Under Two Flags Part 58

"If I had my birthright," he muttered in her own tongue. "If I had it--would she look so cold then? She might love me--women used once. O G.o.d! if she had not looked on me, I had never known all I had lost!"

Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang up from her rest beside him.

"She--she--always she!" she muttered fiercely, while her face grew duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent; and she went slowly away, back to the low wood fire.

This was to be ever her reward!

Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery, vengeful pa.s.sions of her hot and jealous instincts. Cigarette had in her the violence, as she had the n.o.bility, of a grand nature that has gone wholly untutored and unguided; and she had the power of southern vengeance in her, though she had also the swift temper. It was bitter, beyond any other bitterness that could have wounded her, for the spoilt, victorious, imperious, little empress of the Army of Algeria to feel that, though she had given his life twice back to the man, she was less to him than the tiny white dog that nestled in his breast; that she, who never before had endured a slight, or known what neglect could mean, gave care, and pity, and aid, and even tenderness, to one whose only thought was for a woman who had accorded him nothing but a few chill syllables of haughty condescension!

He lay there unconscious of her presence, tossing wearily to and fro in fevered, unrefreshing sleep, murmuring incoherent words of French and English strangely mingled; and Cigarette crouched on the ground, with the firelight playing all over her picturesque, childlike beauty, and her large eyes strained and savage, yet with a strange, wistful pain in them; looking out at the moonlight where the headless body lay in a cold, gray sea of shadow.

Yet she did not leave him.

She was too generous for that. "What is right is right. He is a soldier of France," she muttered, while she kept her vigil. She felt no want of sleep; a hard, hateful wakefulness seemed to have banished all rest from her; she stayed there all the night so, with the touch of water on his forehead, or of cooled wine to his lips, by the alteration of the linen on his wounds, or the shifting of the rough forage that made his bed.

But she did it without anything of that loving, lingering attendance she had given before; she never once drew out the task longer than it needed, or let her hands wander among his hair, or over his lips, as she had done before.

And he never once was conscious of it; he never once knew that she was near. He did not waken from the painful, delirious, stupefied slumber that had fallen on him; he only vaguely felt that he was suffering pain; he only vaguely dreamed of what he murmured of--his past, and the beauty of the woman who had brought all the memories of that past back on him.

And this was Cigarette's reward--to hear him mutter wearily of the proud eyes and of the lost smile of another!

The dawn came at last; her constant care and the skill with which she had cooled and dressed his wounds had done him infinite service; the fever had subsided, and toward morning his incoherent words ceased, his breathing grew calmer and more tranquil; he fell asleep--sleep that was profound, dreamless, and refreshing.

She looked at him with a tempestuous shadow darkening her face, that was soft with a tenderness that she could not banish. She hated him; she ought to have stabbed or shot him rather than have tended him thus; he neglected her, and only thought of that woman of his old Order. As a daughter of the People, as a child of the Army, as a soldier of France, she ought to have killed him rather than have caressed his hair and soothed his pain! Pshaw! She ground one in another her tiny white teeth, that were like a spaniel's.

Then gently, very gently, lest she should waken him, she took her tunic skirt with which she had covered him from the chills of the night, put more broken wood on the fading fire, and with a last, lingering look at him where he slept, pa.s.sed out from the tent as the sun rose in a flushed and beautiful dawn. He would never know that she had saved him thus: he never should know it, she vowed in her heart.

Cigarette was very haughty in her own wayward, careless fashion. At a word of love from him, at a kiss from his lips, at a prayer from his voice, she would have given herself to him in all the abandonment of a first pa.s.sion, and have gloried in being known as his mistress. But she would have perished by a thousand deaths rather than have sought him through his pity or through his grat.i.tude; rather than have accepted the compa.s.sion of a heart that gave its warmth to another; rather than have ever let him learn that he was any more to her than all their other countless comrades who filled up the hosts of Africa.

"He will never know," she said to herself, as she pa.s.sed through the disordered camp, and in a distant quarter coiled herself among the hay of a forage-wagon, and covered up in dry gra.s.s, like a bird in a nest, let her tired limbs lie and her aching eyes close in repose. She was very tired; and every now and then, as she slept, a quick, sobbing breath shook her as she slumbered, like a worn-out fawn who has been wounded while it played.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST.

With the reveille and the break of morning Cigarette woke, herself again; she gave a little petulant shake to her fairy form when she thought of what folly she had been guilty. "Ah, bah! you deserve to be shot," she said to herself afresh. "One would think you were a Silver Pheasant--you grow such a little fool!"

Love was all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had always reckoned; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to flavor an idle moment. "Vin et Venus" she had always been accustomed to see worshiped together, as became their alliterative; it was a bit of fun--that was all. A pa.s.sion that had pain in it had never touched the Little One; she had disdained it with the lightest, airiest contumely.

"If your sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, eat the sugar and throw the almond away, you goose! That is simple enough, isn't it? Bah? I don't pity the people who eat the bitter almond; not I!" she had said once, when arguing with an officer on the absurdity of a melancholy love that possessed him, and whose sadness she rallied most unmercifully.

Now, for once in her young life, the Child of France found that it was remotely possible to meet with almonds so bitter that the taste will remain and taint all things, do what philosophy may to throw its acridity aside.

With the reveille she awoke, herself again, though she had not had more than an hour's slumber, it is true, with a dull ache at her heart that was very new and bitterly unwelcome to her, but with the buoyant vivacity and the proud carelessness of her nature in arms against it, and with that gayety of childhood inherent to her repelling, and very nearly successfully, the foreign depression that weighted on it.

Her first thought was to take care that he should never learn what she had done for him. The Princesse Corona would not have been more utterly disdained to solicit regard through making a claim upon grat.i.tude than the fiery little warrior of France would have done. She went straight to the Tringlo who had known her at her mission of mercy.

"Georges, mon brave," said the Little One, with that accent of authority which was as haughty as any General's, "do you know how that Cha.s.seur is that we brought in last night?"

"Not heard, ma belle," said the cheery little Tringlo, who was hard pressed; for there was much to be done, and he was very busy.

"What is to be done with the wounded?"

Georges lifted his eyebrows.

"Ma belle! There are very few. There are hundreds of dead. The few there are we shall take with an escort of Spahis to headquarters."

"Good. I will go with you. Have a heed, Georges, never to whisper that I had anything to do with saving that man I called to you about."

"And why, my Little One?"

"Because I desire it!" said Cigarette, with her most imperious emphasis.

"They say he is English, and a ruined Milord, pardieu! Now, I would not have an Englishman think I thought his six feet of carca.s.s worth saving, for a ransom."

The Tringlo chuckled; he was an Anglophobist. In the Chinese expedition his share of "loot" had been robbed from him by a trick of which two English soldiers had been the concocters, and a vehement animosity against the whole British race had been the fruit of it in him.

"Non, non, non!" he answered her heartily. "I understand. Thou art very bright, Cigarette. If we have ever obliged an Englishman, he thinks his obligation to us opens him a neat little door through which to cheat us.

It is very dangerous to oblige the English; they always hate you for it.

That is their way. They may have virtues; they may," he added dubiously, but with an impressive air of strictest impartiality, "but among them is not written grat.i.tude. Ask that man, Rac, how they treat their soldiers!" and M. Georges hurried away to this mules and his duties; thinking with loving regret of the delicious Chinese plunder of which the dogs of Albion had deprived him.

"He is safe!" thought Cigarette; of the patrol who had seen her, she was not afraid--he had never noticed with whom she was when he had put his head into the scullion's tent; and she made her way toward the place where she had left him, to see how it went with this man who she as so careful should never know that which he had owed to her.

It went well with him, thanks to her; care, and strengthening nourishment, and the skill of her tendance had warded off all danger from his wound. The bruise and pressure from the weight of the horse had been more ominous, and he could not raise himself or even breathe without severe pain; but his fever had left him, and he had just been lifted into a mule-drawn ambulance-wagon as Cigarette reached the spot.

"How goes the day, M. Victor? So you got sharp scratches, I hear? Ah!

that was a splendid thing we had yesterday! When did you go down?

We charged together!" she cried gayly to him; then her voice dropped suddenly, with an indescribable sweetness and change of tone. "So!--you suffer still?" she asked softly.

Coming close up to where he lay on the straw, she saw the exhausted languor of his regard, the heavy darkness under his eyelids, the effort with which his lips moved as the faint words came broken through them.

"Not very much, ma belle, I thank you. I shall be fit for harness in a day or two. Do not let them send me into hospital. I shall be perfectly--well--soon."

Cigarette swayed herself upon the wheel and leaned toward him, touching and changing his bandages with clever hands.

"They have dressed your wound ill; whose doing is that?"

"It is nothing. I have been half cut to pieces before now; this is a mere bagatelle. It is only--"

"That it hurts you to breathe? I know! Have they given you anything to eat this morning?"

"No. Everything is in confusion. We----"

She did not stay for the conclusion of his sentence; she had darted off, quick as a swallow. She knew what she had left in her dead scullion's tent. Everything was in confusion, as he had said. Of the few hundreds that had been left after the terrific onslaught of the past day, some were employed far out, thrusting their own dead into the soil; others were removing the tents and all the equipage of the camp; others were busied with the wounded, of whom the greatest sufferers were to be borne to the nearest hospital (that nearest many leagues away over the wild and barren country); while those who were likely to be again soon ready for service were to be escorted to the headquarters of the main army.

Among the latter Cecil had pa.s.sionately entreated to be numbered; his prayer was granted to the man who had kept at the head of his Cha.s.seurs and borne aloft the Tricolor through the whole of the war-tempest on which the dawn had risen, and which had barely lulled and sunk by the setting of the sun. Chateauroy was away with the other five of his squadrons; and the Zouave chef-de-bataillon, the only officer of any rank who had come alive through the conflict, had himself visited Bertie, and given him warm words of eulogy, and even of grat.i.tude, that had soldierly sincerity and cordiality in them.

"Your conduct was magnificent," he had said, as he had turned away. "It shall be my care that it is duly reported and rewarded."

Cigarette was but a few seconds absent; she soon bounded back like the swift little chamois she was, bringing with her a huge bowlful of red wine with bread broken in it.

"This is the best I could get," she said; "it is better than nothing. It will strengthen you."