"Come in, my friend, and have some refreshment. On Sundays all the men dine together," he said as he led me inside the door, "and we will have something with them. I fear that you found it difficult to keep from laughing at the sight of such an astonishing set of hats, and scarcely any two alike. We copied them first, I sometimes think, from our highest and most fantastic peaks; but art has outdone nature. In truth they are a motley lot, but there is not a false heart among them."
I had seen nearly all of them before, on the day of the police invasion, but not as now in their best apparel, a strange and interesting sight. Some of them had wondrous coats, frogged and braided, and painted and patched, and ribboned and laced, and leathered, and I know not what, with coins, and baubles, and charms, and stars, and every kind of dangle; and two of them wore Russian uniforms far advanced in years, and captured perhaps in the days of Shamyl. But their faces, though covered with beards and freckles, could not be called savage or ignoble; and though one or two bore a swarthy aspect, some were as fair as Englishmen. I could well believe that there might be truth in the tradition of their tribe, that they were a separate race, distinct among the myriad mountain strains, having the hot oriental blood refreshed and strengthened from the Western founts. They regarded their Chief with patriarchal loyalty and deference, but no servility or cringing; it was his pleasant duty to maintain them, and theirs to work for him, to a rational extent. Whatever they had was his, so far as nature allows such partnership; while his property enjoyed the privilege of ministering to their welfare.
"They have done well," said the Chief to me, while I was revolving these things slowly; and hoping that his daughter might appear at last to grace the feast; "they will go and wander in their gardens now, and have the pleasure of sitting in their native form."
"Which is something like that of a hare," I replied, without calling to mind that it might seem rude; but he smiled, for he never took offence unless it were intended, which is a most sagacious rule. And he proceeded with his inference.
"The fact that they are coming without much pain to the use of chairs and benches, when commended to them by a good dinner, tends to prove that they are of a high and naturally docile race. But come to my room, and have a glass of Kahiti; and then we will go forth into the wood, and you shall know all that has come to pass in the life of a man not so very old yet, but with all his best years behind him."
He smiled, and I looked at him still in his strength, still comely and sweet of temper, a man with almost every gift of nature, but not endowed with happiness. And his smile was not that of a jubilant heart, which has tried and can trust its own buoyancy; but rather of the calm mind which flows in, to level all the tumult, and to cover all the ruin. I thought to myself that I must come to that, if Dariel went on, as she seemed to do, and kept out of sight without a word to me.
But after a bottle of the Chief's light wine—a dozen of which would not have turned a British hair—I had the presence of mind to fill my pipe and pouch with some very fair tobacco of the mountains, and to follow him over a clever little bridge of his own construction into the heart of the grey old wood. There we sat upon a mossy log, and he poured out his story, while the sunshine came in slants sometimes, and I wished there had been more of it.
I cannot repeat Sûr Imar's tale with any of his self-commanding strength, much less convey the light and shade of a voice alive with memory of whatever the soul has suffered. However, to the best of my belief, the import of his words is here. Feebly, but never falsely, have I set down his remembrances. Only his foreign turns of language have escaped my memory; and he must tell what he has to tell like an ordinary Englishman. Which means without long words, whenever short ones serve the turn as well.