Under Two Flags Part 76

"A great fallacy! You must have seen many courageous men vanquished. But what would you imply by it?"

"That you can help this man, if you will."

"Would that I could; but I can discern no means--"

"Make them."

Even in that moment her listener smiled involuntarily at the curt, imperious tones, decisive as Napoleon's "Partons!" before the Pa.s.sage of the Alps.

"Be certain, if I can, I will. Meantime, there is one pressing danger of which you must be my medium to warn him. He and my brother must not meet. Tell him that the latter, knowing him only as Louis Victor, and interested in the incidents of his military career, will seek him out early to-morrow morning before we quit the camp. I must leave it to him to avoid the meeting as best he may be able."

Cigarette smiled grimly.

"You do not know much of the camp. Victor is only a bas-officier; if his officers call him up, he must come, or be thrashed like a slave for contumacy. He has no will of his own."

Venetia gave an irrepressible gesture of pain.

"True; I forgot. Well, go and send him to me. My brother must be taken into his confidence, whatever that confidence reveals. I will tell him so. Go and send him to me; it is the last chance."

Cigarette gave no movement of a.s.sent; all the jealous rage in her flared up afresh to stifle the n.o.ble and unselfish instincts under which she had been led during the later moments. A coa.r.s.e and impudent scoff rose to her tongue, but it remained unuttered; she could not speak it under that glance, which held the evil in her in subjection, and compelled her reluctant reverence against her will.

"Tell him to come here to me," repeated Venetia, with the calm decision of one to whom any possibility of false interpretation of her motives never occurred, and who was habituated to the free action that accompanied an una.s.sailable rank. "My brother must know what I know.

I shall be alone, and he can make his way hither, without doubt, un.o.bserved. Go and say this to him. You are his loyal little friend and comrade."

"If I be, I do not see why I am to turn your lackey, Madame," said Cigarette bitterly. "If you want him, you can send for him by other messengers!"

Venetia Corona looked at her steadfastly, with a certain contempt in the look.

"Then your pleading for him was all insincere? Let the matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired."

The undeviating gentleness of the tone made the rebuke cut deeper, as her first rebuke had cut, than any sterner censure or more peremptory dismissal could have done. Cigarette stood irresolute, ashamed, filled with rage, torn by contrition, impatient, wounded, swayed by jealous rage and by the purer impulses she strove to stifle.

The Cross she had tossed down caught her sight as it glittered on the carpet strewn over the hard earth; she stooped and raised it; the action sufficed to turn the tide with her impressionable, ardent, capricious nature; she would not disgrace that.

"I will go," she muttered in her throat; "and you--you--O G.o.d! no wonder men love you when even I cannot hate you!"

Almost ere the words were uttered she had dashed aside the hangings before the tent entrance, and had darted out into the night air. Venetia Corona gazed after the swiftly flying figure as it pa.s.sed over the starlit ground, lost in amazement, in pity, and in regret; wondering afresh if she had only dreamed of this strange interview in the Algerian camp, which seemed to have come and gone with the blinding rapidity of lightning.

"A little tigress!" she thought; "and yet with infinite n.o.bility, with wonderful germs of good in her. Of such a nature what a rare life might have been made! As it is, her childhood we smile at and forgive; but, great Heaven! what will be her maturity, her old age! Yet how she loves him! And she is so brave she will not show it."

With the recollection came the remembrance of Cigarette's words as to his own pa.s.sion for herself, and she grew paler as it did so. "G.o.d forbid he should have that pain, too!" she murmured. "What could it be save misery for us both!"

Yet she did not thrust the fancy from her with contemptuous nonchalance as she had done every other of the many pa.s.sions she had excited and disdained; it had a great sadness and a greater terror for her. She dreaded it slightly for herself.

She wished now that she had not sent for him. But it was done; it was for sake of their old friendship; and she was not one to vainly regret what was unalterable, or to desert what she deemed generous and right for the considerations of prudence or of egotism.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

ORDEAL BY FIRE.

Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned throughout the camp as the men surrendered themselves to the enjoyment of the largesses of food and of wine allotted to them by their Marshal's command in commemoration of Zaraila, one alone remained apart; silent and powerless to rouse himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endurance, of their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him well, and they also loved him too well to press such partic.i.p.ation on him. They knew that it was no lack of sympathy with them that made him so grave amid their mirth, so mute amid their volubility. Some thought that he was sorely wounded by the delay of the honors promised him. Others, who knew him better, thought that it was the loss of his brother-exile which weighed on him, and made all the scene around him full of pain. None approached him; but while they feasted in their tents, making the celebration of Zaraila equal to the Jour de Mazagran, he sat alone over a picket-fire on the far outskirts of the camp.

His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to risk with every moment that ordeal of recognition which he so utterly dreaded; and to flee was to leave his name to the men, with whom he had served so long, covered with obloquy and odium, buried under all the burning shame and degradation of a traitor's and deserter's memory. The latter course was impossible to him; the only alternative was to trust that the vastness of that great concrete body, of which he was one unit, would suffice to hide him from the discovery of the friend whose love he feared as he feared the hatred of no foe. He had not been seen as he had pa.s.sed the flag-staff; there was little fear that in the few remaining hours any chance could bring the ill.u.s.trious guest of a Marshal to the outpost of the scattered camp.

Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pinewood; she was so near, and he could not behold her!--though he might never see her face again; though they must pa.s.s out of Africa, home to the land that he desired as only exiles can desire, while he still remained silent, knowing that, until death should release him, there could be no other fate for him, save only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncompanioned, unpitied, unrewarded life. But to break his word as the price of his freedom was not possible to his nature or in his creed. This fate was, in chief, of his own making; he accepted it without rebellion, because rebellion would have been in this case both cowardice and self-pity.

He was not conscious of any heroism in this; it seemed to him the only course left to a man who, in losing the position, had not abandoned the instincts of a gentleman.

The evening wore away, unmeasured by him; the echoes of the soldiers'

mirth came dimly on his ear; the laughter, and the songs, and the music were subdued into one confused murmur by distance; there was nothing near him except a few tethered horses, and far way the mounted figure of the guard who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encampment. The fire burned on, for it had been piled high before it was abandoned; the little white dog of his regiment was curled at his feet; he sat motionless, sunk in thought, with his head drooped upon his breast. The voice of Cigarette broke on his musing.

"Beau sire, you are wanted yonder."

He looked up wearily; could he never be at peace? He did not notice that the tone of the greeting was rough and curt; he did not notice that there was a stormy darkness, a repressed bitterness, stern and scornful, on the Little One's face; he only thought that the very dogs were left sometimes at rest and unchained, but a soldier never.

"You are wanted!" repeated Cigarette, with imperious contempt.

He rose on the old instinct of obedience.

"For what?"

She stood looking at him without replying; her mouth was tightly shut in a hard line that pressed inward all its soft and rosy prettiness.

She was seeing how haggard his face was, how heavy his eyes, how full of fatigue his movements. Her silence recalled him to the memory of the past day.

"Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sympathy in all your honors," he said gently, as he laid his hand on her shoulder.

"Believe me, it was unintentional. No one knows better than I how richly you deserved them; no one rejoices more that you should have received them."

The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion; she shook herself roughly out of his hold.

"Point de phrases! All the army is at my back; do you think I cannot do without you? Sympathy too! Bah! We don't know those fine words in camp.

You are wanted, I tell you--go!"

"But where?"

"To your Silver Pheasant yonder--go!"

"Who? I do not--"

"Dame! Can you not understand? Milady wants to see you; I told her I would send you to her. You can use your dainty sentences with her; she is of your Order!"

"What! she wishes--"

"Go!" reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot. "You know the great tent where she is throned in honor--Morbleu!--as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my soldiers' linen were not of more use and more deserved such lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never done aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She waits for you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, I tell you. She is of your own people; we are not!"

The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one after another, rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred repressed emotions. He paused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick upon him; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the evening shadows.