Now when I had read SÛr Imar's letter, which I hastened to do by the light from the west at the very spot where he had told his tale, there was nothing (at least to a clay-headed fellow) affording definite answer to the questions which concerned me most. The first of these was—why on earth had my friends broken up and departed so hastily? And the second—no less of a puzzle to me—what had I done to give fatal offence? All SÛr Imar wrote was this, wherein I found that although he spoke our language so well and fluently and with better command of it than I have, he was not quite so familiar with the mysteries of our spelling. But let that pass unheeded.

My dear young Friend,—So I desire to call you still, because I am old, and an old man has learned that he must not listen to everything, neither yield without proof to assertions which contradict his own experience. My belief is that you are as full of honour as I was at your time of life; and it is always most hot in the young, until they are taught that justice is the first thing to be aimed at. And I have a firm belief from my observation of you, that any mistake you may have made was caused by the influence of the moment, and without any intention to do wrong.

I am grieved that I shall have no opportunity of meeting you again in England. We are obliged to depart at once, having heard of an adverse incident, which threatens all my prospects of success. Probably we shall never meet again; and perhaps you will not desire it. But Englishmen go everywhere, even to the inhospitable Caucasus; and I would try to prove to you that the epithet is undeserved, if you would afford me the chance, and show that you still think kindly of your old friend,

Imar, the Lesghian.

Vexed as I was with painful wonder as to the charge against me, I could not help admiring the large and peaceful nature of this man. He thought that I had wronged his child, the hope of his days, and the heart of his life; and yet not a bitter word did he employ, nor even show a sign of scorn. Not in vain had he passed through the mill of tribulation. By loss of faith in woman's goodness, he had lost all the delights of love, of family bliss, and home, and comfort for the residue of his time on earth. And the lesson it had taught him was to doubt of evil in mankind, or at least in those whom his friendly nature led him to approve and like. Oh! why was not his daughter of an equal trust and largeness? Not a word had she sent me, not even one reproach, which might have told me that her heart was sore. If after all her knowledge of me, all the proof which her eyes alone must have rendered to her mind, one lying tale, whatever it was, had been enough to scatter to the wind all her faith and all her love, then none of it was worth having. So I reasoned, and yet in vain. The stronger my conviction grew, the less was I convinced of it. My heart was all with Dariel still; and let the mind argue as it would, had logic ever looked at her? Any cold dribble may be crystal clear; but the current in the veins of man should be warm and red and glowing.

Under that sudden cloud could I rest without looking up to inquire what it was? All I could do was to guess and guess; but I had no guilty conscience, which is the quickest of all conjecturers. If for one moment of charm, or caprice, any lure of the eye, or bewitchment of a smile, I had gone astray from my one true love, the memory would have come up at once, and suggested to my shame that I was served aright. But there had been nothing of the kind. I had only done what seemed at first the simple duty of friendship, and after that sunk my own delights in the stress of deep affliction. If for this, and no more than this, I was to be treated as a scoundrel, I had a right to know who had put that twist upon it.

Therefore, on the following day, I took an early train to London, and a cab from the terminus to Hatton Garden, and found Signor Nicolo finishing at leisure a delicate and skilful breakfast. He received me very kindly, and unpinned the napkin from his Italian velvet coat, and offered me a glass of something fine, which proved a great deal too fine for me. My impatience seemed to please him, and he was in no hurry to allay it. And his first words seemed to me to contain some rather impertinent assumption.

"The great point is to be calm, Mr. Cranleigh. To be quite calm, and look at things quietly—ah, yes!"

"I scarcely know what you refer to, Mr. Nickols. What is there to prevent my being calm? I am simply come to ask about some friends, as a—as a matter of business. You were kind enough when I was here before——"

"Come, come now. This won't do. We are not having a deal for a diamond. I know all about it, as well almost as if I had been in the thick of it. Ah, yes! But you find yourself bothered, don't you?"

"Certainly, I don't like it much," I answered, as his black eyes flashed at me, and a merry smile lifted his long moustache. "I did not expect to be treated thus. And I was strongly attached to SÛr Imar."

"And to Kuban and Orla. Ah, yes, I see! And to Stepan and Allai, and all the rest. What a pity there were no ladies there! You might have become attached to them as well."

"I call it very kind of you to spare me so much time," I answered rather stiffly, for I would have no vulgar chaff about Dariel; "I was almost afraid of encroaching upon business."

"Duke of K—— at eleven o'clock, Serene Highness of L—— at twelve, King of the Malachites at half-past; and a bigger swell than all of them put together to a devilled bone at 1.30. Therefore we must touch the point. You want to know why our interesting friends have bolted so suddenly; and still more, why they did it without ta-ta to you. That last point I am not clear about, though I have some shrewd suspicions. But I think I can tell you why they made a brief adieu to the neighbours who never came near them. You will acknowledge that they could not be expected to stand on ceremony there."

"You have got the stick by the wrong end altogether," I broke in, for the sake of justice; "we let them alone, for the excellent reason that we knew they wished to be let alone. No Englishman ever endeavours to push through a gate that is always bolted. Our neighbourhood took no notice of them, because it was known from the very first that they came there for that purpose. And living in a wilderness of ivied ruins——"

"You appear to have turned against them, even more than their behaviour warrants. But for all that, SÛr Imar is a really great man. He looks at things differently from you and me; and it is not for us to judge him. For, like all men who go in for what we don't care about, he is set down as a crank, a dreamer, a man with a tile off, a fellow you would like to toss for sovereigns with, and everything else that a cad of the gutter pities and sucks up to. But I can tell you that the Lesghian old man, as the idiots would call him at forty-five, may defy a Polish Jew to cheat him. For I don't call it cheating a man, when he knows it, and lets you do it, because he scorns you and the cash alike. When you cheat him you are like a man who steals his house-water from a horse-trough, and you deserve to get glanders for it. But what I call fine cheating is to get twice the value of a thing out of a wiry old screw, whose money is his life, and his life all money. Oh, yes! There is some joy in that."

Signor Nicolo rubbed his hands, and then put them into the feeling of his pockets, with a warmth of some rich memory—not very old, I daresay.

"But you would never do such a thing as that?" I asked, with a little doubt quivering in the question. "You would be far above all such ideas?"

"Would I? Of course I would, when I couldn't get the chance. And I would never get the better of a real friend, beyond twenty-five per cent at maximum. And he would make seventy-five on that at the West End. But when a man I hate with a fine religious strength, comes here to get the best of me, screwing up his mouth, and looking righteous, and as cordial as a stewed Spanish onion—'oh, dear, how lovely! A little flat in the culet—would be perfect but for that milky spot below the zone,' and so on; for what did the Almighty make a man except to chisel such a curmudgeon? Ah, yes, I have done it a hundred times, and hope I may be spared to do it a thousand more. It is not for the money, it is the intellectual triumph. Everybody knows what I am. Come to me fairly, and I treat you fairly. Must have my living wage, of course. But no more, unless you try to rob me. Then you have got the wrong pig by the ear. And it's the very same thing in love, Mr. Cranleigh. Have you tried to take a rise out of Dariel?"

This would have made me very angry with at least nine people out of ten. But I knew that I had a queer character to deal with, and that he meant no harm, but only to get to the bottom of the matter. So I told him that if there was anything of that sort, I thought it was rather the other way. And then I was quite in a fury with myself, for putting it as if she could have done a shabby thing. And I praised her ninefold, and could have gone on for an hour.

"You are all right," he said, "that is clear enough; you are as infatuated as a Goddess could require. We have all been so, some time or other. But you should have seen her mother, ah, yes, ah, yes! Signora Nicolo cannot bear to hear her name, though she ought to be grateful, for it kept me good, and plunged me, I do believe, into matrimony. A sweet woman never knows the good she does, any more than an impudent flippant one can measure her own mischief. For the sake of that noble Oria, as well as of SÛr Imar, who saved, my life, I would go anywhere and do anything, to be of service to Dariel. And for her own sake too, I can tell you, for she is a most charming creature, though a little too soft, like her father. Ah, that's where the mischief will come in! How can you save a man from himself? After all the lies he has suffered from, and the wreck of his life—I know all about it now, though I didn't when I saw you—would you believe that he is spoonier than ever about doing good to those cursed fellows? Saving their souls! Why, they've got none; or if they have, what are ours to be called? As different as quartz from opal, which are much the same thing though in different form. And as for their bodies, they are big enough already, and dirty enough, and as hard as nails. Let them all kill one another, is what the Lord intended, and Nature does her best to help him. Why, the country ought to belong to us; we could do some good with it. It should have been ours long ago."

"No doubt of that," I replied, for that seems to be the duty of every land; "I knew that SÛr Imar meant to go, and for years he has been preparing to civilise his people; but what has made him go so suddenly?"

"Well, I think it was through a tall young fellow, who has been prowling about for a long time. 'Prince Hafer' he calls himself, Prince of the Ossets, who are next-door neighbours to these Lesghians, when they have any door at all, I mean. I won't pretend to know much about him, but what I have heard is rather shady. He bore a most wonderful reputation among his own niggers, if I may call them so, for the Ossets are rather a dusky lot—never had there been such an Angel seen; too good, too benevolent, too holy. But Apollyon, the Prince of this village of ours, has been too many for our Mountain-Chief; and he has carried on rarely at the Hotel Celestial, and other sparkling places. If he had not been a Prince, they would have had him up at Bow Street; but he talked about Russia, and they thought he was too big. Moreover, our noble Policemen saw that there was nobody likely to interpret him; so they took it out in coin, according to the custom of the Country. He paid for a mirror and three electro-plated pots; and with mutual esteem they parted. But what a fiend of a temper he must have! For he never gets drunk to make us sponge him with our tears."

"That is most unjust on his part. I have seen him twice, and nearly felt him once. But never mind that. I shall square it up, some day. I beg pardon for interrupting. But how can SÛr Imar ever listen to him?"

"When you are as old as I am, Mr. Cranleigh, one thing alone will surprise you. To wit, that you were ever surprised at the folly of the wisest of mankind. But I have no time for a homily. You want to know how I have learned these things. Have you ever heard of a certain Captain Strogue?"

"Yes, and I have seen him. And I formed a strong opinion, though all my impressions seem worthless now, that Captain Strogue is a man of honour. In his own way, I mean, and according to his views."

"Not a man who would try to pot you in the dark? I believe that you are quite right so far. Strogue is a man of honour, according to his lights. But, alas, an inveterate gambler; and that saps the foundations of honesty. God made honesty, and man makes honour, and shapes it according to the fashion of the day. Strogue has been here, he has sat in that chair, with his head in his hands, and shivering; for he is also a very hard drinker. I am well known all over Europe, as a purchaser of fine diamonds. Strogue had given an I. O. U. the night before for £500, which he could not redeem. He had been fleeced, and he knew it too well, by paltry little all-round dealers, hucksters at the very bottom of the trade, who have only one test for gem from paste. If your brother Harold were a bit of a rogue he might have a fine game with them. But Strogue had the wisdom at last to come to me. Poor fellow! He has a very fine nature. He absolutely burst into tears, when he saw all the value he had thrown away. 'Signor, I am very hard up,' he said—which is just the right way to begin with me, though the very worst with any other in the trade; 'this is the last and the best of my jewels. A good judge has told me it is very fine. Unless I can raise £500 to-day, I shall have to put a pistol to my head. How much will you give me for this affair?'

"I examined it well, though a glance was enough. Then I tested him as to his ownership, to keep him on the tenterhooks, as he richly deserved; and then I said, 'Captain, I will take it, at a thousand pounds. But only upon one condition.' You should have seen his eyes. It was a lamentable sight to discover such joy in the face of a man, who had done such wonders in his better days. 'My condition,' I proceeded, for he could not speak, 'is that you shall sign a pledge prepared by me.' 'Anything, anything you like,' he answered; and in two minutes he had signed an undertaking upon his honour to abandon every form of gambling. Whether he will keep it is another question; but so far he has kept it, and I think he will hold fast. That is what I call doing good. And the stone was well worth the money."

I thought that it would have been still more beneficent, if the stone had not been worth the money. But who could expect that, and of whom? Signor Nicolo looked for praise, and I gave it warmly.

"But you did not pump him, on the strength of it?" I asked; and meeting an indignant glance, I qualified my question. "What I mean is, you did not exactly endeavour—your duty towards SÛr Imar, and your desire to protect him from the schemes of that other fellow did not induce you to inquire, I suppose, what this pair of rogues could be driving at? I am not sure that I should have let him go without that."

"To a limited extent perhaps I did," Signor Nicolo answered with a candid smile; "not that I put any temptation in his way to make him turn traitor to his master. But simply that casually, as things came about, he cast away in some degree that cowardly veil of caution, which is always so abhorrent to our better feelings. Nine people out of ten would have cross-examined him. But I did nothing of the sort. Only from some things he let slip I gathered a fair general idea of the game those two are playing. Or rather that other fellow; for to Strogue it can make no difference, unless the bargain is—no play, no pay. Hafer's game is to get possession of the lovely Dariel, as you must have suspected long ago; not for her beauty—those fellows out there pitch-and-toss for that kind of thing—but for the start it will give him, in the universal race of robbery. You must not be mild enough, Mr. Cranleigh, to suppose that you have seen any sample of the Caucasus in the noble SÛr Imar, and his sensitive daughter, or even in the model henchman Stepan. If the camp in your valley had been of the general type, you would not have had a sheep left long ago, much less a cock with a crow in his throat. 'Ragamuffins' is the proper name for most of them. And although these Lesghians, take them all in all, are about the pick of the basket, you would be in the wrong box altogether, if you took them for sweet innocents. They are simply under their chieftain's thumb; and by ancient tribal law, he can chop off their heads when he pleases. This keeps them in order; and they pay for their milk, instead of lifting cattle. Prince Hafer, however, is not under any fealty to SÛr Imar. So far from that, his great aim is to be Lord of the Ossets, and the Kheusurs too, and Karthlos Tower, which is a noble place, and might defy an army for a twelvemonth. Hafer is cunning, but has too much temper; and worst of all, he has not steered clear of the many traps set by civilisation for a young savage with his pockets full. He has fallen among a bad lot, a company of young rakes, contemptuous of women, and yet thoroughly in their power."

"What! would he venture near Dariel, after being in such vile company? We have heard that he was almost too good to live. She gave me so grand an account of him, that I thought it was all up with my poor chance. But what a falling off is here! The Prince of all virtues, the paragon of modesty, the hero of all chivalry—and now he won't even sham! Can you explain it, Mr. Nickols?"

"No; that's no business of mine. Nature does it. But I shall hear more about it soon, and get a flood of light let in. In London you never know anything well, from hearing such a lot about everything. But it is not quite the same in the Caucasus. You don't hear much there; but you attend to it. And now you will be surprised to be told, that after so many years of hearing next to nothing of that part of the world, and never seeing one of their celestial peaks, except in a dream, I am likely to know more about them than when I lived there. Ah, if I hadn't got a wife, and three daughters,—and I have let out so much, like a jolly fool, that they won't have French stuff on their birthdays,—I should be ready to be off again; though I could never do the djedje now; and the love of sport is not in me, as it is in all true-born Englishmen."

He looked regretful, and perhaps remorseful against his mingled parentage; for there was a vein of the Israelite in him, which saddens and deepens the outlook, without showing any sport, except a gold disc to shoot at.

"Never mind," I answered him, though sorry to have to do it; "you get your little excitements, in your way. And although they are not like ours altogether, they pay ever so much better in the end."

"Let us come back," he said, thinking in his heart, perhaps, that he could do very well without my sympathy; "my proceedings only bear upon your case in an odd sort of way, which may come to nothing. You remember that I told you of my Russian friend, whom I met at Odessa, twenty years ago, or more. Through him I first went into those savage parts, where he lost his life; and it was a narrow shave that I survived to tell of it, for which I have to thank SÛr Imar. You may have forgotten, but I think I must have told you that my Russian had a brother, an officer in the army then closing round the forces of Shamyl. Very well, who should call upon me a few days after I told you about that, but the very same Russian officer, now second in command of the Caucasus Division, General Stranglomoff himself. He was in London, about some military business, and knowing my intimacy with his poor brother, he did me the honour of calling to hear some particulars of the sad occurrence. I described it as well as I could; and then he said, brushing up his English, as I brushed up my Russian, whenever there was a gap between us—'I am not a jeweller, Signor, and of precious stones I have not any knowledge; but place thine eyes upon this, is it good?" He wore a white glove of soft rat-skin, and upon it was the rich green light of the finest emerald I have seen since I was at Warsaw.

"'Plenty, plenty, twenty, fifty—ten, a thousand! I pray you to accept this pebble, Signor, for my brother's sake,' he said with a very graceful bow; 'he was taken away through these, and I desire no advantage of them.' And with that he shed a tear, which made me think how much we undervalue that fine race. There is no kinder-hearted man on earth, and no more perfect gentleman, than a Russian of the highest order.

"Well, sir, I sent my own nephew out—Jack Nickols, a wonderfully plucky fellow; not much eye for a stone; but sure to stick to his orders, and tell you the truth. If you can't be satisfied with that, good-bye to your chance of keeping anybody very long; for the sharp ones will soon begin to rogue you. Jack is as good a bit of English Metal as you could pick up from the lias to the granite. And not too clever. In fact, Mr. Cranleigh, you remind me of him, at every turn."

I bowed very deeply at this lovely compliment, with a glance which I meant to be ironical. But Signor Nicolo was too busy with his thoughts to perceive the stern justice he had done me.

"Emeralds are going up," he proceeded, as if I were one of them, "and I should not be surprised if the true grass-green became the rage for the next few years. There are only three gems that will always hold their own, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The rest go up and down, according to the fashion; and emeralds have been unduly in the shade. But now they are worth looking after again; and my nephew is the boy to do it. Hit or miss, he will do his best; and we have made an arrangement with the Russian General, under which he is bound to back him up. Jack is not very strong at letter-writing, and the post is not too brisk out there. But he has been on the spot for some time now, and he has made a very good beginning."

All this to me was little more than cold and cloudy comfort. Here was the winter close at hand, the winter of the frosty Caucasus; the friends I loved become strangers to me, and lost to my sight among savages; my own fair fame in some mysterious manner assailed and blasted; and the only hope of further tidings, or redress, yet visible lay in the chances of a roving jeweller's commission! Nickols might take it all quite calmly. His heart was set, and cemented—as one might almost say—upon precious stones, and hard enough, as it seemed to me, to grind them for trade purposes. But in my impatience I wronged him there.

"You must try to make the best of it, Mr. Cranleigh," he went on, as if he understood my thoughts. "You have been horribly slandered, no doubt; and the sweet young lady has swallowed wicked lies, all the more readily because she is a sweet young lady, and for that reason credulous and jealous. But there are a lot of things in your favour still, if you will let me set them before you. I have not the least idea what you are charged with, any more than you have. But whatever it may be, the charge will grow fainter, and the faith in it weaker, as time goes on; and the inventor of it will become more hateful. Probably Hafer has invented it; and even while she listens to it, her heart will turn against him. I know what a good woman is, because I have had to deal with them. A man who runs women down, is either a bad lot himself, or a most unlucky fellow. Moreover, she dislikes that cousin of hers, if he is her cousin, for his violence, and roughness, and haughty ways. All that will increase, when he gets home again, and contrasts all their hard and uncivilised life with the luxuries and joys of London. She will turn against him more and more; and her father will never compel her to marry against her wishes. Moreover, there is likely to be some time yet before his schemes come to a head. My young savage has overthrown his cast, or that of his mother Marva. In his urgency to get them back straightway to the land of the mountain without the flood, he has sent them round by St. Petersburg. He insisted so much on the peril they were in of losing all their Lesghian rights, that SÛr Imar resolved, very wisely as I thought, to assert them at headquarters. So Stepan and others were left behind to take the heavy goods straight to Poti perhaps. This was a floorer for Prince Hafer, and he gnashed his teeth, which he dyes yellow; for he is the Devil, and no mistake, when he can't have his own way. You don't consider me a suspicious man, Mr. Cranleigh, do you?"

"A little too much the other way; as is the case with all fine natures," I replied, according to my thoughts; for he was evidently taking my part now.

"In that case, listen to my firm belief. I am not at all up to the tone and style of what those mountaineers do now. And of course I may be as much behind the age, as SÛr Imar wants to be in front of it. But to my mind men are men always, and you can't improve them suddenly. A lot of sham comes in with some races; but not with stubborn chaps like these. SÛr Imar may print a million copies of the Sermon on the Mount; but it won't go down with them. Or it goes down, and never comes up again. You may as well pour gold into a cesspool. My firm belief is that this Prince Hafer intends to get our noble friend out there, marry his daughter, and then shoot him, and combine that heritage with his own. Ah, yes!"

Nickols had a very quiet and even pleasant manner of imparting the most atrocious thoughts, that could ever drive another man out of his mind. I looked at him to ask whether he could mean it; and he smiled and answered, "You may take it for a fact."

"But his own sister, his twin sister, the darling of his childhood—Marva! How could all such wickedness go on without her knowledge? It is impossible to imagine that she would allow it."

"She sent her son to England for that very purpose," Mr. Nickols replied, in a tone of deep conviction. "It may not sound sisterly; but it is true. There is the blood-feud between them. That they have been in the womb together only makes it deadlier. I know what I am talking of."

If he did—and he spoke as if it were an ordinary matter—I can only be certain that I did not. My brain was quite stunned with such horrible ideas; and I almost felt as if Dariel herself would be too dear, at the price of any connection with such vile and blood-thirsty savages. Then I felt bitter reproach at blaming a sweet, gentle darling for what she could not help; and after providing for quick communication, I hurried away, with my heart in a whirl.