Under Two Flags Part 28

"Where should one learn courtesies, if not in France?" he answered wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons and the Bedouins to Claude de Chanrellon; but his thoughts were far from her in this moment.

"Ouf! You have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue!" cried Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment than that. From generals and staff officers, as from drummers and trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a barrack flavor about it, commonly is; she would, as often as not, to be sure, finish it with the b.u.t.t-end of her pistol, or the b.u.t.t-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for all that, she liked it, and resented its omission. "They say you are English, but I don't believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the double L's too well. A Spaniard?"

"Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so?"

She laughed. "A Greek, then?"

"Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards?"

"An Austrian? You waltz like a White Coat!"

He shook his head.

She stamped her little foot into the ground--a foot fit for a model, with its shapely military boot; spurred, too, for Cigarette rode like a circus-rider.

"Say what you are, then, at once."

"A soldier of France. Can you wish me more?"

For the first time her eyes flashed and softened--her one love was the tricolor.

"True!" she said simply. "But you were not always a soldier of France?

You joined, they say, twelve years ago. What were you before then?"

She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her elbows on the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him with all the frank curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imaginable, as she launched the question point-blank.

"Before!" he said slowly. "Well--a fool."

"You belonged in the majority, then!" said Cigarette, with a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the camp slang she spoke in.

"You should not have had to come into the ranks, mon ami; majorities--specially that majority--have very smooth sailing generally!"

He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him.

"Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Bah! one is never young, and always young in camps. Young? Pardieu!

When I was four I could swear like a grenadier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink like a bohemian."

Yet--with all that--and it was the truth, the brow was so open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth!

"Why did you come into the service?" she went on, before he had a chance to answer her. "You were born in the n.o.blesse--bah! I know an aristocrat at a glance! Now many of those aristocrats come; shoals of them; but it is always for something. They all come for something; most of them have been ruined by the lionnes, a hundred million of francs gone in a quarter! Ah, bah! what blind bats the best of you are! They have gambled, or bet, or got into hot water, or fought too many duels or caused a court scandal, or something; all the aristocrats that come to Africa are ruined. What ruined you, M. l'Aristocrat?"

"Aristocrat? I am none. I am a Corporal of the Cha.s.seurs."

"Diable! I have known a Duke a Corporal! What ruined you?"

"What ruins most men, I imagine--folly."

"Folly, sure enough!" retorted Cigarette, with scornful acquiescence.

She had no patience with him. He danced so deliciously, he looked so superb, and he would give her nothing but these absent answers. "Wisdom don't bring men who look as you look into the ranks of the volunteers for Africa. Besides, you are too handsome to be a sage!"

He laughed a little.

"I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty to be a cynic."

"A what?" She did not know the word. "Is that a good cigar you have?

Give me one. Do women smoke in your old country?"

"Oh, yes--many of them."

"Where is it, then?"

"I have no country--now."

"But the one you had?"

"I have forgotten I ever had one."

"Did it treat you ill, then?"

"Not at all."

"Had you anything you cared for in it?"

"Well--yes."

"What was it? A woman?"

"No--a horse."

He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more figures slowly in the sand.

"Ah!"

She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she would only have laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than complimentary in her estimate of her own s.e.x.

"There was a man in the Cuira.s.siers I knew," she went on softly, "loved a horse like that;--he would have died for Cossack--but he was a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what I like to play myself. Well, one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone; and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left. Staked and lost the horse! He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once--twice--thrice--and shot himself through the heart."

"Poor fellow!" murmured the Cha.s.seur d'Afrique, in his chestnut beard.

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; "he had gambled away a good deal too," she thought. "It is always the same old story with them."

"Your cigars are good, mon lion," she said impatiently, as she sprang up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon.

"Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is! If you had been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn with you in the cancan!"

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow's, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder out of bravado. "To have nothing more to say to me after dancing with me all night!" thought Cigarette, with fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis had ever experienced.