CHAPTER XX.
CIGARETTE EN CONSEIL ET CACHETTE.
"Corporal Victor, M. le Commandant desires you to present yourself athis campagne to-night, at ten precisely, with all your carvings; aboveall, with your chessmen."
The swift, sharp voice of a young officer of his regiment wakened Cecilfrom his musing, as he went on his way down the crowded, tortuous,stifling street. He had scarcely time to catch the sense of the words,and to halt, giving the salute, before the Chasseur's skittish littleBarbary mare had galloped past him; scattering the people rightand left, knocking over a sweetmeat seller, upsetting a string ofmaize-laden mules, jostling a venerable marabout on to an impudentlittle grisette, and laming an old Moor as he tottered to his mosque,without any apology for any of the mischief, in the customary insolencewhich makes "Roumis" and "Bureaucratic" alike execrated by theindigenous populace with a detestation that the questionable benefitsof civilized importations can do very little to counter-balance in thefiery breasts of the sons of the soil.
Cecil involuntarily stood still. His face darkened. All orders thattouched on the service, even where harshest and most unwelcome, he hadtaught himself to take without any hesitation, till he now scarcely feltthe check of the steel curb; but to be ordered thus like a lackey--totake his wares thus like a hawker!
"We are soldiers, not traders--aren't we? You don't like that, M.Victor? You are no peddler. And you think you would rather risk beingcourt-martialed and shot than take your ivory toys for the Black Hawk'stalons?"
Cecil looked up in astonishment at the divination and translation of histhoughts, to encounter the bright, falcon eyes of Cigarette lookingdown on him from a little oval casement above, dark as pitch within,and whose embrasure, with its rim of gray stone coping, set off like apicture-frame, with a heavy background of unglazed Rembrandt shadow,the piquant head of the Friend of the Flag, with her pouting, scarlet,mocking lips, and her mischievous, challenging smile, and her daintylittle gold-banded foraging-cap set on curls as silken and jetty as anyblack Irish setter's.
"Bon jour, ma belle!" he answered, with a little weariness; lifting hisfez to her with a certain sense of annoyance that this young bohemian ofthe barracks, this child with her slang and her satire, should always bein his way like a shadow.
"Bon jour, mon brave!" returned Cigarette contemptuously. "We are notso ceremonious as all that in Algiers! Good fellow, you should be achamberlain, not a corporal. What fine manners, mon Dieu!"
She was incensed, piqued, and provoked. She had been ready to forgivehim because he carved so wonderfully, and sold the carvings for hiscomrade at the hospital; she was holding out the olive-branch after herown petulant fashion; and she thought, if he had had any grace in him,he would have responded with some such florid compliment as those forwhich she was accustomed to box the ears of her admirers, and wouldhave swung himself up to the coping, to touch, or at least try to touch,those sweet, fresh, crimson lips of hers, that were like a half-openeddamask rose. Modesty is apt to go to the wall in camps, and poor littleCigarette's notions of the great passion were very simple, rudimentary,and in no way coy. How should they be? She had tossed about with thearmy, like one of the tassels to their standards; blowing whichever waythe breath of war floated her; and had experienced, or thought she hadexperienced, as many affairs as the veriest Don Juan among them, thoughher heart had never been much concerned in them, but had beaten scarcea shade quicker, if a lunge in a duel, or a shot from an Indigene, hadpounced off with her hero of the hour to Hades.
"Fine manners!" echoed Cecil, with a smile. "My poor child, have youbeen so buffeted about that you have never been treated with commonestcourtesy?"
"Whew!" cried the little lady, blowing a puff of smoke down on him."None of your pity for me! Buffeted about? Do you suppose anybody everdid anything with me that I didn't choose? If you had as much power asI have in the army, Chateauroy would not send for you to sell your toyslike a peddler. You are a slave! I am a sovereign!"
With which she tossed back her graceful, spirited head, as though thegold band of her cap were the gold band of a diadem. She was very proudof her station in the Army of Africa, and glorified her privileges withall a child's vanity.
He listened, amused with her boastful supremacy; but the last wordstouched him with a certain pang just in that moment. He felt like aslave--a slave who must obey his tyrant, or go out and die like a dog.
"Well, yes," he said slowly; "I am a slave, I fear. I wish a Bedouinflissa would cut my thralls in two."
He spoke jestingly, but there was a tinge of sadness in the words thattouched Cigarette's changeful temper to contrition, and filled her withthe same compassion and wonder at him that she had felt when the ivorywreaths and crucifixes had lain in her hands. She knew she had beenungenerous--a crime dark as night in the sight of the little chivalroussoldier.
"Ah," she said softly and waywardly, winding her way aright with thatpenetration and tact which, however unsexed in other things, Cigarettehad kept thoroughly feminine. "That was but an idle word of mine;forgive it, and forget it. You are not a slave when you fight in thefantasias. Morbleu! They say to see you kill a man is beautiful--soworkmanlike! And you would go out and be shot to-morrow, rather thansell your honor, or stain it. Bah! while you know they should cut yourheart out rather than make you tell a lie, or betray a comrade, you areno slave; you have the best freedom of all. Take a glass of champagne?How you look! Oh, the demoiselles, with the silver necks, are notbarrack drink, of course; but I drink champagne always myself. This isM. le Prince's. He knows I only take the best brands."
With which Cigarette, leaning down from her casement, whose sill wasabout a foot above his head, tendered her peace-offering in a bottle;three of which, packed in her knapsack, she had carried off from theluncheon-table of a Russian Prince who was touring through Algiers, andwho had half lost his Grand Ducal head after the bewitching, dauntless,capricious, unattachable, unpurchasable, and coquettish littlefire-eater of the Spahis, who treated him with infinitely more insolenceand indifference than she would show to some battered old veteran, orsome worn-out old dog, who had passed through the great Kabaila raidsand battles.
"You will go to your Colonel's to-night?" she said questioningly, as hedrank the champagne, and thanked her--for he saw the spirit in which thegift was tendered--as he leaned against the half-ruined Moorish wall,with its blue-and-white striped awning spread over both their heads inthe little street whose crowds, chatter, thousand eyes, and incessanttraffic no way troubled Cigarette; who had talked argot to monarchsundaunted, and who had been one of the chief sights in a hundred grandreviews ever since she had been perched on a gun-carriage at five yearsold, and paraded with a troop of horse artillery in the Champ de Mars,as having gone through the whole of Bugeaud's campaign, at which parade,by the way, being tendered sweetmeats by a famous General's wife,Cigarette had made the immortal reply: "Madame, my sweetmeats arebullets!"
She repeated her question imperiously, as Cecil kept silent. "You willgo to-night?"
He shrugged his shoulders. He did not care to discuss his Colonel'sorders with this pretty little Bacchante.
"Oh, a chief's command, you know--"
"Ah, a fig for a chief!" retorted Cigarette impatiently. "Why don't yousay the truth? You are thinking you will disobey, and risk the rest!"
"Well, why not? I grant his right in barrack and field, but----"
He spoke rather to himself than her, and his thoughts, as he spoke, wentback to the scene of the morning. He felt, with a romantic impulse thathe smiled at, even as it passed over him, that he would rather have halfa dozen muskets fired at him in the death-sentence of a mutineer thanmeet again the glance of those proud, azure eyes, sweeping over him intheir calm indifference to a private of Chasseurs, their calm ignorancethat he could be wounded or be stung.
"But?" echoed Cigarette, leaning out of her oval hole, perched in thequaint, gray Moresco wall, parti-colored with broken encaustics ofvaried hues. "Chut, bon comrade! That little w
ord has been the undoingof the world ever since the world began. 'But' is a blank cartridge, andnever did anything but miss fire yet. Shoot dead, or don't aim at all,whichever you like; but never make a false stroke with 'but'! So youwon't obey Chateauroy in this?"
He was silent again. He would not answer falsely, and he did not care tosay his thoughts to her.
"'No,'" pursued Cigarette, translating his silence at her fancy, "yousay to yourself, 'I am an aristocrat--I will not be ordered in thisthing'--you say, 'I am a good soldier; I will not be sent for like ahawker'--you say, 'I was noble once: I will show my blood at last, if Idie!' Ah!--you say that!"
He laughed a little as he looked up at her.
"Not exactly that, but something as foolish, perhaps. Are you a witch,my pretty one?"
"Whoever doubted it, except you?"
She looked one, in truth, whom few men could resist, bending to himout of her owls' nest, with the flash of the sun under the blue awningbrightly catching the sunny brown of her soft cheek and the cherry bloomof her lips, arched, pouting, and coquette. She set her teeth sharply,and muttered a hot, heavy sacre, or even something worse, as she sawthat his eyes had not even remained on her, but were thoughtfullylooking down the checkered light and color of the street. She waspassionate, she was vain, she was wayward, she was fierce as a littlevelvet leopard, as a handsome, brilliant plumaged hawk; she had all thefaults, as she had all the virtues, of the thorough Celtic race; and,for the moment, she had in instinct--fiery, ruthless, and full ofhate--to draw the pistol out of her belt, and teach him with a shot,crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "unsexed" could keepenough of the woman in them not to be neglected with impunity, andcould lose enough of it to be able to avenge the negligence by a summaryvendetta. But she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion. Shewould not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that mightbe traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud-lips in asfirm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar's or Napoleon's moldedthemselves into, and spoke in the curt, imperious, generalissimo fashionwith which Cigarette before now had rallied a demoralized troop, reelingdrunk and mad away from a razzia.
"I am a witch! That is, I can put two and two together, and read men,though I don't read the alphabet. Well, one reading is a good deal rarerthan the other. So you mean to disobey the Hawk to-night? I like you forthat. But listen here--did you ever hear them talk of Marquise?"
"No!"
"Parbleu!" swore the vivandiere in her wrath, "you look on at a bamboulaas if it were only a bear-cub dancing, and can only give one 'yes'and 'no,' as if one were a drummer-boy. Bah! are those your Pariscourtesies?"
"Forgive me, ma belle! I thought you called yourself our comrade, andwould have no 'fine manners.' There is no knowing how to please you."
He might have pleased her simply and easily enough, if he had onlylooked up with a shade of interest to that most picturesque picture,bright as a pastel portrait, that was hung above him in the oldtumble-down Moorish stonework. But his thoughts were with other things;and a love scene with this fantastic little Amazon did not attract him.The warm, ripe, mellow little wayside cherry hung directly in his path,with the sun on its bloom, and the free wind tossing it merrily; butit had no charm for him. He was musing rather on that costly, delicate,brilliant-hued, hothouse blossom that could only be reached down by somerich man's hand, and grew afar on heights where never winter chills, norsummer tan, could come too rudely on it.
"Come, tell me what is Marquise?--a kitten?" he went on, leaning his armstill on the sill of her embrasure, and willing to coax her out of heranger.
"A kitten!" echoed Cigarette contemptuously. "You think me a child, Isuppose?"
"Surely you are not far off it?"
"Mon Dieu! why, I was never a child in my life," retorted Cigarette,waxing sunny-tempered and confidential again, while she perched herself,like some gay-feathered mockingbird on a branch, on the window-sillitself. "When I was two, I used to be beaten; when I was three, I usedto scrape up the cigar ends the officers dropped about, to sell themagain for a bit of black bread; when I was four, I knew all aboutPhilippe Durron's escape from Beylick, and bit my tongue through, to saynothing, when my mother flogged me with a mule-whip, because I wouldnot tell, that she might tell again at the Bureau and get the reward. Achild! Before I was two feet high I had winged my first Arab. He stolea rabbit I was roasting. Presto! how quick he dropped it when my ballbroke his wrist like a twig!"
And the Friend of the Flag laughed gayly at the recollection, as at thebest piece of mirth with which memory could furnish her.
"But you asked about Marquise? Well, he was what you are--a hawk amongcarrion crows, a gentleman in the ranks. Dieu! how handsome he was!Nobody ever knew his real name, but they thought he was of Austrianbreed, and we called him Marquise because he was so womanish whitein his skin and dainty in all his ways. Just like you! Marquise couldfight, fight like a hundred devils; and--pouf!--how proud he was--verymuch like you altogether! Now, one day something went wrong in theexercise ground. Marquise was not to blame, but they thought he was; andan adjutant struck him--flick, flack, like that--across the face witha riding switch. Marquise had his bayonet fixed and before we knew whatwas up, crash the blade went through--through the breast-bone, and outat the spine--and the adjutant fell as dead as a cat, with the bloodspouting out like a fountain. 'I come of a great race, that never tookinsult without giving back death,' was all that Marquise said when theyseized him and brought him to judgment; and he would never say of whatrace that was. They shot him--ah, bah! discipline must be kept--and Isaw him with five great wounds in his chest, and his beautiful goldenhair all soiled with the sand and the powder, lying there by the opengrave, that they threw him into as if he were offal; and we never knewmore of him than that."
Cigarette's radiant laugh had died, and her careless voice had sunk,over the latter words. As the little vivacious brunette told the tale ofa nameless life, it took its eloquence from her, simple and brief asher speech was; and it owned a deeper pathos because the reckless youngBacchante of the As de Pique grew grave one moment while she told it.Then, grave still, she leaned her brown, bright face nearer down fromher oval hole in the wall.
"Now," she whispered very low, "if you mutiny once, they will shoot youjust like Marquise, and you will die just as silent, like him."
"Well," he answered her slowly, "why not? Death is no great terror; Irisk it every day for the sake of a common soldier's rations; why shouldI not chance it for the sake and in the defense of my honor?"
"Bah! men sell their honor for their daily bread all the world over!"said Cigarette, with the satire that had treble raciness from the slangin which she clothed it. "But it is not you alone. See here--one exampleset on your part, and half your regiment will mutiny too. It is bitterwork to obey the Black Hawk, and if you give the signal of revolt, threeparts of your comrades will join you. Now what will that end in, beaulion?"
"Tell me--you are a soldier yourself, you say."
"Yes, I am a soldier!" said Cigarette between her tight-set teeth, whileher eyes brightened, and her voice sank down into a whisper that hada certain terrible meaning in it, like the first dropping of thescattered, opening shots in the distance before a great battlecommences; "and I have seen war, not holiday war, but war inearnest--war when men fall like hailstones, and tear like tigers, andchoke like mad dogs with their throats full of blood and sand; when thegun-carriage wheels go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horsescharge full gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out thebrains before death has stunned them senseless. Oh, yes! I am a soldier,and I will tell you one thing I have seen. I have seen soldiers mutiny,a squadron of them, because they hated their chief and loved two oftheir sous-officers; and I have seen the end of it all--a few hundredmen, blind and drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, andwalled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from ascore of cannon-mouths--volley on volley, like the thunder--till not oneliving ma
n was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, moaningmass, with the black smoke over all. That is what I have seen; you willnot make me see it again?"
Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and tender withthought; there was a vein of grave, even of intense feeling, that ranthrough the significant words to which tone and accent lent far moremeaning than lay in their mere phrases; the little bohemian lost herinsolence when she pleaded for her "children," her comrades; and themischievous pet of the camp never treated lightly what touched theFrance that she loved--the France that, alone of all things in hercareless life, she held in honor and reverence.
"You will not make me see it again?" she said, once more leaning out,with her eyes, that were like a brown brook sparkling deep, yet brightin the sun, fixed on him. "They would rise at your bidding, and theywould be mowed down like corn. You will not?"
"Never! I give you my word."
The promise was from his heart. He would have endured any indignity,any outrage, rather than have drawn into ruin, through him, the fiery,fearless, untutored lives of the men who marched, and slept, and rode,and fought, and lay in the light of the picket-fires, and swept downthrough the hot sandstorms on to the desert foe by his side. Cigarettestretched out her hand to him--that tiny brown hand, which, small thoughit was, had looked so burned and so hard beside the delicate fairy ivorycarvings of his workmanship--stretched it out with a frank, winning,childlike, soldierlike grace.
"That's right, you are a true soldier!"
He bent over the hand she held to his in the courtesy natural with himto all her sex, and touched it lightly with his lips.
"Thank you, my little comrade," he said simply, with the graver thoughtstill on him that her relation and her entreaty had evoked; "you havegiven me a lesson that I shall not be quick to forget."
Cigarette was the wildest little baccanal that ever pirouetted forthe delight of half a score of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves andhalf-drunk; she was the most reckless coquette that ever madethe roll-call of her lovers range from prince-marshals to plowboyconscripts; she had flirted as far and wide as the butterfly flirts withthe blossoms it flutters on to through the range of a summer day; shetook kisses, if the giver of them were handsome, as readily as achild takes sweetmeats at Mardi Gras; and of feminine honor, femininescruples, feminine delicacy, knew nothing save by such very dim,fragmentary instincts as nature still planted in scant growth amid therank soil and the pestilent atmosphere of camp-life. Her eyes had neversunk, her face had never flushed, her heart had never panted for theboldest or the wildest wooer of them all, from M. de Duc's Lauzunesqueblandishments to Pouffer-de-Rire's or Miou-Miou's rough overtures; shehad the coquetry of her nation with the audacity of a boy. Now only, forthe first time, Cigarette colored hotly at the grave, graceful, distantsalute, so cold and so courteous, which was offered her in lieu of therude and boisterous familiarities to which she was accustomed; and drewher hand away with what was, to the shame of her soldierly hardihood andher barrack tutelage, very nearly akin to an impulse of shyness.
"Dame! Don't humbug me! I am not a court lady!" she cried hastily,almost petulantly, to cover the unwonted and unwelcome weakness; while,to make good the declaration and revindicate her military renown,she balanced herself lightly on the stone ledge of her oval hole, andsprang, with a young wildcat's easy, vaulting leap, over his head,and over the heads of the people beneath, on to the ledge of the houseopposite, a low-built wine-shop, whose upper story nearly touchedthe leaning walls of the old Moorish buildings in which she had beenperched. The crowd in the street below looked up, amazed and aghast, atthat bound from casement to casement as she flew over their heads likea blue-and-scarlet winged bird of Oran; but they laughed as they saw whoit was.
"It is Cigarette! Ah, ha! the devil, for a certainty, must have been herfather!"
"To be sure!" cried the Friend of the Flag, looking from her elevation;"he is a very good father, too, and I don't tease him like his sons thepriests! But I have told him to take you the next time you are strippinga dead body; so look on it--he won't have to wait long."
The discomfited Indigene hustled his way, with many an oath, through thelaughing crowd as best he might; and Cigarette, with an airy pirouetteon the wine-shop's roof that would have done honor to any opera boards,and was executed as carelessly, twenty feet above earth, as if she hadbeen a pantomime-dancer all her days, let herself down by the awning,hand over hand, like a little mouse from the harbor, jumped on toa forage wagon that was just passing full trot down the street, anddisappeared; standing on the piles of hay, and singing.
Cecil looked after her, with a certain touch of pity for her in him.
"What a gallant boy is spoiled in that little Amazon!" he thought; thequick flush of her face, the quick withdrawal of her hand, he had notnoticed; she had not much interest for him,--scarcely any indeed,--savethat he saw she was pretty, with a mignonne, mischievous face, that allthe sun-tan of Africa and all the wild life of the Caserne would notharden or debase. But he was sorry a child so bright and so brave shouldbe turned into three parts a trooper as she was, should have been tossedup on the scum and filth of the lowest barrack life, and shouldbe doomed in a few years' time to become the yellow, battered,foul-mouthed, vulture-eyed camp-follower that premature old age wouldsurely render the darling of the tricolor, the pythoness of the As dePique.
Cigarette was making scorn of her doom of Sex, dancing it down, drinkingit down, laughing it down, burning it out in tobacco fumes, drowning itin trembling cascades of wine, trampling it to dust under the cancan byher little brass-bound boots, mocking it away with her slang jests, andher Theresa songs, and her devil-may-care audacities, till there wasscarce a trace of it left in this prettiest and wildest little scampof all the Army in Africa. But strive to kill it how she would, her sexwould have its revenge one day and play Nemesis to her.
She was bewitching now--bewitching, though she had no witchery forhim--in her youth. But when the bloom should leave her brown cheeks,and the laughter die out of her lightning glance, the womanhood she haddenied would assert itself, and avenge itself, and be hideous in thesight of the men who now loved the tinkling of those little spurredfeet, and shouted with applause to hear the reckless barrack blasphemiesring their mirth from the fresh mouth which was now like a bud froma damask rose branch, though even now it steeped itself in wine, andsullied itself with oaths and seared itself with smoke, and had neverbeen touched from its infancy with any kiss that was innocent--not evenwith its mother's.
And there was a deep tinge of pity for her in Cecil's thoughts as hewatched her out of sight, and then strolled across to the cafe oppositeto finish his cigar beneath its orange-striped awning. The child hadbeen flung upward, a little straw floating in the gutter of Parisiniquities. It was little marvel that the bright, bold, insolent littleFriend of the Flag had nothing of her sex left save a kitten's mischiefand a coquette's archness. It said much rather for the straight, fair,sunlit instincts of the untaught nature that Cigarette had gleaned,even out of such a life, two virtues that she would have held by to thedeath, if tried: a truthfulness that would have scorned a lie as onlyfit for cowards, and a loyalty that cleaved to France as a religion.
Cecil thought that a gallant boy was spoiled in this eighteen-year-oldbrunette of a campaigner; he might have gone further, and said that ahero was lost.
"Voila!" said Cigarette between her little teeth.
She stood in the glittering Algerine night, brilliant with a millionstars, and balmy with a million flowers, before the bronze trellisedgate of the villa on the Sahel, where Chateauroy, when he was not onactive service--which chanced rarely, for he was one of the finestsoldiers and most daring chiefs in Africa--indemnified himself, withthe magnificence that his private fortune enabled him to enjoy, forthe unsparing exertions and the rugged privations that he always sharedwillingly with the lowest of his soldiers. It was the grandest trait inthe man's character that he utterly scorned the effeminacy with whichmany commanders provided f
or their table, their comfort, and theirgratification while campaigning, and would commonly neither take himselfnor allow to his officers any more indulgence on the march than histroopers themselves enjoyed. But his villa on the Sahel was a miniaturepalace; it had formerly been the harem of a great Rais, and the gardenswere as enchanting as the interior was--if something florid, still aselegant as Paris art and Paris luxury could make it; for ferociousas the Black Hawk was in war, and well as he loved the chase and theslaughter, he did not disdain, when he had whetted beak and talonsto satiety, to smooth his ruffled plumage in downy nests and undercaressing hands.
To-night the windows of the pretty, low, snow-white, far-stretchingbuilding were lighted and open, and through the wilderness of cactus,myrtle, orange, citron, fuchsia, and a thousand flowers that almostburied it under their weight of leaf and blossom, a myriad of lamps weregleaming like so many glowworms beneath the foliage, while from a cedargrove, some slight way farther out, the melodies and overtures of thebest military bands in Algiers came mellowed, though not broken, by thedistance and the fall of the bubbling fountains. Cigarette looked andlistened, and her gay, brown face grew duskily warm with wrath.
"Ah, bah!" she muttered as she pressed her pretty lips to thelattice-work. "The men die like sheep in the hospital, and get sourbread tossed to them as if they were pigs, and are thrashed if they pawntheir muskets for a stoup of drink when their throats are as dry as thedesert--and you live in clover. Marbleu!"
Cigarette was a resolute little democrat; she had loaded the carbinesbehind the barricade in Paris before she was ten years old, and was notseldom in the perplexity of conflicting creeds when her loyalty to thetricolor smote with a violent clash on her love for the populace andtheir liberty.
She looked a moment longer through the gilded scroll-work; then, as shehad done once before, thrust her pistols well within her sash thatthey should not catch upon the boughs, and pushing herself through theprickly cactus hedge, impervious to anything save herself or a Barbarymarmoset, twisted with marvelous ingenuity through the sharp-pointedleaves, and the close barriers of spines and launched herself withinimitable dexterity on to the other side of the cacti. Cigarette hadtoo often played a game at spying and reconnoitering for her regiments,and played it with a cleverness that distanced even the most ruse of theZephyrs, not to be able to do just whatever she chose, in taking the wayshe liked, and lurking unseen at discretion.
She crossed the breadth of the grounds under the heavy shade of arbutustrees with a hare's fleetness, and stood a second looking at the openwindows and the terraces that lay before them, brightly lighted by thesummer moon and by the lamps that sparkled among the shrubs. Then downshe dropped, as quickly, as lightly, as a young setter, down among theferns, into a shower of rhododendrons, whose rose and lilac blossomsshut her wholly within them, like a fairy inclosed in bloom. The goodfairy of one life there she was assuredly, though she might be buta devil-may-care, audacious, careless little feminine Belphegor andmilitary Asmodeus.
"Ah!" she said quickly and sharply, with a deep-drawn breath. The singleexclamation was at once a menace, a tenderness, a whirlwind of rage,a volume of disdain, a world of pity. It was intensely French, and thewhole nature of Cigarette was in it.
Yet all she saw was a small and brilliant group sauntering to and frobefore the open windows, after dinner, listening to the bands, which,through dinner, had played to them, and laughing low and softly; and, atsome distance from them, beneath the shade of a cedar, the figure of aCorporal of Chasseurs,--calm, erect, motionless,--as though he were thefigure of a soldier cast in bronze. The scene was simple enough, thoughvery picturesque; but it told, by its vivid force of contrast, a wholehistory to Cigarette.
"A true soldier!" she muttered, where she lay among the rhododendrons,while her eyes grew very soft, as she gave the highest word of praisethat her whole range of language held. "A true soldier! How he keeps hispromise! But it must be bitter!"
She looked a while, very wistfully, at the Chasseur, where he stoodunder the Lebanon boughs; then her glance swept bright as a hawk's overthe terrace, and lighted with a prescient hatred on the central form ofall--a woman's. There were two other great ladies there; but she passedthem, and darted with unerring instinct on that proud, fair, patricianhead, with its haughty, stag-like carriage and the crown of its goldenhair.
Cigarette had seen grand dames by the thousand, though never very close;seen them in Paris when they came to look on at a grand review; seenthem in their court attire, when the Guides had filled the Carrouselon some palace ball-night, and lined the Court des Princes, and she hadbewitched the officers of the guard into letting her pass in to see thepageantry. But she had never felt for those grandes dames anything savea considerably contemptuous indifference. She had looked on them prettymuch as a war-worn, powder-tried veteran looks on the curled dandyof some fashionable, home-staying corps. She had never realized thedifference betwixt them and herself, save in so far as she thoughtthem useless butterflies, worth nothing at all, and laughed as shetriumphantly remembered how she could shoot a man and break in a colt.
Now, for the first time, the sight of one of those aristocrats smoteher with a keen, hot sting of heart-burning jealousy. Now, for the fisttime, the little Friend of the Flag looked at all the nameless gracesof rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had neverbefore been touched with--with a sudden perception, quick as thought,bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what thiswomanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in itshighest and purest shape.
"If those are the women that he knew before he came here, I do notwonder that he never cared to watch even my bamboula," was thelatent, unacknowledged thought that was so cruel to her: theconsciousness--which forced itself in on her, while her eyes jealouslyfollowed the perfect grace of the one in whom instinct had found herrival--that, while she had been so proud of her recklessness, and herdevilry, and her trooper's slang, and her deadly skill as a shot, shehad only been something very worthless, something very lightly held bythose who liked her for a ribald jest, and a dance, and a Spahis' supperof headlong riot and drunken mirth.
The mood did not last. She was too brave, too fiery, too dauntless,too untamed. The dusky, angry flush upon her face grew deeper, and thepassion gathered more stormily in her eyes, while she felt the pistolbutts in her sash, and laughed low to herself, where she lay stretchedunder her flowery nest.
"Bah! she would faint, I dare say, at the mere sight of these," shethought, with her old disdain, "and would stand fire no more thana gazelle! They are only made for summer-day weather, those dainty,gorgeous, silver pheasants. A breath of war, a touch of tempest, wouldsoon beat them down--crash!--with all their proud crests drooping!"
Like many another Cigarette underrated what she had no knowledge of, anddepreciated an antagonist the measure of whose fence she had no power togauge.
Crouched there among the rhododendrons, she lay as still as a mouse,moving nearer and nearer, though none would have told that so much asa lizard even stirred under the blossoms, until her ear, quick andunerring as an Indian's, could detect the sense of the words spoken bythat group, which so aroused all the hot ire of her warrior's soul andher democrat's impatience. Chateauroy himself was bending his fine, darkhead toward the patrician on whom her instinct had fastened her hatred.
"You expressed your wish to see my Corporal's little sculptures again,madame," he was murmuring now, as Cigarette got close enough under herflower shadows to catch the sense of the words. "To hear was to obeywith me. He waits your commands yonder."
Cecil obeyed the lackey who crossed the lawn, passed up the stairs, andstood before his Colonel, giving the salute; the shade of some acaciasstill fell across him, while the party he fronted were in all the glowof a full Algerian moon and of the thousand lamps among the belt offlowers and trees. Cigarette gave a sharp, deep-drawn breath, and layas mute and motionless as she had done before then, among the rushesof some dried brook's bed, scanning a
hostile camp, when the fate of ahandful of French troops had rested on her surety and her caution.
Chateauroy spoke with a carelessness as of a man to a dog, turning tohis Corporal.
"Victor, Mme. la Princesse honors you with the desire to see your toysagain. Spread them out."
The savage authority of his general speech was softened for sake of hisguest's presence, but there was a covert tone in the words that madeCigarette murmur to herself:
"If he forget his promise, I will forgive him!"
Cecil had not forgotten it; neither had he forgotten the lesson thatthis fair aristocrate had read him in the morning. He saluted his chiefagain, set the chessbox down upon the ledge of the marble balustrade,and stood silent, without once glancing at the fair and haughty facethat was more brilliant still in the African starlight than it had beenin the noon sun of the Chasseurs' Chambree. Courtesy was forbidden himas insult from a corporal to a nobly born beauty; he no more quarreledwith the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevitabledegradations, that followed on his entrance as a private under theFrench flag. He had been used to the impassable demarcations of Caste;he did not dispute them more now that he was without, than he had donewhen within, their magic pale.
The carvings were passed from hand to hand as the Marquis' six or eightguests, listless willing to be amused in the warmth of the evening aftertheir dinner, occupied themselves with the ivory chess armies, cut witha skill and a finish worthy a Roman studio. Praise enough was awarded tothe art, but none of them remembered the artist, who stood apart, grave,calm, with a certain serene dignity that could not be degraded becauseothers chose to treat him as the station he filled gave them fit rightto do.
Only one glanced at him with a touch of wondering pity, softening herpride; she who had rejected the gift of those mimic squadrons.
"You were surely a sculptor once?" she asked him with that graceful,distant kindness which she might have shown some Arab outcast.
"Never, madame."
"Indeed! Then who taught you such exquisite art?"
"It cannot claim to be called art, madame."
She looked at him with an increased interest: the accent of his voicetold her that this man, whatever he might be now, had once been agentleman.
"Oh, yes; it is perfect of its kind. Who was your master in it?"
"A common teacher, madame--Necessity."
There was a very sweet gleam of compassion in the luster of her dark,dreaming eyes.
"Does necessity often teach so well?"
"In the ranks of our army, madame, I think it does--often, indeed, muchbetter."
Chateauroy had stood by and heard, with as much impatience as he caredto show before guests whose rank was precious to the man who had stillweakness enough to be ashamed that his father's brave and famous lifehad first been cradled under the thatch roof of a little posting-house.
"Victor knows that neither he nor his men have any right to waste theirtime on such trash," he said carelessly; "but the truth is they love thecanteen so well that they will do anything to add enough to their pay tobuy brandy."
She whom he had called Mme. la Princesse looked with a doubting surpriseat the sculptor of the white Arab King she held.
"That man does not carve for brandy," she thought.
"It must be a solace to many a weary hour in the barracks to be able toproduce such beautiful trifles as these?" she said aloud. "Surely youencourage such pursuits, monsieur?"
"Not I," said Chateauroy, with a dash of his camp tone that he couldnot withhold. "There are but two arts or virtues for a trooper to mytaste--fighting and obedience."
"You should be in the Russian service, M. de Chateauroy," said the ladywith a smile, that, slight as it was, made the Marquis' eyes flash fire.
"Almost I wish I had been," he answered her; "men are made to keep theirgrades there, and privates who think themselves fine gentlemen receivethe lash they merit."
"How he hates his Corporal!" she thought while she laid aside the WhiteKing once more.
"Nay," interposed Chateauroy, recovering his momentary self-abandonment,"since you like the bagatelles, do me honor enough to keep them."
"Oh, no! I offered your soldier his own price for them this morning, andhe refused any."
Chateauroy swung round.
"Ah, you dared refuse your bits of ivory when you were honored by anoffer for them?"
Cecil stood silent; his eyes met his chief's steadily; Chateauroy hadseen that look when his Chasseur had bearded him in the solitude of histent, and demanded back the Pearl of the Desert.
The Princesse glanced at both; then she stooped her elegant headslightly to the Marquis.
"Do not blame your Corporal unjustly through me, I pray you. He refusedany price, but he offered them to me very gracefully as a gift, thoughof course it was not possible that I should accept them so."
"The man is the most insolent in the service," muttered her host, as hemotioned Cecil back off the terrace. "Get you gone, sir, and leave yourtoys here, or I will have them broken up by a hammer."
The words were low, that they should not offend the ears of the greatladies who were his listeners; but they were coarsely savage in theirwhispered command, and the Princesse heard them.
"He has brought his Chasseur here only to humiliate him," she thought,with the same thought that flashed through the mind of the LittleFriend of the Flag where she hid among her rhododendrons. Now the daintyaristocrate was very proud, but she was not so proud but that justicewas stronger in her than pride; and a noble, generous temper mellowedthe somewhat too cold and languid negligence of one of the fairest andhaughtiest women that ever adorned a court. She was too generous not torescue anyone who suffered through her the slightest injustice, not tointerfere when through her any misconception lighted on another;she saw, with her rapid perception and sympathy, that the man whomChateauroy addressed with the brutal insolence of a bully to hisdisobedient dog, had once been a gentlemen, though he now held but therank of a sous-officier in the Algerian Cavalry, and she saw that hesuffered all the more keenly under an outrage he had no power to resistbecause of that enforced serenity, that dignity of silence and ofpatience, with which he stood before his tyrant.
"Wait," she said, moving a little toward them, while she let her eyesrest on the carver of the sculptures with a grave compassion, though sheaddressed his chief. "You wholly mistake me. I laid no blame whateveron your Corporal. Let him take the chessmen back with him; I would on noaccount rob him of them. I can well understand that he does not care topart with such masterpieces of his art; and that he would not appraisethem by their worth in gold only shows that he is a true artist, asdoubtless also he is a true soldier."
The words were spoken with a gracious courtesy; the clear, cold tone ofher habitual manner just marking in them still the difference of castebetween her and the man for whom she interceded, as she would equallyhave interceded for a dog who should have been threatened with the lashbecause he had displeased her. That very tone struck a sharper blow toCecil than the insolence of his commander had power to deal him. Hisface flushed a little; he lifted his cap to her with a grave reverence,and moved away.
"I thank you, madame. Keep them, if you will so far honor me."
The words reached only her ear. In another instant he had passed awaydown the terrace steps, obedient to his chief's dismissal.
"Ah! have no kind scruples in keeping them, madame," Chateauroy laughedto her, as she still held in her hand, doubtfully, the White Sheik ofthe chess Arabs; "I will see that Bel-a-faire-peur, as they call him,does not suffer by losing these trumperies, which, I believe, oldZist-et-Zest, a veteran of ours and a wonderful carver, had really farmore to do with producing than he. You must not let your gracious pitybe moved by such fellows as these troopers of mine; they are the mostingenious rascals in the world, and know as well how to produce adramatic effect in your presence as they do how to drink and to swearwhen they are out of it."
"Very possibly," she said,
with an indolent indifference; "but that manwas no actor, and I never saw a gentleman if he have not been one."
"Like enough," answered the Marquis. "I believe many 'gentlemen' comeinto our ranks who have fled their native countries and broken all lawsfrom the Decalogue to the Code Napoleon. So long as they fight well,we don't ask their past criminalities. We cannot afford to throw away agood soldier because he has made his own land too hot to hold him."
"Of what country is your Corporal, then?"
"I have not an idea. I imagine his past must have been something veryblack, indeed, for the slightest trace of it has never, that I knowof, been allowed to let slip from him. He encourages the men in everyinsubordination, buys their favor with every sort of stage trick, thinkshimself the finest gentleman in the whole brigades of Africa, and oughtto have been shot long ago, if he had had his real deserts."
She let her glance dwell on him with a contemplation that was halfcontemptuous amusement, half unexpressed dissent.
"I wonder he has not been, since you have the ruling of his fate," shesaid, with a slight smile lingering about the proud, rich softness ofher lips.
"So do I."
There was a gaunt, grim, stern significance in the three monosyllablesthat escaped him unconsciously; it made her turn and look at him moreclosely.
"How has he offended you?" she asked.
Chateauroy laughed off her question.
"In a thousand ways, madame. Chiefly because I received my regimentaltraining under one who followed the traditions of the Armies of Egyptand the Rhine, and have, I confess little tolerance, in consequence,of a rebel who plays the martyr, and a soldier who is too effeminate anidler to do anything except attitudinize in interesting situations toawaken sympathy."
She listened with something of distaste upon her face where she stillleaned against the marble balustrade, toying with the ivory Bedouins.
"I am not much interested in military discussion," she said coldly,"but I imagine--if you will pardon me for saying so--that you do yourCorporal some little injustice here. I should not fancy he 'affects'anything, to judge from the very good tone of his manners. For the rest,I shall not keep the chessmen without making him fitting payment forthem; since he declines money, you will tell me what form that hadbetter take to be of real and welcome service to a Chasseur d'Afrique."
Chateauroy, more incensed than he chose or dared to show, bowedcourteously, but with a grim, ironic smile.
"If you really insist, give him a Napoleon or two whenever you see him;he will be very happy to take it and spend it au cabaret, though heplayed the aristocrat to-day. But you are too good to him, he is one ofthe very worst of my pratiques; and you are as cruel to me in refusingto deign to accept my trooper's worthless bagatelles at my hands."
She bent her superb head silently, whether in acquiescence or rejectionhe could not well resolve with himself, and turned to the staffofficers, among them the heir of a princely semi-royal French House, whosurrounded her, and sorely begrudged the moments she had given to thoseminiature carvings and the private soldier who had wrought them. She wasno coquette; she was of too imperial a nature, had too lofty a pride,and was too difficult to charm or to enchain; but those meditative,brilliant, serene eyes had a terrible gift of awakening without everseeking love, and of drawing without ever recompensing homage.
Crouched down among her rose-hued covert, Cigarette had watched andheard; her teeth set tightly, her breath coming and going swiftly, herhand clinched close on the butts of her pistols; fiery curses, with allthe infinite variety in cursing of a barrack repertoire, chasing oneanother in hot, fast mutterings of those bright lips, that should haveknown nothing except a child's careless and innocent song.
She had never looked at a beautiful, high-born woman before, holdingthem in gay, satirical disdain as mere butterflies who could not primea revolver and fire it off to save their own lives, if ever such needarose. But now she studied one through all the fine, quickened, unerringinstincts of jealousy; and there is no instinct in the world that givessuch thorough appreciation of the very rival it reviles. She saw thecourtly negligence, the regal grace, the fair, brilliant loveliness, thedelicious, serene languor, of a pure aristocrate for the very first timeto note them, and they made her heart sick with a new and deadly sense;they moved her much as the white, delicate carvings of the lotus-lilieshad done; they, like the carvings, showed her all she had missed. Shedropped her head suddenly like a wounded bird, and the racy, vindictivecamp oaths died off her lips. She thought of herself as she had dancedthat mad bacchic bamboula amid the crowd of shouting, stamping, drunken,half-infuriated soldiery; and for the moment she hated herself more eventhan she hated that patrician yonder.
"I know what he meant now!" she pondered, and her spirited, sparkling,brunette face was dark and weary, like a brown, sun-lightened brookover whose radiance the heavy shadow of some broad-spread eagle's wingshovers, hiding the sun.
She looked once, twice, thrice, more inquiringly, envyingly, thirstily;then, as the band under the cedars rolled out their music afresh, andlight laughter echoed to her from the terrace, she turned andwound herself back under the cover of the shrubs; not joyously andmischievously as she had come, but almost as slowly, almost as sadly, asa hare that the greyhounds have coursed drags itself through the grassesand ferns.
Once through the cactus hedge her old spirit returned; she shook herselfangrily with petulant self-scorn; she swore a little, and felt that thefierce, familiar words did her good like brandy poured down her throat;she tossed her head like a colt that rebels against the gall of thecurb; then, fleet as a fawn, she dashed down the moonlit road at topmostspeed. "She can't do what I do!" she thought.
And she ran the faster, and sang a drinking-song of the Spahis all thelouder, because still at her heart a dull pain was aching.