Under Two Flags Part 46

"May I bear it to your carriage, madame?" he asked, as she moved to leave, having made it her own, while her footman carried out the smaller articles she had bought to the equipage. She bowed in silence; she was very exclusive, she was not wholly satisfied with herself for having conversed thus with a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique in a Moor's bazaar. Still, she vaguely felt pity for this man; she equally vaguely desired to serve him.

"Wait, M. Victor!" she said, as he closed the door of her carriage. "I accepted your chessmen last night, but you are very certain that it is impossible I can retain them on such terms."

A shadow darkened his face.

"Let your dogs break them then, madame. They shall not come back to me."

"You mistake--I did not mean that I would send them back. I simply desire to offer you some equivalent for them. There must be something that you wish for?--something which would be acceptable to you in the life you lead?"

"I have already named the only thing I desire."

He had been solicitous to remember and sustain the enormous difference in their social degrees; but at the offer of her gifts, of her patronage, of her recompense, the pride of his old life rose up to meet her own.

"To be forgotten? A sad wish! Nay, surely life in a regiment of Africa cannot be so cloudless that it can create in you no other?"

"It is not. I have another."

"Then tell it to me; it shall be gratified."

"It is to enjoy a luxury long ago lost forever. It is--to be allowed to give the slight courtesy of a gentleman without being tendered the wage of a servant."

She understood him; she was moved, too, by the inflexion of his voice.

She was not so cold, not so negligent, as the world called her.

"I had pa.s.sed my word to grant it; I cannot retract," she answered him, after a pause. "I will press nothing more on you. But--as an obligation to me--can you find no way in which a rouleau of gold would benefit your men?"

"No way that I can take it for them. But, if you care indeed to do them a charity, a little wine, a little fruit, a few flowers (for there are those among them who love flowers), sent to the hospital, will bring many benedictions on your name, madame. They lie in infinite misery there!"

"I will remember," she said simply, while a thoughtful sadness pa.s.sed over her brilliant face. "Adieu, M. le Caporal; and if you should think better of your choice, and will allow your name to be mentioned by me to his Majesty, send me word through my people. There is my card."

The carriage whirled away down the crooked street. He stood under the tawny awning of the Moorish house, with the thin, glazed card in his hand. On it was printed:

"Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague,

"Hotel Corona, Paris."

In the corner was written, "Villa Aiaussa, Algiers." He thrust it in the folds of his sash, and turned within.

"Do you know her?" he asked Ben Arsli.

The old man shook his head.

"She is the most beautiful of thy many fair Frankish women. I never saw her till to-day. But listen here. Touching these ivory toys--if thou does not bring henceforth to me all the work in them that thou doest, thou shalt never come here more to meet the light of her eyes."

Cecil smiled and pressed the Moslem's hand.

"I kept them away because you would have given me a hundred piasters for what had not been worth one. As for her eyes, they are stars that shine on another world than an African trooper's. So best!"

Yet they were stars of which he thought more, as he wended his way back to the barracks, than of the splendid constellations of the Algerian evening that shone with all the l.u.s.ter of the day, but with the soft, enchanted light which transfigured sea, and earth, and sky as never did the day's full glow, as he returned to the mechanical duties, to the thankless services, to the distasteful meal, to the riotous mirth, to the coa.r.s.e comradeship, which seemed to him to-night more bitter than they had ever done since his very ident.i.ty, his very existence, had been killed and buried past recall, past resurrection, under the kepi d'ordonnance of a Cha.s.seur d'Afrique.

Meanwhile the Princess Corona drove homeward--homeward to where a temporary home had been made by her in the most elegant of the many snow-white villas that stud the sides of the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay; a villa with balconies, and awnings, and cool, silent chambers, and rich, glowing gardens, and a broad, low roof, half hidden in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid sound of waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of blossom.

Mme. la Princesse pa.s.sed from her carriage to her own morning room and sank down on a couch, a little listless and weary with her search among the treasures of the Algerine bazaars. It was purposeless work, after all. Had she not bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objets d'art in profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great, grim palace in Estremadura.

"Not one of those things do I want--not one shall I look at twice. The money would have been better at the soldiers' hospital," she thought, while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near her--a table on which the mimic hosts of Cha.s.seurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons.

She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with a certain interest.

"That man has been n.o.ble once," she thought. "What a fate--what a cruel fate!"

It touched her to great pity; although proud with too intense a pride, her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when once moved, deeply compa.s.sionate. The unerring glance of a woman habituated to the first society of Europe had told her that the accent, the bearing, the tone, the features of this soldier, who only asked of life "oblivion," were those of one originally of gentle blood; and the dignity and patience of his acceptance of the indignities which his present rank entailed on him had not escaped her any more than the delicate beauty of his face as she had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with pain, in the unconscious revelation of sleep.

"How bitter his life must be!" she mused. "When Philip comes, perhaps he will show some way to aid him. And yet--who can serve a man who only desires to be forgotten?"

Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd discrepancy, of some unseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling on the wishes and the burdens of a sous-officier of Light Cavalry, she laughed a little, and put the White Chief back once more in his place. Yet even as she set the king among his mimic forces, the very carvings themselves served to retain their artist in her memory.

There was about them an indescribable elegance, an exceeding grace and beauty, which spoke of a knowledge of art and of refinement of taste far beyond those of a mere military amateur in the one who had produced them.

"What could bring a man of that talent, with that address, into the ranks?" she mused. "Persons of good family, of once fine position, come here, they say, and live and die unrecognized under the Imperial flag.

It is usually some dishonor that drives them out of their own worlds; it may be so with him. Yet he does not look like one whom shame has touched; he is proud still--prouder than he knows. More likely it is the old, old story--a high name and a narrow fortune--the ruin of thousands!

He is French, I suppose; a French aristocrat who has played au roi depouille, most probably, and buried himself and his history forever beneath those two names that tell one nothing--Louis Victor. Well, it is no matter of mine. Very possibly he is a mere adventurer with a good manner. This army here is a pot-pourri, they say, of all the varied scoundrelisms of Europe!"

She left the chess-table and went onward to the dressing and bath and bed chambers, which opened in one suite from her boudoir, and resigned herself to the hands of her attendants for her dinner toilet.

The Moslem had said aright of her beauty; and now, as her splendid hair was unloosened and gathered up afresh with a crescent-shaped comb of gold that was not brighter than the tresses themselves, the brilliant, haughty, thoughtful face was of a truth, as he had said, the fairest that had ever come from the Frankish sh.o.r.es to the hot African sea-board. Many beside the old Moslem had thought it "the fairest that e'er the sun shone on," and held one grave, l.u.s.trous glance of the blue imperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her--all without return. Yet, although only twenty years had pa.s.sed over her proud head, the Princesse Corona d'Amague had been wedded and been widowed.

Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain pity and a certain honor for the man whose n.o.ble Spanish name she took. Widowed, by a death that was the seal of her marriage sacrament, and left her his wife only in name and law.

The marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made her mistress of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, of that light, s.p.a.cious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her name, of that vast majestic old castle throned on brown Estremaduran crags, and looking down on mighty woods of cork and chestnut, and flashing streams of falling water hurling through the gorges. The death had left no regret upon her; it only gave her for a while a graver shadow over the brilliancy of her youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always--or for so long, at least, as she chose to use it--a plea for that indifference to men's worship of her which their s.e.x called heartlessness; which her own s.e.x thought an ultra-refined coquetry; and which was, in real truth, neither the one nor the other, but simply the negligence of a woman very difficult to touch, and, as it had seemed, impossible to charm.

None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some were wont to whisper "ambition"; and, when that whisper came round to her, her splendid lips would curl with as splendid a scorn.

"Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us equally?" she would ask; for she came of a great Line that thought few royal branches on equality with it; and she cherished as things of strictest creed the legends that gave her race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire blue, the blood of Arthur in their veins.

Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his death-bed, with Beltran Corona d'Amague; but what it was the world could never tell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard the truth--the truth that it had been, in a different fashion, a gleam of something of the same compa.s.sion that now made her merciful to a common trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish Prince--compa.s.sion which, with many another rich and generous thing, lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen lies folded within the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily.

She had never felt a touch of even pa.s.sing preference to any one out of the many who had sought her high-born beauty; she was too proud to be easily moved to such selection, and she was far too habituated to homage to be wrought upon by it, ever so slightly. She was of a n.o.ble, sun-lit, gracious nature, she had been always happy, always obeyed, always caressed, always adored; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuous of flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain. She had never had aught to regret; it was not possible that she could realize what regret was.

Hence men called and found her very cold; yet those of her own kin whom she loved knew that the heart of a summer rose was not warmer, nor sweeter, nor richer than hers. And first among these was her brother--at once her guardian and her slave--who thought her perfect, and would no more have crossed her will than he would have set his foot on her beautiful, imperial head. Corona d'Amague had been his friend; the only one for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying indifference to her lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded vainly until one autumn season, when they had stayed together at a great archducal castle in South Austria. In one of the forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of the hunt, she rejected, for the third time, the pa.s.sionate supplication of the superb n.o.ble who ranked with the D'Ossuna and the Medina-Sidonia. He rode from her in great bitterness, in grief that no way moved her--she was importuned with these entreaties to weariness. An hour after he was brought past her, wounded and senseless; he had saved her brother from imminent death at his own cost, and the tusks of the mighty Styrian boar had plunged through and through his frame, as they had met in the narrow woodland glade.

"He will be a cripple--a paralyzed cripple--for life!" said the one whose life had been saved by his devotion to her that night; and his lips shook a little under his golden beard as he spoke.

She looked at him; she loved him well, and no homage to herself could have moved her as this sacrifice for him had done.

"You think he will live?" she asked.