Under Two Flags Part 61

He sat now, having recovered from the effects of the day of Zaraila, within a little distance of the fire at which his men were stewing some soup in the great simmering copper bowl. They had eaten nothing for nigh a week, except some moldy bread, with the chance of a stray cat or a shot bird to flavor it. Hunger was a common thorn in Algerian warfare, since not even the matchless intendance of France could regularly supply the troops across those interminable breadths of arid land, those sun-scorched plains, swept by Arab foragers.

"Beau Victor! You took their parts well," said a voice behind him, as Cigarette vaulted over a pile of knapsacks and stood in the glow of the fire, with a little pipe in her pretty rosebud mouth and her cap set daintily on one side of her curls.

He looked up, and smiled.

"Not so well as your own clever tongue would have done. Words are not my weapons."

"No! You are as silent as the grave commonly; but when you do speak, you speak well," said the vivandiere condescendingly. "I hate silence myself! Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they keep little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest."

With which metaphor Cigarette blew a cloud of smoke into the night air, looking the prettiest little genre picture in the ruddy firelight that ever was painted on such a background of wavering shadow and undulating flame.

"Will your allegory hold good, pet.i.te?" smiled Cecil, thinking but little of his answer or of his companion, of whose service to him he remained utterly ignorant. "I fancy speech is the chaff most generally, little better. So, they talk of you for the Cross? No soldier ever, of a surety, more greatly deserved it."

Her eyes gleamed with a l.u.s.ter like the African planets above her; her face caught all the fire, the light, the illumination of the flames flashing near her.

"I did nothing," she said curtly. "Any man on the field would have done the same."

"That is easy to say; not so easy to prove. In all great events there may be the same strength, courage, and desire to act greatly in those who follow as in the one that leads; but it is only in that one that there is also the daring to originate, the genius to seize aright the moment of action and of success."

Cigarette was a little hero; she was, moreover, a little desperado; but she was a child in years and a woman at heart, valiant and ruthless young soldier though she might be. She colored all over her mignonne face at the words of eulogy from this man whom she had told herself she hated; her eyes filled; her lips trembled.

"It was nothing" she said softly, under her breath. "I would die twenty deaths for France."

He looked at her, and for the hour understood her aright; he saw that there was the love for her country and the power of sacrifice in this gay-plumaged and capricious little hawk of the desert.

"You have a n.o.ble nature, Cigarette," he said, with an earnest regard at her. "My poor child, if only----" He paused. He was thinking what it was hard to say to her--if only the accidents of her life had been different, what beauty, race, and genius might have been developed out of the untamed, untutored, inconsequent, but glorious nature of the child-warrior.

As by a fate, unconsciously his pity embittered all the delight his praise had given, and this implied regret for her stung her as the rend of the spur a young Arab colt--stung her inwardly into cruel wrath and pain; outwardly into irony, deviltry, and contemptuous retort.

"Oh! Child, indeed! Was I a child the other day, my good fellow, when I saved your squadron from being cut to pieces like gra.s.s with a scythe?

As for n.o.bility? Pouf! Not much of that in me. I love France--yes. A soldier always loves his country. She is so brave, too, and so fair, and so gay. Not like your Albion--if it is yours--who is a great gobemouche stuffed full of cotton, steaming with fog, clutching gold with one hand and the Bible with the other, that she may swell her money-bags, and seem a saint all the same; never laughing, never learning, always growling, always shuffling, who is like this spider--look!--a tiny body and huge, hairy legs--pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her little English body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like to know what size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell and to strut?"

Wherewith Cigarette tossed the spider into the air, with all the supreme disdain she could impel into that gesture. Cigarette, though she knew not her A B C, and could not have written her name to save her own life, had a certain bright intelligence of her own that caught up political tidings, and grasped at public subjects with a skill education alone will not bestow. One way and another she had heard most of the floating opinions of the day, and stored them up in her fertile brain as a bee stores honey into his hive by much as nature-given and unconscious an instinct as the bee's own.

Cecil listened, amused.

"You little Anglophobist! You have the tongue of a Voltaire!"

"Voltaire?" questioned Cigarette. "Voltaire! Let me see. I know that name. He was the man who championed Calas? Who had a fowl in the pot for every poor wretch that pa.s.sed his house? Who was taken to the Pantheon by the people in the Revolution?"

"Yes. And the man whom the wise world pretends still to call without a heart or a G.o.d!"

"Chut! He fed the poor, and freed the wronged. Better than pattering Paters, that!" said Cigarette, who thought a midnight ma.s.s at Notre Dame or a Salutation at the Madeleine a pretty coup de theatre enough, but who had for all churches and creeds a serene contempt and a fierce disdain. "Go to the grandams and the children!" she would say, with a shrug of her shoulders, to a priest, whenever one in Algiers or Paris attempted to reclaim her; and a son of the Order of Jesus, famed for persuasiveness and eloquence, had been fairly beaten once when, in the ardor of an African missionary, he had sought to argue with the little Bohemian of the Tricolor, and had had his logic rent in twain, and his rhetoric scattered like dust, under the merciless home-thrusts and the sarcastic artillery of Cigarette's replies and inquiries.

"Hola!" she cried, leaving Voltaire for what took her fancy. "We talk of Albion--there is one of her sons. I detest your country, but I must confess she breeds uncommonly handsome men."

She was a dilettante in handsome men; she nodded her head now to where, some yards off, at another of the camp-fires, stood, with some officers of the regiment, one of the tourists; a very tall, very fair man, with a gallant bearing, and a tawny beard that glittered to gold in the light of the flames.

Cecil's glance followed Cigarette's. With a great cry he sprang to his feet and stood entranced, gazing at the stranger. She saw the startled amaze, the longing love, the agony of recognition, in his eyes; she saw the impulse in him to spring forward, and the shuddering effort with which the impulse was controlled. He turned to her almost fiercely.

"He must not see me! Keep him away--away, for G.o.d's sake!"

He could not have leave his men; he was fettered there where his squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from the flame-light into the shadow, and thrust himself among the tethered horses. Cigarette asked nothing; comprehended at a glance with all the tact of her nation; and sauntered forward to meet the officers of the regiment as they came up to the picket-fire with the yellow-haired English stranger. She knew how charming a picture there, with her hands lightly resting on her hips, and her bright face danced on by the ruddy fire-glow, she made; she knew she could hold thus the attention of a whole brigade. The eyes of the stranger lighted on her, and his voice laughed in mellow music to his companions and ciceroni.

"Your intendance is perfect; your ambulance is perfect; your camp-cookery is perfect, messieurs; and here you have even perfect beauty, too! Truly, campaigning must be pleasant work in Algeria!"

Then he turned to her with compliments frank and gay, and full of a debonair grace that made her doubt he could be of Albion.

Retort was always ready to her; and she kept the circle of officers in full laughter round the fire with a shower of repartee that would have made her fortune on the stage. And every now and then her glance wandered to the shadow where the horses were tethered.

Bah! why was she always doing him service? She could not have told.

Still she went on--and did it.

It was a fantastic picture by the bright scarlet light of the camp-fire, with the Little One in her full glory of mirth and mischief, and her circle of officers laughing on her with admiring eyes; nearest her the towering height of the English stranger, with the gleam of the flame in the waves of his leonine beard.

From the darkness, where the scores of gray horses were tethered, Cecil's eyes were riveted on it. There were none near to see him; had there been, they would have seen an agony in his eyes that no physical misery, no torture of the battlefield, had brought there. His face was bloodless, and his gaze strained through the gleam on to the fire-lit group with a pa.s.sionate intensity of yearning--he was well used to pain, well used to self-control, well used to self-restraint, but for the first time in his exile the bitterness of a struggle almost vanquished him. All the old love of his youth went out to this man, so near to him, yet so hopelessly severed from him; looking on the face of his friend, a violence of longing shook him. "O G.o.d, if I were dead!" he thought, "they might know then----"

He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand once more touch his; those familiar eyes once more look on him with the generous, tender trust of old.

His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood there among his horses, with the stir and tumult of the bivouac about him. There was nothing simpler, nothing less strange, than that an English soldier should visit the Franco-Arab camp; but to him it seemed like a resurrection of the dead.

Whether it was a brief moment, or an hour through, that the circle stood about the great, black caldron that was swinging above the flames, he could not have told; to him it was an eternity. The echo of the mellow, ringing tones that he knew so well came to him from the distance, till his heart seemed breaking with but one forbidden longing--to look once more in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar quail, and say only, "I was guiltless."

It is bitter to know those whom we love dead; but it is more bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have sunk our memory deep beneath oblivion that is not the oblivion of the grave.

A while, and the group broke up and was scattered; the English traveler throwing gold pieces by the score among the waiting troopers. "A bientot!" they called to Cigarette, who nodded farewell to them with a cigar in her mouth, and busied herself pouring some brandy into the old copper caldron in which some black coffee and muddy water, three parts sand, was boiling. A few moments later, and they were out of sight among the confusion, the crowds, and the flickering shadows of the camp. When they were quite gone, she came softly to him; she could not see him well in the gloom, but she touched his hand.

"Dieu! how cold you are! He is gone."

He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in his the little, warm, brown palm. She felt a shiver shake his limbs.

"Is he your enemy?" she asked.

"No."

"What, then?"

"The man I love best on earth."

"Ah!" She had felt a surprise she had not spoke that he should flee thus from any foe. "He thinks you dead, then?"

"Yes."

"And must always think so?"

"Yes." He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard--the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. "Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful; for G.o.d's sake, get me sent out of this camp to-night. I am powerless."