I begged his pardon; for I knew nothing of such things. And he made allowance for my outburst; while I thought that I would rather play the French than the English part, in such a case—which was far from my usual sentiment.
"You need not make a fuss," he said, "all these things are an allegory. The wisest of men has been young and green at some time. Bat Strogue is not the boy to sing for starch in bibs and tuckers. Cranleigh, you may look at me, and some day you will tell your grandson—'Ah, you should have seen Bat Strogue! An Englishman of the old sort he was. Forty-six inches round the chest, and not a lie to be found in him.' Give me your hand, young man, I like you."
It occurred to me—so mean our nature is—that the brandy-and-water, which he quaffed like milk, was beginning to perturb a spirit even so ubiquitous. But his gaze was clear and bright as it had not been in the morning, and his voice impressive.
"You have only to go home, and wait. I have a friend who is on his way at this moment to St. Petersburg. I shall telegraph to him to-morrow, to keep his eye on Sûr Imar. He will have no trouble about that, the man being so conspicuous. I shall know when Imar thinks of leaving, and then we must look sharp indeed. You want to save him; so do I. And more than that, to blow to pieces the plans of this vile Hafer. He has treated me infamously; I will not bother you with that now. He little knows what Bat Strogue is. I might have starved, but for Jemmy Nickols. Just for the present I am in cash; but money never sticks to me. If the sinews of war fail, I shall not scruple to ask your help, though I know that you are not a millionaire, George Cranleigh. But I am a man of honour, sir. Though not a swell, I am no sponge. And I have some chance of a good windfall which is keeping me in London now. 'Never say die,' is my motto, sir; and if I get what I ought, I will lend you a hundred pounds as soon as look at you. Strogue is of Yorkshire family, sir, and a Yorkshireman always does what he says. But that Hafer is a cur, as mean a cur, and as fierce a cur, as was ever begotten by Cerberus. He made a scoundrel rob me of five hundred pounds, by false cards; as I found out just too late, and they split the swag between them. A burglar is a trump in comparison with them; and he has taken out young Petheril instead of me. Cranleigh, do you ask me why? Then I'll tell you in two words; because he can get him cheaper, sir, and because he has got no principle. Strogue must travel like a gentleman, as he is by birth and behaviour, and all that; Strogue maintains his rank, sir. You try to shove him into any skunky corner to save a few copeks in passage-money, and he lets you know—ay, you soon find that out, and you won't forget it in a hurry. But this fellow Petheril, that's his name, he would make any skunk's hole skunkier; and you wouldn't care to touch him with a pair of tongs. And another reason I can tell you too, Petheril doesn't know the little things about that beauty of a Marva, which have come to my ears, though I never saw her. Shows what my reputation is—'Bartholomew Strogue, The World,' would find me from any post-office in it. Though when you send me a hundred-pound note, it would be as well to be more precise. But I am not proud of that; it is a nuisance to me. I open a hundred letters, when I find myself in the humour, and there is not a penny in one of them; but they all want me to do something."
Fearing that he was becoming inclined to go off on the rove, as great travellers must, and being in a hurry about Stoneman and Grace, I asked him to say in a few words how Prince Hafer came under his charge in London.
"Simply because of my taking a little turn into the Caucasus," Captain Strogue replied, as if he had gone off into a side-walk in some Hampstead villa garden. "I was tired of the monotony on the northern side of the Caspian, where the people are too much alike, with plenty of barbarous customs; but when you have seen one, you know them all. There is not the variety which can be found in the mountain regions only. In a very rugged land, the human race cannot get so confoundedly chummy as to take the variety out of them, like peas in a pod perhaps a thousand miles long. The Caucasus is quite a small affair, compared to the Andes, or Himalaya, or half-a-dozen other mountain-chains. But it beats them all in this, that it was peopled earlier, or at any rate more thickly. And there the fellows are; no two lots at all alike; and if it was the cradle of the human race, as the ethnologists used to tell us, it was lucky that we tumbled out of it. Mind, I don't run them down; there are some of the noblest samples, so far as the body is concerned, that you could find on the face of the earth. And many of noble intelligence too, but with little chance of increasing it. As a rule, they hate work, both of body and of mind; and without proper work, we all relapse into monkeys, or advance into devils. You say, 'Strogue, then which are you?' You were longing to ask it, but too polite. Very well, Cranleigh, I am neither. I have done as much hard work as any man living. And I hope to do more, if my life holds out, although my joints are getting rickety. But my rule is—either work, or play. And I never mix the two together."
"But," I inquired, to bring him back to the point, for he seemed to be rather fond of talking about himself, "what was the reason that Hafer, if he was sent to fetch his uncle back, was not despatched to the camp at once, the old place in the valley, I mean, where his countrymen had taken up their abode. That would have saved all the London expenses, and the need for a guide and interpreter, and a lot of other trouble, as well as kept him out of mischief."
"True, my son; but it would have ruined the whole scheme. Hafer's nature would soon have shown itself, for his temper is simply horrible; kinjals would have flashed in the Surrey sun, and no Dariel would there have been for him. Even as it was, he contrived sometimes to make himself unpleasant to her. You remember our catching your little friend Allai, and putting some strain upon his loyalty? That was to learn a few useful facts from him, especially one about the lady and her father, and some points as to your proceedings. If you had not interfered, we should very soon have succeeded, for there is no great power of endurance in them. No, no. His mother knows too well what Hafer is, to quarter him on a quiet gentleman. And he never would have stood it. He came here to have his fling, quite as much as to carry out her plot—and a jolly wild time he has had of it. There is no steady love in a man like that, any more than there was in his father Rakhan."
"Foul scum of the earth, low blackguard! How dare he come near Dariel?" For the moment I lost my self-command. "How can I wait, Strogue? Am I to sit and count the time, while Imar and his daughter are going to their doom? Why not set off for Petersburg and try to keep them there? Or at any rate warn them, and go back with them, if they must go, and face that wicked woman and her despicable son. That seems to me to be the better plan by far. It would cost a lot of money; but I would beg, borrow, steal—"
"Won't do. You must follow my directions. In the first place, you forget what a cloud you are under. Probably Sûr Imar and his daughter would refuse to see you if you followed them. Or if you got over that difficulty, would they listen to your story? You know nothing about Marva's scheme, except through me, and I have no proofs. It is all suspicion, or inference from little slips of Hafer's and so on, and what I have heard since he departed. Mind you, I know it, as well as if I saw it; but there is nothing I could lay before Imar, to convince him that his sister intends to have him murdered, and to make her son the Master of Karthlos, and Chief of that branch of the Lesghians. Be in no hurry, my good young friend. I shall prick you up quite soon enough. It is the jerking that spoils everything. We were a nobler race five hundred years ago than we are now; because we took our time to think, and mind kept time with body. These fellows also take their time. They learn it from the way the snow falls; and they know that the snow tells a deeper tale than fifty thousand thunderstorms. In the Caucasus a tragedy—and they have no such thing as comedy—goes into ten acts at least, and lasts for generations."