Swords Reluctant

by Max Pemberton

"I hope we shall do so, sir."

He passed the cigarettes and the matches, and his master lighted one and sat and smoked in silence. It may be that he asked himself what he, John Faber, was doing out there upon this bleak hillside when he might have been on board his yacht in the harbour of Antivari. Such reflections had occurred to him on several occasions when some absurd venture had brought him very near to that haven where millions are the poorest credentials; but they were unduly ironical to-day, and not a little persistent. Why had he come to Ranovica? Because that little wide-eyed woman, who made such a curious appeal to him, had insisted upon his coming. It was very true, and he would not fence with it. He might lose his life for Maryska even yet; and that would be a grotesque finale enough. Meanwhile, a certain doubt about her remained and troubled him with a graver thought. Why had he not discovered her in the village? No man could venture into that inferno now, for the whole place was just a flame upon the hillside; but he had been up and down the street with Paleologue, and they had seen nothing of her. He thought it curious if nothing more. They should have discovered her immediately when the fire broke out.

Alussein Pasha rode up presently and his little staff with him. He had treated Faber with some deference from the beginning, and now that the fury of the sack was over he became almost grotesquely polite, gabbling in appalling German and expressing as well as he could his regret for the state in which he discovered the stranger. In return, Faber asked him of his friend—gesture serving where names failed—and the matter being understood, the Pasha told off a lieutenant and two men who invited the "infidel" to follow them. Ranovica had burned itself to a cinder by this time, and if it was not possible to pass down the narrow street, at least the precincts of the houses might be searched. Faber trudged after the men and came to the ruined church, now but a shell and a few blackened beams. A young Turkish soldier walked to and fro here; but the gulley of the road before the church was blocked by corpses, and near by them lay the figure of Louis de Paleologue. He had been shot through the head just as he reached the porch, and he lay face downwards, an unlighted cigarette between his lips and his kindly eyes wide open.

Faber knelt and turned the dead man over. He felt his pulse, and even laid his head upon his chest to listen for the beating of his heart. There had been horrors enough in Ranovica this day; but they had to do with a strange and savage people, of whom he knew nothing. He remembered that this man had taken his mother to America when she had no other friend in the world. Had he not come to Europe to reward him for what he had done as few have been rewarded, whatever the service? And this was the end of it—this prone figure, still and fearful—this, and the Turks who looked down upon the scene with Oriental indifference—this, and the sentry who leered behind their backs and made no attempt to hide his satisfaction. Faber caught the fellow grinning, and recognized him for one of the men who had turned on him earlier in the day when Paleologue floored the officer. The rifle in his hand had come from the arsenal at Charleston. Surely destiny spoke loudly enough here.

He borrowed a burned and tattered cloak from one of the dead in the gutter, and covered his friend's face reverently. Where to go, what to do next, he knew not; nor in what manner he should seek Maryska. The truth had gripped him with fingers of iron.

This was war—and of war was he not the disciple?

III

The Turks left the village about three in the after-noon. It was understood that they had other work of the kind, but more to the northward, and removed from the observant eye of their neighbours, the Montenegrins, who would surely avenge this day. Before they left, they were able to restore to Faber the mules which had brought his party to Ranovica. The beasts had been taken up the hillside during the conflagration, and would have been led much further afield but for the Pasha's desire to curry favour with the American. He knew that this was the man who made the rifles with which the infidel dogs must be destroyed; urgent messages from Constantinople had warned him to show deference to so useful an ally, and he obeyed his instructions with a display of manners quite pleasing. It was otherwise when the dead artist and his daughter were mentioned. Constantinople had said nothing about them, and it really seemed to Faber that the flat-faced, good-humoured Alussein could be a genius of understanding or the dullest blockhead at his pleasure.

So away the Turk went, just when the sun was beginning to dip down over the Adriatic and all the wilderness to glow beneath the shimmer of its deepening rays. A hillside, normally grey and cold, shone rose-pink and purple in the waxing splendour of the hour. The burned village became but the blacker for the gift, a charred log lying in a cup of the burnished rocks. Out of it, when every ruin had been twice searched, every heap of ashes turned for possible plunder, out of it went the baggy breeches and the little white horses and the fierce and bristling men, as cool and laconic as though this were but an episode and to-morrow would furnish another. Romancers' tales of troops drunk with lust and slaughter could not be told of them. All that passed, women's fearful struggles to escape their embraces, the shrieks of men whose hearts were being torn out, the gasps of the dying and the livid faces of the dead—all this was already forgotten, and would hardly be remembered when a week had gone. Had not the Prophet commanded them so to do, and was not he a discerning person withal?

Faber had taken a meal with Alussein upon the hillside about midday, and after that he had patrolled the village with Frank at his side, waiting and hoping for the coming of Maryska. To return to Ragusa without her would have been an infamy he could not contemplate; and yet he feared to meet her or to tell her the truth which must be told. When at last he did discover her, some hours had passed, and it was quite dark. The hillside with its savage boulders had given up the most part of the refugees then, and they had come down to the village to wander amid the ruins of their poor homes and to fill the street with their wailing. It was at this time also that another band of Albanians came up the valley to their comrades' rescue; alas, so many hours too late, but yet in time to help the desperate refugees and to bring them food and succour. Fires were now lighted by the valley road, and the women and children grouped about them. The most timid crept down from the rocks above; girls dishevelled and weeping, men who had fled with gashed limbs to the harbourage of caves, children whose parents lay dead beneath the ashes—all came at the summons of the shrill goat's horn. Meanwhile, none thought of burying the dead—none except Faber, who would not leave the body of Louis de Paleologue where it was, and returned with two lusty Albanians at his heels to do what could be done in the matter.