Under Two Flags Part 47

"They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But how? My G.o.d! what a death in life! And all for my sake, in my stead!"

She was silent several moments; then she raised her face, a little paler than it had been, but with a pa.s.sionless resolve set on it.

"Philip, we do not leave our debts unpaid. Go; tell him I will be his wife."

"His wife--now! Venetia----"

"Go!" she said briefly. "Tell him what I say."

"But what a sacrifice! In your beauty, your youth--"

"He did not count cost. Are we less generous? Go--tell him."

He was told; and was repaid. Such a light of unutterable joy burned through the misty agony of his eyes as never, it seemed to those who saw, had beamed before in mortal eyes. He did not once hesitate at the acceptance of her self-surrender; he only pleaded that the marriage ceremony should pa.s.s between them that night.

There were notaries and many priests in the great ducal household; all was done as he desired. She consented without wavering; she had pa.s.sed her word, she would not have withdrawn it if it had been a thousand times more bitter in its fulfillment. The honor of her house was dearer to her than any individual happiness. This man for them had lost peace, health, joy, strength, every hope of life; to dedicate her own life to him, as he had vainly prayed her when in the full glow and vigor of his manhood, was the only means by which their vast debt to him could be paid. To so pay it was the instant choice of her high code of honor, and of her generosity that would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitied him unspeakably, though her heart had no tenderness for him; she had dismissed him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to save the only life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, broken, helpless wreck, with endless years of pain and weariness before him!

At midnight, in the great, dim magnificence of the state chamber where he lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the chapel choir from afar echoing through the incensed air, she bent her haughty head down over his couch, and the marriage benediction was spoken over them.

His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of a pa.s.sionate triumph in it. When the last words were uttered, he lay a while, exhausted, silent; only looking ever upward at her with his dark, dreamy eyes, in which the old love glanced so strangely through the blindness of pain. Then he smiled as the last echo of the choral melodies died softly on the silence.

"That is joy enough! Ah! have no fear. With the dawn you will be free once more. Did you think that I could have taken your sacrifice? I knew well, let them say as they would, that I should not live the night through. But, lest existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, I rent the linen bands off my wounds an hour ago. All their science will not put back the life now! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up!

Ah, love! Ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But have no grief for me. I am happy. Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mine once. You are my own!--death is sweeter than life!"

And before sunrise he died.

Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage rested on her still. Though she was blameless, some vague remorse ever haunted her; though she had been so wholly guiltless of it, this death for her sake ever seemed in some sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder, only prouder; but they erred. She was one of those women who, beneath the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite tenderness, infinite n.o.bility, and infinite self-reproach.

A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from a distance, shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, like the sun dazzled him. "Exquisite--superb!" he muttered; and he was a man whose own ideals were so matchless that living women rarely could wring out his praise.

"She is nearly perfect, your Princesse Corona!"

"Nearly!" cried a Roman sculptor. "What, in Heaven's name, can she want?"

"Only one thing!"

"And that is----"

"To have loved."

Wherewith he turned into the Greco.

He had found the one flaw--and it was still there. What he missed in her was still wanting.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE.

"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!"

The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette's tight-pressed, bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. She was sitting on the edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfortless as a truss of straw, and looking down the long hospital room, with its endless rows of beds and its hot sun shining blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls.

She was well known and well loved there. When her little brilliant-hued figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, down the dreary length of those chambers of misery, bloodless lips, close-clinched in torture, would stir with a smile, would move with a word of welcome.

No tender-voiced, dove-eyed Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray and soft, and like a living psalm of consolation, beside those couches of misery, bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that the Friend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, were gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest blackguard prostrate there; but they never smiled, they never took the dying heart of a man back with one glance to the days of his childhood, they never gave a sweet, wild s.n.a.t.c.h of song like a bird's on a spring-blossoming bough that thrilled through half-dead senses, with a thousand voices from a thousand buried hours. "But the Little One," as said a gaunt, gray-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealing slowly up his jagged, torn frame--"the Little One--do you see--she is youth, she is life; she is all we have lost. That is her charm! The Sisters are good women, they are very good; but they only pity us. The Little One, she loves us. That is the difference; do you see?"

It was all the difference--a wide difference; she loved them all, with the warmth and fire of her young heart, for the sake of France and of their common Flag. And though she was but a wild, wayward, mischievous gamin,--a gamin all over, though in a girl's form,--men would tell in camp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their brown, scarred cheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated foreheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long nights of torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or p.a.w.ned as soon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how in their delirium the sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regiment would soothe them, singing above their wretched beds some carol or chant of their own native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri--Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother's cradle-song and of his first love's lips. And there had been times when those songs, suddenly breaking through the darkness of night, suddenly lulling the fiery anguish of wounds, had made the men who one hour before had been like mad dogs, like goaded tigers--men full of the l.u.s.ts of slaughter and the l.u.s.t of the senses, and chained powerless and blaspheming to a bed of agony--tremble and shudder at themselves, and turn their faces to the wall and weep like children, and fall asleep, at length, with wondering dreams of G.o.d.

"V'la ce que c'est la gloire--au grabat!" said Cigarette, now grinding her pretty teeth. She was in her most revolutionary and reckless mood, drumming the rataplan with her spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the corner of old Miou-Matou's mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that t.i.tle among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat into a stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, being laid up with a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his shoulders, a rib or so broken, and one or two other little trifling casualties.

Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed in the depths of his great, hairy chest. "Dream of glory, and end on a grabat!

Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures--to sweep off an Arbico's neck nice and clean--swish!" and he described a circle with his lean, brawny arm with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would listen thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience or Della Quercia work.

"Pleasures! My G.o.d! Infinite, endless misery!" murmured a man on her right hand. He was not thirty years of age; with a delicate, dark, beautiful head that might have pa.s.sed as model to a painter for a St.

John. He was dying fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies.

Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him.

"Well! is it not misery that is glory?"

"We think that it is when we are children. G.o.d help me!" murmured the man who lay dying of lung-disease.

"Ouf! Then we think rightly! Glory! Is it the cross, the star, the baton? No![*] He who wins those runs his horse up on a hill, out of shot range, and watches through his gla.s.s how his troops surge up, wave on wave, in the great sea of blood. It is misery that is glory--the misery that toils with bleeding feet under burning suns without complaint; that lies half-dead through the long night with but one care--to keep the torn flag free from the conqueror's touch; that bears the rain of blows in punishment, rather than break silence and buy release by betrayal of a comrade's trust; that is beaten like the mule, and galled like the horse, and starved like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet does the thing which is right, and the thing which is brave, despite all; that suffers, and endures, and pours out his blood like water to the thirsty sands, whose thirst is never stilled, and goes up in the morning sun to the combat, as though death were paradise that the Arbicos dream; knowing the while, that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoof through the throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over the writhing limb. That is glory. The misery that is heroism because France needs it, because a soldier's honor wills it. That is glory. It is here to-day in the hospital as it never is in the Cour des Princes, where the glittering host of the marshals gather!"

[*] Having received ardent reproaches from field officers and commanders of divisions for the injustice done their services by this sentence, I beg to a.s.sure them that the sentiment is Cigarette's--not mine. I should be very sorry for an instant to seem to depreciate that "genius of command" without whose guidance an army is but a rabble, or to underrate that n.o.blest courage which accepts the burden of arduous responsibilities and of duties as bitter in anxiety as they are precious in honor.

Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in her bright cheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there was in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world mistily calls genius.

There were men lying in that sick-chamber brutalized, crime-stained, ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and, like them, reared and driven for the slaughter; yet there was not one among them to whom some ray of light failed to come from those words, through whom some thrill failed to pa.s.s as they heard them. Out yonder in the free air, in the barrack court, or on the plains, the Little One would rate them furiously, mock them mercilessly, rally them with the fist of a saber, if they were mutinous, and lash them with the most pitiless ironies if they were grumbling; but here, in the hospital, the Little One loved them, and they knew it, and that love gave a flute-like music to the pa.s.sion of her voice.

Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with her bra.s.s heel.

"All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat; eh, Pere Matou?" she said curtly. She was half impatient of her own momentary lapse into enthusiasm, and she knew the temper of her "children" as accurately as a bugler knows the notes of the reveille--knew that they loved to laugh even with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts half breaking over a comrade's corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, "Ah, the good fellow! He's swallowed his own cartouche!"

"Paradise!" growled Pere Matou. "Ouf! Who wants that? If one had a few bidons of brandy, now----"

"Brandy? Oh, ha! you are to be much more of aristocrats now than that!"

cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire curling on her rosy piquant lips. "The Silver Pheasants have taken to patronize you. If I were you, I would not touch a gla.s.s, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you have the spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of her table--pardieu! That is not for soldiers of France!"

"What dost thou say?" growled Miou-Matou, peering up under his gray, s.h.a.ggy brows.

"Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That is all. Sapristi!

How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan with two words to one's maitre d'hotel, and a rouleau of gold that one never misses! The rich they can buy all things, you see, even heaven, so cheap!" With which withering satire Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that he must be already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk of champagne to him; and flitting down between the long rows of beds with the old disabled veterans who tended them, skimmed her way, like a bird as she was, into another great chamber, filled, like the first, with suffering in all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript, tossing in African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundred wounds.

Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through the entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy to the invalid soldiers--a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would brighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse might be she knew nothing; but the t.i.tle was enough; she was a silver pheasant--bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats--when they were of the s.e.x feminine. "An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle," she would say, "but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peac.o.c.k." Which was the reason why she flouted glittering young n.o.bles with all the insolence imaginable, but took the part of "Marquise," of "Bel-a-faire-peur," and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here and a touch there,--tender, soft, and bright,--since, however ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the narrow c.h.i.n.k of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to visit--a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form of a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a G.o.d.

The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tight clinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning misery that gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and again by the matador, and yet cannot die.

She bent over him softly.