I re-entered the château feeling sad, irresolute, and crushed in spirit. I had lost that on which I had set my heart, and at the hands of Tolstoff, my rival, I might yet lose more, if his threats meant anything--liberty, perhaps life itself.
What, then, was to be done? I was without money, without arms, or a horse. All these Valerie might procure for me; but how or where was I to address her again? After the result of our last interview she would be certain to avoid me more sedulously than ever. As I passed through the magnificent vestibule, which was hung with rose-coloured lamps, the light of which fell softly on the green malachite pedestals and white marble Venuses, Dianas, and Psyches, which had no part of them dressed but their hair, which was done to perfection, I met Ivan Yourivitch, who made me understand that the officer whom the Pulkovnick expected with certain papers from Sebastopol had arrived, and was now in the dining-room; but the Pulkovnick had smoked himself off to sleep, and must not, under certain pains and penalties, be disturbed. Would I see him? And so, before I knew what to say, or had made up my mind whether to avoid or meet the visitor, I was ushered into the stately room, when I found myself once more face to face with Mr. Hawkesby Guilfoyle!
The ex-cornet of wagoners was clad now in the gray Russian military capote, with a sword and revolver at his girdle. His beard had grown prodigiously; but his hair--once so well cared for--was now very thin indeed, and he did not appear altogether to have thriven in the new service to which he had betaken himself. His aspect was undoubtedly haggard. Suspected by his new friends (who urged him on duties for which he had not the smallest taste), and in perpetual dread of falling into the hands of the old, by whom he would be certainly hanged or shot, his life could not be a pleasant one; so he had evidently betaken himself to drink, as his face was blotched and his eyes inflamed in an unusual degree.
He was very busy with a decanter of sparkling Crimskoi and other good things which the dvornick had placed before him, and on looking up he failed to recognise me, clad as I was in a suit of Volhonski's plain clothes, which were "a world too wide" for me; and no doubt I was the last person in the world whom he wished or expected to see in such a place and under such circumstances--being neither guest nor prisoner, and yet somewhat of both characters. He bowed politely, however, and said something in Russian, of which he had picked up a few words, and then smiled blandly.
"You smile, sir," said I, sternly; "but remember the adage, a man may smile and smile, and be----"
"Stay, sir!" he exclaimed, starting up; "this is intolerable! Who the devil are you, and what do you mean?"
"Simply that you are a villain, and of the deepest die!"
His hand went from the neck of the decanter towards his revolver; then he reseated himself, and with his old peculiar laugh said, while inserting his glass in his right eye,
"O, this beats cock-fighting! Hardinge of the Welsh Fusileers! Now, where on earth did you come from?"
"Not from the ranks of the enemy, at all events," I replied.
His whole character--the wrongs he had tried to do me and had done to many others; the artful trick he had played me at Walcot Park his pitiless cruelty to Georgette Franklin; his base conduct to me when helpless on the field of Inkermann; his guiding a sortie in the night; his entire career of unvarying cunning and treachery--caused me to regard the man with something of wonder, mingled with loathing and contempt, but contempt without anger. He was beneath that.
"So you are a prisoner of war?" said he, after a brief pause, during which he had drained a great goblet of the Crimskoi--a kind of imitation champagne.
"What I am is nothing to you--my position, mind, and character are the same."
"Perhaps so," he continued; "but I think that the most contemptible mule on earth is a fellow in whom no experience or time can effect a change of mind, or cure of those narrow opinions in which he is first brought up, as the phrase is, in that little island of ours."
"So you have quite adopted the Russian idea of Britain?" said I, with a scornful smile.
"Yes; and hope to have more scope for my talents on the Continent than I ever had there. I should not have left the army of my good friend Raglan----"
"Who presented you with that ring, eh?"
"Had there not been the prospect of a row about a rooking one night in camp, and a bill which some meddling fellow called a forgery. Bah! a bad bill may be a very useful thing at times; it is like a gun warranted to burst; but, as Lever says, you must always have it in the right man's hands, when it comes for explosion. If you are a prisoner, I am afraid that your chances of early seeing our dear mutual friends in Taffyland--by the way, how is old Sir Taffy?--are very slender, if once you are sent towards the Ukraine," he went on mockingly, as he lit a papirosse. "And so the fair Estelle threw you over, eh? Good joke that! Preferred old Potter's company to yours, for the term of his natural life? What a deuced sell! But what a touching picture of love they must present--quite equal to Paul and Virginia, to Pyramus and Thisbe!"
At that moment, and while indulging in a loud and mocking laugh, his countenance suddenly changed; he grew very pale, the glass fell from his pea-green eye, and the lighted papirosse from his lips; all his natural assurance and insouciance deserted him, and he looked as startled and bewildered as if a cannon-shot had just grazed his nose. I turned with surprise at this sudden change, and saw the face and figure of Colonel Tolstoff, who had limped into the room and been regarding us for half a minute unperceived. He stood behind me, grim and stern as Ajax, and was gazing at Guilfoyle with eyes that, under their bristling brows, glittered like those of a basilisk, and seemed to fascinate him.
"We have not met since that night at Dunamunde!" exclaimed Tolstoff, in a voice of concentrated fury; "but, I thank God and St. Sergius, we have met at last--yes, at last! And so you know each other--you two?" he added, in German, while bestowing a withering glance on me.
"Dunamunde!" said I, sternly, as the name of that place recalled something of a strange story concerning Tolstoff told by Guilfoyle to Lord Pottersleigh at Craigaderyn; "and you two would seem to have known each other and been friends of old, that is, if you are the same Count Tolstoff whom he saved from the machinations of a certain Colonel Nicolaevitch, then commanding the Marine Infantry at Riga."
"What rubbish is this you speak?" demanded the other, with angry surprise; "there never was a Count Tolstoff; and I am the Pulkovnick Nicolaevitch Tolstoff who commanded in Dunamunde, and was custodian of eighty thousand silver roubles, all government money. This ruffian was my friend--my chief friend then, though of the gaming table; but he joined in a plot, with others like himself, among whom was the Head of the Police, to rob me. He admitted them masked into my rooms, when they shot me down with my own pistols, and left me, with a broken thigh, bound hand and foot and cruelly gagged, while they escaped in safety across the Prussian frontier and got to Berlin, where they started a gaming-house. But he is here--here in my power at last; and sweetly and surely, I shall have such vengeance as that power gives me. Ha! look at him, the speechless coward; he has no bones in his tongue now!" he added, using a favourite Russian taunt.
"All over--run to earth, by Jove!" muttered Guilfoyle, with trembling lips, forgetting about the papers he had brought, his new character of a Russian officer, and forgetting even to deny his identity; "I have thrown the dice for the last time, and d--nation, they have turned up aces!"
Ivan Yourivitch and other Cossack servants, who had heard the loud voice of Tolstoff raised in undisguised anger, now appeared, and received some orders from him in Russian. In a moment they threw themselves upon Guilfoyle, disarmed, stripped him of his uniform, and bound him with a silken cord torn from the window-curtains. At first I was not without fears that they meant to strangle him with it, so prompt and fierce was their manner; but they merely tied his hands behind him, and thrust him into a closet, the door of which was locked, and the key given to the Pulkovnick.
The latter, without deigning to take farther notice of me, turned on his heel and limped away, muttering anathemas in Russian; and I felt very thankful that he had not made me a close prisoner also, after the humiliating fashion to which he had subjected the wretched Guilfoyle. But he was not without secret and serious ulterior views regarding me. All remained still now in the great mansion after this noisy and sudden episode; and I heard no sound save once--the clatter of a horse's hoofs, which seemed to leave the adjoining stable-yard and die away, as I thought, in the direction of the Baidar Valley, where the Cossacks lay encamped; and somehow my heart naturally connected these circumstances and foreboded coming evil, as I sat alone in the recess of a window overlooking the terrace, and the same moonlighted scenery which Valerie had viewed from it so lately.
