Under Two Flags Part 70

Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath which his flight had been made? He began to think so. It was possible. She had been so young a child when he had left for Africa; then the story was probably withheld from reaching her; and now, what memory had the world to give a man whose requiem it had said twelve long years before? In all likelihood she had never heard his name, save from her brother's lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old comrade.

"Leave my life alone, for G.o.d's sake!" he said pa.s.sionately. "Tell me of your own--tell me, above all, of his. He loved me, you say?--O Heaven!

he did! Better than any creature that ever breathed; save the man whose grave lies yonder."

"He does so still," she answered eagerly. "Philip's is not a heart that forgets. It is a heart of gold, and the name of his earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever. He thinks you dead; to-night will be the happiest hour he had ever known when he shall meet you here."

He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs lest it should strike a chill to her as she pa.s.sed over it; the torture grew unsupportable to him. And yet, it had so much of sweetness that he was powerless to end it--sweetness in the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by birth; in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen now and forever.

She watched him with grave, musing eyes. She was moved, startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with a wondering of regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleasure, rose above these.

She had never forgotten the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought the gifts of her golden store; she was glad that he lived, though he lived thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion than any that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except her brother. The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger's fortunes, and which she had driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her harboring, was justified for one whom her people had known and valued while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had never heard from her brother's lips aught except constant regret and imperishable attachment. For it was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his memory had pa.s.sed to all in England had never been seen by her eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary.

"What is it you fear from Philip?" she asked him, at last, when she had waited vainly for him to break the silence. "You can remember him but ill if you think that there will be anything in his heart save joy when he shall know that you are living. You little dream how dear your memory is to him--"

He paused before her abruptly.

"Hush, hush! or you will kill me! Why!--three nights ago I fled the camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw his face in the light of the bivouac-fire and dreaded that he should so see mine!"

She gazed at him in troubled amaze; there was that in the pa.s.sionate agitation of this man who had been serene through so much danger, and unmoved beneath so much disaster, that startled and bewildered her.

"You fled from Philip? Ah! how you must wrong him! What will it matter to him whether you be prince or trooper, wear a peer's robes or a soldier's uniform? His friendship never yet was given to externals.

But--why?--that reminds me of your inheritance. Do you know that lord Royallieu is dead? That your younger brother bears the t.i.tle, thinking you perished at Ma.r.s.eilles? He was here with me yesterday; he has come to Algeria for the autumn. Whatever your motive may have been to remain thus hidden from us all, you must claim your own rights now. You must go back to all that is so justly yours. Whatever your reason be to have borne with all the suffering and the indignity that have been your portion here, they will be ended now."

Her beauty had never struck him as intensely as at this moment, when, in urging him to the demand of his rights, she so unconsciously tempted him to betray his brother and to forsake his word. The indifference and the careless coldness that had to so many seemed impenetrable and unalterable in her were broken and had changed to the warmth of sympathy, of interest, of excitation. There was a world of feeling in her face, of eloquence in her eyes, as she stooped slightly forward with the rich glow of the cashmeres about her, and the sun-gleam falling across her brow. Pure, and proud, and n.o.ble in every thought, and pressing on him now what was the due of his birth and his heritage, she yet unwittingly tempted him with as deadly a power as though she were the vilest of her s.e.x, seducing him downward to some infamous dishonor.

To do what she said would be but his actual right, and would open to him a future so fair that his heart grew sick with longing for it; and yet to yield, and to claim justice for himself, was forbidden him as utterly as though it were some murderous guilt. He had promised never to sacrifice his brother; the promise held him like the fetters of a galley slave.

"Why do you not answer me?" she pursued, while she leaned nearer with wonder, and doubt, and a certain awakening dread shadowing the blue l.u.s.ter of her eyes that were bent so thoughtfully, so searchingly, upon him. "Is it possible that you have heard of your inheritance, of your t.i.tle and estates, and that you voluntarily remain a soldier here? Lord Royallieu must yield them in the instant you prove your ident.i.ty, and in that there could be no difficulty. I remember you well now, and Philip, I am certain, will only need to see you once to--"

"Hush, for pity's sake! Have you never heard--have none ever told you----"

"What?"

Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could unman him thus.

"What is it I should have heard?" she asked him, as he kept his silence.

He turned from her so that she could not see his face.

"That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the taint of crime on me!"

"Of crime?"

An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word; but she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no shadowy terror appall.

"Of crime? What crime?"

Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hopeless, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or could have given.

"I was accused of having forged your brother's name."

A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes darkened and dilated.

"Accused. But wrongfully?"

His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms.

"I could not prove that."

"Not prove it? Why?"

"I could not."

"But he--Philip--never believed you guilty?"

"I cannot tell. He may; he must."

"But you are not!"

It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out in the silver clearness of her voice. There was not a single intonation of doubt in it; there was rather a haughty authority that forbade even himself to say that one of his race and that one of his Order could have been capable of such ign.o.ble and craven sin.

His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him; he turned his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the heart.

"Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will; I cannot answer you."

His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of their utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the n.o.bler, belief offered to her choice.

She had lived much in the world, but it had not corroded her; she had acquired keen discernment from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked at him now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and gracious gesture of infinite eloquence.

"You are guiltless, whatever circ.u.mstance may have arrayed against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely on you. Is it not so?"

He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. In that moment half the bitterness of his doom pa.s.sed from him; he had at least her faith. But his face was bloodless as that of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were audible on the stillness. This faith must live on without one thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be?

He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own closed involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until her dying day.

"I was guiltless; but none could credit it then; none would do so now; nor can I seek to make them. Ask me no more; give me your belief, if you can--G.o.d knows what precious mercy it is to me; but leave me to fulfill my fate, and tell no living creature what I have told you now."

The great tears stood in her eyes, and blinded her as she heard. Even in the amaze and the vagueness of this first knowledge of the cause of his exile she felt instinctively, as the Little One also had done, that some great sacrifice, some great fort.i.tude and generosity, lay within this sealed secret of his sufferance of wrong. She knew, too, that it would be useless to seek to learn that which he had chosen to conceal; that for no slender cause could he have come out to lead this life of whose sufferings she could gauge the measure; that nothing save some absolute and imperative reason could have driven him to accept such living death as was his doom in Africa.

"Tell no one!" she echoed. "What! not Philip even? Not your oldest friend. Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might be against you, his heart never condemned you for one instant."

"I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you to do for me, is to keep silence forever on my name. To-day, accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to keep sacred. When you recognized me, I could not deny myself, I could not lie to you; but, for G.o.d's sake, tell none of what has pa.s.sed between us!"

"But why?" she pursued--"why? You lie under this charge still--you cannot disprove it, you say; but why not come out before the world, and state to all what you swear now to me, and claim your right to bear your father's honors? If you were falsely accused, there must have been some guilty in your stead; and if--"

"Cease, for pity's sake! Forget I ever told you I was guiltless! Blot my memory out; think of me as dead, as I have been, till your eyes called me back to life. Think that I am branded with the theft of your brother's name; think that I am vile, and shameless and fallen as the lowest wretch that pollutes this army; think of me as what you will, but not as innocent!"

The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears away all barriers that have long dammed their course. They were wild, pa.s.sionate, incoherent; unlike any that had ever pa.s.sed his lips, or been poured out in her presence. He felt mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon her face again, and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the man whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to betray.

She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most women would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the violence of his self-accusation; she did not. Her intuition was too fine, her sympathies too true. She felt that he feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but that she should justly think him guiltless. She knew that this, whatever its root might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal life.