Under Two Flags Part 33

"But that you trust yourself to my honor I would rend you limb from limb. Go back to the tiger who rules you, and tell him that--as Allah liveth--I will fall on him, and smite him as he hath never been smitten.

Dead or living, I will have back my own. If he take her life, I will have ten thousand lives to answer it; if he deal her dishonor, I will light such a holy war through the length and breadth of the land that his nation shall be driven backward like choked dogs into the sea, and perish from the face of the earth for evermore. And this I swear by the Law and the Prophet!"

The menace rolled out, imperious as a monarch's, thrilling through the desert hush. The Cha.s.seur bent his head, as the words closed. His own teeth were tightly clinched, and his face was dark.

"Emir, listen to one word," he said briefly. "Shame has been done to me as to you. Had I been told what words I bore, they had never been brought by my hand. You know me. You have had the marks of my steel, as I have had the marks of yours. Trust me in this, Sidi. I pledge you my honor that, before the sun sets, she shall be given back to you unharmed, or I will return here myself, and your tribe shall slay me in what fashion they will. So alone can she be saved uninjured. Answer, will you have faith in me?"

The desert chief looked at him long; sitting motionless as a statue on his stallion, with the fierce gleam of his eyes fixed on the eyes of the man who so long had been his foe in contests whose chivalry equaled their daring. The Cha.s.seur never wavered once under the set, piercing, ruthless gaze.

Then the Emir pointed to the sun, that was not at its zenith:

"You are a great warrior: such men do not lie. Go, and if she be borne to me before the sun is half-way sunk toward the west, all the branches of the tribes of Ilderim shall be as your brethren, and bend as steel to your bidding. If not--as G.o.d is mighty--not one man in all your host shall live to tell the tale!"

The Cha.s.seur bowed his head to his horse's mane; then, without a word, wheeled round, and sped back across the plain.

When he reached his own cavalry camp, he went straightway to his chief.

What pa.s.sed between them none ever knew. The interview was brief; it was possibly as stormy. Pregnant and decisive it a.s.suredly was; and the squadrons of Africa marveled that the man who dared beard Raoul de Chateauroy in his lair came forth with his life. Whatever the spell he used, the result was a marvel.

At the very moment that the sun touched the lower half of the western heavens, the Sheik Ilderim, where he sat in his saddle, with all his tribe stretching behind him, full-armed, to sweep down like falcons on the spoilers, if the hour pa.s.sed with the pledge unredeemed, saw the form of the Cha.s.seur reappear between his sight and the glare of the skies; nor did he ride alone. That night the Pearl of the Desert lay once more in the mighty, sinuous arms of the great Emir.

But, with the dawn, his vengeance fell in terrible fashion, on the sleeping camp of the Franks; and from that hour dated the pa.s.sionate, savage, unconcealed hate of Raoul de Chateauroy for the most daring soldier of all his fiery Horse, known in his troop as "Bel-a-faire-peur."

It was in the tent of Ilderim now that he reclined, looking outward at the night where flames were leaping ruddily under a large caldron, and far beyond was the dark immensity of the star-studded sky; the light of the moon strayed in and fell on the chestnut waves of his beard, out of which the long amber stem of an Arab pipe glittered like a golden line, and on the skin--fair, despite a warm hue of bronze--and the long, slumberous softness of the hazel eyes, were in so marked a contrast of race with the eagle outlines of the Bedouins around.

From the hour of the restoration of his treasure the Sheik had been true to his oath; his tribe in all its branches had held the French lascar in closest brotherhood; wherever they were he was honored and welcomed; was he in war, their swords were drawn for him; was he in need, their houses of hair were spread for him; had he want of flight, the swiftest and most precious of their horses was at his service; had he thirst, they would have died themselves, wringing out the last drop from the water-skin for him. Through him their alliance, or more justly to speak, their neutrality, was secured to France, and the Bedouin Chief loved him with a great, silent, n.o.ble love that was fast rooted in the granite of his nature. Between them there was a brotherhood that beat down the antagonism of race, and was stronger than the instinctive hate of the oppressed for all who came under the abhorred standard of the usurpers.

He liked the Arabs, and they liked him; a grave courtesy, a preference for the fewest words and least demonstration possible, a marked opinion that silence was golden, and that speech was at best only silver-washed metal, an instinctive dread of all discovery of emotion, and a limitless power of resisting and suppressing suffering, were qualities the nomads of the desert and the lion of the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique had in common; as they had in unison a wild pa.s.sion for war, a dauntless zest in danger, and a love for the hottest heat of fiercest battle.

Silence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, screened by a heavy curtain of goat's hair, the beautiful young Djelma played with her only son, a child of three or four summers; the Sheik lay mute, the Djouad and Marabouts around never spoke in his presence unless their lord bade them, and the Cha.s.seur was stretched motionless, his elbow resting on a cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking outward at the restless, changing movement of the firelit, starlit camp.

After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay, elastic good humor of his French comrades, the silence and the calm of the Emir's "house of hair" were welcome to him. He never spoke much himself; of a truth, his gentle, immutable laconism was the only charge that his comrades ever brought against him. That a man could be so brief in words, while yet so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all nature to the vivacious Frenchmen; that unchanging stillness and serenity in one who was such a reckless, resistless croc-mitaine, swift as fire in the field, was an enigma that the Cavalry and the Demi-cavalry of Algeria never solved. His corps would have gone after him to the devil, as Claude de Chanrellon had averred; but they would sometimes wax a little impatient that he would never grow communicative or thread many phrases together, even over the best wine which ever warmed the hearts of its drinkers or loosened all rein from their lips.

"I wish I had come straight to you, Sidi, when I first set foot in Africa," he said at last, while the fragrant smoke uncurled from under the droop of his long, pendent mustaches.

"Truly it had been well," answered the Khalifa, who would have given the best stallions in his stud to have had this Frank with him in warfare, and in peace. "There is no life like our life."

"Faith! I think not!" murmured the Cha.s.seur, rather to himself than the Bedouin. "The desert keeps you and your horse, and you can let all the rest of the world 'slide.'"

"But we are murderers and pillagers, say your nations," resumed the Emir, with the shadow of a sardonic smile flickering an instant over the sternness and composure of his features. "To rifle a caravan is a crime, though to steal a continent is glory."

Bel-a-faire-peur laughed slightly.

"Do not tempt me to rebel against my adopted flag."

The Sheik looked at him in silence; the French soldiers had spent twelve years in the ceaseless exertions of an amused inquisitiveness to discover the antecedents of their volunteer; the Arabs, with their loftier instincts of courtesy, had never hinted to him a question of whence or why he had come upon African soil.

"I never thought at all in those days; else, had I thought twice, I should not have gone to your enemies," he answered, as he lazily watched the Bedouins without squat on their heels round the huge bra.s.s bowls of couscoussou, which they kneaded into round lumps and pitched between their open, bearded lips in their customary form of supper. "Not but what our Roumis are brave fellows enough; better comrades no man could want."

The Khalifa took the long pipe from his mouth and spoke; his slow, sonorous accents falling melodiously on the silence in the lingua sapir of the Franco-Arab tongue.

"Your comrades are gallant men; they are great warriors, and fearless foes; against such my voice is never lifted, however my sword may cross with them. But the locust-swarms that devour the land are the money-eaters, the petty despots, the bribe-takers, the men who wring gold out of infamy, who traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official seals, who curse Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with the h.e.l.l-sp.a.w.n of civilization. It is the 'Bureaucracy,' as your tongue phrases it, that is the spoiler and the oppressor of the soil. But--we endure only for a while. A little, and the shame of the invader's tread will be washed out in blood. Allah is great; we can wait."

And with Moslem patience that the fiery gloom of his burning eyes belied, the Djied stretched himself once more into immovable and silent rest.

The Cha.s.seur answered nothing; his sympathies were heartfelt with the Arabs, his allegiance and his esprit de corps were with the service in which he was enrolled. He could not defend French usurpation; but neither could he condemn the Flag that had now become his Flag, and in which he had grown to feel much of national honor, to take much of national pride.

"They will never really win again, I am afraid," he thought, as his eyes followed the wraith-like flash of the white burnous, as the Bedouins glided to and fro in the chiar-oscuro of the encampment; now in the flicker of the flames, now in the silvered l.u.s.ter of the moon. "It is the conflict of the races, as the cant runs, and their day is done.

It is a bolder, freer, simpler type than anything we get in the world yonder. Shall we ever drift back to it in the future, I wonder?"

The speculation did not stay with him long; Semitic, Latin, or Teuton race was very much the same to him, and intellectual subtleties had not much attraction at any time for the most brilliant soldier in the French cavalry; he preferred the ring of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun's play along the line of steel as his regiment formed in line on the eve of a life-and-death struggle, the wild, breathless sweep of a midnight gallop over the brown, swelling plateau under the light of the stars, or,--in some brief interval of indolence and razzia-won wealth,--the gleam of fair eyes and the flush of sparkling sherbet when some pa.s.sionate, darkling glance beamed on him from some Arab mistress whose scarlet lips murmured to him through the drowsy hush of an Algerine night the sense, if not the song of Pelagia,

"Life is so short at best!

Take while thou canst thy rest, Sleeping by me!"

His thoughts drifted back over many varied scenes and changing memories of his service in Algiers, as he lay there at the entrance of the Sheik's tent, with the night of looming shadow and reddened firelight and picturesque movement before him. Hours of reckless, headlong delight, when men grew drunk with bloodshed as with wine; hours of horrible, unsuccored suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his throat and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh, while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal; hours of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was given to slay and yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent rocks, the doomed were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles. Hours, in the warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative left, as the challenging eyes of "Zephir" or "Cha.s.se-Marais" flashed death across the barriere, in a combat where only one might live, though the root of the quarrel had been nothing more than a toss too much of brandy, a puff of tobacco smoke construed into insult, or a fille de joie's maliciously cast fire-brand of taunt or laugh. Hours of severe discipline, of relentless routine, of bitter deprivation, of campaigns hard as steel in the endurance they needed, in the miseries they entailed; of military subjection, stern and unbending, a yoke of iron that a personal and pitiless tyranny weighted with persecution that was scarce else than hatred; of an implicit obedience that required every instinct of liberty, every habit of early life, every impulse of pride and manhood and freedom to be choked down like crimes, and buried as though they had never been. Hours again that repaid these in full, when the long line of Horse swept out to the attack, with the sun on the points of their weapons; when the wheeling clouds of Arab riders poured like the clouds of the simoon on a thinned, devoted troop that rallied and fought as hawks fight herons, and saved the day as the sky was flushed with that day's decline; when some soft-eyed captive, with limbs of free mountain grace, and the warm veins flushing under the clear olive of her cheeks, was first wild as a young fettered falcon, and then, like the falcon, quickly learned to tremble at a touch, and grow tame under a caress, and love nothing so well as the hand that had captured her. Hours of all the chanceful fortunes of a soldier's life, in hill-wars and desert raids, pa.s.sed in memory through his thoughts now where he was stretched; looking dreamily through the film of his smoke at the city of tents, and the reclining forms of camels, and the tall, white slowly moving shapes of the lawless marauders of the sand plains.

"Is my life worth much more under the French Flag than it was under the English?" thought the Cha.s.seur, with a certain, careless, indifferent irony on himself, natural to him. "There I killed time--here I kill men.

Which is the better pursuit, I wonder. The world would rather economize the first commodity than the last, I believe. Perhaps it don't make an overgood use of either."

The night was someway spent when the talk of wild-pigeon-blue mares and sorrel stallions closed between the Djied and his guest; and the French soldier, who had been sent hither from the Bureau with another of his comrades, took his way through the now still camp where the cattle were sleeping, and the fires were burning out, and the banner-folds hung motionless in the l.u.s.ter of the stars, to the black-and-white tent prepared for him. A s.p.a.cious one, close to the chief's, and given such luxury in the shape of ornamented weapons, thick carpets, and soft cushions, as the tribe's resources could bring together.

As he opened the folds and entered, his fellow-soldier, who was lying on his back, with his heels much higher than his head, and a short pipe in his teeth, tumbled himself up; with a rapid somersault, and stood bolt upright, giving the salute; a short, st.u.r.dy little man, with a skin burnt like a coffee-berry, that was in odd contrast with his light, dancing blue eyes, and his close, matted curls of yellow hair.

"Beg pardon, sir! I was half asleep!"

The Cha.s.seur laughed a little.

"Don't talk English; somebody will hear you one day."

"What's the odds if they do, sir?" responded the other. "It relieves one's feelings a little. All of 'em know I'm English, but never a one of 'em know what you are. The name you was enrolled by won't really tell 'em nothing. They guess it ain't yours. That cute little chap, Tata, he says to me yesterday, 'you're always a-treating of your galonne like as if he was a prince.' 'Damme!' says I, 'I'd like to see the prince as would hold a candle to him.' 'You're right there,' says the little 'un. 'There ain't his equal for taking off a beggar's head with a back sweep.'"

The Corporal laughed a little again, as he tossed himself down on the carpet.

"Well, it's something to have one virtue! But have a care what those chatter-boxes get out of you."

"Lord, sir! Ain't I been a-taking care these ten years? It comes quite natural now. I couldn't keep my tongue still; that wouldn't be in anyways possible. So I've let it run on oiled wheels on a thousand rum tracks and doublings. I've told 'em such a lot of amazing stories about where we come from, that they've got half a million different styles to choose out of. Some thinks as how you're a Polish n.o.b, what got into hot water with the Russians; some as how you're a Italian prince, what was cleaned out like Parma and them was; some as how you're a Austrian Archduke that have cut your country because you was in love with the Empress, and had a duel about her that scandalized the whole empire; some as how you're a exiled Spanish grandee a-come to learn tactics and that like, that you may go back, and pitch O'Donnell into the middle of next week, whenever you see a chance to cut in and try conclusions with him. Bless you, sir! you may let me alone for bamboozling of anybody."

The Corporal laughed again, as he began to unharness himself. There was in him a certain mingling of insouciance and melancholy, each of which alternately predominated; the former his by nature, the latter born of circ.u.mstances.

"If you can outwit our friends the Zephyrs you have reached a height of diplomacy indeed! I would not engage to do it myself. Take my word for it, ingenuity is always dangerous--silence is always safe."

"That may be, sir," responded the Cha.s.seur, in the st.u.r.dy English with which his bright blue eyes danced a fitting nationality. "No doubt it's uncommon good for them as can bring their minds to it--just like water instead o' wine--but it's very trying, like the teetotalism. You might as well tell a Newfoundland not to love a splash as me not to love a chatter. I'd cut my tongue out sooner than say never a word that you don't wish--but say something I must, or die for it."

With which the speaker, known to Algerian fame by the sobriquet of "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," from the hair-breadth escapes and reckless razzias from which he had come out without a scratch, dropped on his knees and began to take off the trappings of his fellow-soldier, with as reverential a service as though he were a lord of the bedchamber serving a Louis Quatorze. The other motioned him gently away.

"No, no! I have told you a thousand times we are comrades and equals now."

"And I've told you a thousand times, sir, that we aren't, and never will be, and don't oughtn't to be," replied the soldier doggedly, drawing off the spurred and dust-covered boots. "A gentleman's a gentleman, let alone what straits he fall into."

"But ceases to be one as soon as he takes a service he cannot requite, or claims a superiority he does not possess. We have been fellow-soldiers for twelve years--"