Under Two Flags Part 39

"Well, yes," he said slowly; "I am a slave, I fear. I wish a Bedouin flissa would cut my thralls in two."

He spoke jestingly, but there was a tinge of sadness in the words that touched Cigarette's changeful temper to contrition, and filled her with the same compa.s.sion and wonder at him that she had felt when the ivory wreaths and crucifixes had lain in her hands. She knew she had been ungenerous--a crime dark as night in the sight of the little chivalrous soldier.

"Ah," she said softly and waywardly, winding her way aright with that penetration and tact which, however uns.e.xed in other things, Cigarette had kept thoroughly feminine. "That was but an idle word of mine; forgive it, and forget it. You are not a slave when you fight in the fantasias. Morbleu! They say to see you kill a man is beautiful--so workmanlike! And you would go out and be shot to-morrow, rather than sell your honor, or stain it. Bah! while you know they should cut your heart out rather than make you tell a lie, or betray a comrade, you are no slave; you have the best freedom of all. Take a gla.s.s of champagne?

How you look! Oh, the demoiselles, with the silver necks, are not barrack drink, of course; but I drink champagne always myself. This is M. le Prince's. He knows I only take the best brands."

With which Cigarette, leaning down from her cas.e.m.e.nt, whose sill was about a foot above his head, tendered her peace-offering in a bottle; three of which, packed in her knapsack, she had carried off from the luncheon-table of a Russian Prince who was touring through Algiers, and who had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless, capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish little fire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more insolence and indifference than she would show to some battered old veteran, or some worn-out old dog, who had pa.s.sed through the great Kabaila raids and battles.

"You will go to your Colonel's to-night?" she said questioningly, as he drank the champagne, and thanked her--for he saw the spirit in which the gift was tendered--as he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall, with its blue-and-white striped awning spread over both their heads in the little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessant traffic no way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchs undaunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred grand reviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage at five years old, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars, as having gone through the whole of Bugeaud's campaign, at which parade, by the way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous General's wife, Cigarette had made the immortal reply: "Madame, my sweetmeats are bullets!"

She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent. "You will go to-night?"

He shrugged his shoulders. He did not care to discuss his Colonel's orders with this pretty little Bacchante.

"Oh, a chief's command, you know--"

"Ah, a fig for a chief!" retorted Cigarette impatiently. "Why don't you say the truth? You are thinking you will disobey, and risk the rest!"

"Well, why not? I grant his right in barrack and field, but----"

He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, as he spoke, went back to the scene of the morning. He felt, with a romantic impulse that he smiled at, even as it pa.s.sed over him, that he would rather have half a dozen muskets fired at him in the death-sentence of a mutineer than meet again the glance of those proud, azure eyes, sweeping over him in their calm indifference to a private of Cha.s.seurs, their calm ignorance that he could be wounded or be stung.

"But?" echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, perched in the quaint, gray Moresco wall, parti-colored with broken encaustics of varied hues. "Chut, bon comrade! That little word has been the undoing of the world ever since the world began. 'But' is a blank cartridge, and never did anything but miss fire yet. Shoot dead, or don't aim at all, whichever you like; but never make a false stroke with 'but'! So you won't obey Chateauroy in this?"

He was silent again. He would not answer falsely, and he did not care to say his thoughts to her.

"'No,'" pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her fancy, "you say to yourself, 'I am an aristocrat--I will not be ordered in this thing'--you say, 'I am a good soldier; I will not be sent for like a hawker'--you say, 'I was n.o.ble once: I will show my blood at last, if I die!' Ah!--you say that!"

He laughed a little as he looked up at her.

"Not exactly that, but something as foolish, perhaps. Are you a witch, my pretty one?"

"Whoever doubted it, except you?"

She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, bending to him out of her owls' nest, with the flash of the sun under the blue awning brightly catching the sunny brown of her soft cheek and the cherry bloom of her lips, arched, pouting, and coquette. She set her teeth sharply, and muttered a hot, heavy sacre, or even something worse, as she saw that his eyes had not even remained on her, but were thoughtfully looking down the checkered light and color of the street. She was pa.s.sionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a little velvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all the faults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and, for the moment, she had in instinct--fiery, ruthless, and full of hate--to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "uns.e.xed" could keep enough of the woman in them not to be neglected with impunity, and could lose enough of it to be able to avenge the negligence by a summary vendetta. But she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion. She would not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that might be traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud-lips in as firm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar's or Napoleon's molded themselves into, and spoke in the curt, imperious, generalissimo fashion with which Cigarette before now had rallied a demoralized troop, reeling drunk and mad away from a razzia.

"I am a witch! That is, I can put two and two together, and read men, though I don't read the alphabet. Well, one reading is a good deal rarer than the other. So you mean to disobey the Hawk to-night? I like you for that. But listen here--did you ever hear them talk of Marquise?"

"No!"

"Parbleu!" swore the vivandiere in her wrath, "you look on at a bamboula as if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and can only give one 'yes'

and 'no,' as if one were a drummer-boy. Bah! are those your Paris courtesies?"

"Forgive me, ma belle! I thought you called yourself our comrade, and would have no 'fine manners.' There is no knowing how to please you."

He might have pleased her simply and easily enough, if he had only looked up with a shade of interest to that most picturesque picture, bright as a pastel portrait, that was hung above him in the old tumble-down Moorish stonework. But his thoughts were with other things; and a love scene with this fantastic little Amazon did not attract him.

The warm, ripe, mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his path, with the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it merrily; but it had no charm for him. He was musing rather on that costly, delicate, brilliant-hued, hothouse blossom that could only be reached down by some rich man's hand, and grew afar on heights where never winter chills, nor summer tan, could come too rudely on it.

"Come, tell me what is Marquise?--a kitten?" he went on, leaning his arm still on the sill of her embrasure, and willing to coax her out of her anger.

"A kitten!" echoed Cigarette contemptuously. "You think me a child, I suppose?"

"Surely you are not far off it?"

"Mon Dieu! why, I was never a child in my life," retorted Cigarette, waxing sunny-tempered and confidential again, while she perched herself, like some gay-feathered mockingbird on a branch, on the window-sill itself. "When I was two, I used to be beaten; when I was three, I used to sc.r.a.pe up the cigar ends the officers dropped about, to sell them again for a bit of black bread; when I was four, I knew all about Philippe Durron's escape from Beylick, and bit my tongue through, to say nothing, when my mother flogged me with a mule-whip, because I would not tell, that she might tell again at the Bureau and get the reward. A child! Before I was two feet high I had winged my first Arab. He stole a rabbit I was roasting. Presto! how quick he dropped it when my ball broke his wrist like a twig!"

And the Friend of the Flag laughed gayly at the recollection, as at the best piece of mirth with which memory could furnish her.

"But you asked about Marquise? Well, he was what you are--a hawk among carrion crows, a gentleman in the ranks. Dieu! how handsome he was!

n.o.body ever knew his real name, but they thought he was of Austrian breed, and we called him Marquise because he was so womanish white in his skin and dainty in all his ways. Just like you! Marquise could fight, fight like a hundred devils; and--pouf!--how proud he was--very much like you altogether! Now, one day something went wrong in the exercise ground. Marquise was not to blame, but they thought he was; and an adjutant struck him--flick, flack, like that--across the face with a riding switch. Marquise had his bayonet fixed and before we knew what was up, crash the blade went through--through the breast-bone, and out at the spine--and the adjutant fell as dead as a cat, with the blood spouting out like a fountain. 'I come of a great race, that never took insult without giving back death,' was all that Marquise said when they seized him and brought him to judgment; and he would never say of what race that was. They shot him--ah, bah! discipline must be kept--and I saw him with five great wounds in his chest, and his beautiful golden hair all soiled with the sand and the powder, lying there by the open grave, that they threw him into as if he were offal; and we never knew more of him than that."

Cigarette's radiant laugh had died, and her careless voice had sunk, over the latter words. As the little vivacious brunette told the tale of a nameless life, it took its eloquence from her, simple and brief as her speech was; and it owned a deeper pathos because the reckless young Bacchante of the As de Pique grew grave one moment while she told it.

Then, grave still, she leaned her brown, bright face nearer down from her oval hole in the wall.

"Now," she whispered very low, "if you mutiny once, they will shoot you just like Marquise, and you will die just as silent, like him."

"Well," he answered her slowly, "why not? Death is no great terror; I risk it every day for the sake of a common soldier's rations; why should I not chance it for the sake and in the defense of my honor?"

"Bah! men sell their honor for their daily bread all the world over!"

said Cigarette, with the satire that had treble raciness from the slang in which she clothed it. "But it is not you alone. See here--one example set on your part, and half your regiment will mutiny too. It is bitter work to obey the Black Hawk, and if you give the signal of revolt, three parts of your comrades will join you. Now what will that end in, beau lion?"

"Tell me--you are a soldier yourself, you say."

"Yes, I am a soldier!" said Cigarette between her tight-set teeth, while her eyes brightened, and her voice sank down into a whisper that had a certain terrible meaning in it, like the first dropping of the scattered, opening shots in the distance before a great battle commences; "and I have seen war, not holiday war, but war in earnest--war when men fall like hailstones, and tear like tigers, and choke like mad dogs with their throats full of blood and sand; when the gun-carriage wheels go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horses charge full gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out the brains before death has stunned them senseless. Oh, yes! I am a soldier, and I will tell you one thing I have seen. I have seen soldiers mutiny, a squadron of them, because they hated their chief and loved two of their sous-officers; and I have seen the end of it all--a few hundred men, blind and drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, and walled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from a score of cannon-mouths--volley on volley, like the thunder--till not one living man was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, moaning ma.s.s, with the black smoke over all. That is what I have seen; you will not make me see it again?"

Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and tender with thought; there was a vein of grave, even of intense feeling, that ran through the significant words to which tone and accent lent far more meaning than lay in their mere phrases; the little bohemian lost her insolence when she pleaded for her "children," her comrades; and the mischievous pet of the camp never treated lightly what touched the France that she loved--the France that, alone of all things in her careless life, she held in honor and reverence.

"You will not make me see it again?" she said, once more leaning out, with her eyes, that were like a brown brook sparkling deep, yet bright in the sun, fixed on him. "They would rise at your bidding, and they would be mowed down like corn. You will not?"

"Never! I give you my word."

The promise was from his heart. He would have endured any indignity, any outrage, rather than have drawn into ruin, through him, the fiery, fearless, untutored lives of the men who marched, and slept, and rode, and fought, and lay in the light of the picket-fires, and swept down through the hot sandstorms on to the desert foe by his side. Cigarette stretched out her hand to him--that tiny brown hand, which, small though it was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate fairy ivory carvings of his workmanship--stretched it out with a frank, winning, childlike, soldierlike grace.

"That's right, you are a true soldier!"

He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural with him to all her s.e.x, and touched it lightly with his lips.

"Thank you, my little comrade," he said simply, with the graver thought still on him that her relation and her entreaty had evoked; "you have given me a lesson that I shall not be quick to forget."

Cigarette was the wildest little bacca.n.a.l that ever pirouetted for the delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves and half-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever made the roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to plowboy conscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the b.u.t.terfly flirts with the blossoms it flutters on to through the range of a summer day; she took kisses, if the giver of them were handsome, as readily as a child takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras; and of feminine honor, feminine scruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such very dim, fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant growth amid the rank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of camp-life. Her eyes had never sunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for the boldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. de Duc's Lauzunesque blandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough overtures; she had the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy. Now only, for the first time, Cigarette colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distant salute, so cold and so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of the rude and boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed; and drew her hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly hardihood and her barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an impulse of shyness.

"Dame! Don't humbug me! I am not a court lady!" she cried hastily, almost petulantly, to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while, to make good the declaration and revindicate her military renown, she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, and sprang, with a young wildcat's easy, vaulting leap, over his head, and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of the house opposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story nearly touched the leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings in which she had been perched. The crowd in the street below looked up, amazed and aghast, at that bound from cas.e.m.e.nt to cas.e.m.e.nt as she flew over their heads like a blue-and-scarlet winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as they saw who it was.

"It is Cigarette! Ah, ha! the devil, for a certainty, must have been her father!"

"To be sure!" cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from her elevation; "he is a very good father, too, and I don't tease him like his sons the priests! But I have told him to take you the next time you are stripping a dead body; so look on it--he won't have to wait long."

The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an oath, through the laughing crowd as best he might; and Cigarette, with an airy pirouette on the wine-shop's roof that would have done honor to any opera boards, and was executed as carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she had been a pantomime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning, hand over hand, like a little mouse from the harbor, jumped on to a forage wagon that was just pa.s.sing full trot down the street, and disappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing.