Under Two Flags Part 40

Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her in him.

"What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon!" he thought; the quick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of her hand, he had not noticed; she had not much interest for him,--scarcely any indeed,--save that he saw she was pretty, with a mignonne, mischievous face, that all the sun-tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne would not harden or debase. But he was sorry a child so bright and so brave should be turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should have been tossed up on the sc.u.m and filth of the lowest barrack life, and should be doomed in a few years' time to become the yellow, battered, foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that premature old age would surely render the darling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As de Pique.

Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of s.e.x, dancing it down, drinking it down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes, drowning it in trembling cascades of wine, trampling it to dust under the cancan by her little bra.s.s-bound boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, and her Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there was scarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scamp of all the Army in Africa. But strive to kill it how she would, her s.e.x would have its revenge one day and play Nemesis to her.

She was bewitching now--bewitching, though she had no witchery for him--in her youth. But when the bloom should leave her brown cheeks, and the laughter die out of her lightning glance, the womanhood she had denied would a.s.sert itself, and avenge itself, and be hideous in the sight of the men who now loved the tinkling of those little spurred feet, and shouted with applause to hear the reckless barrack blasphemies ring their mirth from the fresh mouth which was now like a bud from a damask rose branch, though even now it steeped itself in wine, and sullied itself with oaths and seared itself with smoke, and had never been touched from its infancy with any kiss that was innocent--not even with its mother's.

And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil's thoughts as he watched her out of sight, and then strolled across to the cafe opposite to finish his cigar beneath its orange-striped awning. The child had been flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter of Paris iniquities. It was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent little Friend of the Flag had nothing of her s.e.x left save a kitten's mischief and a coquette's archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair, sunlit instincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had gleaned, even out of such a life, two virtues that she would have held by to the death, if tried: a truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as only fit for cowards, and a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.

Cecil thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this eighteen-year-old brunette of a campaigner; he might have gone further, and said that a hero was lost.

"Voila!" said Cigarette between her little teeth.

She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with a million stars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the bronze trellised gate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateauroy, when he was not on active service--which chanced rarely, for he was one of the finest soldiers and most daring chiefs in Africa--indemnified himself, with the magnificence that his private fortune enabled him to enjoy, for the unsparing exertions and the rugged privations that he always shared willingly with the lowest of his soldiers. It was the grandest trait in the man's character that he utterly scorned the effeminacy with which many commanders provided for their table, their comfort, and their gratification while campaigning, and would commonly neither take himself nor allow to his officers any more indulgence on the march than his troopers themselves enjoyed. But his villa on the Sahel was a miniature palace; it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardens were as enchanting as the interior was--if something florid, still as elegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferocious as the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase and the slaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted beak and talons to satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in downy nests and under caressing hands.

To-night the windows of the pretty, low, snow-white, far-stretching building were lighted and open, and through the wilderness of cactus, myrtle, orange, citron, fuchsia, and a thousand flowers that almost buried it under their weight of leaf and blossom, a myriad of lamps were gleaming like so many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedar grove, some slight way farther out, the melodies and overtures of the best military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though not broken, by the distance and the fall of the bubbling fountains. Cigarette looked and listened, and her gay, brown face grew duskily warm with wrath.

"Ah, bah!" she muttered as she pressed her pretty lips to the lattice-work. "The men die like sheep in the hospital, and get sour bread tossed to them as if they were pigs, and are thrashed if they p.a.w.n their muskets for a stoup of drink when their throats are as dry as the desert--and you live in clover. Marbleu!"

Cigarette was a resolute little democrat; she had loaded the carbines behind the barricade in Paris before she was ten years old, and was not seldom in the perplexity of conflicting creeds when her loyalty to the tricolor smote with a violent clash on her love for the populace and their liberty.

She looked a moment longer through the gilded scroll-work; then, as she had done once before, thrust her pistols well within her sash that they should not catch upon the boughs, and pushing herself through the p.r.i.c.kly cactus hedge, impervious to anything save herself or a Barbary marmoset, twisted with marvelous ingenuity through the sharp-pointed leaves, and the close barriers of spines and launched herself with inimitable dexterity on to the other side of the cacti. Cigarette had too often played a game at spying and reconnoitering for her regiments, and played it with a cleverness that distanced even the most ruse of the Zephyrs, not to be able to do just whatever she chose, in taking the way she liked, and lurking unseen at discretion.

She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy shade of arbutus trees with a hare's fleetness, and stood a second looking at the open windows and the terraces that lay before them, brightly lighted by the summer moon and by the lamps that sparkled among the shrubs. Then down she dropped, as quickly, as lightly, as a young setter, down among the ferns, into a shower of rhododendrons, whose rose and lilac blossoms shut her wholly within them, like a fairy inclosed in bloom. The good fairy of one life there she was a.s.suredly, though she might be but a devil-may-care, audacious, careless little feminine Belphegor and military Asmodeus.

"Ah!" she said quickly and sharply, with a deep-drawn breath. The single exclamation was at once a menace, a tenderness, a whirlwind of rage, a volume of disdain, a world of pity. It was intensely French, and the whole nature of Cigarette was in it.

Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering to and fro before the open windows, after dinner, listening to the bands, which, through dinner, had played to them, and laughing low and softly; and, at some distance from them, beneath the shade of a cedar, the figure of a Corporal of Cha.s.seurs,--calm, erect, motionless,--as though he were the figure of a soldier cast in bronze. The scene was simple enough, though very picturesque; but it told, by its vivid force of contrast, a whole history to Cigarette.

"A true soldier!" she muttered, where she lay among the rhododendrons, while her eyes grew very soft, as she gave the highest word of praise that her whole range of language held. "A true soldier! How he keeps his promise! But it must be bitter!"

She looked a while, very wistfully, at the Cha.s.seur, where he stood under the Lebanon boughs; then her glance swept bright as a hawk's over the terrace, and lighted with a prescient hatred on the central form of all--a woman's. There were two other great ladies there; but she pa.s.sed them, and darted with unerring instinct on that proud, fair, patrician head, with its haughty, stag-like carriage and the crown of its golden hair.

Cigarette had seen grand dames by the thousand, though never very close; seen them in Paris when they came to look on at a grand review; seen them in their court attire, when the Guides had filled the Carrousel on some palace ball-night, and lined the Court des Princes, and she had bewitched the officers of the guard into letting her pa.s.s in to see the pageantry. But she had never felt for those grandes dames anything save a considerably contemptuous indifference. She had looked on them pretty much as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran looks on the curled dandy of some fashionable, home-staying corps. She had never realized the difference betwixt them and herself, save in so far as she thought them useless b.u.t.terflies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as she triumphantly remembered how she could shoot a man and break in a colt.

Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats smote her with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy. Now, for the fist time, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never before been touched with--with a sudden perception, quick as thought, bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its highest and purest shape.

"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do not wonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was the latent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: the consciousness--which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealously followed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found her rival--that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and her devilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, she had only been something very worthless, something very lightly held by those who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supper of headlong riot and drunken mirth.

The mood did not last. She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless, too untamed. The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and the pa.s.sion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistol b.u.t.ts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretched under her flowery nest.

"Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these," she thought, with her old disdain, "and would stand fire no more than a gazelle! They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty, gorgeous, silver pheasants. A breath of war, a touch of tempest, would soon beat them down--crash!--with all their proud crests drooping!"

Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, and depreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power to gauge.

Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse, moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much as a lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick and unerring as an Indian's, could detect the sense of the words spoken by that group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior's soul and her democrat's impatience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, dark head toward the patrician on whom her instinct had fastened her hatred.

"You expressed your wish to see my Corporal's little sculptures again, madame," he was murmuring now, as Cigarette got close enough under her flower shadows to catch the sense of the words. "To hear was to obey with me. He waits your commands yonder."

Cecil obeyed the lackey who crossed the lawn, pa.s.sed up the stairs, and stood before his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acacias still fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glow of a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the belt of flowers and trees. Cigarette gave a sharp, deep-drawn breath, and lay as mute and motionless as she had done before then, among the rushes of some dried brook's bed, scanning a hostile camp, when the fate of a handful of French troops had rested on her surety and her caution.

Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, turning to his Corporal.

"Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toys again. Spread them out."

The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of his guest's presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that made Cigarette murmur to herself:

"If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!"

Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson that this fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. He saluted his chief again, set the chessbox down upon the ledge of the marble bal.u.s.trade, and stood silent, without once glancing at the fair and haughty face that was more brilliant still in the African starlight than it had been in the noon sun of the Cha.s.seurs' Chambree. Courtesy was forbidden him as insult from a corporal to a n.o.bly born beauty; he no more quarreled with the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevitable degradations, that followed on his entrance as a private under the French flag. He had been used to the impa.s.sable demarcations of Caste; he did not dispute them more now that he was without, than he had done when within, their magic pale.

The carvings were pa.s.sed from hand to hand as the Marquis' six or eight guests, listless willing to be amused in the warmth of the evening after their dinner, occupied themselves with the ivory chess armies, cut with a skill and a finish worthy a Roman studio. Praise enough was awarded to the art, but none of them remembered the artist, who stood apart, grave, calm, with a certain serene dignity that could not be degraded because others chose to treat him as the station he filled gave them fit right to do.

Only one glanced at him with a touch of wondering pity, softening her pride; she who had rejected the gift of those mimic squadrons.

"You were surely a sculptor once?" she asked him with that graceful, distant kindness which she might have shown some Arab outcast.

"Never, madame."

"Indeed! Then who taught you such exquisite art?"

"It cannot claim to be called art, madame."

She looked at him with an increased interest: the accent of his voice told her that this man, whatever he might be now, had once been a gentleman.

"Oh, yes; it is perfect of its kind. Who was your master in it?"

"A common teacher, madame--Necessity."

There was a very sweet gleam of compa.s.sion in the l.u.s.ter of her dark, dreaming eyes.

"Does necessity often teach so well?"

"In the ranks of our army, madame, I think it does--often, indeed, much better."

Chateauroy had stood by and heard, with as much impatience as he cared to show before guests whose rank was precious to the man who had still weakness enough to be ashamed that his father's brave and famous life had first been cradled under the thatch roof of a little posting-house.

"Victor knows that neither he nor his men have any right to waste their time on such trash," he said carelessly; "but the truth is they love the canteen so well that they will do anything to add enough to their pay to buy brandy."

She whom he had called Mme. la Princesse looked with a doubting surprise at the sculptor of the white Arab King she held.

"That man does not carve for brandy," she thought.

"It must be a solace to many a weary hour in the barracks to be able to produce such beautiful trifles as these?" she said aloud. "Surely you encourage such pursuits, monsieur?"

"Not I," said Chateauroy, with a dash of his camp tone that he could not withhold. "There are but two arts or virtues for a trooper to my taste--fighting and obedience."

"You should be in the Russian service, M. de Chateauroy," said the lady with a smile, that, slight as it was, made the Marquis' eyes flash fire.