Under Two Flags Part 31

"They are bons enfants," he thought, with a half smile, as he listened; "they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever were in that old world of mine."

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing to exchange one of those pa.s.ses of arms which were her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her mother tongue.

"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been drinking at his expense, you rascal?"

The grumbled a.s.sent of the accused was inaudible.

"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere; "you would p.a.w.n your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your children, en frica.s.see! You would sell your father's bones for a draught of brandy!"

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared forth a defiance.

"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He kills women--he kills women with his lady's grace!"

"He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat them with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do, Barbe-Grise," retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the absent. "White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other people's pockets as yours are!"

This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the infinite glee of the whole ballroom.

"Dame!--his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.

"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twist c.o.c.ks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours; but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appet.i.te, if they could touch such canaille."

"Canaille?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. "If you were but a man!"

"What would you do to me, brigand?" screamed Cigarette, in fits of laughter. "Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?"

A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.

"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror of women--this soldier aristocrat!"

The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.

Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of gla.s.s slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.

At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what one of his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of the little cas.e.m.e.nt moved forward to the doorway of the dancing room; he did not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against the onslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.

His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even of the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him at once. "Did he hear?" she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise and excitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at the coa.r.s.est jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life that had been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancy to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuira.s.sier's corslet among the baggage-wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not heard; his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it fell on her, was abstracted.

"Oh!" thought Cigarette, with a flash of hot wrath superseding her momentary and most rare embarra.s.sment. "You are looking at me and not thinking of me! We will soon change that!"

Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the first day when she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a great drum when she was three years old, in the middle of a circular camp of Tirailleurs. It sent fresh nerve into her little limbs. It made her eyes flash like so much fire, it gave her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more heedlessness. She stamped her tiny, spurred foot petulantly.

"Quicker! Quicker!" she cried; and as the musician obeyed her, she whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to live in air, while her soft curls blew off her brow, and her white teeth glanced, and her cheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and the little gold aiglettes broke across her chest with the beating of her heart that throbbed like a bird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of Spring.

She had pitted herself against him; and she won--so far.

The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the voluptuous repose that now and then broke the ceaseless, sparkling movement of her dancing, caught his eyes and fixed them on her; it was bewitching, and it bewitched him for the moment; he watched her as in other days he had watched the fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charms of opera dancers.

This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky glare and the tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves with their short, black pipes in their mouths, with as matchless a grace as ever the first ballerinas of Europe danced before sovereigns and dukes on the boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It was the eastern bamboula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic joyance, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France.

Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head.

It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to join in that wild vertigo for which every one of her spectators was panting; their pipes were flung away, their kepis tossed off their heads, the music clashed louder and faster and more fiery with every sound; the chorus of the Ma.r.s.eillaise des Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices--they danced as only men can dance who serve under the French flag, and live under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on--the Cha.s.seur d'Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for life at Mazagran.

"Are you a stupid? Don't you dance?" muttered the veteran Zephyr to his silent companion.

The Cha.s.seur turned and smiled a little.

"I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere."

"Bravo! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you?"

"Yes; too pretty to be uns.e.xed by such a life."

His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well: a young Arab, with eyes like the softness of dark waters, who had fallen to him once in a razzia as his share of spoil, and for whom he had denied himself cards, or wine, or tobacco, or an hour at the Cafe, or anything that alleviated the privation and severity of his lot as "simple soldat," which he had been then, that she might have such few and slender comforts as he could give her from his miserable pay. She was dead. Her death had been the darkest pa.s.sage in his life in Africa--but the flute-like music of her voice seemed to come on his ear now. This girl-soldier had little charm for him after the sweet, silent, tender grace of his lost Zelme.

He turned and touched on the shoulder a Cha.s.seur who had paused a moment to get breath in the headlong whirl:

"Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn!"

The trooper obeyed instantly; they were ordered to visit and remain with a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on the naked plateau; a camp professedly submissive, but not so much so but that the Bureau deemed it well to profit themselves by the services of the corporal, whose knowledge of Arabic, whose friendship with the tribes, and whose superior intelligence in all such missions rendered him peculiarly fitted for errands that required diplomacy and address as well as daring and fire.

He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ballroom into the warm l.u.s.ter of the Algerian night; as he went, Cigarette, who had been nearer than he knew, flashed full in his eyes the fury of her own sparkling ones, while, with a contemptuous laugh, she struck him on the lips with the cigar she hurled at him.

"Uns.e.xed? Pouf! If you have a woman's face, may I not have a man's soul?

It is only a fair exchange. I am no kitten, bon zig; take care of my talons!"

The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa; she had too much in her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the Chacals, with whom her youth had been spent from her cradle up, not to be dangerous when roused; she was off at a bound, and in the midst of the mad whirl again before he could attempt to soften or efface the words she had overheard, and the last thing he saw of her was in a cloud of Zouaves and Spahis with the wild uproar of the music shaking riotous echoes from the rafters.

But when he had pa.s.sed out of sight Cigarette shook herself free from the dancers with petulant impatience; she was not to be allured by flattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst them; she set her delicate pearly teeth tight, and vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous oath that she was tired; that she was sick of them; that she was no strolling player to caper for them with a tambourine; and with that declaration made her way out alone into the little open court under the stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and turbulence within.

There she dropped on a broad stone step, and leaned her head on her hand.

"Uns.e.xed! Uns.e.xed! What did he mean?" she thought, while for the first time, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears welled hot and bitter into her sunny eyes, while the pained color burned in her face. Those tears were the first that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones, though they lasted but a little time; there was too much fire in the young Bohemian of the Army not to scorch them as they rose. She stamped her foot on the stones pa.s.sionately, and her teeth were set like a little terrier's as she muttered:

"Uns.e.xed! Uns.e.xed! Bah, Monsieur Aristocrat! If you think so, you shall find your thought right; you shall find Cigarette can hate as men hate, and take her revenge as soldiers take theirs!"

CHAPTER XVII.

UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR.

It was just sunset.

The far-off summits of the Djurjura were tinted with the intense glare of the distant pines and cypresses cut sharply against the rose-warmed radiance of the sky. On the slopes of the hills white cupolas and terraced gardens, where the Algerine haouach still showed the taste and luxury of Algerine corsairs, rose up among their wild olive shadows on the groves of the lentiscus. In the deep gorges that were channeled between the riven rocks the luxuriance of African vegetation ran riot; the feathery crests of tossing reeds, the long, floating leaves of plants, filling the dry water-courses of vanished streams; the broad foliage of the wild fig, and the glowing, dainty blossoms of the oleander, wherever a trace of brook, or pool, or rivulet let it put forth its beautiful coronal, growing one in another in the narrow valleys, and the curving pa.s.ses, wherever broken earth or rock gave shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day.

Farther inland the bare, sear stretches of brown plain were studded with dwarf palm, the vast shadowless plateaux were desolate as the great desert itself far beyond; and the sun, as it burned on them a moment in the glory of its last glow, found them naked and grand by the sheer force of immensity and desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken into refts and chasms, as though to make fairer by their own barren solitude the laughing luxuriance of the sea-face of the Sahel.

A moment, and the l.u.s.ter of the light flung its own magic brilliancy over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full on the heights of El Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, delicate form of the Italian pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, threw out their graceful heads against the amber sun-glow and the deep azure of the heavens. Then swiftly, suddenly, the sun sank; twilight pa.s.sed like a gray, gliding shade, an instant, over earth and sea; and night--the balmy, sultry, star-studded night of Africa,--fell over the thirsty leaf.a.ge longing for its dews, the closed flowers that slumbered at its touch, the seared and blackened plains to which its coolness could bring no herbage, the ma.s.sive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in its rest.