CHAPTER XVIII.
CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE.
"Oh! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings of Europe," saidClaude de Chanrellon, dashing some vermouth off his golden mustaches,where he lay full-length on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Placedu Gouvernement, where the lamps were just lit, and shining throughthe burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored,many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were allfluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored moths.
"Hein! Diamonds are found in the rag-picker's sweepings," growled aGeneral of Division, who was the most terrible martinet in the whole ofthe French service, but who loved "my children of hell," as he was wontto term his men, with a great love, and who would never hear anotherdisparage them, however he might order them blows of the stick, or exilethem to Beylick himself.
"You are poetic, mon General," said Claude de Chanrellon; "but youare true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned intoDare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, andone at which France has no equal."
"But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that thedevil made them if the drill have molded them!" urged a Colonel ofTirailleurs Indigenes.
Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar.
"Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in thisworld without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets,proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge oflife, but devilry is its champagne!"
"Ventre bleu!" growled the General. "We have a right to praise theblackguards; without them our conscripts would be very poor trash. Theconscript fights because he has to fight; the blackguard fights becausehe loves to fight. A great difference that."
The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale effeminate,dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger than a hot-houseflower, yet who, as many an African chronicle could tell, was swift asfire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard's leap, untiring as an Indianon trail, once in the field with his Indigenes.
"In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, monGeneral," he murmured; "what the catalogue of your crimes must be!"
The tough old campaigner laughed grimly; he took it as a highcompliment.
"Sapristi! The cardinal virtues don't send anybody, I guess, intoAfrican service. And yet, pardieu, I don't know. What fellows I haveknown! I have had men among my Zephyrs--and they were the wildestinsubordinates too--that would have ruled the world! I have had morewit, more address, more genius, more devotion, in some headlong scampof a loustic than all the courts and cabinets would furnish. Such lives,such lives, too, morbleu!"
And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelousvicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, theBeaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page offairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, whichhe had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr;buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild,lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their daysin the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscureskirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cordof the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in theGazettes du Jour.
"Faith!" laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General's observation,"if we all published our memoirs, the world would have a droll book.Dumas and Terrail would be beat out of the field. The real recruitingsergeants that send us to the ranks would be soon found to be--"
"Women!" growled the General.
"Cards," sighed the Colonel.
"Absinthe," muttered another.
"A comedy that was hissed."
"The spleen."
"The dice."
"The roulette."
"The natural desire of humanity to kill or to get killed!"
"Morbleu!" cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, "all those mischiefsbeat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure enough; but theGeneral named the worst. Look at that little Cora; the Minister of Warshould give her the Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eatersthan the Conscription does. Five fine fellows--of the vieille rochetoo--joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, andthey have nothing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora."
"And there is not much to look at in her either," objected a captain,who commanded Turcos. "I saw her when our detachment went to show inParis. A baby face, innocent as a cherub--a soft voice--a shape thatlooks as slight and as breakable as the stem of my glass--there is theend!"
The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; he had been agreat lion of the fashionable world before he came out to his Indigenes.
"The end of Cora! The end of her is--My good Alcide--that 'baby face'has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet,so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sadtoo, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, andpaf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands,and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!"
"Why do you let her do it?" growled the vieille moustache, who hadserved under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of theways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda.
"Ah, bah!" said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; "it is thething to be ruined by Cora."
Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with thesigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for manyseasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it."It was Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up--thatwoman--in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she strippedme as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was uncut emeralds just then. Welluncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d'Acierwas a wonderful woman!--and the chief wonder of her was, that she was asugly as sin."
"Ugly!"
"Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming thanVenus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creaturesfor her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month."
"Like Loto," chimed in the Tirailleur. "Loto has not a shred of beauty.She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice anda villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieveddistinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order ofnobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day.She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret."
"Audacity, my friend! Always that!" said Chanrellon, with a twist of hissuperb mustaches. "It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win.Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, youfell, too, among the Lotos and the Coeurs d'Acier once, I will warrant."
The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, as hesaluted.
"Coeurs d'Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, monsieur, Ifancy!"
"Bah! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you out here?"
"No, monsieur--only chance."
"A fig for your chance! Women are the mischief that casts us adrift tochance."
"Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes."
"Dieu de Dieu! I doubt that. We should go straight enough if it were notfor them."
The Chasseur smiled again.
"M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, for the key toevery black story, we ask, 'Who was she?'"
"Of course I do. Well! who was she? We are all quoting our temptersto-night. Give us your story, mon brave!"
"Monsieur, you have it in the folios, as well as my sword could writeit."
"Good, good!" muttered the listening General. The soldier-like answerpleased him, and he looked attentively at the giver of it.
Chanrellon's brown eyes flashed a bright response.
"And your sword writes in a brave man's fashion--writes what Franceloves to read. But before you wo
re your sword here? Tell us of that. Itwas a romance--wasn't it?"
"If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur."
"Open it then! Come--what brought you out among us? Out with it!"
"Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier's duty; but I never heard thatinquisitive annoyance was an officer's privilege."
These words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little haughty.The manner of old habit, the instinct of buried pride spoke in them,and disregarded the barrier between a private of Chasseurs who was but asous-officier, and a Colonel Commandant who was also a noble of France.
Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little table, outside thecafe, turned and looked at him. The boldness of speech and the quietudeof tone drew all their eyes in curiosity upon him.
Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an instant's passiongleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his three chairs down with acrash, as he shook his mighty frame like an Alpine dog, and bowed with aFrench grace, with a campaigner's frankness.
"A right rebuke!--fairly given, and well deserved. I thank you for thelesson."
The Chasseur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was more touchedthan he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, consideration and courtesyhad been things long unshown to him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank,he stretched his hand out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier,of gentleman to gentleman. Then, as the bitter remembrance of thedifference in rank and station between them flashed on his memory, hewas raising it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate tohis superior, when Chanrellon's grasp closed on it readily. The victimof Coeur d'Acier was of as gallant a temper as ever blent the recklesscondottiere with the thoroughbred noble.
The Chasseur colored slightly, as he remembered that he had forgottenalike his own position and their relative stations.
"I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte," he said simply, as he gave thesalute with ceremonious grace, and passed onward rapidly, as though hewished to forget and to have forgotten the momentary self-oblivion ofwhich he had been guilty.
"Dieu!" muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and struck hishand on the marble-topped table till the glasses shook. "I would give ayear's pay to know that fine fellow's history. He is a gentleman--everyinch of him."
"And a good soldier, which is better," growled the General of Brigade,who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow over the heavy tillageof Alsace.
"A private of Chateauroy's?" asked the Tirailleur, lifting his eye-glassto watch the Chasseur as he went.
"Pardieu--yes--more's the pity," said Chanrellon, who spoke his thoughtsas hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. "The Black Hawk hateshim--God knows why--and he is kept down in consequence, as if he werethe idlest lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look atwhat he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finerRoumi in Africa--not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, therehas not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that he has not hadhis share in. There has not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila thathe had not gone out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouinsteel. He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with aspear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddlejust as he gave them up to the commandant's own hands. He saved the day,two years ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, assure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurstogether, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with theirshame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of thefight, and pierced the Arabs' center, and gave us breathing room,till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd ofjackals. There are a hundred more like stories of him--every one of themtrue as my saber--and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!"
"Superb!" said the General, with a grim significance. "Twelve years! Infive under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade;but then"--and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretfulmelancholy--"but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read themwrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders."
"The Black Hawk can read, too," said Chanrellon meditatively; but it wasthe "petit nom," that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which hewas best known through the army. "No eyes are keener than his to tracea lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak andtalons--pong!--till the thing drops dead--even where he strikes a birdof his own brood."
"That is bad," said the old General sententiously. "There are fourpeople who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are aninnkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship's skipper, and a military chief."
With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert.
Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cosmopolitan groups ofthe great square. A little farther onward, laughing, smoking, chatting,eating ices outside a Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen--ayachting party, whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment;and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiarwords. As he bent his head, no one saw the shadow of pain that passedover his face.
But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. "The deuce,"he murmured to the man nearest him, "who the dickens is it that Frenchsoldier's like?"
The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, moved awayquickly. He was uneasy in the city--uneasy lest he should be recognizedby any passer-by or tourist.
"I need not fear that, though," he thought with a smile. "Tenyears!--why, in that world, we used to forget the blackest ruin in tendays, and the best life among us ten hours after its grave was closed.Besides, I am safe enough. I am dead!"
And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the cigar underthe chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black eyes of veiled womenflashed lovingly on his tall, lithe form, with the scarlet undress fezset on his forehead, fair as a woman's still, despite the tawny glow ofthe African sun that had been on it for so long.
He was "dead"; therein had lain all his security; thereby had "Beauty ofthe Brigades" been buried beyond all discovery in "Bel-a-faire-peur"of the 2nd Chasseurs d'Afrique. When, on the Marseilles rails, themaceration and slaughter of as terrible an accident as ever befell atrain rushing through the midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had lefthimself and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by littleless than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen fromdiscovery or pursuit.
Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the debris, he had struckacross the country with Rake for the few leagues that still lay betweenthem and the city, and had entered Marseilles as weary foot travelers,before half the ruin on the rails had been seen by the full noon sun.
As it chanced a trading yawl was loading in the port, to run across toAlgiers that very day. The skipper was short of men, and afraid of theLascars, who were the only sailors that he seemed likely to find to fillup the vacant places in his small crew.
Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the passage. He had only avery few gold pieces on his person, and he was willing to work his wayacross, if he could.
"But you're a gentleman," said the skipper, doubtfully eyeing him, andhis velvet dress, and his black sombrero with its eagle's plume. "I wanta rare, rough, able seaman, for there'll like to be foul weather. Shelooks too fair to last," he concluded, with a glance upward at the sky.
He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own rakish-lookinglittle black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont to say, was not averseto a bit of slaving, if she found herself in far seas, with a likely runbefore her.
"You're a swell, that's what you are," emphasized the skipper. "Youbean't no sort of use to me."
"Wait a second," answered Cecil. "Did you ever chance to hear of aschooner called 'Regina'?"
The skipper's face lighted in a moment.
"Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years? Her as drove throughthe storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swallow, when everything wassplitting and foundering, and shipping seas around her? Her
as was thefirst to bear down to the great 'Wrestler,' a-lying there hull over inwater, and took aboard all as ever she could hold o' the passengers;a-pitching out her own beautiful cabin fittings to have as much room forthe poor wretches as ever she could? Be you a-meaning her?"
Cecil nodded assent.
"She was my yacht, that's all; and I was without a captain through thatstorm. Will you think me a good enough sailor now?"
The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.
"Good enough! Blast my timbers! There aren't one will beat you in anywaters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke ofwork shall you do atween my decks. I never did think as how one of youryachting-nobs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me,if the Club make such sailors as you it's a rare 'un! Lord a mercy! Why,my wife was in the 'Wrestler.' I've heard her tell scores of times ashow she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swalingsea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how theswell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had hisswivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he mightbe able to carry more passengers, and fed 'em, and gave 'em champagneall around, and treated 'em like a prince, till he ran 'em straight intoBrest Harbor. But, damn me! that ever a swell like you should--"
"Let's weigh anchor," said Bertie quietly.
And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidingswent that the mutilated form, crushed between iron and wood, on theMarseilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful,ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rushing trains had met,as meet the thunder-clouds. The world thought him dead; as such thejournals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, tomake the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be utteredat Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, lovingforce, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt:--and he, leavingthem in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of hisChristian names, which happily had a foreign sound--Louis Victor--andlaid aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil.
He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in anyof the larger towns since he had joined. His only danger of recognition,had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well inParis and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the Africantroops.
Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards'distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glancedinvoluntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Sallesde Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note achain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin therewere against "les ordonnances" in all the glittering squadrons; andswept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands--a unit in themighty aggregate of the "raw material" of war.
The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, "Why don't they allride like that man? He has the seat of the English Guards." But that itwas in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own,who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leadernever dreamed.
From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, andextravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, poverty,discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every sense wasgratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured. He hadled the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses,oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been usedto every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarseblack bread of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too muchtrouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies' ears; he came wheremorning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelledhis incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He hadknown nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement,refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger,brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, andpandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.
A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man'sendurance. No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, morestaunchly than did the "dandy of the Household."
The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him.Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant's jibe,and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace. Misery, when hungerand thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at thehalf-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood,which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the drearydawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of pettytyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoyduty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and theweary night fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blasphemyand befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even thepeace and oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchednessoftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who hadfollowed him into his exile. But, however wretched, they never wrunga single regret or lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life;he took it as it was. As, having lost the title to command, the highbreeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience whichwas the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, fromfirst to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the alteredfortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inuredsoldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparentcontent and more absolute fortitude than did the man who had used tothink it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to WormwoodScrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load his own gun any shootingseason, or to draw off his own coat any evening. He suffered acutelymany times; suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he neversought to escape the slightest penalty or hardship, and not even Rakeever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity.
Moreover, the war-fire woke in him.
In one shape or another active service was almost always his lot, andhot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to military life inAlgeria. The latent instinct in him--the instinct that had flashed outduring his lazy, fashionable calm in all moments of danger, in all daysof keen sport; the instinct that had made him fling himself into theduello with the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, "Killme if you like, but don't fail me!"--was the instinct of the bornsoldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush of thecharge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near presence ofdeath, and in the chase of a foe through a hot African night when bothwere armed to the teeth, and one or both must fall when the grapplecame--in all these that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made himcontent; made him think that the life which brought them was worth theliving.
There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which had sleptunder the serene, effeminate insouciance of his careless temper andhis pampered habits. It had full rein now, and made him, as the armyaffirmed, one of the most intrepid, victorious, and chivalrous lascarsof its fiery ranks. Fate had flung him off his couch of down into thetempest of war; into the sternness of life spent ever on the borderof the grave; ruled over by an iron code, requiring at everystep self-negation, fortitude, submission, courage, patience; theself-control which should take the uttermost provocation from those incommand without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous recklessnesswhich should meet death and deal death; which should be as the eagle toswoop, as the lion to rend. And he was not found wanting in it.
He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority that fortuneno longer conferred on him; to seek to obtain a deference that he hadno longer the position to demand. He was too quiet, too courteous, toocalmly listless; he had too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too manygentleman habits, for them. But when they found that he could fight likea Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot-wounds or desert-thirstas though he were of bronze, it grew a delight
to them to see of whatgranite and steel this dainty patrician was made; and they loved himwith a rough, ardent, dog-like love, when they found that his lastcrust, in a long march, would always be divided: that the most desperateservice of danger was always volunteered for by him; that no severity ofpersonal chastisement ever made him clear himself of a false charge at acomrade's expense; and that all his pay went in giving a veteran a stoupof wine, or a sick conscript a tempting meal, or a prisoner of Beylicksome food through the grating, scaled too at risk of life and limb.
He had never before been called on to exert either thought or action;the necessity for both called many latent qualities in him into play.The same nature, which had made him wish to be killed over the GrandMilitary course, rather than live to lose the race, made him now bearprivation as calmly, and risk death as recklessly, as the heartiest andmost fiery loustic of the African regiments.
On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life more utterlythrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a gentleman, a man ofgood blood, high rank, and talented gifts--had he ever chosen to makeanything of them--buried in the ranks of the Franco-African army;risking a nameless grave in the sand with almost every hour, associatedwith the roughest riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by theslash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years' splendid service bythe distinctive badge of a corporal.
Yet it might be doubted if any life would have done for him what thishad done; it might be questioned if, judging a career not by its socialposition, but by its effect on character, any other would have beenso well for him, or would equally have given steel and strength to theindolence and languor of his nature as this did. In his old world hewould have lounged listlessly through fashionable seasons, and in anatmosphere that encouraged his profound negligence of everything;and his natural listlessness would have glided from refinement toeffeminacy, and from lazy grace to blase inertia.
The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the French army hadroused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as everranged under any flag. He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved,hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and avividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, passionless,insouciant world of other days. It developed him into a magnificentsoldier--too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service hehad adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever livedunder any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defendednow.
The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gatesof Royallieu--"Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume"--verified itself inhis case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a stroke of every hope andprospect--he had taken his adversity boldly by the beard, and hadmade himself at once a country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce,reckless, loyal hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, andwest--driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate--to fill upthe battalions of North Africa.
As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned up intothe Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of a narrow, dark,tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like a stall of a Cairo bazaar; halflike a Jew's den in a Florentine alley.
A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom.
"Ah, ha! Good-even, Corporal Victor!"
Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered.
"Have you sold any?" he asked. There was a slight constraint andhesitation in the words, as of one who can never fairly bend his spiritto the yoke of barter.
The little, hideous, wrinkled, dwarf-like creature, a trader incuriosities, grinned with a certain gratification in disappointing thislithe-limbed, handsome Chasseur.
"Not one. The toys don't take. Daggers now, or anything made out ofspent balls, or flissas one can tell an Arab story about, go off likewild-fire; but your ivory bagatelles are no sort of use, M. le Caporal."
"Very well--no matter," said Cecil simply, as he paused a moment beforesome delicate little statuettes and carvings--miniature things, carvedout of a piece of ivory, or a block of marble the size of a horse'shoof, such as could be picked up in dry river channels or broken offstray boulders; slender crucifixes, wreathes of foliage, branches ofwild fig, figures of Arabs and Moors, dainty heads of dancing-girls, andtiny chargers fretting like Bucephalus. They were perfectly conceivedand executed. He had always had a gift that way, though, in common withall his gifts, he had utterly neglected all culture of it, until, castadrift on the world, and forced to do something to maintain himself, hehad watched the skill of the French soldiers at all such expedients togain a few coins, and had solaced many a dreary hour in barracks andunder canvas with the toy-sculpture, till he had attained a singularart at it. He had commonly given Rake the office of selling them, and ascommonly spent all the proceeds on all other needs save his own.
He lingered a moment, with regret in his eyes; he had scarcely a sou inhis pocket, and he had wanted some money sorely that night for a comradedying of a lung-wound--a noble fellow, a French artist, who, in an evilhour of desperation, had joined the army, with a poet's temper that madeits hard, colorless routine unendurable, and had been shot in the chestin a night-skirmish.
"You will not buy them yourself?" he asked at length, the color flushingin his face; he would not have pressed the question to save his own lifefrom starving, but Leon Ramon would have no chance of fruit or a lump ofice to cool his parched lips and still his agonized retching, unless hehimself could get money to buy those luxuries that are too splendid andtoo merciful to be provided for a dying soldier, who knows so little ofhis duty to his country as to venture to die in his bed.
"Myself!" screeched the dealer, with a derisive laugh. "Ask me to giveyou my whole stock next! These trumperies will lie on hand for a year."
Cecil went out of the place without a word; his thoughts were with LeonRamon, and the insolence scarce touched him. "How shall I get him theice?" he wondered. "God! if I had only one of the lumps that used tofloat in our claret cup!"
As he left the den, a military fairy, all gay with blue and crimson,like the fuchsia bell she most resembled, with a meerschaum in herscarlet lips and a world of wrath in her bright black eyes, dashed pasthim into the darkness within, and before the dealer knew or dreamed ofher, tossed up the old man's little shriveled frame like a shuttlecock,shook him till he shook like custards, flung him upward and caught himas if he were the hoop in a game of La Grace, and set him down bruised,breathless, and terrified out of his wits.
"Ah!" cried Cigarette, with a volley of slang utterly untranslatable,"that is how you treat your betters, is it? Miser, monster, crocodile,serpent! He wanted the money and you refused it? Ah! son of Satan! Youlive on other men's miseries! Run after him, quick, and give him this,and this, and this, and this; and say you were only in jest, and thatthe things were worth a Sheik's ransom. Stay! You must not give him toomuch, or he will know it is not you--viper! Run quick, and breath a wordabout me, if you dare; one whisper only, and my Spahis shall cut yourthroat from ear to ear. Off! Or you shall have a bullet to quicken yoursteps; misers dance well when pistols play the minuet!"
With which exordium the little Amie du Drapeau shook her culprit atevery epithet, emptied out a shower of gold and silver just won at play,from the bosom of her uniform, forced it into the dealer's hands, hurledhim out of his own door, and drew her pretty weapon with a clash fromher sash.
"Run for your life!--and do just what I bid you; or a shot shall crashyour skull in as sure as my name is Cigarette!"
The little old Jew flew as fast as his limbs would carry him, clutchingthe coins in his horny hands. He was terrified to a mortal anguish, andhad not a thought of resisting or disobeying her; he knew the fameof Cigarette--as who did not? Knew that she would fire at a man ascarelessly as at a cat,--more carelessly, in truth,--for she favoredcats; saving many from going to the Zouaves' soup-caldrons, and favoredcivilians not at all; and knew that at her rallying cry all the sabersabout the town would be drawn without a s
econd's deliberation, andsheathed in anything or anybody that had offended her, for Cigarettewas, in her fashion, Generalissima of all the Regiments of Africa.
The dealer ran with all the speed of terror, and overtook Cecil, who wasgoing slowly onward to the barracks.
"Are you serious?" he asked in surprise at the large amount, as thelittle Jew panted out apologies, entreaties, and protestations of hisonly having been in jest, and of his fervently desiring to buy thecarvings at his own price, as he knew of a great collector in Paris towhom he needed to send them.
"Serious! Indeed am I serious, M. le Caporal," pleaded thecuriosity-trader, turning his head in agonized fear to see if thevivandiere's pistol was behind him. "The things will be worth a greatdeal to me where I shall send them, and though they are but bagatelles,what is Paris itself but one bagatelle? Pouf! They are all childrenthere--they will love the toys. Take the money, I pray you; take themoney!"
Cecil looked at him a moment; he saw the man was in earnest, and thoughtbut little of his repentance and trepidation, for the citizens were allafraid of slighting or annoying a soldier.
"So be it. Thank you," he said, as he stretched out his hand and tookthe coins, not without a keen pang of the old pride that would notbe wholly stilled, yet gladly for sake of the Chasseur dying yonder,growing delirious and retching the blood off his lungs in want of onetouch of the ice, that was spoiled by the ton weight, to keep cool thewines and the fish of M. le Marquis de Chateauroy. And he went onwardto spend the gold his sculpture had brought on some yellow figs andsome cool golden grapes, and some ice-chilled wines that should soothe alittle of the pangs of dissolution to his comrade.
"You did it? That is well. Now, see here--one word of me, now orever after, and there is a little present that will come to you fromCigarette," said the little Friend of the Flag with a sententioussternness. The unhappy Jew shuddered and shut his eyes as she held abullet close to his sight, then dropped it with an ominous thud in herpistol barrel.
"Not a syllable, never a syllable," he stammered; "and if I had knownyou were in love with him--"
A box on the ears sent him across his own counter.
"In love? Parbleu! I detest the fellow!" said Cigarette, with fieryscorn and as hot an oath.
"Truly? Then why give your Napoleons----" began the bruised andstammering Israelite.
Cigarette tossed back her pretty head that was curly and spirited andshapely as any thoroughbred spaniel's; a superb glance flashed from hereyes, a superb disdain sat on her lips.
"You are a Jew trader; you know nothing of our code under the tricolor.We are too proud not to aid even an enemy when he is in the right, andFrance always arms for justice!"
With which magnificent peroration she swept all the carvings--they wererightfully hers--off the table.
"They will light my cooking fire!" she said contemptuously, as shevaulted lightly over the counter into the street, and pirouetted alongthe slope of the crowded Babazoum. All made way for her, even the mightySpahis and the trudging Bedouin mules, for all knew that if they didnot she would make it for herself, over their heads or above theirprostrated bodies. Finally she whirled herself into a dark, desertedMoresco archway, a little out of the town, and dropped on a stone block,as a swallow, tired of flight, drops on to a bough.
"Is that the way I revenge myself? Ah, bah! I deserve to be killed! Whenhe called me unsexed--unsexed--unsexed!"--and with each repetition ofthe infamous word, so bitter because vaguely admitted to be true, withher cheeks scarlet and her eyes aflame, and her hands clinched, sheflung one of the ivory wreathes on to the pavement and stamped on itwith her spurred heel until the carvings were ground into powderedfragments--stamped, as though it were a living foe, and her steel-boundfoot were treading out all its life with burning hate and pitilessvenom.
In the act her passion exhausted itself, as the evil of such warm,impetuous, tender natures will; she was very still, and looked at theruin she had done with regret and a touch of contrition.
"It was very pretty--and cost him weeks of labor, perhaps," she thought.
Then she took all the rest up, one by one, and gazed at them. Thingsof beauty had had but little place in her lawless young life; what shethought beautiful was a regiment sweeping out in full sunlight, with itseagles, and its colors, and its kettle-drums; what she held as musicwas the beat of the reveille and the mighty roll of the great artillery;what made her pulse throb and her heart leap was to see two fineopposing forces draw near for the onslaught and thunder of battle. Ofthings of grace she had no heed, though she had so much grace herself;and her life, though full of color, pleasure, and mischief, was as rougha one in most respects as any of her comrades'. These delicate artisticcarvings were a revelation to her.
She touched them reverently one by one; all the carvings had theirbeauty for her, but those of the flowers had far the most. She had nevernoted any flowers in her life before, save those she strung together forthe Zephyrs. Her youth was a military ballad, rhymed vivaciously to therhythm of the Pas de Charge; but other or softer poetry had never byany chance touched her until now--now that in her tiny, bronzed,war-hardened palms lay the while foliage, the delicate art-trifles ofthis Chasseur, who bartered his talent to get a touch of ice for theburning lips of his doomed comrade.
"He is an aristocrat--he has such gifts as this--and yet he must sellall this beauty to get a slice of melon for Leon Ramon!" she thought,while the silvery moon strayed in through a broken arch, and fell on anivory coil of twisted leaves and river grasses.
And, lost in a musing pity, Cigarette forgot her vow of vengeance.