Was it curiosity or the girl? Just the passing fancy for the wildest little woman he had ever met or the desire to see his fellow men butchered? One or the other it must be, and he was too honest to deny it. Either Maryska or the Turkish butcher, scimitar in hand.
If it were the girl, his vain folly had met with a swift rebuke. Looking up to her bedroom window, he remembered her "good-night," and the manner of it. She had told him that he was an "old, old man," and the words struck him as a thunderclap. An "old, old man!" Good God! had so much of his life already run? No one had ever spoken such words before and his vanity bristled. Had the girl been serious, or did she speak in jest?
An "old, old man"—and he was not forty. In America, it is true, they have little use for forty unless forty can command allegiance. He, John Faber, had ruled a city in Charleston. His works employed more than five thousand men; he was the high priest of the temples of labour his own brain had built up. No one remembered his age there. They spoke of him as "the new Krupp," the young genius in steel who could make or mar the fortunes of empires. The women pursued him relentlessly, remembering his eleven millions. He could have led the life of an Oriental debauchee and no one criticise him. To read the papers—many of which he owned—you might have set him down for twenty-five. This chit of a wild girl had burst the bubble with a little pin prick of her candour. An old, old man! The words raked his self-assurance, he could have boxed her ears for them.
If not Maryska, what, then, had brought him to Ranovica?
Was it to see if he could witness something of that wild life of the Balkans which had stirred his imagination in the past? When quite a lad he had read of these villages and of what befell them when the Turk came in. One incident he had never forgotten; it was on the Macedonian frontier where a little town had been sacked, the men butchered or burned by naphtha, the women violated, the old priest flayed alive. He had the account of it in the Illustrated London News among his papers to that very day. Such a village as this might have been the scene of it!
He passed on, musing deeply, and presently met an Albanian posted at the head of the street. The soldier had an American rifle, and he discovered that it had come from his own factory at Charleston. He gave the man a couple of crowns, and the fellow grinned savagely, pointing at the same time up to the silent hills. There were Turks somewhere up there, and he would shoot them. The rifle was about to do that for which it was made. Faber would see the fruit of his own work.
He walked on a little way and met his valet, Frank. The young man spoke German fluently, and had learned a good deal from the Austrian porters. He was much alarmed by his situation, and did not hesitate to say so.
"They tell me an attack is expected, sir. We shall fare badly in this hole if it comes off. I don't think the authorities can do much for us; what's more, there ain't any."
Faber thrust his hands into his pockets—a habit of his—and walked a little way by his servant's side.
"Why," he said half reflectively, "it isn't exactly the Ritz Hotel to be sure. Who's been talking, Frank?"