Under Two Flags Part 75

"My poor child, it is rather something in yourself--a native n.o.bility that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent as your soul desires--"

Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience.

"Pardieu! Do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my 'insolence'

in earnest! You may be a sovereign grand dame everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you for me, I promise you!"

"I do not seek to do so. If I did not feel interest in you, do you suppose I should suffer for a moment the ignorant rudeness of an ill-bred child? You fail in the tact, as in the courtesy, that belong to your nation."

The rebuke was gentle, but it was all the more severe for its very serenity. It cut Cigarette to the quick; it covered her with an overwhelming sense of mortification and of failure. She was too keen and too just, despite all her vanity, not to feel that she had deserved the condemnation, and not to know that her opponent had all the advantage and all the justice on her side. She had done nothing by coming here; nothing except to appear as an insolent and wayward child before her superb rival, and to feel a very anguish of inferiority before the grace, the calm, the beauty, the nameless, potent charm of this woman, whom she had intended to humiliate and injure!

The inborn truth within her, the native generosity and candor that soon or late always overruled every other element in the Little One, conquered her now. She dashed down her Cross on the ground, and trod pa.s.sionately on the decoration she adored.

"I disgrace it the first day I wear it! You are right, though I hate you, and you are as beautiful as a sorceress! There is no wonder he loves you!"

"He! Who?"

There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the interview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose.

The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she said; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many emotions in her.

"The man who carves the toys you give your dog to break!" she answered bitterly. "Dieu de Dieu! he loves you. When he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he said so; but he never knew what he said, and he never knew that I heard him. You are like the women of his old world; though through you he got treated like a dog, he loves you!"

"Of whom do you venture to speak?"

The cold, calm dignity of the question, whose very tone was a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of Cigarette's speech.

"Sacre bleu! Of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his wares to you like a hawker. And you think it insult, I will warrant!--insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to enn.o.ble him, to dare to love Mme. la Princesse Corona! I think otherwise. I think that Mme. la Princesse Corona never had a love of so much honor, though she has had princes and n.o.bles and all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, through that beauty that is like a spell!"

Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own hatred for her rival, which drove her to magnify the worth of the pa.s.sion of which she was so jealous, that she might lessen, if she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, she never paused to care what she said, or heed what its consequences might become. She felt incensed, amazed, irritated, to see no trace of any emotion come on her hearer's face; the hot, impetuous, expansive, untrained nature underrated the power for self-command of the Order she so blindly hated.

"You speak idly and at random, like the child you are," the grande dame answered her with chill, contemptuous rebuke. "I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you his confidante in such a matter?"

"He!" retorted Cigarette. "He belongs to your cla.s.s, Milady. He is as silent as the grave. You might kill him, and he would never show it hurt. I only know what he muttered in his fever."

"When you attended him?"

"Not I!" cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that she was betraying herself. "He lay in the scullion's tent where I was; that was all; and he was delirious with the shot-wounds. Men often are--"

"Wait! Hear me a little while, before you rush on in this headlong and foolish speech," interrupted her auditor, who had in a moment's rapid thought decided on her course with this strange, wayward nature. "You err in the construction you have placed on the words, whatever they were, which you heard. The gentleman--he is a gentleman--whom you speak of bears me no love. We are almost strangers. But by a strange chain of circ.u.mstances he is connected with my family; he once had great friendship with my brother; for reasons that I do not know, but which are imperative with him, he desires to keep his ident.i.ty unsuspected by everyone; an accident alone revealed it to me, and I have promised him not to divulge it. You understand?"

Cigarette gave an affirmative gesture. Her eyes were fastened suddenly, yet with a deep, bright glow in them, upon her companion; she was beginning to see her way through his secret--a secret she was too intrinsically loyal even now to dream of betraying.

"You spoke very n.o.bly for him to-day. You have the fealty of one brave character to another, I am sure!" pursued Venetia Corona, purposely avoiding all hints of any warmer feeling on her listener's part, since she saw how tenacious the girl was of any confession of it. "You would do him service if you could, I fancy. Am I right?"

"Oh, yes!" answered Cigarette, with an over-a.s.sumption of carelessness.

"He is bon zig; we always help each other. Besides, he is very good to my men. What is it you want of me?"

"To preserve secrecy on what I have told you for his sake; and to give him a message from me."

Cigarette laughed scornfully; she was furious with herself for standing obediently like a chidden child to hear this patrician's bidding, and to do her will. And yet, try how she would, she could not shake off the spell under which those grave, sweet, l.u.s.trous eyes of command held her.

"Pardieu, Milady! Do you think I babble like any young drunk with his first measure of wine? As for your message, you had better let him come and hear what you have to say; I cannot promise to remember it!"

"Your answer is reckless; I want a serious one. You spoke like a brave and a just friend to him to-day; are you willing to act as such to-night? You have come here strangely, rudely, without pretext or apology; but I think better of you than you would allow me to do, if I judged only from the surface. I believe that you have loyalty, as I know that you have courage."

Cigarette set her teeth hard.

"What of that?"

"This of it. That one who has them will never cherish malice unjustifiably, or fail to fulfill a trust."

Cigarette's clear, brown skin grew very red.

"That is true," she muttered reluctantly. Her better nature was growing uppermost, though she strove hard to keep the evil one predominant.

"Then you will cease to feel hatred toward me for so senseless a reason as that I belong to an aristocracy that offends you; and you will remain silent on what I tell you concerning the one whom you know as Louis Victor?"

Cigarette nodded a.s.sent; the sullen fire-glow still burned in her eyes, but she succ.u.mbed to the resistless influence which the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had over her. She was studying Venetia Corona all this while with the keen, rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy; studying her features, her form, her dress, her att.i.tude, all the many various and intangible marks of birth and breeding which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem so strange, so dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the while the sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own boldness, her own debas.e.m.e.nt was growing upon her, eating, sharply into the metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet making her heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself.

"He is of your Order, then?" she asked abruptly.

"He was--yes."

"Oh, ha!" cried Cigarette, with her old irony. "Then he must be always, mustn't he? You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King's purple or a Roumi's canvas shirt. Blood tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some say my father was a Prince of France--maybe! So, he is of your Order?

Bah! I knew that the first day I saw his hands. Do you want me to tell you why he lives among us, buried like this?"

"Not if you violate any confidence to do so."

"Pardieu! He makes no confidence, I promise you. Not ten words will Monsieur say, if he can help it, about anything. He is as silent as a lama. But we learn things without being told in camp; and I know well enough he is here to save someone else, in someone's place; it is a sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom."

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve of her cla.s.s, made her shrink from discussing the history of one whom she knew--shrink from having any argument on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy.

Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the only means through which she could send him a warning that must be sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the "aristocrat," to whom she was so singular and novel a rarity as though she were some young savage of desert western isles.

"Look you, Milady," said Cigarette, half sullenly, half pa.s.sionately, for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her in their utterance, "that man suffers; his life here is a h.e.l.l upon earth--I don't mean for the danger, he is bon soldat; but for the indignity, the subordination, the license, the brutality, the tyranny.

He is as if he were chained to the galleys. He never says anything.

Oh, no! he is of your kind you know! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu! he suffers. Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him? Can you ransom him in no way? Can you go away out of Africa and leave him in this living death to get killed and thrust into the sand, like his comrade the other day?"

Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; they cut her to the soul. It was not for the first time that the awful desolation of his future had been present before her; but it was the first time that the fate to which she would pa.s.s away and leave him had been so directly in words before her. Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her better nature, and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity with which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed her rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid skill. She was pleading against herself; no matter. In that instant she was capable of crucifying herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent.

"I have heard," she went on vehemently, for the utterance to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, "that you of the n.o.blesse are stanch as steel to your own people. It is the best virtue that you have. Well, he is of your people. Will you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave him to eat his heart out in bitterness and misery? He was your brother's friend; he was known to you in his early time; you said so. And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Milady, not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage?--to go back to your palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and be happy, while this man is left on bearing his yoke here?--and it is a yoke that galls, that kills!--bearing it until, in some day of desperation, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and makes its pulse cease forever? If you do, you patricians are worse still than I thought you!"

Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came over her face as the vivid phrases followed each other. She was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the challenge and the insolence of their manner. She knew that the Little One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious to conceal her love; and she was touched, not less by the magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus prefigured before her.

"Your reproaches are unneeded," she replied, slowly and wearily. "I could not abandon one who was once the friend of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great pain. But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think I could do with so much ease. I am not in its secret; I do not know the reason of its seeming suicide; I have no more connection with its intricacies than you have. This gentleman has chosen his own path; it is not for me to change his choice or spy into his motives."

Cigarette's flashing, searching eyes bent all their brown light on her.

"Mme. Corona, you are courageous; to those who are so, all things are possible."