CHAPTER XXI.
CIGARETTE EN CONDOTTIERA.
Cigarette always went fast. She had a bird-like way of skimming herground that took her over it with wonderful swiftness; all the tassels,and ribbon knots, and sashes with which her uniform was rendered so gayand so distinctive fluttering behind her; and her little military boots,with the bright spurs twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly fora speck of dust,--though it lay thick as August suns could parch it,--torest upon her. Thus she went now, along the lovely moonlight; singingher drinking song so fast and so loud that, had it been any other thanthis young fire-eater of the African squadrons, it might have beensupposed she sang out of fear and bravado--two things, however, thatnever touched Cigarette; for she exulted in danger as friskily as ayoung salmon exults in the first, crisp, tumbling crest of a sea-wave,and would have backed up the most vainglorious word she could havespoken with the cost of her life, had need been. Suddenly, as she went,she heard a shout on the still night air--very still, now that thelights, and the melodies, and the laughter of Chateauroy's villa layfar behind, and the town of Algiers was yet distant, with its lampsglittering down by the sea.
The shout was, "A moi, Roumis! Pour la France!" And Cigarette knew thevoice, ringing melodiously and calm still, though it gave the sound ofalarm.
"Cigarette au secour!" she cried in answer; she had cried it many a timeover the heat of battlefields, and when the wounded men in the dead ofthe sickly night writhed under the knife of the camp-thieves. If she hadgone like the wind before, she went like the lightning now.
A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and of ridersstruggling one with another in a cloud of white dust, silvery and hazyin the radiance of the moon.
The center figure was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed tothe teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunkendebauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild withits poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out ofthe town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poorbeasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood. Just as theyneared Cecil they had knocked aside and trampled over a worn out oldcolon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time from their path.Cecil had reined up and shouted to them to pause; they, inflamed withthe perilous drink, and senseless with the fury which seems to possessevery Arab once started in a race neck-to-neck, were too blind to see,and too furious to care, that they were faced by a soldier of France,but rode down on him at once, with their curled sabers flashing roundtheir heads. His horse stood the shock gallantly, and he sought at firstonly to parry their thrusts and to cut through their stallions' reins;but the latter were chain bridles, and only notched his sword as theblade struck them, and the former became too numerous and too savagelydealt to be easily played with in carte and tierce. The Arabs weredead-drunk, he saw at a glance, and had got the blood-thirst upon them;roused and burning with brandy and raki, these men were like tigers todeal with; the words he had spoken they never heard, and their horseshemmed him in powerless, while their steel flashed on every side--theywere not of the tribe of Khalifa.
If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few moments moreof that moonlight night were all that he would live. He wished to avoidbloodshed, both because his sympathies were always with the conqueredtribes, and because he knew that every one of these quarrels and combatsbetween the vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen thebreach, already broad enough, between them. But it was no longer amatter of choice with him, as his shoulder was grazed by a thrust which,but for a swerve of his horse, would have pierced to his lungs; andthe four riders, yelling like madmen, forced the animal back on hishaunches, and assaulted him with breathless violence. He swept his ownarm back, and brought his saber down straight through the sword-arm ofthe foremost; the limb was cleft through as if the stroke of an ax hadsevered it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs closed in on him. Thepoints of their weapons were piercing his harness when, sharp andswift, one on another, three shots hissed past him; the nearest of hisassailants fell stone dead, and the others, wounded and startled, loosedtheir hold, shook their reins, and tore off down the lonely road, whilethe dead man's horse, shaking his burden from him out of the stirrups,followed them at a headlong gallop through a cloud of dust.
"That was a pretty cut through the arm; better had it been throughthe throat. Never do things by halves, ami Victor," said Cigarettecarelessly, as she thrust her pistols back into her sash, and looked,with the tranquil appreciation of a connoisseur, on the brown, brawny,naked limb, where it lay severed on the sand, with the hilt of theweapon still hanging in the sinewy fingers. Cecil threw himself from hissaddle and gazed at her in bewildered amazement; he had thought thosesure, cool, death-dealing shots had come from some Spahi or Chasseur.
"I owe you my life!" he said rapidly. "But--good God!--you have shot thefellow dead----"
Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous glance at theBedouin's corpse.
"To be sure--I am not a bungler."
"Happily for me, or I had been where he lies now. But wait--let me look;there may be breath in him yet."
Cigarette laughed, offended and scornful, as with the offense and scornof one whose first science was impeached.
"Look and welcome; but if you find any life in that Arab, make a laughof it before all the army to-morrow."
She was at her fiercest. A thousand new emotions had been roused in herthat night, bringing pain with them, that she bitterly resented; and,moreover, this child of the Army of Africa caught fire at the flame ofbattle with instant contagion, and had seen slaughter around her fromher first infancy.
Cecil, disregarding her protest, stooped and raised the fallen Bedouin.He saw at a glance that she was right; the lean, dark, lustful face wasset in the rigidity of death; the bullet had passed straight through thetemples.
"Did you never see a dead man before?" demanded Cigarette impatiently,as he lingered--even in this moment he had more thought of this Arabthan he had of her!
He laid the Arab's body gently down, and looked at her with a glancethat, rightly or wrongly, she thought had a rebuke in it.
"Very many. But--it is never a pleasant sight. And they were in drink;they did not know what they did."
"Pardieu! What divine pity! Good powder and ball were sore wasted, itseems; you would have preferred to lie there yourself, it appears. I begyour pardon for interfering with the preference."
Her eyes were flashing, her lips very scornful and wrathful. This washis gratitude!
"Wait, wait," said Cecil rapidly, laying his hand on her shoulder, asshe flung herself away. "My dear child, do not think me ungrateful. Iknow well enough I should be a dead man myself had it not been for yourgallant assistance. Believe me, I thank you from my heart."
"But you think me 'unsexed' all the same! I see, beau lion!"
The word had rankled in her; she could launch it now with tellingreprisal.
He smiled; but he saw that this phrase, which she had overheard, had notalone incensed, but had wounded her.
"Well, a little, perhaps," he said gently. "How should it be otherwise?And, for that matter, I have seen many a great lady look on and laughher soft, cruel laughter, while the pheasants were falling by hundreds,or the stags being torn by the hounds. They called it 'sport,' but therewas not much difference--in the mercy of it, at least--from your war.And they had not a tithe of your courage."
The answer failed to conciliate her; there was an accent of compassionin it that ill-suited her pride, and a lack of admiration that was notless new and unwelcome.
"It was well for you that I was unsexed enough to be able to send anounce of lead into a drunkard!" she pursued with immeasurable disdain."If I had been like that dainty aristocrate down there--pardieu! It hadbeen worse for you. I should have screamed, and fainted, and left you tobe killed, while I made a tableau. Oh, ha! that is to be 'feminine,' isit not?"
"Where did you see that lady?" he as
ked in some surprise.
"Oh, I was there!" answered Cigarette, with a toss of her head southwardto where the villa lay. "I went to see how you would keep your promise."
"Well, you saw I kept it."
She gave her little teeth a sharp click like the click of a trigger.
"Yes. And I would have forgiven you if you had broken it."
"Would you? I should not have forgiven myself."
"Ah! you are just like the Marquise. And you will end like him."
"Very probably."
She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his path with herpistols thrust in her sash, and her hands resting lightly on her hips,as a good workman rests after a neatly finished job, and her dainty fezset half on one side of her brown, tangled curls, while upon them theintense luster of the moonlight streamed, and in the dust, well-nigh attheir feet, lay the gaunt, while-robed form of the dead Arab, with theolive, saturnine face turned upward to the stars.
"Why did you give the chessmen to that silver pheasant?" she asked himabruptly.
"Silver pheasant?"
"Yes. See how she sweeps--sweeps--sweeps so languid, so brilliant, souseless--bah! Why did you give them?"
"She admired them. It was not much to give."
"You would not have given them to a daughter of the people."
"Why not?"
"Why not? Oh, ha! because her hands would be hard, and brown, andcoarse, not fit for those ivory puppets; but hers are white like theivory, and cannot soil it. She will handle them so gracefully, for fiveminutes; and then buy a new toy, and let her lapdog break yours!"
"Like enough." He said it with his habitual gentle temper, but there wasa shadow of pain in the words. The chessmen had become in some sort likeliving things to him, through long association; he had parted from themnot without regret, though for the moment courtesy and generosity ofinstinct had overcome it; and he knew that it was but too true how inall likelihood these trifles of his art, that had brought him manya solace and been his companion through many a lonely hour, would beforgotten by the morrow, where he had bestowed them, and at best putaside in a cabinet to lie unnoticed among bronzes or porcelain, or beset on some boudoir table to be idled with in the mimic warfare thatwould serve to cover some listless flirtation.
Cigarette, quick to sting, but as quick to repent using her sting,saw the regret in him; with the rapid, uncalculating liberality of anutterly unselfish and intensely impulsive nature, she hastened to makeamends by saying what was like gall on her tongue in the utterance:
"Tiens!" she said quickly. "Perhaps she will value them more thanthat. I know nothing of the aristocrats--not I! When you were gone, shechampioned you against the Black Hawk. She told him that if you had notbeen a gentleman before you came into the ranks, she had never seen one.She spoke well, if you had but heard her."
"She did!"
She saw his glance brighten as it turned on her in a surprisedgratification.
"Well! What is there so wonderful?"
Cigarette asked it with a certain petulance and doggedness; taking anamesake out of her breast-pocket, biting its end off, and strikinga fusee. A word from this aristocrate was more welcome to him than abullet that had saved his life!
Her generosity had gone very far, and, like most generosity, got nothingfor its pains.
He was silent a few moments, tracing lines in the dust with the pointof his scabbard. Cigarette, with the cigar in her mouth, stamped her footimpatiently.
"Corporal Victor! Are you going to dream there all night? What is to bedone with this dog of an Arab?"
She was angered by him; she was in the mood to make herself seem allthe rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more callous. She had shot theman--pouf! What of that? She had shot men before, as all Africa knew.She would defend a half-fledged bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out oldcur; but a man! Men were the normal and natural food for pistols andrifles, she considered. A state of society in which firearms had beenunknown was a thing Cigarette had never heard of, and in which she wouldhave contumeliously disbelieved if she had been told of it.
Cecil looked up from his musing. He thought what a pity it was thispretty, graceful French kitten was such a bloodthirsty young panther atheart.
"I scarcely know what to do," he answered her doubtfully. "Put himacross my saddle, poor wretch, I suppose; the fray must be reported."
"Leave that to me," said Cigarette decidedly, and with a certain haughtypatronage. "I shot him--I will see the thing gets told right. It mightbe awkward for you; they are growing so squeamish about the Roumiskilling the natives. Draw him to one side there, and leave him. Thecrows will finish his affair."
The coolness with which this handsome child disposed of the fate ofwhat, a moment or two before, had been a sentient, breathing, vigorousframe, sent a chill through her hearer, though he had been seasoned by adecade of slaughter.
"No," he said briefly. "Suspicion might fall on some innocent passer-by.Besides--he shall have a decent burial."
"Burial for an Arab--pouf!" cried Cigarette in derision. "Parbleu, M.Bel-a-faire-peau, I have seen hundreds of our best soldiers lie rottingon the plains with the birds' beaks at their eyes and the jackals' fangsin their flesh. What was good enough for them is surely good enough forhim. You are an eccentric fellow--you--"
He laughed a little.
"Time was when I should have begged you not to call me any such 'badform'! Eccentric! I have not genius enough for that."
"Eh?" She did not understand him. "Well, you want that carrion pokedinto the earth, instead of lying atop of it. I don't see much differencemyself. I would like to be in the sun as long as I could, I think, deador alive. Ah! how odd it is to think one will be dead some day--neverwake for the reveille--never hear the cannon or the caissons rollby--never stir when the trumpets sound the charge, but lie theredead--dead--dead--while the squadrons thunder above one's grave! Droll,eh?"
A momentary pathos softened her voice, where she stood in the glisteningmoonlight. That the time would ever come when her glad laughter wouldbe hushed, when her young heart would beat no more, when the bright,abundant, passionate blood would bound no longer through her veins, whenall the vivacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended forher forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home to her thana bird that sings in the light of the sun could be made to know thatthe time would come when its little, melodious throat would be frozen indeath, and give song never more.
The tone touched him--made him think less and less of her as adare-devil boy, as a reckless child-soldier, and more of her as what shewas, than he had done before; he touched her almost caressingly.
"Pauvre enfant! I hope that day will be very distant from you. Andyet--how bravely you risked death for me just now!"
Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the camp, flushedever so slightly at the mere caress of his hand.
"I risked nothing!" she said rapidly. "As for death--when it comes, itcomes. Every soldier carries it in his wallet, and it may jump out onhim any minute. I would rather die young than grow old. Age is nothingelse but death that is conscious."
"Where do you get your wisdom, little one?"
"Wisdom? Bah! living is learning. Some people go through life with theireyes shut, and then grumble there is nothing to see in it! Well--youwant that Arab buried? What a fancy! Look you, then; stay by him, sinceyou are so fond of him, and I will go and send some men to you with astretcher to carry him down to the town. As for reporting, leave thatto me. I shall tell them I left you on guard. That will square things ifyou are late at the barrack."
"But that will give you so much trouble, Cigarette."
"Trouble? Morbleu! Do you think I am like that silver pheasant yonder?Lend me your horse, and I shall be in the town in ten minutes!"
She vaulted, as she spoke, into the saddle; he laid his hand on thebridle and stopped her.
"Wait! I have not thanked you half enough, my brave little champion. Howam I to show you my gratitude?"
For a moment the bright, brown, changeful face, that could look sofiercely scornful, so sunnily radiant, so tempestuously passionate, andso tenderly childlike, in almost the same moment, grew warm as the warmsuns that had given their fire to her veins; she glanced at him almostshyly, while the moonlight slept lustrously in the dark softness ofher eyes; there was an intense allurement in her in that moment--theallurement of a woman's loveliness, bitterly as she disdained a woman'scharms. It might have told him, more plainly than words, how best hecould reward her for the shot that had saved him; yet, though a man onwhom such beguilement usually worked only too easily and too often, itdid not now touch him. He was grateful to her, but, despite himself, hewas cold to her; despite himself, the life which that little hand thathe held had taken so lightly made it the hand of a comrade to be graspedin alliance, but never the hand of a mistress to steal to his lips andto lie in his breast.
Her rapid and unerring instinct made her feel that keenly and instantly;she had seen too much passion not to know when it was absent. The warmthpassed off her face, her teeth clinched; she shook the bridle out of hishold.
"Take gratitude to the silver pheasant there! She will value fine words;I set no count on them. I did no more for you than I have done scores oftimes for my Spahis. Ask them how many I have shot with my own hand!"
In another instant she was away like a sirocco; a whirlwind of dust,that rose in the moonlight, marking her flight as she rode full gallopto Algiers.
"A kitten with the tigress in her," thought Cecil, as he seated himselfon a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over the dead Arab. It wasnot that he was callous to the generous nature of the little Friend ofthe Flag, or that he was insensible either to the courage that beat sodauntlessly in her pulses, or to the piquant, picturesque grace thataccompanied even her wildest actions; but she had nothing of her sex'scharm for him. He thought of her rather as a young soldier than as ayoung girl. She amused him as a wayward, bright, mischievous, audaciousboy might have done; but she had no other interest for him. He had givenher little attention; a waltz, a cigar, a passing jest, were all hehad bestowed on the little lionne of the Spahis corps; and the deepestsentiment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity--pity forthis flower which blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under thepoison-dropping branches of lawless crime. A flower, bright-hued andsun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just unclosed,in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted by the bedfrom which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away with time, scentlessand loveless, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, blackstream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly.
Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the sound of thehorse's hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile of stones, with thelifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet.
"Who was it in my old life that she is like?" he was musing. It was thedeep-blue, dreaming haughty eyes of the Princesse that he was bringingback to memory, not the brown, mignon face that had been so late closeto his in the light of the moon.
Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Chasseurherself. She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert coltwithout stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot,now on the other, on the animal's naked back, while they flew at fullspeed. Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down intothe city, scattering all she met with right and left, till she rodestraight up to the barracks of the Chasseurs d'Afrique. At the entrance,as she reined up, she saw the very person she wanted, and signed himto her as carelessly as if he were a conscript instead of that powerfulofficer, Francois Vireflau, captain and adjutant.
"Hola!" she cried, as she signaled him; Cigarette was privileged allthrough the army. "Adjutant Vireflau, I come to tell you a good storyfor your folios. There is your Corporal there--le beau Victor--has beenattacked by four drunken dogs of Arbicos, dead-drunk, and four againstone. He fought them superbly, but he would only parry, not thrust,because he knows how strict the rules are about dealing with thescoundrels--even when they are murdering you, parbleu! He has behavedsplendidly. I tell you so. And he was so patient with those dogs that hewould not have killed one of them. But I did; shot one straight throughthe brain--a beautiful thing--and he lies on the Oran road now. Victorwould not leave him, for fear some passer-by should be thought guilty ofa murder. So I came on to tell you, and ask you to send some men up forthe jackal's body. Ah! he is a fine soldier, that Bel-a-faire-peur ofyours. Why don't you give him a step--two steps--three steps? Diantre!It is not like France to leave him a Corporal!"
Vireflau listened attentively--a short, lean, black-visaged campaigner,who yet relaxed into a grim half-smile as the vivandiere addressed himwith that air, as of a generalissimo addressing a subordinate, whichalways characterized Cigarette the more strongly the higher the grade ofher companion or opponent.
"Always eloquent, pretty one!" he growled. "Are you sure he did notbegin the fray?"
"Don't I tell you the four Arabs were like four devils! They knockeddown an old colon, and Bel-a-faire-peur tried to prevent their doingmore mischief, and they set on him like so many wild-cats. He kept histemper wonderfully; he always tries to preserve order; you can't say somuch of your riff-raff, Captain Vireflau, commonly! Here! this is hishorse. Send some men to him; and mind the thing is reported fairly, andto his credit, to-morrow."
With which command, given as with the air of a commander-in-chief, inits hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted off the charger,flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away and out of sight beforeFrancois Vireflau had time to consider whether he should laugh at hercaprices, as all the army did, or resent her insolence to his dignity.But he was a good-natured man, and, what was better, a just one; andCigarette had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh wellwith him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would not reach hisColonel in any warped version that could give pretext for any freshexercise of tyranny over "Bel-a-faire-peur" under the title of"discipline."
"Dieu de Dieu!" thought his champion as she made her way through thegas-lit streets. "I swore to have my vengeance on him. It is a drollvengeance, to save his life, and plead his cause with Vireflau! Nomatter! One could not look on and let a set of Arbicos kill a goodlascar of France; and the thing that is just must be said, let it go asit will against one's grain. Public Welfare before Private Pique!"
A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for an abandonmentof her sworn revenge which she felt was a weakness utterly unworthyof her, and too much like that inconsequent weathercock, that useless,insignificant part of creation, those objects of her supreme derisionand contempt, those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good Godhad ever troubled himself to make--namely, "Les Femmes."
"Hola, Cigarette!" cried the Zouave Tata, leaning out of a littlecasement of the As de Pique as she passed it. "A la bonne heure, mabelle! Come in; we have the devil's own fun here--"
"No doubt!" retorted the Friend of the Flag. "It would be odd if themaster-fiddler would not fiddle for his own!"
Through the window, and over the sturdy shoulders, in their canvasshirt, of the hero Tata, the room was visible--full of smoke, throughwhich the lights glimmered like the sun in a fog; reeking with badwines, crowded with laughing, bearded faces, and the battered beauty ofwomen revelers, while on the table, singing with a voice Mario himselfcould not have rivaled for exquisite sweetness, was a slender Zouavegesticulating with the most marvelous pantomime, while his melodioustones rolled out the obscenest and wittiest ballad that ever was caroledin a guinguette.
"Come in, my pretty one!" entreated Tata, stretching out his brawn arms."You will die of laughing if you hear Gris-Gris to-night--such a song!"
"A pretty song, yes--for a pigsty!" said Cigarette, with a glanceinto the chamber; and she shook his hand off her, and went on down thestreet. A night or two before a new song from Gris-Gris, the best tenorin the whole army, would have been paradise to her, and sh
e would havevaulted through the window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Now,she did not know why, she found no charm in it.
And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her garret, andcurled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for the first time in heryoung life sleep did not come readily to her, and when it did come, forthe first time found a restless sigh upon her laughing mouth.