Part 34

Berkeley's infamous treachery made my heart glow like a furnace! How deeply I repented now that, instead of succouring and remounting him, I had not left him, as his prior conduct deserved, to the chances of war and fate, and to take the place now occupied by me!

How long might I be a prisoner!

Of this war with the greatest empire in the world none could foresee or calculate the end.

Years, perhaps, might pass, and find me still a captive. By the troops of General Canrobert, some men had been discovered who had been lost by the French on their fatal retreat from Moscow in 1813, and who had, from youth to age, been slaves in the Tartar fortresses or the Siberian mines.

My blood ran cold with this idea. Oh, if such were to be my fate!

If Berkeley returned to England after all, and married Louisa! And then, if this wretched Brassy Wheedleton succeeded in marrying Cora, while I was industriously quarrying for copper and assafoetida in the vicinity of that pleasant city, Tobolsk by name!

But what was Cora to me? She was my cousin, and, of course, my cousin must not throw herself away and make an unequal marriage.

"There are men in this world," says a female writer, "who are quite capable of being in love with two women at once."

This was not at all my case; but I fear that Louisa's cold and cutting neglect was causing me to think more than I used to do of Cora Calderwood, who I knew loved me well, and I remembered the strange episode of the spell, or mesmeric riddle, wrought by the _hakim_ Abd-el-Rasig, the surgeon of the 10th Egyptian Infantry.

But to be a prisoner--the prisoner of these filthy wretches--and to be conveyed by them, like a helpless Polish exile, I knew not whither!

If in boyhood, and even in infancy, I had ever a horror of study and restraint; if in later years, even regimental discipline sometimes galled me by its monotonous trammels, the reader may imagine how I writhed, how my soul revolted, at the idea of being a Russian captive, and how I longed for vengeance on Berkeley. I swore to horsewhip him in front of the line, and pistol him after! There was no extravagant length in punishment to which my fancy did not resort and my fury indulge in. No MacGregor with the dirk at his lips, swearing vengeance for Alaster of Glenstrae; no Corsican De Franchi, vowing a dreadful _vendetta_ on his foe, could harbour feelings more bitter than I did in those moments of futile anger in that poor Tartar cottage.

I talked to myself wrathfully and incoherently.

I dozed at last; but my slumber was haunted by dreams and nightmares, like those of a fevered patient. I saw Louisa Loftus, with her pale and lovely features distorted by fear, her black hair floating all dishevelled about her white shoulders. She was clinging to the verge of a lofty rock, towards which an angry tide was advancing, while I, chained, withheld by some mysterious power, was unable to succour or to save her. My voice was gone, and my agonies were unbelieved, as she only beheld them with proud smiles of scorn and derision.

The scene changed. Now she had married, or was about to marry the Marquis of Slubber, believing me dead--that I had perished in the East. I heard her say so, distinctly and tearlessly, with a calm sympathetic smile, which my Lady Chillingham, with an impatient motion of her fan rebuked. Still I was deprived of all power of volition, and a spell tied up my utterance, till Berkeley--I saw him to the life, in his lancer uniform, hovering about her, to the evident annoyance of the senile marquis--told her, in his drawling lisp, that he had seen me killed, and she quite believed him. Then a painful cry escaped me, and I awoke. I had other dreams, and these were, perhaps, the worst of all. I was free! I had exposed and punished Berkeley. I was again among my friends; handsome Beverley, Travers, bluff Jack Studhome, Fred Wilford, and the others were around me. The lancers were on parade, I heard the neighing of the chargers; and saw the long line of glittering lances, the plumes and banperoles waving in the sunshine; I heard the music of our band; we were laughing, talking, smoking; we were in the mess or billiard-room, and I could hear the bells of Canterbury ringing in the cathedral towers.

At other times I was in Calderwood Glen, under the old, old trees that had echoed to the hunting-horn of many a kingly Stuart; or I was on the heather muirs, gun in hand, with old Sir Nigel, knocking over the whirring partridges and the golden pheasants, the plash of the mountain burn and the hum of the mountain bee coming together on the balmy breeze, as I trod the green Lomond side, and saw the grassy glens of Fife, the blue Forth, and many a village spire among the woodlands far away.

Then to waken and find myself chained to the Cossack corporal, in that loathly Russian den, in the wilds of Crim Tartary, was a disappointment cruel and bitter!

The rising sun saw us once more on the road; but for what place I was still ignorant. Before we started Corporal Pugacheff released my hand, but pointed significantly to his pistols.

On this day, as we proceeded eastward, there rose in the distance on our right the mountain of the Tents, the highest in the Crimea (the Tchatir Dagh, a mass of red marble), so named from its resemblance to the dwellings of the Nogai Tartars. Five thousand feet it towered above the Euxine, with its summit crimsoned in the morning sun.

Through a defile, named Demir-Kapon (or the Iron Gate), we entered the valley of the Angar, a tributary of the Salghir (which flows into the Putrid Sea); and here, from the slopes of the mountain, the scenes we saw were full of rural loveliness--picturesque Tartar villages, laden orchards and blushing vineyards, and flocks and herds without end; everywhere softness blending with sublimity. I noted every foot of the way well, as I had but one thought--escape.

I remember that near the Tartar town of Sivritash, which lies twenty miles north-east of Sebastopol, we passed a body of Russian recruits for various regiments, all hastening to get into the latter place before the Allies could invest it.

These recruits were escorted by a squadron of the hussars of the Princess Maria Paulowna (sister of the Emperor). They were certainly gorgeously-equipped and accoutred troopers, mounted on fine Arab horses; but my admiration for them was not increased by a blow which one of them dealt me, in mere wantonness, with the flat of his sabre, as I trudged past wearily and afoot: but this insult honest Pugacheff resented by laying his lance heavily across the shoulders of the hussar.

Many questions were asked of him by the officers of these troops, who altogether mustered about five thousand men; and from the frequency with which the name Kourouk occurred in his replies, as well as the direction in which we were travelling, I surmised that we were proceeding to the fortress at that place.

In this conjecture I was right, for on the evening of the third day after my capture, I found myself a prisoner in the secluded Russian fort or outpost of Kourouk, which lies on the northern slope of the mountain of Karaba Yaila, and is distant exactly seventy miles, as a bird flies, from Sebastopol.

No parole was offered me; I was without money, and my name and rank were alike unknown; I was clad only in the tatters of my own regimental finery; and I felt a deep gloom steal over me, when the little wicket gate in the massive wooden and iron barriers of the fortress was closed behind me. And now, cast utterly among strangers, I parted with regret even from the snub-nosed Corporal Pugacheff, who had been my guide thus far, and from his red-eyed poodle, Olga, too.

I was the only prisoner of war in the fortress of Kourouk.

*CHAPTER XLV.*

It was at length the same to me, Fettered or fetterless to be, I learned to love despair. And thus when they appeared at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, Those heavy walls to me had grown A heritage--and all my own! BYRON.

Situated on a rocky slope, under the shadow of the hills of Karaba Yaila, stand the town and castle of Kourouk.

Built by the Genoese upon the ruins of a fortress erected by a khan of the house of Zingis (under whom the Crimea became an independent monarchy in 1441), the castle had been in its glory in the days when Genoa the superb was mistress of the coasts of Asia, and the islands of Cyprus, Lesbos, and Scio; but when Mohammed II. conquered Constantinople, he destroyed all the colonies of the Genoese republic upon the shores of the Euxine.

The defenders of the Castle of Kourouk, under a Scottish soldier of fortune, made a gallant resistance; but were all put to the sword, and their skulls are now built into a portion of the rampart which faces Mecca. The rocks of red and white marble on which it stands have been excavated, like those of its contemporary, the old Genoese Castle of Balaclava, into magazines and stately chambers, the sides of which are covered with coloured designs in stucco.

The two old round towers of the Genoese days were crowned by Russian cupolas--one striped like a melon, the other cut into facets, like a pineapple, all red and yellow alternately, and each surmounted by a glittering cross. These, with the great white banner of St. Andrew, with its blue saltire over all, made Kourouk look gay at a distance.

Within all was grim and sombre enough.

The garrison consisted of a four-company battalion of Russian infantry, under a _chef-de-bataillon_, named Vladimir Dahl, a tall, grisly-moustached old soldier, who wore on his breast the embroidered representation of a Turkish standard, which he had taken from the Infidels, in the days of Navarino. Each of his companies consisted of two hundred men, and belonged to a regiment three thousand strong. Such corps are the usual Russian formation, and are commanded by a _pulkovnick_, or colonel.

These troops wore long, loose, dirty-grey capotes, reaching to their ankles. On their shoulders, and in front of their flat cloth caps, was sewn a piece of green stuff, with the regimental number, 45; and this was all their finery.

They were on parade in line as Corporal Pugacheff conducted me into the fortress; and I thought them a strange array of sorry-looking wretches, so stolid in aspect, that I was reminded of the traveller, who, on seeing a Russian and a British regiment under arms in the same square at Naples, exclaimed--

"There is but one face in that whole regiment, while in this" (pointing to the British) "every soldier has a face of his own."

I was treated with the greatest respect and kindness by old Vladimir Dahl and the officers of the 45th, or Tambrov Infantry, for the outrages of the French at Kertch, and the infamous massacre of our seamen at Hango, had not yet occurred to impart a bitterness to the war.

Neither he nor I knew the other's language; his _capitans_, _fiarooschicks_, and _praperchicks_ (_i.e._, lieutenants and ensigns) were in the same condition. Thus we had no means of communication, save by clinking our glasses, and exchanging cigarettes, nods, winks, and grins.

An old _Times_ newspaper was given to me. It was dated months back, and detailed the battle of Oltenitza; but its columns had been carefully purged by the censor of everything political--an ingenious process achieved by gutta-percha and ground glass.

The reader has, perhaps, heard of how a farrier-sergeant of the Emperor Alexander's Dragoon Guards predicted the destruction of the grand army of Napoleon I., on being shown a horseshoe dropped by the retreating cavalry of France.

"What! not frosted yet," he exclaimed, professionally, "and the snow to fall to-morrow! Holy St. Sergius! these fellows don't know Russia!"

Vladimir Dahl was the son of the farrier-sergeant who thus predicted the downfall of the enemies of Russia; and he was more proud of his father than if he had been, like the best of the Muscovite nobles, descended from Ruric the Norman.

The days passed slowly away. I might as well have been dumb, having no one to converse with. I could not pass the castle gates, as every avenue, angle, and outlet was guarded by snub-nosed Muscovites, in grey capotes, with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets.

Hope of escape as yet I had none!

On the morning of the fourth day, a mounted Paulowna hussar delivered at Kourouk a letter, with a shred of the feather of the quill with which it had been written inserted among the wax of the seal--a Russian mode of signifying speed.

It announced the arrival of General Baur, with all his staff. Baur had been wounded in the encounter with our troops at Khutor-Mackenzie; and I was very well pleased when the evening of the same day saw him ride into Kourouk, of which I was heartily weary; and I was not without hopes that the general, on remembering how we had released him after the Alma, might do something for me in the way of exchanging or paroling me; and in his aide-de-camp, the gay young Captain Anitchoff, of the Maria Paulowna Hussars, I was glad to see a face that I knew, and to meet one with whom I could converse.

The general had been wounded by a musket shot in the bridle arm. It was severely inflamed. Ease had been recommended, so he had come to spend a week or so at Kourouk, which was in his own military district; and on the very evening of his arrival, Anitchoff brought me an invitation to dine with him.

Anitchoff was eminently a handsome Russian. His eyes were dark, and had a latent fire in them that showed some Tartar blood; the lids were full and white, the lashes long and dark. His nose was straight and thin, and his ponderous moustache was as black as his close-shaven hair, or the wolf's fur that trimmed his light blue uniform.

My costume was of the most sorry description; but a few discrepancies were made up by Vladimir Dahl, who, among other things, presented me with a full uniform, silver epaulettes and all, of the Tambrov infantry.

French is not so much spoken in Russia as people in Britain suppose; yet, luckily for me, General Baur and Anitchoff could speak it fluently.

Before proceeding to the General's I asked--

"Can you inform me, Captain Anitchoff, if parole is to be accepted?"

"I cannot say, but rather think not," he replied, with hesitation.

"The deuce!" I exclaimed, haughtily; "then I shall escape, if I can."

"Pray don't think of it," said he, earnestly.

"Why?" I demanded, with intense chagrin.

"We have rather a summary mode of dealing with prisoners who attempt to escape. So be wary, my friend."

"Indeed, summary. How?"

"We don't always keep them on our hands," said he, with a smile that was grimly significant, while he played with the gold tassels of his hussar busby.

"Well, 'twere better to be shot than kept lingering here."

"Oh, you won't be kept here, my friend."

"Where then?"

"In a few days you will probably be sent with a convoy of sick and wounded by the way of Perecop and the desert plains towards Yekaterinoslav."

"I shall escape by the way," said I, doggedly.

"I repeat, my friend, don't think of it, for Trebitski, who will command, does not stand on trifles; and yet," he added, with a smile, "there are two persons who seldom fail in what they attempt--a prisoner and a lover."

"Why?"

"Stendahl, a Russian author, says, 'The lover thinks oftener of obtaining his mistress than the husband does of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks oftener of escaping from his prison than the gaoler does of keeping him safe within its walls. Therefore, the lover and the prisoner should succeed.' You see," he continued, laughing, "we have some authors in snowy Russia, whatever you Britons may think to the contrary. But here is the general."

Passing through the officers of the 45th, who all made way for us, I was ushered into the presence of General Baur, the grim soldier, who was related to the hero of Beverley's interesting anecdote--Karlovitch Baur, son of Karl, the brother of Michel, the old miller of Husum.

He received me with studious politeness, though he could not help smiling at my Tambrov uniform. His left arm was in a sling, and, as he shook hands with me, I felt that he had but two right fingers remaining. A Turkish sabre had shorn him of the rest at Kalafat, on the Danube, in the year before.

Baur was every way a man of a severely impressive presence and aspect. He had an enormous white moustache, the long, snaky curls of which floated almost over each of his large silver epaulettes. His forehead was high, massive and stern; his hair, shorn short, was rough and grizly. His dark eyes were keen, bold, and inquiring at times; but at others they wore a deep, sombre and melancholy expression, as if he was always thinking of a world beyond the present--to be looking into it, in fact--and this was not to be wondered at when we consider that Karlovitch Baur was the hero of one of the most remarkable episodes ever committed to paper.

His manner was that of one who is prompt and ready alike in thought and action, and yet who never unsaid or undid anything.

Over his grass-green and silver-laced uniform, he wore a loose, wide _souba_, or fur coat with sleeves, for service, and this he cast aside when the trumpets announced that dinner was served; and then, among many other orders that glittered on his warlike breast, I saw that of St. Andrew, which was founded in 1699 by Peter the Great, and is only bestowed on crowned heads and officers of the highest rank.

It reminded me much of our own Order of the Thistle, being a blue enamelled saltire; but on the reverse was a Muscovite eagle, with the initials "S.A.P.R." (_Sanctus Andreas, Patronus Russiae_).

At the table I was seated between the general and his chief aide-de-camp, Anitchoff, both of whom conversed with me in French.

"How did it come to pass that you were taken prisoner?" asked the former.

"My horse was shot under me."

"Near the Belbeck?"

"Yes," said I, blushing like a school-girl, as I could not, for the soul of me, say that a British officer had degraded his epaulettes by the perfidy of which Berkeley had been guilty.

"Ah! unlucky; but such things will happen. Your troops and the French, with the Turkish dogs, are now almost in front of Sebastopol."

"Indeed!" said I, with a joy which I could not conceal.

"You think, no doubt, to take it under our moustaches, or, as you Britons say, under our noses; but you won't," he added with a grave smile. "St. Sergius has ordained it otherwise, and Todleben, the wary old Courlander, is busy fortifying it. His sappers are at work day and night."

"Pho! don't talk of Sebastopol, general," said his aide-de-camp, laughing. "Our feeding there was so bad that I felt inclined to try whether the Allies fared better than we did; but after the Alma, I thought that the less I considered the matter the better."

"Ah, that day at Alma played the deuce with many a family circle in Sebastopol," said Baur, twisting his moustache angrily.

"Yes," added Anitchoff; "many a widow is there now, weeping for the dear defunct with one eye, and ogling his successor with the other."

At this jest a dark frown gathered on the long, stern visage of Baur.

Dinner proceeded briskly. It was served up in a kind of hall, which had arched and painted windows, flanked by the round Genoese towers, whose gilt cupolas formed the chief features of the fortress.

The walls were simply whitewashed, and the furniture was somewhat of the "barrack ordnance" description of our own equipments in quarters at home.

The repast was rather military in fashion, and by no means a dinner _a la Russe_, all flower vases, bouquets, and kickshaws; but was composed of substantial edibles for hungry and soldierly stomachs.

We began with small glasses of kimmel, and then came caviare, made from the roe of the sturgeon of the Don, spread on thin slices of bread; then followed the fish--turbot and mackerel from the Black Sea; yellow-fleshed sterlets from the Volga, salted in oil; wild boar hams from the forest of Khutor-Mackenzie; mutton fed on the Tauridian steppes; pies of holy pigeons from the gilt domes I had admired at a distance; piles of Crimean fruit; the wines of Ac-metchet and Kastropulo, with Cliquot; and there, too, were London stout and Bass's pale ale, taken from some of our wrecks in the Black Sea.

During dinner I was amused by hearing the ideas entertained by the Russians of our British soldiers, with whom they were now for the first time in actual conflict; for Prince Menschikoff had industriously spread among his troops a rumour that we were only beardless seamen, dressed up as soldiers; and that, however formidable on the ocean, we were worthless ashore.

To this contemptuous notion was added a sublime faith in their own valour, and the miracles to be wrought by St. Sergius, whose image they bore at Alma, and whose fourth reappearance was confidently predicted by Innocent, Archbishop of Odessa, in his sermon to the garrison of Sebastopol, for Sergius was a patriotic saint and warrior who defeated the Tartars--whose "uncorrupted body" lies in a silver shrine, like a four-post bed, and whose shoes (sorely worn at the heels) are still preserved in the Troitza, or monastery, of the Holy Trinity at Moscow.

General Baur, a man deeply imbued with the most gloomy superstition, believed in all these delusions devoutly. His aide-de-camp and Vladimir Dahl, however, laughed at him covertly; but admitted that the appearance of the Highland regiments filled the columns on the Kourgane Hill with a strange terror; for being, as the author of "Eoethen" records, "men of great stature, and in a strange garb, their plumes being tall, and the view of them being broken and distorted by the wreaths of smoke, and there being, too, an ominous silence in their ranks, there were men among the Russians who began to conceive a vague terror--the terror of things unearthly; and some, they say, imagined that they were being charged by horsemen, strange, silent, and monstrous, bestriding giant chargers."

Dinner was drawing to a close, or giving place to the dessert, when my former acquaintance under less pleasant circumstances, Lieutenant Adrian Trebitski, of the Tchernimoski Cossacks, appeared, travel-stained, and splashed with the mud of a journey on his boots and sabretache, having arrived on duty with sick soldiers, and a deserter, who was to be shot on the morrow.

"Why not to-night?" asked the stern Baur.

"The sentence says to-morrow, general," replied Anitchoff consulting a despatch.

"Then to-morrow be it--I am not a messman, and so don't begrudge the poor wretch his last supper. Is he one of your corps, Trebitski?"

"Yes, general, I regret to say, a Cossack of our sotnia, from the Lena, in Siberia," replied Trebitski, who was eyeing me with an aspect of discomposure, evidently fearing that I might report the pillage I had undergone at his hands. But this fear subsided when I drank wine with him, clinking my glass over and under his, for I felt that my position was too perilous to make an enemy of this man, especially as Anitchoff informed me that he was to have command of the convoy which would take me towards Perecop.

"I hope he will treat me with courtesy," said I, "and remember that I am a commissioned officer."

"Why do you doubt him?" asked Anitchoff, with a quiet smile.

"I--I don't like the expression of his eyes."

"They are as keen as those of a Tartar; but, then, he has Tartar blood in him, for his mother was a woman of the middle Kirghis hordes, lately added to our empire."

"Are they remarkable for a curious expression of eye?"

"Yes; any Tartar can discern a single Russian horseman at a quarter of the distance that a Russian will discover a whole troop of Tartars, even with lances uplifted; hence they make our best vedettes."