The Heritage. 1908

THE HERITAGE.

PROLOGUE.

Night was falling in the leafless beech forest which covered a spur of the Balkans. There was a thin sprinkling of snow on the rocky ground, but it was frozen hard, and showed no trace of the leather moccasins of the two men who were climbing the slope. Both wore unobtrusive uniforms of dull grey, almost concealed by huge brown greatcoats with hoods, and carried rifles slung across their backs; but while one was a stolid peasant, the other had a keen intellectual face, not devoid of a certain tincture of what may without offence be termed “slimness.” It was a face familiar to many Emathian mountaineers, and to a few startled Roumis, as that of Lazar Nilischeff, a prominent leader of revolt. As he and his follower mounted the path, two men, somewhat similar to them in aspect, but with a slight difference in their equipment, came out from among the trees to meet them, and one of them greeted Nilischeff with the formal politeness natural between those who are pursuing the same end with distinct purposes in view. Both were Thracian by race, and had received their university training at the city of Bellaviste; but while Nilischeff was a Thracian subject, and had crossed the frontier in the hope of adding a freed Emathia to his sovereign’s dominions, Dr Afanasi Terminoff was Emathian-born, and scouted any prospect other than that of actual independence for his unrestful country.

“You sent an urgent message for me?” said Nilischeff, as the two leaders went on together up the hill, leaving their subordinates to guard the path.

“The rich Englishman is dying,” said Terminoff gloomily, “and he begged me to find him a lawyer.”

“No doubt he wishes to make his will.” The only available lawyer tried hard not to exhibit indecent exultation. “He will leave his money to the Organisation, you think?”

“He has not told me,” was the curt answer, and the two men continued their climb in silence, the minds of both running riot over the possibilities of unlimited action called forth by the suggestion. The rich Englishman’s money had already provided a pleasurable earnest in the shape of rifles, ammunition, dynamite, and other materials of the revolutionary craft, but its owner had exercised a control over their employment which the recipients found somewhat galling.

“Why are you in these parts?” was the next question, for this particular spur of the mountains was situated in the region sacred to Nilischeff’s band.

“We were betrayed to the Roumis—by a Greek,” replied Terminoff. “Our scouts had only just time to warn us.”

“Did the Greek get away?”

“For the moment; but we fastened up his wife and daughters in their house, and set light to it. Then we ambushed the Roumis in the river-gorge, and scattered them and caught him. So there was an end of the lot.”

“If we are not to be left in peace in the winter, things are coming to a pretty pass,” said Nilischeff sympathetically. “You are in the cave, I suppose?”

The question was asked with renewed sharpness, for it was not etiquette for any other band to imperil one of Nilischeff’s villages by seeking shelter in it, but Terminoff was able to give a satisfactory answer. The cave was common property, and there were few nights in the year when a sufficiently energetic force of Roumis might not have made a valuable capture by visiting it, but the forests and defiles through which it was approached were a country notoriously ill-suited to Roumis who had any care for their health. Every now and then a murmured greeting to Terminoff showed the presence of a scout in ambush, and when the forest was left behind, the rest of the ascent was commanded, every foot of it, by the rough breastwork at the cave’s mouth. The two leaders climbed the almost invisible path, and wriggled into the cave between the great stones heaped before it. A fire was burning behind a sheltering rock, casting a fitful glimmer into the dark recesses at the back, where the only other light came from a candle flickering before a sacred picture fixed crookedly on the wall. On a couch of rugs and greatcoats, spread upon a foundation of dead beech leaves brought from the forest below, lay a very tall man with strongly marked features and a pointed white beard. He held out his hand feebly to Nilischeff.

“They’ve got me at last, you see, though not by a bullet,” he said, speaking with difficulty. “A lifetime spent in the West Indies is a bad preparation for the Balkans in mid-winter, and it’s rough on a sick man to have to turn out of bed and tramp all night through the snow. But now about that little bit of business I want you to do for me. You have brought writing materials, of course?”

He lay back and gasped while Nilischeff brought out a fountain-pen and a writing-pad, but there was a cynical smile on his drawn face.

“It’s not my will,” he murmured, with obvious enjoyment of the two men’s discomfiture. “That was made and left in safe keeping before I started. This is merely a codicil that I wish to add.”

The words came slowly and painfully from him in French, and as he spoke his thumb moved rapidly backwards and forwards over his forefinger, in the familiar Eastern gesture denoting the telling of money. They watched him as if fascinated.

“I have never concealed from you my object in taking part in your operations,” he went on. “You, gentlemen, are solely actuated, as I know, by the high and noble desire of freeing Emathia from the Roumi yoke. I confess without shame that my aim is the grovelling one of restoring my family to its ancient position. My fortune is left in trust for my cousin Maurice Teffany, head of the house of Theophanis, his wife Eirene, representative of the younger line of the Imperial house, and their children, to be used in regaining for them the throne of the Eastern Empire, and maintaining the dignity when they achieve it.” He watched narrowly with his sunken eyes the gloomy looks of Terminoff, and the protesting face of Nilischeff, and spoke with hoarse passion,—“But in acting for the good of my family, I am doing the best thing for you, and you know it. I am giving you a head, a master, who will weld you into a nation with or without your consent. Why, if the Roumis left Emathia to-morrow, you and the Greeks would be at each other’s throats before night, with Thracia and Mœsia, and perhaps Dardania and Dacia, mobilising in feverish haste to seize whatever they could, until Scythia and Pannonia stepped in and divided the country between them! This is your one chance.”

“As well hand ourselves over to Panagiotis and his Greeks at once,” muttered Nilischeff. “The old time-server will come over to your cousin’s side again as soon as he hears of your legacy. They say that Prince Christodoridi refuses to contribute one single drachma towards the Greek propaganda, though it is to put himself on the throne.”

“Then he is penny wise and pound foolish,” said the sick man; “and you are worse, if you don’t welcome Panagiotis and the Greeks, whatever brings them over to your side. Europe will never see Emathia annexed to Thracia, but she will allow you to build up an autonomous state if you can only keep your hands off your knives. And meanwhile, you shall each have a thousand pounds, which will provide your bands with cartridges and dynamite until Maurice Theophanis is ready to move. So call two of your men as witnesses.”

Two members of the band who were not on guard were summoned, and Nilischeff prepared to write. The cynical smile was again on the invalid’s face.

“My cousin is too fond of waiting to be called upon,” he said. “I wish to make him act of his own accord.”

“A bomb, sir?” suggested one of the witnesses, an eager-faced student who had run away from a theological seminary to join the band. “Only a small one, of course—merely to frighten, not to hurt any one.”

“You might blow up all England before you would frighten Maurice Teffany back to Emathia. No, what I mean to use is a domestic bombshell. Write down that while the principal of the trust-money can only be touched by husband and wife acting together, the interest may be used, for the purposes of the trust, by the Princess Eirene at her own discretion. I think my friend Maurice will find himself in Emathia sooner than he expects. You will write out the codicil twice, if you please,” he added to Nilischeff, “and I will sign both copies, so that you and our friend Terminoff may each keep one.” The smile expressed what he did not add, that the mutual jealousy of the two men would ensure the due production of the document.

“Maurice Teffany?” said the second witness, when the matter had been explained to him. “Why, that was one of the European travellers we captured four years ago, when I was in Stoyan’s band. He called himself Ismit (Smith), but we heard afterwards that he was a Greek prince, and we ought to have killed him. ‘If I were your leader——!’ he said one day, and we laughed, not knowing. And will the other man come with him, the Capitan with the blue eyes? If he does, I tell you there is no one left of Stoyan’s band that will not rather fight with him than against him!”

With some difficulty the garrulous ex-brigand was silenced, and induced to affix his mark to the two papers. When this had been done, and the sick man was resting, Dr Terminoff escorted Nilischeff down the hill again and past his outposts. The lawyer’s brain was working busily.

“I see a way of turning this to account,” he said. “I am sending off despatches to-morrow, and I will mention the sad death of the noble-hearted British philanthropist, Teffany-Wise. It will appear in all the English papers how he gave his declining years to the service of freedom, visiting Emathia with relief for the oppressed, and was pursued from place to place by the Roumis thirsting for his blood. Imagine it—he dies in a cave, deprived of every comfort, but with his last breath bequeathing to the cause all he has to leave. A fine moral effect, is it not?”