have no language wherewith to express the mingled bitterness and desolation that came over my soul at that time. Estelle lost to me; life, too, it seemed, going, for I must be drowned or taken--taken but to die. The remembrance of all I had loved and of all who loved me; all that I had delighted in--the regiment, which was my pride--my friends and comrades, and all that had ever raised hope or fancy, or excited emulation--seemed lost to me, as the waves of the Black Sea closed over my head, and I went down to die, my fate unknown, and even in my grave, "unhousled, disappointed, unaneled."
Even now as I write, when the danger has long since passed away, and when the sun has shone again in all his glory on me, in my dreams I am sometimes once more the desperate and despairing fellow I was then.
[CHAPTER XLIII.--WINIFRED'S SECRET.]
It was Christmas-eve at Craigaderyn as well as before Sebastopol, and all over God's land of Christendom--the "Land of Cakes," perhaps, excepted, as Christmas and all such humanising holidays were banished thence as paganish, by the acts of her Parliament and her "bigots of the Iron Time," as in England by Cromwell, some eighty years later, for a time. A mantle of gleaming white covered all mighty Snowdon, the tremendous abysses of Carneydd Llewellyn, and the lesser ranges of Mynyddhiraeth. Llyn Aled and Llyn Alwen were frozen alike, and the Conway at some of its falls exhibited a beard of icicles that made all who saw them think of the friendly giant--old Father Christmas himself! Deep lay the snow in the Martens' dingle and under all the oaks of the old forest and chase; for it was one of those hearty old English yules that seem to be passing away with other things, or to exist chiefly in the fancy of artists, and which, with their concomitants of cold without and warmth and glowing hospitality within, seemed so much in unison with an old Tudor mansion like Craigaderyn--a genuine Christmas, like one of the olden time, when the yule-log was an institution, when hands were shaken and faces brightened, kind wishes expressed, and hearts grew glad and kind. But on this particular Christmas-eve Winifred and Dora were not at the Court, but with some of their lady friends were busy putting the finishing touches to the leafy decorations of the parish church, for the great and solemn festival of the morrow, with foliage cut from the same woods and places where the Druids procured similar decorations for their temples, as it is simply a custom--an ancient usage--which has survived the shock of invading races and changing creeds.
The night was beautiful, clear, and frosty, and to those who journeyed along the hard and echoing highway the square tower of the old church, loaded alike by snow and ivy, could be seen to loom, darkly and huge, against the broad face of the moon, that seemed to hang like a silver shield or mighty lamp amid the floating clouds, and right in a cleft between the mountains. The heavens were brilliant with stars; and lines of light, varied by the tinting of heraldic blazons and quaint scriptural subjects, fell from the traceried and mullioned windows of the ancient church on the graves and headstones in the burial-place around it; while shadows flitted to and fro within--those of the merry-hearted and white-handed girls who were so cheerily at work, and whose soft voices could be heard echoing under the groined arches in those intervals when the chimes ceased in the belfry far above them. Huge icicles depended from the wyverns and dragons, through whose stony mouths the rain of fully five centuries had been disgorged by the gutters of the old church, and being coated with snow, the obelisks and other mementos of the dead had a weird and ghostlike effect in the frosty moonlight.
In the cosy porch of the church were Sir Madoc Lloyd and his hunting bachelor friend, Sir Watkins Vaughan, each solacing himself with a cigar while waiting for the ladies, to escort whom home they had driven over from the Court after dinner in Sir Watkins' bang-up dog-cart. While smoking and chatting (about the war of course, as no one spoke of anything else then), they peeped from time to time at the picturesque vista of the church, where garlands of ivy and glistening holly, green and white, with scarlet berries, and masses of artificial flowers, were fast making gay the grim Norman arches and sturdy pillars, with their grotesque capitals and quaint details. Nor were the tombs and trophies of the Lloyds of other times forgotten; so the old baronet watched with a pleased smile the slender fingers of his young daughter as they deftly wreathed with holly and bay the rusty helmet that whilom Madoc ap Meredyth wore at Flodden and Pinkey, her blue eyes radiant the while with girlish happiness, and her hair as usual in its unmanageable masses rolling down her back, and seeming in the lights that flickered here and there like gold shaded away with auburn.