Chapter I · LE RESTAURANT DE L'ARMÉE D'ORIENT.

"We are going to have cigars and a bottle of Greek wine," said Cyril to the Zouave Captain, who seemed at first doubtful about entering, and then acceded with a bow. Cyril thought that perhaps he was a man of high French family and did not care much to mix with the sous-officiers, many of whom were then mingling with their superiors, playing chess or dominoes, laughing, smoking, chatting gaily, or perusing the Charivari; even Punch and the Illustrated News, which were not wanting for the amusement of the British officers, many of whom were in the large and strange-looking coffee-room, which had been the place where the horses and camels had been stabled when the house was a khan of high repute. On many parts of the walls were coloured prints of Parisian girls, opera and ballet dancers, pirouetting in the shortest of drapery, and round them the Turks were wont to gather in amazement, and to mutter that such beauties were worthy of the Padisha himself.

Everything that he saw filled Horace, like every new comer, with wonder, or excited his interest; strange dresses, manners, voices and faces; but Cyril had already become intimate with all these as if he had known them from boyhood.

He who arrives in any place which is to be his quarters for a time, feels as if the strange streets, the public edifices, the churches, and the sound of their bells, would never become familiar; yet Horace was so much of a soldier that he had not been three days in and about Varna before the aspect of the itinerant Dervises, who received his piastres or paras with a malediction; the shrill invitation of the Muezzin from the minaret; the Turk kneeling at prayer on a bit of tattered carpet in the open street, counting his colomboio, and scowling with horror at the passing Highlander; the French vivandière riding at the head of a battalion of Chasseurs à Cheval, and waggishly kissing her hand to some fat old Pasha; the women stealing along like sheeted spectres in their white yashmacs and yellow boots: the jolly gangs of British tars, trundling up their Lancaster guns from the beach like toys, became all familiar, for the sense of novelty was gone.

They had scarcely entered before several of their brother-officers came forward from amid the various tables and groups to accost them, for the cousins were decidedly popular among the Fusileers. There were Bingham, Jack Probyn, old Conyers Singleton the Major, and Pat Beamish, with his black whiskers more bushy than ever.

"Welcome to Varna, Horace, though bad luck to it for a hole, anyhow!" said Beamish; "for if we don't get out of it sharp, between raid and unripe fruit, we'll leave half our men behind us."

"Orders and advice go for nothing, so far as these are concerned," added the Major.

"Bedad, the arms of Briareus and the eyes of Argus won't keep these Greek devils with their fruit out of the camp; and there's Bingham of ours narrowly escaped a slash from a yataghan for peeping through the holes of a woman's yashmac in a sherbet shop yesterday, and giving her a chuck under the chin."

"Is that Home of the Guards with a cocked hat?" asked Horace, as he saw the Master of Ernescleugh seated jauntily on a table, laughing with some French and Turkish officers.

"Yes; he's on the staff."

"An aide-de-camp?"

"Yes, and enjoys the fullest confidence of the General," said Beamish; "but here, unfortunately, he cannot have that which is so indispensable to the position of an aide-de-camp—the confidence of the General's wife and daughters."

Colonel De la Fosse, who was seated at a table with a few officers of the French 34th, now rose and lifted his cap to Horace, who said—

"Allow me, Colonel, to introduce my brother officer, Captain Wedderburn. It was De la Fosse," he added to Cyril, "who in some measure revenged you on Chesters; but, by the way, in the troop-ship we agreed not to refer to that subject."

"Ah, now, comrade, it was to your kind father I believe that I owe the favour of being what I now am," said the Colonel, as he warmly shook Cyril's hand; "for his opportune assistance saved me, when yonder brigand put me in a sore strait indeed!"

Wine and cigars were speedily brought, and the new arrivals proceeded through their medium to enjoy the buzz and heedless merriment around them. The restaurant was soon densely crowded, and the mixture of languages, French, English, Turkish, Greek, and often a polyglot of them all, and bad Bulgarian, were heard on all sides. The only silent person was the observant Captain of Zouaves who accompanied Cyril and Horace, and who, oddly enough, seemed far from being at ease.

"Drink with us, Monsieur," said Colonel De la Fosse. "You are very silent for a Zouave; your fellows have the reputation of being more noisy than even the Tourlourous," he added, laughing, as he used the sobriquet for the French Linesmen.

"I am thinking of Paris," replied the Captain. "But we must rough it as best we may, for potages and jellies, ragoûts, and pâtés are all unknown here."

"But you can have kidneys fried in champagne," said Beamish; "or claret mulled with a dash of clove or a slice of pineapple, and sure these are luxuries enough for any man on service."

"Yes; but here one longs for the cafés chantants, the theatres, the casinos, and the girls of Paris, with their sparkling black eyes and white shoulders."

"Ah, ces épaules blanches!" said a sous-lieutenant, throwing up his eyes. "True; for the women here look hideous in their shapeless mufflings."

"Your regiment, mon Capitaine, is the——" De la Fosse paused and twirled his moustache.

"The 1st Zouaves, mon Colonel," replied the other curtly.

"Ah, encamped at present a mile or two beyond the Devna Lake."

"Exactly, Monsieur," replied the Zouave Captain, who seemed to dislike the expression of scrutiny he read in the keen eyes of the Colonel, who wore the square peak of his scarlet kepi close to his nose.

"It was your regiment that led the van at the Pass of Djerma?"

"Yes, Monsieur," replied the Zouave, while the Colonel tugged at his moustache more than ever.

"I too am sick of Varna," said a gay-looking Chasseur à Cheval, "and long, if not for active service, for the pleasures of Paris; a ramble in the Place de la Concorde, or the Gardens of the Tuileries, or to take my ease in the Hôtel de Lausanne, instead of the devilish old tumble-down Restaurant de l'Armée d'Orient."

"Yes; and perhaps to run after the nurses and grisettes," said the Zouave Captain.

"Tra la la la, l'amour est là!" sang the Chasseur. "Well, perhaps, yes."

"But," said Cyril, "there are no grisettes such as we find in the romances of Paul de Koch and his predecessor, the author of the 'Conquests of Mademoiselle Zina' (over which the Emperor slept on the retreat from Leipzig)—the grisette is now a petite dame."

"Any way you take it," replied the Zouave, with a growing irritation of manner. "We have but a dreary time of it here, nursing the sick and burying the dead; no fighting, no glory; patience—always patience. Mal peste! what we have endured since our troops came down the passes of the Balkan!"

"Your reward is at hand, Monsieur," said De la Fosse. "In four days we leave this to attack the enemy!"

A burst of applause followed this announcement, and hearty English cheers, mingled with shrill yells of "Vive la France!" "Vive l'Empereur!" the old cry that rang over Waterloo, and many a field of the past!

"In what direction is the attack?" asked the Zouave, eagerly.

"I am not yet at liberty to say."

"But your authority is undoubted, Monsieur?"

"I had it from Marshal St. Arnaud himself."

"I am glad to hear of it," added the Zouave. "Gunpowder is the incense amid which the souls of the brave go straight to God."

"Somehow, that bit of bombast is the only thing this fellow has said like a true Frenchman," whispered Cyril to Horace.

"In four days," exclaimed the young chasseur. "Ouf, ma foi! we'll eat the Muscovites up—train oil, tallow, and all the rest of it!"

"And now, Messieurs, adieu," said the Zouave, as he drained his wineglass, put his sword under his arm, and with a low bow quitted the café. The keen glance of De la Fosse followed him, and then fell on Cyril Wedderburn. Each read doubt in the other's eye.

"Is that Captain of Zouaves much about the camp?" he asked.

"Daily; but he keeps more among the British than the Turks."

"I am sorry to hear this."

"Why, Monsieur?" asked Cyril.

"Because it adds to my suspicions," said De la Fosse, lowering his voice. "He showed a purse with more gold in it than usually falls to the lot of a captain of Zouaves; and he spoke of the First leading the van at Djerma, when it was I who led the van there, at the head of the 3rd Zouaves, and 3rd Chasseurs a Pied."

"Do you mean to say that you think——"

"I know not what to think; but fear to be rash. To detain him, might excite a bad feeling between the Zouaves and ours, if he be innocent; but anyway, I shall ride to Devna to-morrow, and see his regiment on parade."

"You had not many scruples about unmasking our Major of the Turkish Contingent," said Horace, laughing.

"Ah! but then I knew him of old," replied the Colonel; "and I detected his false play while watching, with regret, a signet ring he wore; an onyx graven with my crest, a gauntlet on the point of a sword, with the motto, Droit en avant—a ring that had been long in my family, and which we valued highly, because there is a terrible story attached to it. He won it from me, however, at play, when I madly staked and was stripped of everything."

"And what is this story, if I may inquire?" asked Wedderburn.

"It belongs to the old days when duelling was alike a passion and a vice with the French, who carried it almost to a pitch of insanity; and if it wile a little of this time, which we find so irksome in Varna, I care not if I relate to you the affair, as illustrative of the days of our grandfathers—in France at least."

"Bon! tres bon! Agreed! Very good! Fire away! Colonel," said several voices in French and English; and after more wine and cigars had been brought, the Colonel related the following story.