Under Two Flags Part 52

"But is it usual for officers of his high grade to show such malice to their soldiers?"

"Most unusual. In this service especially so; although officers rising from the ranks themselves are more apt to contract prejudices and ill feeling against, as they are to feel favoritism to, their men, than where they enter the regiment in a superior grade at once. At least, that is the opinion I myself have formed; studying the working of the different systems."

"You know the English service, then?"

"I know something of it."

"And still, though thinking this, you prefer the French?"

"I distinctly prefer it, as one that knows how to make fine soldiers and how to reward them; as one in which a brave man will be valued, and a worn-out veteran will not be left to die like a horse at a knacker's."

"A brave man valued, and yet you are a corporal!" thought Milady, as he pursued:

"Since I am here, madame, let me thank you, in the Army's name, for your infinite goodness in acting so munificently on my slight hint. Your generosity has made many happy hearts in the hospital."

"Generosity! Oh, do not call it by any such name! What did it cost me?

We are terribly selfish here. I am indebted to you that for once you made me remember those who suffered."

She spoke with a certain impulse of candor and of self-accusation that broke with great sweetness the somewhat coldness of her general manner; it was like a gleam of light that showed all the depth and the warmth that in truth lay beneath that imperious languor of habit. It broke further the ice of distance that severed the grande dame from the cavalry soldier.

Insensibly to himself, the knowledge that he had, in fact, the right to stand before her as an equal gave him the bearing of one who exercised that right, and her rapid perception had felt before now that this Roumi of Africa was as true a gentleman as any that had ever thronged about her in palaces. Her own life had been an uninterrupted course of luxury, prosperity, serenity, and power; the adversity which she could not but perceive had weighed on his had a strange interest to her. She had heard of many calamities, and aided many; but they had always been far sundered from her, they had never touched her; in this man's presence they seemed to grow very close, terribly real. She led him on to speak of his comrades, of his daily life, of his hara.s.sing routine of duties in peace, and of his various experiences in war. He told her, too, of Leon Ramon's history; and as she listened, he saw a mist arise and dim the brilliancy of those eyes that men complained would never soften. The very fidelity with which he sketched to her the bitter sufferings and the rough n.o.bility that were momentarily borne and seen in that great military family of which he had become a son by adoption, interested her by its very unlikeness to anything in her own world.

His voice had still the old sweetness, his manner still its old grace; and added to these were a grave earnestness and a natural eloquence that the darkness of his own fortunes, and the sympathies with others that pain had awakened, had brought to him. He wholly forgot their respective stations; he only remembered that for the first time for so many years he had the charm of converse with a woman of high breeding, of inexpressible beauty, and of keen and delicate intuition. He wholly forgot how time pa.s.sed, and she did not seek to remind him; indeed, she but little noted it herself.

At last the conversation turned back to his Chief.

"You seem to be aware of some motive for your commandant's dislike?" she asked him. "Tell me to what you attribute it?"

"It is a long tale, madame."

"No matter; I would hear it."

"I fear it would only weary you."

"Do not fear that. Tell it me."

He obeyed, and told to her the story of the Emir and of the Pearl of the Desert; and Venetia Corona listened, as she had listened to him throughout, with an interest that she rarely vouchsafed to the recitals and the witticisms of her own circle. He gave to the narrative a soldierly simplicity and a picturesque coloring that lent a new interest to her; and she was of that nature which, however, it may be led to conceal feeling from pride and from hatred, never fails to awaken to indignant sympathy at wrong.

"This barbarian is your chief!" she said, as the tale closed. "His enmity is your honor! I can well credit that he will never pardon your having stood between him and his crime."

"He has never pardoned it yet, of a surety."

"I will not tell you it was a n.o.ble action," she said, with a smile sweet as the morning--a smile that few saw light on them. "It came too naturally to a man of honor for you to care for the epithet. Yet it was a great one, a most generous one. But I have not heard one thing: what argument did you use to obtain her release?"

"No one has ever heard it," he answered her, while his voice sank low.

"I will trust you with it; it will not pa.s.s elsewhere. I told him enough of--of my own past life to show him that I knew what his had been, and that I knew, moreover, though they were dead to me now, men in that greater world of Europe who would believe my statement if I wrote them this outrage on the Emir, and would avenge it for the reputation of the Empire. And unless he released the Emir's wife, I swore to him that I would so write, though he had me shot on the morrow; and he knew I should keep my word."

She was silent some moments, looking on him with a musing gaze, in which some pity and more honor for him were blended.

"You told him your past. Will you confess it to me?"

"I cannot, madame."

"And why?"

"Because I am dead! Because, in your presence, it becomes more bitter to me to remember that I ever lived."

"You speak strangely. Cannot your life have a resurrection?"

"Never, madame. For a brief hour you have given it one--in dreams. It will have no other."

"But surely there may be ways--such a story as you have told me brought to the Emperor's knowledge, you would see your enemy disgraced, yourself honored?"

"Possibly, madame. But it is out of the question that it should ever be so brought. As I am now, so I desire to live and die."

"You voluntarily condemn yourself to this?"

"I have voluntarily chosen it. I am well sure that the silence I entreat will be kept by you?"

"a.s.suredly; unless by your wish it be broken. Yet--I await my brother's arrival here; he is a soldier himself; I shall hope that he will persuade you to think differently of your future. At any rate, both his and my own influence will always be exerted for you, if you will avail yourself of it."

"You do me much honor, madame. All I will ever ask of you is to return those coins to my Colonel, and to forget that your gentleness has made me forget, for one merciful half hour, the sufferance on which alone a trooper can present himself here."

He swept the ground with his kepi as though it were the plumed hat of a Marshal, and backed slowly from her presence, as he had many a time long before backed out of a throne-room.

As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chessmen; they stood under gla.s.s, and had not been broken by her lapdog.

Milady, left alone there in her luxurious morning room, sat a while lost in thought. He attracted her; he interested her; he aroused her sympathy and her wonder as the men of her own world failed to do--aroused them despite the pride which made her impatient of lending so much attention to a mere Cha.s.seur d'Afrique. His knowledge of the fact that he was in reality the representative of his race, although the power to declare himself so had been forever abandoned and lost, had given him in her presence that day a certain melancholy, and a certain grave dignity that would have shown a far more superficial observer than she was that he had come of a great race, and had memories that were of a very different hue to the coa.r.s.e and hard life which he led now. She had seen much of the world, and was naturally far more penetrative and more correct in judgment than are most women. She discovered the ring of true gold in his words, and the carriage of pure breeding in his actions. He interested her more than it pleased her that he should. A man so utterly beneath her; doubtless brought into the grade to which he had fallen by every kind of error, of improvidence, of folly--of probably worse than folly!

It was too absurd that she, so difficult to interest, so inaccessible, so fastidious, so satiated with all that was brilliant and celebrated, should find herself seriously spending her thoughts, her pity, and her speculation on an adventurer of the African Army! She laughed a little at herself as she stretched out her hand for a new volume of French poems dedicated to her by their accomplished writer, who was a Parisian diplomatist.

"One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and weaving a marvelous romance from a mystery and a tristesse, because the first soldier I notice in Algeria has a gentleman's voice and is ill treated by his officers!" she thought with a smile, while she opened the poems which had that day arrived, radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet, and the gold of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona d'Amague on their binding. The poems were sparkling with grace and elegant silvery harmonies; but they served ill to chain her attention, for while she read her eyes wandered at intervals to the chess battalions.

"Such a man as that buried in the ranks of this brutalized army!"

she mused. "What fatal chance could bring him here? Misfortune, not misconduct, surely. I wonder if Lyon could learn? He shall try."

"Your Cha.s.seur has the air of a Prince, my love," said a voice behind her.

"Equivocal compliment! A much better air than most Princes," said Mme.

Corona, glancing up with a slight shrug of her shoulders, as her guest and traveling companion, the Marquise de Renardiere, entered.

"Indeed! I saw him as he pa.s.sed out; and he saluted me as if he had been a Marshal. Why did he come?"

Venetia Corona pointed to the Napoleons, and told the story; rather listlessly and briefly.

"Ah! The man has been a gentleman, I dare say. So many of them come to our army. I remember General Villefleur's telling me--he commanded here a while--that the ranks of the Zephyrs and Zouaves were full of well-born men, utterly good-for-nothing, the handsomest scoundrels possible; who had every gift and every grace, and yet come to no better end than a pistol-shot in a ditch or a mortal thrust from Bedouin steel.

I dare say your Corporal is one of them."