Under Two Flags Part 64

It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear--she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him--a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!

She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable pa.s.sionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he--he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known--he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.

Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.

Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.

"What is your name?" she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Cha.s.seurs were entertaining him.

"Well--some call me Seraph."

"Ah! you have pet.i.te names, then, in Albion? I should have though she was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?"

"Lyonnesse."

"What a droll name! What are you?"

"A soldier."

"Good! What grade?"

"A Colonel of Guards."

Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Cha.s.seur, "He has the seat of the English Guards."

"My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his t.i.tle," cried one of the officers.

Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.

"Ouf! t.i.tles are nothing to me. I am a child of the People. So you are a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph? Well, that is not much, to my thinking.

Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing privates' uniforms, and littering down their own horses.

Bah! Have you that sort of thing in Albion?"

"Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep crossings? Oh, yes!" laughed her interlocutor. "But you speak of aristocrats in your ranks--that reminds me. Have you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor?"

He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who answered him in the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper name, heightened and tight-strung.

"A fine fellow," continued the Chef d'Escadron to whom he had appealed.

"He behaved magnificently the other day at Zaraila; he must be distinguished for it. He is just sent on a perilous errand, but though so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, and woe to the Arabs who slay him! Are you acquainted with him?"

"Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of him. I have been told he seems above his present position. Is it so?"

"Likely enough, monsieur; he seems a gentleman. But then we have many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can make no difference for that.

Cigarette can tell you more of him; she used to complain that he bowed like a Court chamberlain."

"Oh, ha!--I did!" cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony because pained and irritated by being appealed to on the subject. "And of course, when so many of his officers have the manners of Pyrenean bears, it is a little awkward for him to bring us the manner of a Palace!"

Which effectually chastised the Chef d'Escadron, who was one of those who had a ton of the roughest manners, and piqued himself on his powers of fence much more than on his habits of delicacy.

"Has this Victor any history?" asked the English Duke.

"He has written one with his sword; a fine one," said Cigarette curtly.

"We are not given here to care much about any other."

"Quite right; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen his carvings wished to serve him, if it were possible; and--"

"Ho! That is Milady, is suppose!" Cigarette's eyes flashed fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. "What did she tell you about him?"

"I am ignorant of whom you speak?" he answered, with something of surprise and annoyance.

"Are you?" said Cigarette, in derision. "I doubt that. Of whom should I speak but of her? Bah? She insulted him, she offered him gold, she sent my men the spoils of her table, as if they were paupers, and he thinks it all divine because it is done by Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague!

Bah! when he was delirious, the other night, he could babble of nothing but of her--of her--of her!"

The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every other thought; she was a child in much, she was untutored in all; she had no thought that by the scornful vituperation of "Milady" she could either harm Cecil or betray herself. But she was amazed to see the English guest change color with a haughty anger that he strove to subdue as he half rose and answered her with an accent in his voice that reminded her--she knew not why--of Bel-a-faire-peur and of Marquise.

"Mme. la Princess Corona d'Amague is my sister; why do you venture to couple the name of this Cha.s.seur with hers?"

Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, dared to anything by the mere fact of being publicly arraigned.

"Pardieu! Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with the Eagles of France?--a pretty idea, truly! So she is your sister, is she? Milady?

Well, then, tell her from me to think twice before she outrages a soldier with 'patronage'; and tell her, too, that had I been he I would have ground my ivory toys into powder before I would have let them become the playthings of a grande dame who tendered me gold for them!"

The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was mingled with a vivid sense of intense annoyance and irritated pride, that the name he cherished closest should be thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandiere and in connection with a trooper of Cha.s.seurs.

"I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle," he said, with an impatient stroke to his beard. "There is no occasion for it. Mme. Corona d'Amague, my sister," he continued, to the officers present, "became accidentally acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of yours; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding.

She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity--"

"M. le Duc!" cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and startling as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the warmth of wrath at once jealous and generous, "keep your compa.s.sion until it is asked of you. No soldier of France needs it; that I promise you. I know this man that you talk of 'pitying.' Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the guidon; I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from under his horse, and his first conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to a wretch who had thieved from him. Our life here is h.e.l.l upon earth to such as he, yet none ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone to the chances of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses'

kisses; he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored. Such a one is not to have the patronage of a Milady Corona, nor the pity of a stranger of England. Let the first respect him; let the last imitate him!"

And Cigarette, having p.r.o.nounced her defense and her eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their lighted tent.

"C'est Cigarette!" said the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities.

"A strange little Amazon!" said their guest. "Is she in love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?"

The Major shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know that, monsieur," answered one. "She will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor."

Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Cha.s.seur's fortunes, he should have brought in the name he loved so well--the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe--into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner.

Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief words:

"Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us.

He fights well--it is often a blackguard's virtue!"

His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at the introduction of his sister's name into the discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.