Under Two Flags Part 38

"Wherever there is insubordination in the regiment, the blame is very certain to be yours! Corporal Victor, if you allow your Chambre to be turned into the riot of a public fair, you will soon find yourself degraded from the rank you so signally contrive to disgrace."

The words were far less than the tone they were spoken in, that gave them all the insolence of so many blows, as he swung on his heel and bent to the ladies of the party he escorted. Cecil stood mute; bearing the rebuke as it became a Corporal to bear his Commander's anger; a very keen observer might have seen that a faint flush rose over the sun tan of his face, and that his teeth clinched under his beard; but he let no other sign escape him.

The very self-restraint irritated Chateauroy, who would have been the first to chastise the presumption of a reply, had any been attempted.

"Back to your place, sir!" he said, with a wave of his hand, as he might have waved back a cur. "Teach your men the first formula of obedience, at any rate!"

Cecil fell back in silence. With a swift, warning glance at Rake,--whose mouth was working, and whose forehead was hot as fire, where he clinched his lion-skin, and longed to be once free, to pull his chief down as lions pull in the death spring,--he went to his place at the farther end of the chamber and stood, keeping his eyes on the chess carvings, lest the control which was so bitter to retain should be broken if he looked on at the man who had been the curse and the antagonist of his whole life in Algeria.

He saw nothing and heard almost as little of all that went on around him; there had been a flutter of cloud-like color in his sight, a faint, dreamy fragrance on the air, a sound of murmuring voices and of low laughter; he had known that some guests or friends of the Marquis' had come to view the barracks, but he never even glanced to see who or what they were. The pa.s.sionate bitterness of just hatred, that he had to choke down as though it were the infamous instinct of some nameless crime, was on him.

The moments pa.s.sed, the hum of the voices floated to his ear; the ladies of the party lingered by this soldier and by that, buying half the things in the chamber, filling their hands with all the quaint trifles, ordering the daggers and the flissas and the ornamented saddles and the desert skins to adorn their chateaux at home; and raining down on the troopers a shower of uncounted Napoleons until the Cha.s.seurs, who had begun to think their trades would take them to Beylick, thought instead that they had drifted into dreams of El Dorado. He never looked up; he heard nothing, heeded nothing; he was dreamily wondering whether he should always be able so to hold his peace, and to withhold his arm, that he should never strike his tyrant down with one blow, in which all the opprobrium of years should be stamped out. A voice woke him from his reverie.

"Are those beautiful carvings yours?"

He looked up, and in the gloom of the alcove where he stood, where the sun did not stray, and two great rugs of various skins, with some conquered banners of Bedouins, hung like a black pall, he saw a woman's eyes resting on him; proud, l.u.s.trous eyes, a little haughty, very thoughtful, yet soft withal, as the deepest hue of deep waters. He bowed to her with the old grace of manner that had so amused and amazed the little vivandiere.

"Yes, madame, they are mine."

"Ah!--what wonderful skill!"

She took the White King, an Arab Sheik on his charger, in her hand, and turned to those about her, speaking of its beauties and its workmanship in a voice low, very melodious, ever so slightly languid, that fell on Cecil's ear like a chime of long-forgotten music. Twelve years had drifted by since he had been in the presence of a high-bred woman, and those lingering, delicate tones had the note of his dead past.

He looked at her; at the gleam of the brilliant hair, at the arch of the proud brows, at the dreaming, imperial eyes; it was a face singularly dazzling, impressive, and beautiful at all times; most so of all in the dusky shadows of the waving desert banners, and the rough, rude, barbaric life of the Caserne, where a fille de joie or a cantiniere were all of her s.e.x that was ever seen, and those--poor wretches!--were hardened, and bronzed, and beaten, and brandy-steeped out of all likeness to the fairness of women.

"You have an exquisite art. They are for sale?" she asked him. She spoke with the careless, gracious courtesy of a grande dame to a Corporal of Cha.s.seurs; looking little at him, much at the Kings and their mimic hosts of Zouaves and Bedouins.

"They are at your service, madame."

"And their price?" She had been purchasing largely of the men on all sides as she swept down the length of the Chambre and she drew out some French banknotes as she spoke. Never had the bitterness of poverty smitten him as it smote him now when this young patrician offered him her gold! Old habits vanquished; he forgot who and where he now was; he bowed as in other days he had used to bow in the circle of St. James'.

"Is--the honor of your acceptance, if you will deign to give that."

He forgot that he was not as he once had been. He forgot that he stood but as a private of the French army before an aristocrat whose name he had never heard.

She turned and looked at him, which she had never done before, so absorbed had she been in the chessmen, and so little did a Cha.s.seur of the ranks pa.s.s into her thoughts. There was an extreme of surprise, there was something of offense, and there was still more of coldness in her glance; a proud languid, astonished coldness of regard, though it softened slightly as she saw that he had spoken in all courtesy of intent.

She bent her graceful, regal head.

"I thank you. Your very clever work can, of course, only be mine by purchase."

And with that she laid aside the White King among his little troop of ivory Arabs and floated onward with her friends. Cecil's face paled slightly under the mellow tint left there by the desert sun and the desert wind; he swept the chessmen into their walnut case and thrust them out of sight under his knapsack. Then he stood motionless as a sentinel, with the great leopard skins and Bedouin banners behind him, casting a gloom that the gold points on his harness could scarcely break in its heavy shadow, and never moved till the echo of the voices, and the cloud of draperies, and the fragrance of perfumed laces, and the brilliancy of the staff officers' uniforms had pa.s.sed away, and left the soldiers alone in their Chambre. Those careless cold words from a woman's lips had cut him deeper than the stick could have cut him, though it had bruised his loins and lashed his breast; they showed all he had lost.

"What a fool I am still!" he thought, as he made his way out of the barrack room. "I might have fairly forgotten by this time that I ever had the rights of a gentleman."

So the carvings had won him one warm heart and one keen pang that day; the vivandiere forgave, the aristocrat stung him, by means of those snowy, fragile, artistic toys that he had shaped in lonely nights under canvas by ruddy picket-fires, beneath the shade of wild fig trees, and in the stir and color of Bedouin encampments.

"I must ask to be ordered out of the city," he thought, as he pushed his way through the crowds of soldiers and civilians. "Here I get bitter, restless, impatient; here the past is always touching me on the shoulder; here I shall soon grow to regret, and to chafe, and to look back like any pining woman. Out yonder there, with no cares to think of but my horse and my troop, I am a soldier--and nothing else; so best. I shall be nothing else as long as I live. Pardieu, though! I don't know what one wants better; it is a good life, as life goes. One must not turn compliments to great ladies, that is all--not much of a deprivation there. The chessmen are the better for that; her Maltese dog would have broken them all the first time it upset their table!"

He laughed a little as he went on smoking; the old carelessness, mutability, and indolent philosophies were with him still, and were still inclined to thrust away and glide from all pain, as it arose.

Though much of gravity and of thoughtfulness had stolen on him, much of insouciance remained; and there were times when there was not a more reckless or a more nonchalant lion in all the battalions than "Bel-a-faire-peur." Under his gentleness there was "wild blood" in him still, and the wildness was not tamed by the fiery champagne-draught of the perilous, adventurous years he spent.

"I wonder if I shall never teach the Black Hawk that he may strike his beak in once too far?" he pondered, with a sudden darker, graver touch of musing; and involuntarily he stretched his arm out, and looked at the wrist, supple as Damascus steel, and at the muscles that were traced beneath the skin, as he thrust the sleeve up, clear, firm, and sinewy as any athlete's. He doubted his countenance then, fast rein as he held all rebellion in, close shield as he bound to him against his own pa.s.sions in the breastplate of a soldier's first duty--obedience.

He shook the thought off him as he would have shaken a snake. It had a terrible temptation--a temptation which he knew might any day overmaster him; and Cecil, who all through his life had certain inborn instincts of honor, which served him better than most codes or creeds served their professors, was resolute to follow the military religion of obedience enjoined in the Service that had received him at his needs, and to give no precedent in his own person that could be fraught with dangerous, rebellious allurement for the untamed, chafing, red-hot spirits of his comrades, for whom he knew insubordination would be ruin and death--whose one chance of reward, of success, and of a higher ambition lay in their implicit subordination to their chiefs, and their continuous resistance of every rebellious impulse.

Cecil had always thought very little of himself.

In his most brilliant and pampered days he had always considered in his own heart that he was a graceless fellow, not worth his salt, and had occasionally wondered, in a listless sort of way, why so useless a bagatelle a la mode as his own life was had ever been created. He thought much the same now; but following his natural instincts, which were always the instincts of a gentleman, and of a generous temper, he did, unconsciously, make his life of much value among its present comrades.

His influence had done more to humanize the men he was a.s.sociated with than any preachers or teachers could have done. The most savage and obscene brute in the ranks with him caught something gentler and better from the "aristocrat." His refined habits, his serene temper, his kindly forbearance, his high instinctive honor, made themselves felt imperceptibly, but surely; they knew that he was as fearless in war, as eager for danger as themselves; they knew that he was no saint, but loved the smile of women's eyes, the flush of wines, and the excitation of gaming hazards as well as they did; and hence his influence had a weight that probably a more strictly virtuous man's would have strained for and missed forever. The coa.r.s.est ruffian felt ashamed to make an utter beast of himself before the calm eyes of the patrician. The most lawless pratique felt a lie halt on his lips when the contemptuous glance of his gentleman-comrade taught him that falsehood was poltroonery. Blasphemous tongues learned to rein in their filthiness when this "beau lion" sauntered away from the picket-fire, on an icy night, to be out of hearing of their witless obscenities. More than once the weight of his arm and the slash of his saber had called them to account in fiery fashion for their brutality to women or their thefts from the country people, till they grew aware that "Bel-a-faire-peur"

would risk having all their swords buried in him rather than stand by to see injustice done.

And throughout his corps men became unconsciously gentler, juster; with a finer sense of right and wrong, and less b.e.s.t.i.a.l modes of pleasure, of speech, and of habit, because he was among them. Moreover, the keen-eyed desperadoes who made up the chief sum of his comrades saw that he gave unquestioning respect to a chief who made his life a h.e.l.l; and rendered unquestioning submission under affronts, tyrannies, and insults which, as they also saw, stung him to the quick, and tortured him as no physical torture would have done--and the sight was not without a strong effect for good on them. They could tell that he suffered under these as they never suffered themselves, yet he bore them and did his duty with a self-control and patience they had never attained.

Almost insensibly they grew ashamed to be beaten by him, and strove to grow like him as far as they could. They never knew him drunk, they never heard him swear; they never found him unjust--even to a poverty-stricken indigene; or brutal--even to a fille de joie.

Insensibly his presence humanized them. Of a surety, the last part Bertie dreamed of playing was that of a teacher to any mortal thing; yet, here in Africa, it might reasonably be questioned if a second Augustine or Francis Xavier would ever have done half the good among the devil-may-care Roumis that was wrought by the dauntless, listless, reckless soldier who followed instinctively the one religion which has no cant in its brave, simple creed, and binds man to man in links that are true as steel--the religion of a gallant gentleman's loyalty and honor.

CHAPTER XX.

CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE.

"Corporal Victor, M. le Commandant desires you to present yourself at his campagne to-night, at ten precisely, with all your carvings; above all, with your chessmen."

The swift, sharp voice of a young officer of his regiment wakened Cecil from his musing, as he went on his way down the crowded, tortuous, stifling street. He had scarcely time to catch the sense of the words, and to halt, giving the salute, before the Cha.s.seur's skittish little Barbary mare had galloped past him; scattering the people right and left, knocking over a sweetmeat seller, upsetting a string of maize-laden mules, jostling a venerable marabout on to an impudent little grisette, and laming an old Moor as he tottered to his mosque, without any apology for any of the mischief, in the customary insolence which makes "Roumis" and "Bureaucratic" alike execrated by the indigenous populace with a detestation that the questionable benefits of civilized importations can do very little to counter-balance in the fiery b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the sons of the soil.

Cecil involuntarily stood still. His face darkened. All orders that touched on the service, even where harshest and most unwelcome, he had taught himself to take without any hesitation, till he now scarcely felt the check of the steel curb; but to be ordered thus like a lackey--to take his wares thus like a hawker!

"We are soldiers, not traders--aren't we? You don't like that, M.

Victor? You are no peddler. And you think you would rather risk being court-martialed and shot than take your ivory toys for the Black Hawk's talons?"

Cecil looked up in astonishment at the divination and translation of his thoughts, to encounter the bright, falcon eyes of Cigarette looking down on him from a little oval cas.e.m.e.nt above, dark as pitch within, and whose embrasure, with its rim of gray stone coping, set off like a picture-frame, with a heavy background of unglazed Rembrandt shadow, the piquant head of the Friend of the Flag, with her pouting, scarlet, mocking lips, and her mischievous, challenging smile, and her dainty little gold-banded foraging-cap set on curls as silken and jetty as any black Irish setter's.

"Bon jour, ma belle!" he answered, with a little weariness; lifting his fez to her with a certain sense of annoyance that this young bohemian of the barracks, this child with her slang and her satire, should always be in his way like a shadow.

"Bon jour, mon brave!" returned Cigarette contemptuously. "We are not so ceremonious as all that in Algiers! Good fellow, you should be a chamberlain, not a corporal. What fine manners, mon Dieu!"

She was incensed, piqued, and provoked. She had been ready to forgive him because he carved so wonderfully, and sold the carvings for his comrade at the hospital; she was holding out the olive-branch after her own petulant fashion; and she thought, if he had had any grace in him, he would have responded with some such florid compliment as those for which she was accustomed to box the ears of her admirers, and would have swung himself up to the coping, to touch, or at least try to touch, those sweet, fresh, crimson lips of hers, that were like a half-opened damask rose. Modesty is apt to go to the wall in camps, and poor little Cigarette's notions of the great pa.s.sion were very simple, rudimentary, and in no way coy. How should they be? She had tossed about with the army, like one of the ta.s.sels to their standards; blowing whichever way the breath of war floated her; and had experienced, or thought she had experienced, as many affairs as the veriest Don Juan among them, though her heart had never been much concerned in them, but had beaten scarce a shade quicker, if a lunge in a duel, or a shot from an Indigene, had pounced off with her hero of the hour to Hades.

"Fine manners!" echoed Cecil, with a smile. "My poor child, have you been so buffeted about that you have never been treated with commonest courtesy?"

"Whew!" cried the little lady, blowing a puff of smoke down on him.

"None of your pity for me! Buffeted about? Do you suppose anybody ever did anything with me that I didn't choose? If you had as much power as I have in the army, Chateauroy would not send for you to sell your toys like a peddler. You are a slave! I am a sovereign!"

With which she tossed back her graceful, spirited head, as though the gold band of her cap were the gold band of a diadem. She was very proud of her station in the Army of Africa, and glorified her privileges with all a child's vanity.

He listened, amused with her boastful supremacy; but the last words touched him with a certain pang just in that moment. He felt like a slave--a slave who must obey his tyrant, or go out and die like a dog.