Under Two Flags Part 41

"Almost I wish I had been," he answered her; "men are made to keep their grades there, and privates who think themselves fine gentlemen receive the lash they merit."

"How he hates his Corporal!" she thought while she laid aside the White King once more.

"Nay," interposed Chateauroy, recovering his momentary self-abandonment, "since you like the bagatelles, do me honor enough to keep them."

"Oh, no! I offered your soldier his own price for them this morning, and he refused any."

Chateauroy swung round.

"Ah, you dared refuse your bits of ivory when you were honored by an offer for them?"

Cecil stood silent; his eyes met his chief's steadily; Chateauroy had seen that look when his Cha.s.seur had bearded him in the solitude of his tent, and demanded back the Pearl of the Desert.

The Princesse glanced at both; then she stooped her elegant head slightly to the Marquis.

"Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray you. He refused any price, but he offered them to me very gracefully as a gift, though of course it was not possible that I should accept them so."

"The man is the most insolent in the service," muttered her host, as he motioned Cecil back off the terrace. "Get you gone, sir, and leave your toys here, or I will have them broken up by a hammer."

The words were low, that they should not offend the ears of the great ladies who were his listeners; but they were coa.r.s.ely savage in their whispered command, and the Princesse heard them.

"He has brought his Cha.s.seur here only to humiliate him," she thought, with the same thought that flashed through the mind of the Little Friend of the Flag where she hid among her rhododendrons. Now the dainty aristocrate was very proud, but she was not so proud but that justice was stronger in her than pride; and a n.o.ble, generous temper mellowed the somewhat too cold and languid negligence of one of the fairest and haughtiest women that ever adorned a court. She was too generous not to rescue anyone who suffered through her the slightest injustice, not to interfere when through her any misconception lighted on another; she saw, with her rapid perception and sympathy, that the man whom Chateauroy addressed with the brutal insolence of a bully to his disobedient dog, had once been a gentlemen, though he now held but the rank of a sous-officier in the Algerian Cavalry, and she saw that he suffered all the more keenly under an outrage he had no power to resist because of that enforced serenity, that dignity of silence and of patience, with which he stood before his tyrant.

"Wait," she said, moving a little toward them, while she let her eyes rest on the carver of the sculptures with a grave compa.s.sion, though she addressed his chief. "You wholly mistake me. I laid no blame whatever on your Corporal. Let him take the chessmen back with him; I would on no account rob him of them. I can well understand that he does not care to part with such masterpieces of his art; and that he would not appraise them by their worth in gold only shows that he is a true artist, as doubtless also he is a true soldier."

The words were spoken with a gracious courtesy; the clear, cold tone of her habitual manner just marking in them still the difference of caste between her and the man for whom she interceded, as she would equally have interceded for a dog who should have been threatened with the lash because he had displeased her. That very tone struck a sharper blow to Cecil than the insolence of his commander had power to deal him. His face flushed a little; he lifted his cap to her with a grave reverence, and moved away.

"I thank you, madame. Keep them, if you will so far honor me."

The words reached only her ear. In another instant he had pa.s.sed away down the terrace steps, obedient to his chief's dismissal.

"Ah! have no kind scruples in keeping them, madame," Chateauroy laughed to her, as she still held in her hand, doubtfully, the White Sheik of the chess Arabs; "I will see that Bel-a-faire-peur, as they call him, does not suffer by losing these trumperies, which, I believe, old Zist-et-Zest, a veteran of ours and a wonderful carver, had really far more to do with producing than he. You must not let your gracious pity be moved by such fellows as these troopers of mine; they are the most ingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to produce a dramatic effect in your presence as they do how to drink and to swear when they are out of it."

"Very possibly," she said, with an indolent indifference; "but that man was no actor, and I never saw a gentleman if he have not been one."

"Like enough," answered the Marquis. "I believe many 'gentlemen' come into our ranks who have fled their native countries and broken all laws from the Decalogue to the Code Napoleon. So long as they fight well, we don't ask their past criminalities. We cannot afford to throw away a good soldier because he has made his own land too hot to hold him."

"Of what country is your Corporal, then?"

"I have not an idea. I imagine his past must have been something very black, indeed, for the slightest trace of it has never, that I know of, been allowed to let slip from him. He encourages the men in every insubordination, buys their favor with every sort of stage trick, thinks himself the finest gentleman in the whole brigades of Africa, and ought to have been shot long ago, if he had had his real deserts."

She let her glance dwell on him with a contemplation that was half contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt, half unexpressed dissent.

"I wonder he has not been, since you have the ruling of his fate," she said, with a slight smile lingering about the proud, rich softness of her lips.

"So do I."

There was a gaunt, grim, stern significance in the three monosyllables that escaped him unconsciously; it made her turn and look at him more closely.

"How has he offended you?" she asked.

Chateauroy laughed off her question.

"In a thousand ways, madame. Chiefly because I received my regimental training under one who followed the traditions of the Armies of Egypt and the Rhine, and have, I confess little tolerance, in consequence, of a rebel who plays the martyr, and a soldier who is too effeminate an idler to do anything except att.i.tudinize in interesting situations to awaken sympathy."

She listened with something of distaste upon her face where she still leaned against the marble bal.u.s.trade, toying with the ivory Bedouins.

"I am not much interested in military discussion," she said coldly, "but I imagine--if you will pardon me for saying so--that you do your Corporal some little injustice here. I should not fancy he 'affects'

anything, to judge from the very good tone of his manners. For the rest, I shall not keep the chessmen without making him fitting payment for them; since he declines money, you will tell me what form that had better take to be of real and welcome service to a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique."

Chateauroy, more incensed than he chose or dared to show, bowed courteously, but with a grim, ironic smile.

"If you really insist, give him a Napoleon or two whenever you see him; he will be very happy to take it and spend it au cabaret, though he played the aristocrat to-day. But you are too good to him, he is one of the very worst of my pratiques; and you are as cruel to me in refusing to deign to accept my trooper's worthless bagatelles at my hands."

She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence or rejection he could not well resolve with himself, and turned to the staff officers, among them the heir of a princely semi-royal French House, who surrounded her, and sorely begrudged the moments she had given to those miniature carvings and the private soldier who had wrought them. She was no coquette; she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride, and was too difficult to charm or to enchain; but those meditative, brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of awakening without ever seeking love, and of drawing without ever recompensing homage.

Crouched down among her rose-hued covert, Cigarette had watched and heard; her teeth set tightly, her breath coming and going swiftly, her hand clinched close on the b.u.t.ts of her pistols; fiery curses, with all the infinite variety in cursing of a barrack repertoire, chasing one another in hot, fast mutterings of those bright lips, that should have known nothing except a child's careless and innocent song.

She had never looked at a beautiful, high-born woman before, holding them in gay, satirical disdain as mere b.u.t.terflies who could not prime a revolver and fire it off to save their own lives, if ever such need arose. But now she studied one through all the fine, quickened, unerring instincts of jealousy; and there is no instinct in the world that gives such thorough appreciation of the very rival it reviles. She saw the courtly negligence, the regal grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, the delicious, serene languor, of a pure aristocrate for the very first time to note them, and they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense; they moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus-lilies had done; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had missed. She dropped her head suddenly like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictive camp oaths died off her lips. She thought of herself as she had danced that mad bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken, half-infuriated soldiery; and for the moment she hated herself more even than she hated that patrician yonder.

"I know what he meant now!" she pondered, and her spirited, sparkling, brunette face was dark and weary, like a brown, sun-lightened brook over whose radiance the heavy shadow of some broad-spread eagle's wings hovers, hiding the sun.

She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, thirstily; then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their music afresh, and light laughter echoed to her from the terrace, she turned and wound herself back under the cover of the shrubs; not joyously and mischievously as she had come, but almost as slowly, almost as sadly, as a hare that the greyhounds have coursed drags itself through the gra.s.ses and ferns.

Once through the cactus hedge her old spirit returned; she shook herself angrily with petulant self-scorn; she swore a little, and felt that the fierce, familiar words did her good like brandy poured down her throat; she tossed her head like a colt that rebels against the gall of the curb; then, fleet as a fawn, she dashed down the moonlit road at topmost speed. "She can't do what I do!" she thought.

And she ran the faster, and sang a drinking-song of the Spahis all the louder, because still at her heart a dull pain was aching.

CHAPTER XXI.

CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA.

Cigarette always went fast. She had a bird-like way of skimming her ground that took her over it with wonderful swiftness; all the ta.s.sels, and ribbon knots, and sashes with which her uniform was rendered so gay and so distinctive fluttering behind her; and her little military boots, with the bright spurs twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly for a speck of dust,--though it lay thick as August suns could parch it,--to rest upon her. Thus she went now, along the lovely moonlight; singing her drinking song so fast and so loud that, had it been any other than this young fire-eater of the African squadrons, it might have been supposed she sang out of fear and bravado--two things, however, that never touched Cigarette; for she exulted in danger as friskily as a young salmon exults in the first, crisp, tumbling crest of a sea-wave, and would have backed up the most vainglorious word she could have spoken with the cost of her life, had need been. Suddenly, as she went, she heard a shout on the still night air--very still, now that the lights, and the melodies, and the laughter of Chateauroy's villa lay far behind, and the town of Algiers was yet distant, with its lamps glittering down by the sea.

The shout was, "A moi, Roumis! Pour la France!" And Cigarette knew the voice, ringing melodiously and calm still, though it gave the sound of alarm.

"Cigarette au secour!" she cried in answer; she had cried it many a time over the heat of battlefields, and when the wounded men in the dead of the sickly night writhed under the knife of the camp-thieves. If she had gone like the wind before, she went like the lightning now.

A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and of riders struggling one with another in a cloud of white dust, silvery and hazy in the radiance of the moon.

The center figure was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunken debauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out of the town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood. Just as they neared Cecil they had knocked aside and trampled over a worn out old colon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time from their path.

Cecil had reined up and shouted to them to pause; they, inflamed with the perilous drink, and senseless with the fury which seems to possess every Arab once started in a race neck-to-neck, were too blind to see, and too furious to care, that they were faced by a soldier of France, but rode down on him at once, with their curled sabers flashing round their heads. His horse stood the shock gallantly, and he sought at first only to parry their thrusts and to cut through their stallions' reins; but the latter were chain bridles, and only notched his sword as the blade struck them, and the former became too numerous and too savagely dealt to be easily played with in carte and tierce. The Arabs were dead-drunk, he saw at a glance, and had got the blood-thirst upon them; roused and burning with brandy and raki, these men were like tigers to deal with; the words he had spoken they never heard, and their horses hemmed him in powerless, while their steel flashed on every side--they were not of the tribe of Khalifa.

If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few moments more of that moonlight night were all that he would live. He wished to avoid bloodshed, both because his sympathies were always with the conquered tribes, and because he knew that every one of these quarrels and combats between the vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen the breach, already broad enough, between them. But it was no longer a matter of choice with him, as his shoulder was grazed by a thrust which, but for a swerve of his horse, would have pierced to his lungs; and the four riders, yelling like madmen, forced the animal back on his haunches, and a.s.saulted him with breathless violence. He swept his own arm back, and brought his saber down straight through the sword-arm of the foremost; the limb was cleft through as if the stroke of an ax had severed it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs closed in on him. The points of their weapons were piercing his harness when, sharp and swift, one on another, three shots hissed past him; the nearest of his a.s.sailants fell stone dead, and the others, wounded and startled, loosed their hold, shook their reins, and tore off down the lonely road, while the dead man's horse, shaking his burden from him out of the stirrups, followed them at a headlong gallop through a cloud of dust.

"That was a pretty cut through the arm; better had it been through the throat. Never do things by halves, ami Victor," said Cigarette carelessly, as she thrust her pistols back into her sash, and looked, with the tranquil appreciation of a connoisseur, on the brown, brawny, naked limb, where it lay severed on the sand, with the hilt of the weapon still hanging in the sinewy fingers. Cecil threw himself from his saddle and gazed at her in bewildered amazement; he had thought those sure, cool, death-dealing shots had come from some Spahi or Cha.s.seur.