Under Two Flags Part 37

He lingered a moment, with regret in his eyes; he had scarcely a sou in his pocket, and he had wanted some money sorely that night for a comrade dying of a lung-wound--a n.o.ble fellow, a French artist, who, in an evil hour of desperation, had joined the army, with a poet's temper that made its hard, colorless routine unendurable, and had been shot in the chest in a night-skirmish.

"You will not buy them yourself?" he asked at length, the color flushing in his face; he would not have pressed the question to save his own life from starving, but Leon Ramon would have no chance of fruit or a lump of ice to cool his parched lips and still his agonized retching, unless he himself could get money to buy those luxuries that are too splendid and too merciful to be provided for a dying soldier, who knows so little of his duty to his country as to venture to die in his bed.

"Myself!" screeched the dealer, with a derisive laugh. "Ask me to give you my whole stock next! These trumperies will lie on hand for a year."

Cecil went out of the place without a word; his thoughts were with Leon Ramon, and the insolence scarce touched him. "How shall I get him the ice?" he wondered. "G.o.d! if I had only one of the lumps that used to float in our claret cup!"

As he left the den, a military fairy, all gay with blue and crimson, like the fuchsia bell she most resembled, with a meerschaum in her scarlet lips and a world of wrath in her bright black eyes, dashed past him into the darkness within, and before the dealer knew or dreamed of her, tossed up the old man's little shriveled frame like a shuttlec.o.c.k, shook him till he shook like custards, flung him upward and caught him as if he were the hoop in a game of La Grace, and set him down bruised, breathless, and terrified out of his wits.

"Ah!" cried Cigarette, with a volley of slang utterly untranslatable, "that is how you treat your betters, is it? Miser, monster, crocodile, serpent! He wanted the money and you refused it? Ah! son of Satan! You live on other men's miseries! Run after him, quick, and give him this, and this, and this, and this; and say you were only in jest, and that the things were worth a Sheik's ransom. Stay! You must not give him too much, or he will know it is not you--viper! Run quick, and breath a word about me, if you dare; one whisper only, and my Spahis shall cut your throat from ear to ear. Off! Or you shall have a bullet to quicken your steps; misers dance well when pistols play the minuet!"

With which exordium the little Amie du Drapeau shook her culprit at every epithet, emptied out a shower of gold and silver just won at play, from the bosom of her uniform, forced it into the dealer's hands, hurled him out of his own door, and drew her pretty weapon with a clash from her sash.

"Run for your life!--and do just what I bid you; or a shot shall crash your skull in as sure as my name is Cigarette!"

The little old Jew flew as fast as his limbs would carry him, clutching the coins in his h.o.r.n.y hands. He was terrified to a mortal anguish, and had not a thought of resisting or disobeying her; he knew the fame of Cigarette--as who did not? Knew that she would fire at a man as carelessly as at a cat,--more carelessly, in truth,--for she favored cats; saving many from going to the Zouaves' soup-caldrons, and favored civilians not at all; and knew that at her rallying cry all the sabers about the town would be drawn without a second's deliberation, and sheathed in anything or anybody that had offended her, for Cigarette was, in her fashion, Generalissima of all the Regiments of Africa.

The dealer ran with all the speed of terror, and overtook Cecil, who was going slowly onward to the barracks.

"Are you serious?" he asked in surprise at the large amount, as the little Jew panted out apologies, entreaties, and protestations of his only having been in jest, and of his fervently desiring to buy the carvings at his own price, as he knew of a great collector in Paris to whom he needed to send them.

"Serious! Indeed am I serious, M. le Caporal," pleaded the curiosity-trader, turning his head in agonized fear to see if the vivandiere's pistol was behind him. "The things will be worth a great deal to me where I shall send them, and though they are but bagatelles, what is Paris itself but one bagatelle? Pouf! They are all children there--they will love the toys. Take the money, I pray you; take the money!"

Cecil looked at him a moment; he saw the man was in earnest, and thought but little of his repentance and trepidation, for the citizens were all afraid of slighting or annoying a soldier.

"So be it. Thank you," he said, as he stretched out his hand and took the coins, not without a keen pang of the old pride that would not be wholly stilled, yet gladly for sake of the Cha.s.seur dying yonder, growing delirious and retching the blood off his lungs in want of one touch of the ice, that was spoiled by the ton weight, to keep cool the wines and the fish of M. le Marquis de Chateauroy. And he went onward to spend the gold his sculpture had brought on some yellow figs and some cool golden grapes, and some ice-chilled wines that should soothe a little of the pangs of dissolution to his comrade.

"You did it? That is well. Now, see here--one word of me, now or ever after, and there is a little present that will come to you from Cigarette," said the little Friend of the Flag with a sententious sternness. The unhappy Jew shuddered and shut his eyes as she held a bullet close to his sight, then dropped it with an ominous thud in her pistol barrel.

"Not a syllable, never a syllable," he stammered; "and if I had known you were in love with him--"

A box on the ears sent him across his own counter.

"In love? Parbleu! I detest the fellow!" said Cigarette, with fiery scorn and as hot an oath.

"Truly? Then why give your Napoleons----" began the bruised and stammering Israelite.

Cigarette tossed back her pretty head that was curly and spirited and shapely as any thoroughbred spaniel's; a superb glance flashed from her eyes, a superb disdain sat on her lips.

"You are a Jew trader; you know nothing of our code under the tricolor.

We are too proud not to aid even an enemy when he is in the right, and France always arms for justice!"

With which magnificent peroration she swept all the carvings--they were rightfully hers--off the table.

"They will light my cooking fire!" she said contemptuously, as she vaulted lightly over the counter into the street, and pirouetted along the slope of the crowded Babazoum. All made way for her, even the mighty Spahis and the trudging Bedouin mules, for all knew that if they did not she would make it for herself, over their heads or above their prostrated bodies. Finally she whirled herself into a dark, deserted Moresco archway, a little out of the town, and dropped on a stone block, as a swallow, tired of flight, drops on to a bough.

"Is that the way I revenge myself? Ah, bah! I deserve to be killed! When he called me uns.e.xed--uns.e.xed--uns.e.xed!"--and with each repet.i.tion of the infamous word, so bitter because vaguely admitted to be true, with her cheeks scarlet and her eyes aflame, and her hands clinched, she flung one of the ivory wreathes on to the pavement and stamped on it with her spurred heel until the carvings were ground into powdered fragments--stamped, as though it were a living foe, and her steel-bound foot were treading out all its life with burning hate and pitiless venom.

In the act her pa.s.sion exhausted itself, as the evil of such warm, impetuous, tender natures will; she was very still, and looked at the ruin she had done with regret and a touch of contrition.

"It was very pretty--and cost him weeks of labor, perhaps," she thought.

Then she took all the rest up, one by one, and gazed at them. Things of beauty had had but little place in her lawless young life; what she thought beautiful was a regiment sweeping out in full sunlight, with its eagles, and its colors, and its kettle-drums; what she held as music was the beat of the reveille and the mighty roll of the great artillery; what made her pulse throb and her heart leap was to see two fine opposing forces draw near for the onslaught and thunder of battle. Of things of grace she had no heed, though she had so much grace herself; and her life, though full of color, pleasure, and mischief, was as rough a one in most respects as any of her comrades'. These delicate artistic carvings were a revelation to her.

She touched them reverently one by one; all the carvings had their beauty for her, but those of the flowers had far the most. She had never noted any flowers in her life before, save those she strung together for the Zephyrs. Her youth was a military ballad, rhymed vivaciously to the rhythm of the Pas de Charge; but other or softer poetry had never by any chance touched her until now--now that in her tiny, bronzed, war-hardened palms lay the while foliage, the delicate art-trifles of this Cha.s.seur, who bartered his talent to get a touch of ice for the burning lips of his doomed comrade.

"He is an aristocrat--he has such gifts as this--and yet he must sell all this beauty to get a slice of melon for Leon Ramon!" she thought, while the silvery moon strayed in through a broken arch, and fell on an ivory coil of twisted leaves and river gra.s.ses.

And, lost in a musing pity, Cigarette forgot her vow of vengeance.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE IVORY SQUADRONS.

The barracks of the Cha.s.seurs was bright and clean in the morning light; in common with all Algerian barrack rooms as unlike the barrack rooms of the ordinary army as Cigarette, with her debonair devilry, smoking on a gun-wagon, was unlike a trim Normandy soubrette, sewing on a bench in the Tuileries gardens.

Disorder reigned supreme; but Disorder, although a disheveled G.o.ddess, is very often a picturesque one, and more of an artist than her better-trained sisters; and the disorder was brightened with a thousand vivid colors and careless touches that blent in confusion to enchant a painter's eyes. The room was crammed with every sort of spoil that the adventurous pillaging temper of the troopers could forage from Arab tents, or mountain caves, or river depths, or desert beasts and birds.

All things, from tiger skins to birds' nests, from Bedouin weapons to ostrich eggs, from a lion's mighty coat to a tobacco-stopper chipped out of a morsel of deal, were piled together, pell-mell, or hung against the whitewashed walls, or suspended by cords from bed to bed. Everything that ingenuity and hardihood, prompted by the sharp spur of hunger, could wrest from the foe, from the country, from earth or water, from wild beasts or rock, were here in the midst of the soldiers' regimental pallets and regimental arms, making the barracks at once atelier, storehouse, workshop, and bazaar; while the men, cross-legged on their little hard couches, worked away with the zest of those who work for the few coins that alone will get them the food, the draught of wine, the hour's mirth and indulgence at the estaminet, to which they look across the long, stern probation of discipline and maneuver.

Skill, grace, talent, invention whose mother was necessity, and invention that was the unforced offshoot of natural genius, were all at work; and the hands that could send the naked steel down at a blow through turban and through brain could shape, with a woman's ingenuity, with a craftsman's skill, every quaint device and dainty bijou from stone and wood, and many-colored feathers, and mountain berries, and all odds and ends that chance might bring to hand, and that the women of Bedouin tribes or the tourists of North Africa might hereafter buy with a wondrous tale appended to them--racy and marvelous as the Sapir slang and the military imagination could weave--to enhance the toys' value, and get a few coins more on them for their manufacture.

Ignorance jostled art, and bizarre ran hand in hand with talent, in all the products of the Cha.s.seurs' extemporized studio; but nowhere was there ever clumsiness, and everywhere was there an industry, gay, untiring, accustomed to make the best of the worst; the workers laughing, chattering, singing, in all good-fellowship, while the fingers that gave the dead thrust held the carver's chisel, and the eyes that glared blood-red in the heat of battle twinkled mischievously over the meerschaum bowl, in whose grinning form some great chief of the Bureau had just been sculptured in audacious parody.

In the midst sat Rake, tattooing with an eastern skill the skin of a great lion, that a year before he had killed in single combat in the heart of Oran, having watched for the beast twelve nights in vain, high perched on a leafy crest of rock, above a water-course. While he worked his tongue flew far and fast over the camp slang--the slangs of all nations came easy to him--in voluble conversation with the Cha.s.seur next, who was making a fan out of feathers that any Peeress might have signaled with at the Opera. "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort" was in high popularity with his comrades; and had said but the truth when he averred that he had never been so happy as under the tricolor. The officers p.r.o.nounced him an incurably audacious "pratique"; he was always in mischief, and the regimental rules he broke through like a terrier through a gauze net; but they knew that when once the trumpets sounded Boot and Saddle, this yellow-haired dare-devil of an English fellow would be worth a score of more orderly soldiers, and that, wherever his adopted flag was carried, there would he be, first and foremost, in everything save retreat. The English service had failed to turn Rake to account; the French service made no such mistake, but knew that though this British bulldog might set his teeth at the leash and the lash, he would hold on like grim death in a fight, and live game to the last, if well handled.

Apart, at the head of the barracks, sat Cecil. The banter, the songs, the laughter, the chorus of tongues, went on unslackened by his presence. He had cordial sympathies with the soldiers--with those men who had been his followers in adversity and danger; and in whom he had found, despite all their occasional ferocity and habitual recklessness, traits and touches of the n.o.blest instincts of humanity. His heart was with them always, as his purse, and his wine, and his bread were alike shared ever among them. He had learned to love them well--these wild wolf-dogs, whose fangs were so terrible to their foes, but whose eyes would still glisten at a kind word, and who would give a staunch fidelity unknown to tamer animals.

Living with them, one of them in all their vicissitudes; knowing all their vices, but knowing also all their virtues; owing to them many an action of generous n.o.bility and watching them in many an hour when their gallant self-devotion and their loyal friendships went far to redeem their lawless robberies and their ruthless crimes, he understood them thoroughly, and he could rule them more surely in their tempestuous evil, because he comprehended them so well in their mirth and in their better moods. When the grade of sous-officier gave him authority over them, they obeyed him implicitly because they knew that his sympathies were with them at all times, and that he would be the last to check their gayety, or to punish their harmless indiscretions.

The warlike Roumis had always had a proud tenderness for their "Bel-a-faire-peur," and a certain wondering respect for him; but they would not have adored him to a man, as they did, unless they had known that they might laugh without restraint before him, and confide any dilemma to him--sure of aid, if aid were in his power.

The laughter, the work, and the clatter of conflicting tongues were at their height; Cecil sat, now listening, now losing himself in thought, while he gave the last touch to the carvings before him. They were a set of chessmen which it had taken him years to find materials for and to perfect; the white men were in ivory, the black in walnut, and were two opposing squadrons of French troops and of mounted Arabs. Beautifully carved, with every detail of costume rigid to truth, they were his masterpiece, though they had only been taken up at any odd ten minutes that had happened to be unoccupied during the last three or four years.

The chessmen had been about with him in so many places and under canvas so long, from the time that he chipped out their first Zouave p.a.w.n, as he lay in the broiling heat of Oran prostrate by a dry brook's stony channel, that he scarcely cared to part with them, and had refused to let Rake offer them for sale, with all the rest of the carvings.

Stooping over them, he did not notice the doors open at the end of the barracks until a sudden silence that fell on the babble and uproar round him made him look up; then he rose and gave the salute with the rest of his discomfited and awestricken troopers. Chateauroy with a brilliant party had entered.

The Colonel flashed an eagle glance round.

"Fine discipline! You shall go and do this pretty work at Beylick!"

The soldiers stood like hounds that see the lash; they knew that he was like enough to carry out his threat; though they were doing no more than they had always tacit, if not open, permission to do. Cecil advanced, and fronted him.

"Mine is the blame, mon Commandant!"

He spoke simply, gently, boldly; standing with the ceremony that he never forgot to show to their chief, where the glow of African sunlight through the cas.e.m.e.nt of the barracks fell full across his face, and his eyes met the dark glance of the "Black Hawk" unflinchingly. He never heeded that there was a gay, varied, numerous group behind Chateauroy; visitors who were looking over the barrack; he only heeded that his soldiers were unjustly attacked and menaced.

The Marquis gave a grim, significant smile, that cut like so much cord of the scourge.