An hour later Cecil left the hospital, seeing and hearing nothing of thegay riot of the town about him, though the folds of many-colored silkand bunting fluttered across the narrow Moorish streets, and the wholeof the populace was swarming through them with the vivacious enjoymentof Paris mingling with the stately, picturesque life of Arab habit andcustom. He was well used to pain of every sort; his bread had long beenthe bread of bitterness, and the waters of his draught been of gall. Yetthis stroke, though looked for, fell heavily and cut far.
Yonder, in the deadroom, there lay a broken, useless mass of flesh andbone that in the sight of the Bureau Arabe was only a worn-out machinethat had paid its due toll to the wars of the Second Empire, and was nowvalueless; only fit to be cast in to rot, unmourned, in the devouringAfrican soil. But to him that lifeless, useless mass was dear still; wasthe wreck of the bravest, tenderest, and best-loved friend that he hadfound in his adversity.
In Leon Ramon he had found a man whom he had loved, and who had lovedhim. They had suffered much, and much endured together; their verydissimilarities had seemed to draw them nearer to each other. Thegentle impassiveness of the Englishman had been like rest to the ardentimpetuosity of the French soldier; the passionate and poetic temperamentof the artist-trooper had revealed to Cecil a thousand views of thoughtand of feeling which had never before then dawned on him. And now thatthe one lay dead, a heavy, weary sense of loneliness rested on theother. They died around him every day; the fearless, fiery blood ofFrance watered in ceaseless streams the arid, harvestless fields ofnorthern Africa. Death was so common that the fall of a comrade was nomore noted by them than the fall of a loose stone that their horse'sfoot shook down a precipice. Yet this death was very bitter to him. Hewondered with a dull sense of aching impatience why no Bedouin bullet,no Arab saber, had ever found his own life out, and cut his thrallsasunder.
The evening had just followed on the glow of the day--evening, morelustrous even than ever, for the houses were all aglitter with endlesslines of colored lamps and strings of sparkling illuminations, a verysea of bright-hued fire. The noise, the mirth, the sudden swell ofmusic, the pleasure-seeking crowds--all that were about him--served onlyto make more desolate and more oppressive by their contrast his memoriesof that life, once gracious, and gifted, and content with the dower ofits youth, ruined by a woman, and now slaughtered here, for no avail andwith no honor, by a lance-thrust in a midnight skirmish, which had beenunrecorded even in the few lines of the gazette that chronicled the warnews of Algeria.
Passing one of the cafes, a favorite resort of the officers of his ownregiment, he saw Cigarette. A sheaf of blue, and white, and scarletlights flashed with tongues of golden flame over her head, and a greattricolor flag, with the brass eagle above it, was hanging in the still,hot air from the balcony from which she leaned. Her tunic-skirt was fullof bonbons and crackers that she was flinging down among the crowdwhile she sang; stopping every now and then to exchange some passage ofgaulois wit with them that made her hearers scream with laughter, whilebehind her was a throng of young officers drinking champagne, eatingices, and smoking; echoing her songs and her satires with enthusiasticvoices and stamps of their spurred bootheels. As he glanced upward, shelooked literally in a blaze of luminance, and the wild, mellow tones ofher voice, ringing out sounded like a mockery of that dying-bed besidewhich they had both so late stood together.
"She has the playfulness of the young leopard, and the cruelty," hethought, with a sense of disgust; forgetting that she did not know whathe knew, and that, if Cigarette had waited to laugh until death hadpassed by, she would have never laughed all her life through, in thebattalions of Africa.
She saw him, as he went beneath her balcony; and she sung all thelouder, she flung her sweetmeat missiles with reckless force; shelaunched bolts of tenfold more audacious raillery at the delighted mobbelow. Cigarette was "bon soldat"; when she was wounded, she wound herscarf round the nerve that ached, and only laughed the gayer.
And he did her that injustice which the best among us are apt to doto those whom we do not feel interest enough in to study with thatcloseness which can alone give comprehension of the intricate andcomplex rebus, so faintly sketched, so marvelously involved, of humannature.
He thought her a little leopard, in her vivacious play and her inbornbloodthirstiness.
Well, the little leopard of France played recklessly enough thatevening. Algiers was en fete, and Cigarette was sparkling over thewhole of the town like a humming-bird or a firefly--here and there, andeverywhere, in a thousand places at once, as it seemed; staying longwith none, making music and mirth with all. Waltzing like a thingpossessed, pelting her lovers with a tempest storm of dragees, standingon the head of a gigantic Spahi en tableau amid a shower of fireworks,improvising slang songs, and chorused by a hundred lusty lungs thatyelled the burden in riotous glee as furiously as they were accustomedto shout "En avant!" in assault and in charge, Cigarette made amends toherself at night for her vain self-sacrifice of the fete-day.
She had her wound; yes, it throbbed still now and then, and stung like abee in the warm core of a rose. But she was young, she was gay, she wasa little philosopher; above all, she was French, and in the real Frenchblood happiness runs so richly that it will hardly be utterly chilleduntil the veins freeze in the coldness of death. She enjoyed--enjoyedall the more fiercely, perhaps, because a certain desperate bitternessmingled with the abandonment of her Queen Mab-like revelries. Untilnow Cigarette had been as absolutely heedless and without a care asany young bird, taking its first summer circles downward through theintoxication of the sunny air. It was not without fiery resistance andscornful revolt that the madcap would be prevailed on to admit that anyshadow could have power to rest on her.
She played through more than half the night, with the agile, bounding,graceful play of the young leopard to which he had likened her, and witha quick punishment from her velvet-sheathed talons if any durst offendher. Then when the dawn was nigh, leopard-like, the Little One soughther den.
She was most commonly under canvas; but when she was in town it wasat one with the proud independence of her nature that she rejected alloffers made her, and would have her own nook to live in, even though shewere not there one hour out of the twenty-four.
"Le Chateau de Cigarette" was a standing jest of the Army; for none wasever allowed to follow her thither, or to behold the interior of herfortress; and one overventurous Spahi, scaling the ramparts, had beenrewarded with so hot a deluge of lentil soup from a boiling casserolepoured on his head from above, that he had beaten a hasty andignominious retreat--which was more than a whole tribe of the mostwarlike of his countrymen could ever have made him do.
"Le Chateau de Cigarette" was neither more nor less than a couple ofgarrets, high in the air, in an old Moorish house, in an old Moorishcourt, decayed, silent, poverty-struck; with the wild pumpkin thrustingits leaves through the broken fretwork, and the green lizard shootingover the broad pavements, once brilliant in mosaic, that the robe ofthe princes of Islam had swept; now carpeted deep with the dry, white,drifted dust, and only crossed by the tottering feet of aged Jews or theladen steps of Algerine women.
Up a long, winding rickety stair Cigarette approached her castle, whichwas very near the sky indeed. "I like the blue," said the chatelainelaconically, "and the pigeons fly close by my window." And through it,too, she might have added; for, though no human thing might invade herchateau, the pigeons, circling in the sunrise light, always knew wellthere were rice and crumbs spread for them in that eyelet-hole of acasement.
Cigarette threaded her agile way up the dark, ladder-like shaft, andopened her door. There was a dim oil wick burning; the garret was large,and as clean as a palace could be; its occupants were various, andall sound asleep except one, who, rough, and hard, and small, andthree-legged, limped up to her and rubbed a little bullet head againsther lovingly.
"Bouffarick--petite Bouffarick!" returned Cigarette caressingly, in awhisper, and Bouffarick, content, limped
back to a nest of hay; being alittle wiry dog that had lost a leg in one of the most famous battles ofOran, and lain in its dead master's breast through three days and nightson the field. Cigarette, shading the lamp with one hand, glanced roundon her family.
They had all histories--histories in the French Army, which was the onlyhistory she considered of any import to the universe. There was a ravenperched high, by name Vole-qui-Vent; he was a noted character among theZouaves, and had made many a campaign riding on his owner's bayonet; heloved a combat, and was specially famed for screaming "Tue! Tue! Tue!"all over a battlefield; he was very gray now, and the Zouave's bones hadlong bleached on the edge of the desert.
There was a tame rat who was a vieille moustache, and who had livedmany years in a Lignard's pocket, and munched waifs and strays of themilitary rations, until, the enormous crime being discovered that itwas taught to sit up and dress its whiskers to the heinous air of the"Marseillaise," the Lignard got the stick, and the rat was condemnedto be killed, had not Cigarette dashed in to the rescue and carried thelong-tailed revolutionist off in safety.
There was a big white cat curled in a ball, who had been the darlingof a Tringlo, and had traveled all over North Africa on the top of hismule's back, seven seasons through; in the eighth the Tringlo was pickedoff by a flying shot, and an Indigene was about to skin the shriekingcat for the soup-pot, when a bullet broke his wrist, making him dropthe cat with a yell of pain, and the Friend of the Flag, catching itup, laughed in his face: "A lead comfit instead of slaughter-soup, myfriend!"
There were little Bouffarick and three other brother-dogs of equalcelebrity; one, in especial, who had been brought from Chalons, indefiance of the regulations, inside the drum of his regiment, and hadbeen wounded a dozen times; always seeking the hottest heat of theskirmish. And there was, besides these, sleeping serenely on straw,a very old man with a snowy beard. A very old man--one who had been aconscript in the bands of Young France, and marched from his Pyreneanvillage to the battle tramp of the Marseillaise, and charged with theEnfants de Paris across the plains; who had known the passage ofthe Alps, and lifted the long curls from the dead brow of Dessaix atMarengo, and seen in the sultry noonday dust of a glorious summer theGuard march into Paris, while the people laughed and wept with joy;surging like the mighty sea around one pale, frail form, so young byyears, so absolute by genius.
A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with bereavement,with extreme old age; and, by a long course of cruel accidents, alone,here in Africa, without one left of the friends of his youth, or of thechildren of his name, and deprived even of the charities due from hiscountry to his services--alone, save for the little Friend of the Flag,who, for four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, inthis Moorish attic; tending him herself when in town, taking heed thathe should want for nothing when she was campaigning.
"I will have a care of him," she had said curtly, when she had found himin great misery and learned his history from others; and she had hadthe care accordingly, maintaining him at her own cost in the Moorishbuilding, and paying a good Jewess of the quarter to tend him when shewas not herself in Algiers.
The old man was almost dead, mentally, though in bodily strengthstill well able to know the physical comforts of food and rest, andattendance; he was in his second childhood, in his ninetieth year, andwas unconscious of the debt he owed her; even, with a curious caprice ofdecrepitude, he disliked her, and noticed nothing, except the raven whenit shrieked its "Tue! Tue! Tue!" But to Cigarette he was as sacred asa god; had he not fought beneath the glance, and gazed upon the face ofthe First Consul?
She bent over him now, saw that he slept, busied herself noiselessly inbrewing a little tin pot full of coffee and hot milk, set it over thelamp to keep it warm, and placed it beside him ready for his morningmeal, with a roll of white wheat bread; then, with a glance round tosee that her other dependents wanted for nothing, went to her own garretadjoining, and with the lattice fastened back, that the first rays ofsunrise and the first white flash of her friends the pigeons' gleamingwings might awaken her, threw herself on her straw and slept with allthe graceful, careless rest of the childhood which, though in once senseshe had never known, yet in another had never forsaken her.
She hid as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide a sin,had she chosen to commit one, this compassion which she, the youngcondottiera of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldierof Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery, imperious voice was gentleas the dove; her wayward, dominant will was pliant as the reed; hercontemptuous, skeptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar.In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacredthe eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on thebreastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Kellerman, theCuirassiers of Milhaud; sacred the hands which, when nervous with youth,had borne the standard of the Republic victorious against the gatheredTeuton host in Champagne; sacred the ears which, when quick to hear,had heard the thunder of Arcola, of Lodi, of Rivoli, and, above eventhe tempest of war, the clear, still voice of Napoleon; sacred thelips which when their beard was dark in the fullness of manhood, hadquivered, as with a woman's weeping, at the farewell, in the springnight, in the moonlit Cour des Adieux.
Cigarette had a religion of her own; and followed it more closely thanmost disciples follow other creeds.