Under Two Flags Part 53

"It may be so."

"But you doubt it, I imagine."

"I am not sure now that I do. But this person is certainly unlike a man to whom disgrace has ever attached."

"You think your protege, then, has become what he is through adversity, I suppose? Very interesting!"

"I really can tell you nothing of his antecedents. Through his skill at sculpture, and my notice of it, considerable indignity has been brought upon him; and a soldier can feel, it seems, though it is very absurd that he should! That is all my concern with the matter, except that I have to teach his commander not to play with my name in his barrack yard."

She spoke with that negligence which always sounded very cold, though the words were so gently spoken. Her best and most familiar friends always knew when, with that courtly chillness, she had signed them their line of demarcation.

And the Marquise de Renardiere said no more, but talked of the Amba.s.sador's poems.

CHAPTER XXV.

"LE BON ZIG."

Meanwhile the subject of their first discourse returned to the Chambree.

He had encouraged the men to pursue those various industries and ingenuities, which, though they are affectedly considered against "discipline," formed, as he knew well, the best preservative from real insubordination, and the best instrument in humanizing and ameliorating the condition of his comrades. The habit of application alone was something gained; and if it kept them only for a while from the haunts of those coa.r.s.est debaucheries which are the only possible form in which the soldier can pursue the forbidden license of vice, it was better than that leisure should be spent in that joyless b.e.s.t.i.a.lity which made Cecil, once used to every refinement of luxury and indulgence, sicken with a pitying wonder for those who found in it the only shape they knew of "pleasure."

He had seen from the first, capabilities that might be turned to endless uses; in the conscript drawn from the populace of the provinces there was almost always a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, coupled with habits of diligence; in the soldier made from the street Arab of Paris there were always inconceivable intelligence, rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity; in the adventurers come, like himself, from higher grades of society, and burying a broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there were continually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, that had run to seed and brought forth no fruit. Of all these France always avails herself in a great degree; but, as far as Cecil's influence extended, they were developed much more than usual. As his own character gradually changed under the force of fate, the desire for some interest in life grew on him (every man, save one absolutely brainless and self-engrossed, feels this sooner or late); and that interest he found, or rather created, in his regiment. All that he could do to contribute to its efficiency in the field he did; all that he could do to further its internal excellence he did likewise.

Coa.r.s.eness perceptibly abated, and violence became much rarer in that portion of his corps with which he had immediately to do; the men gradually acquired from him a better, a higher tone; they learned to do duties inglorious and distasteful as well as they did those which led them to the danger and the excitation that they loved; and, having their good faith and sympathy, heart and soul, with him, he met, in these lawless leopards of African France, with loyalty, courage, generosity, and self-abnegation far surpa.s.sing those which he had ever met with in the polished civilization of his early experience.

For their sakes, he spent many of his free hours in the Chambree. Many a man, seeing him there, came and worked at some ingenious design, instead of going off to burn his brains out with brandy, if he had sous enough to buy any, or to do some dexterous bit of thieving on a native, if he had not. Many a time knowing him to be there sufficed to restrain the talk around from lewdness and from ribaldry, and turn it into channels at once less loathsome and more mirthful, because they felt that obscenity and vulgarity were alike jarring on his ear, although he had never more than tacitly shown that they were so. A precisian would have been covered with their contumely and ridicule; a saint would have been driven out from their midst with every missile merciless tongues and merciless hands could pelt with; a martinet would have been cursed aloud, and cheated, flouted, rebelled against, on every possible occasion. But the man who was "one of them" entirely, while yet simply and thoroughly a gentleman, had great influence--an influence exclusively for good.

The Chambree was empty when he returned; the men were scattered over the town in one of their scant pauses of liberty; there was only the dog of the regiment, Flick-Flack, a snow-white poodle, asleep in the heat, on a sack, who, without waking, moved his tail in a sign of gratification as Cecil stroked him and sat down near; betaking himself to the work he had in hand.

It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon. There was no other to remember the dead Cha.s.seur; no other beside himself, save an old woman sitting spinning at her wheel under the low-sloping, shingle roof of a cottage by the western Biscayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread flew, looked with anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had seen his father--the son of her youth--go down beneath the waters.

But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread of her waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom she watched would go back to her and to Languedoc.

For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who remember so well, and yet are forgotten as though already they were amid the dead.

Cecil's hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his thoughts wandered far from the place where he was. Alone there, in the great sun-scorched barrack room, the news that he had read, the presence he had quitted, seemed like a dream.

He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had stood before the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial eyes the light of other years seemed to lie; the memories of other worlds seemed to slumber.

These blue, proud, fathomless eyes! Why had they looked on him? He had grown content with his fate; he had been satisfied to live and to fall a soldier of France; he had set a seal on that far-off life of his earlier time, and had grown to forget that it had ever been. Why had chance flung him in her way that, with one careless, haughty glance, one smile of courteous pity, she should have undone in a moment all the work of a half-score years, and shattered in a day the serenity which it had cost him such weary self-contest, such hard-fought victory, to attain?

She had come to pain, to weaken, to disturb, to influence him, to shadow his peace, to wring his pride, to unman his resolve, as women do mostly with men. Was life not hard enough here already, that she must make it more bitter yet to bear?

He had been content, with a soldier's contentment, in danger and in duty; and she must waken the old coiled serpent of restless, stinging regret which he had thought lulled to rest forever!

"If I had my heritage!" he thought; and the chisel fell from his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack room with the blue glare of the African sky through the cas.e.m.e.nt.

Then he smiled at his own folly, in dreaming idly thus of things that might have been.

"I will see her no more," he said to himself. "If I do not take care, I shall end by thinking myself a martyr--the last refuge and consolation of emasculate vanity, of impotent egotism!"

For though his whole existence was a sacrifice, it never occurred to him that there was anything whatever great in its acceptation, or unjust in its endurance. He thought too little of his life's value, or of its deserts, even to consider by any chance that it had been harshly dealt with, or unmeritedly visited.

At that instant Pet.i.t Picpon's keen, pale, Parisian face peered through the door; his great, black eyes, that at times had so pathetic a melancholy, and at others such a monkeyish mirth and malice, were sparkling excitedly and gleefully.

"Mon Caporal!"

"You, Picpon! What is it?"

"Mon, Caporal, there is great news. There is fighting broken out yonder."

"Ah! Are you sure?"

"Sure, mon Caporal. The Arbicos want a skirmish to the music of musketry. We are not to know just yet; we are to have the order de route to-morrow. I overheard our officers say so. They think we shall have brisk work. And for that they will not punish the vieille lame."

"Punish! Is there fresh disobedience? In my squadron; in my absence?"

He rose instinctively, buckling on the sword which he had put aside.

"Not in your squadron, mon Caporal," said Picpon quickly. "It is not much, either. Only the bon zig Rac."

"Rake? What has he been doing?"

There was infinite anxiety and vexation in his voice. Rake had recently been changed into another squadron of the regiment, to his great loss and regret; for not only did he miss the man's bright face and familiar voice from the Chambree, but he had much disquietude on the score of his safety, for Rake was an incorrigible pratique, had only been kept from sc.r.a.pes and mischief by Cecil's influence, and even despite that had been often in hot water, and once even had been drafted for a year or so of chastis.e.m.e.nt among the "Zephyrs," a mode of punishment which, but for its separation of him from his idol, would have given unmitigated delight to the audacious offender.

"Very little, mon Caporal!" said Picpon eagerly. "A mere nothing--a bagatelle! Run a Spahi through the stomach, that is all. I don't think the man is so much as dead, even!"

"I hope not, indeed. When will you cease this brawling among yourselves?

A soldier's blade should never be turned upon men of his own army. How did it happen?"

"A woman! They quarreled about a little fruit-seller. The Spahi was in fault. 'Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort' was there before him; and was preferred by the girl; and women should be allowed something to do with choosing their lovers, that I think, though it is true they often take the worst man. They quarreled; the Spahi drew first; and then, pouf et pa.s.se!

quick as thought, Rac lunged through him. He has always a most beautiful stroke. Le Capitaine Argentier was pa.s.sing, and made a fuss; else nothing would have been done. They have put him under arrest; but I heard them say they would let him free to-night because we should march at dawn."

"I will go and see him at once."

"Wait, mon Caporal; I have something to tell you," said Picpon quickly.

"The zig has a motive in what he does. Rac wanted to get the prison. He has done more than one bit of mischief only for that."

"Only for what? He cannot be in love with the prison?"

"It serves his turn," said Picpon mysteriously. "Did you never guess why, mon Caporal? Well, I have. 'Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort' is a fine fearless soldier. The officers know it; the bureaus know it. He would have mounted, mounted, mounted, and been a Captain long before now, if he had not been a pratique."

"I know that; so would many of you."

"Ah, mon Caporal; but that is just what Rac does not choose. In the books his page beats every man's, except yours. They have talked of him many times for the cross and for promotion; but whenever they do he goes off to a bit of mischief, and gets himself punished. Any term of punishment, long or short, serves his purpose. They think him too wild to take out of the ranks. You remember, mon Caporal, that splendid thing that he did five years ago at Sabasasta? Well, you know they spoke of promoting him for it, and he would have run up all the grades like a squirrel, and died a Kebir, I dare say. What did he do to prevent it?

Why, went that escapade into Oran disguised as a Dervish, and go the prison instead."