I had scarcely conceived the thought, when the general passed near us on his way from his tent, whence he had just been called; and at the sight my new-born hopes vanished. He was bare-headed; he carried no arms, and had nothing in his hand but a riding-switch. But the stern, grim aspect of his face, in which was no mercy and no quailing, was worth a thousand pikes. The firelight shone on his pale, olive cheek and brooding eyes, as he went by us, not seeing us; and after that I did not doubt what would happen, although for a moment the tumult of oaths and cries seemed to swell rather than sink, and I saw more than one pale-lipped officer climbing into his saddle that he might be able to fly, if necessary.
The issue agreed with my expectations. The heart of the disorder lay in a part of the camp separated from our quarters by a brook, but near enough in point of distance; so that we saw, my lady and all, pretty clearly what followed. For a moment, for a few seconds, during which you could hear a pin drop through the camp, the general stood, his life in the balance, unarmed in the midst of armed men. But he had that set courage which seems to daunt the common sort and paralyse the finger on the trigger; and he prevailed. The knaves lowered their weapons and shrank back cowering before him. In a twinkling the fires were beaten out by a hundred eager feet, and the general strode back to us through the silent, obsequious camp.
He distinguished my lady standing at the door of her tent, and stepped aside. 'I am sorry that you have been disturbed, Countess,' he said politely. 'It shall not occur again. I will hang up a dozen of those hounds to-morrow, and we shall have less barking.'
'You are not hurt?' my lady asked, in a voice unlike her own.
He laughed, deigning no answer in words. Then he said, 'You have no fire? Camp rules are not for you. Pray have one lit.' And he went on to his tent.
I had the curiosity to pass near it when my lady retired. I found a dozen men, cuirassiers of his privileged troop, peeping and squinting under the canvas which had been hung round the fire. I joined them and looked; and saw him lying at length, wrapped in his cloak, reading 'Cæsar's Campaigns' by the light of the blaze, as if nothing had happened.
CHAPTER XIX.
[IN A GREEN VALLEY.]
He was as good as his word. Before the sun had been up an hour six of the mutineers, chosen by lot from a hundred of the more guilty, dangled from a great tree which overhung the brook, and were already forgotten--so short are soldiers' memories--in the hurry and bustle of a new undertaking. The slope of the ridge which divided us from the neighbouring valley was quickly dotted with parties of men making their way up it, through bracken and furze which reached nearly to the waist; while the horse under Count Waska rode slowly off to make the circuit of the hill and enter the next valley by an easier road.
My lady chose to climb the hill on foot, in the track of the pikemen, though the heavy dew, which the sun had not yet drunk up, soon drenched her skirts, and she might, had she willed it, have been carried to the top on men's shoulders. The fern and long grass delayed her and made our progress slow, so that the general's dispositions were in great part made when we reached the summit. Busy as he still was, however, he had eyes for us. He came at once and placed us in a small coppice of fir trees that crowned one of the knobs of the ridge. From this point, where he took up his own position, we could command, ourselves unseen, the whole valley, the road, and river--the scene of the coming surprise--and see clearly, what no one below could discern, where our footmen lay in ambush in parties of fifty; the pikemen among some black thorns, close to the north end of the valley, the musketmen a little farther within and almost immediately below us. The latter, prone in the fern, looked, viewed from above, like lines of sheep feeding, until the light gleamed on a gun-barrel or sword-hilt and dispelled the peaceful illusion.