Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent ofthe Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returnedto the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those lastoffices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived;all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists wasgone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained thedetachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for awhile.
It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great starsshining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made thesingle grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of apine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats.The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem;and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come andplay, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod,its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.
When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again torest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon thegrave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonelyand unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousandmarks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savagelusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lostyouth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of theyears that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man hadfollowed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor forhis sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilledforever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished,unavenged! It seemed to him like murder--murder with which his own handwas stained.
The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to thestorm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of theyoung goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the blacklengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; agrief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following hisfate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the landof his exile.
He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through thesilence he heard a name whispered--the name of his childhood, of hispast.
He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw oncemore his brother's face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained withan agonizing dread. Concealment was no longer possible. The youngerman knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistiblecertainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear inits chill, leaden, merciless conviction.
For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable memories chokedthought or word in both. They knew each other--all was said in that.
Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer with a rapidmovement, and his hand fell heavily on the other's shoulder.
"Have you lived stainlessly since?"
The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His brother shudderedbeneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.
"God is my witness, yes! But you--you--they said that you were dead!"
Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the words whichsmote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there wasthe accent of regret.
"I am dead," he said simply; "dead to the world and you."
He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.
"How have you lived?" he whispered hoarsely.
"Honorably. Let that suffice. And you?"
The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal--the old, timorous,terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy's face,strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.
"In honor too, I swear! That was my first disgrace, and my last. Youbore the weight of my shame? Good God, what can I say? Such nobility,such sacrifice----"
He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who hadlost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, butonly love. As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone.While crushed with the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, hestill was filled with only one thought that burned through the darknessof his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy. Even inthe very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believeddead was living--living and bearing the burden of the guilt he shouldhave borne--what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.
Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish loveliness heremembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of theman. He saw that life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with thisweak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation toevil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world.He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw thathappiness had done for this character what adversity had done for hisown. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity wouldhave wrecked. He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word;whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.
The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in thosepale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.
"We believed you were dead," he murmured wildly. "They said so; thereseemed every proof. But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you--I knewyou, though you passed me as a stranger. I stayed on here; they told meyou would return. God! what agony this day and night have been!"
Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lesthe should be living.
There were many emotions at war in him--scorn, and pity, and woundedlove, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote asacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held himspeechless. To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to countand claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revilethe wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his ownto rest upon him--to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago he hadaccepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undonow all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now theone whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, andforsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded forso long--this was not possible to him. Though it would be but his ownbirthright that he would demand, his own justification that he wouldestablish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craventhing. No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made wasunworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade himnow to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of hisearly fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it mighteven have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother's placeto receive the shame of his brother's action; but it had been done solong before--done on the spur of generous affection, and actuated by thestrange hazard that made the keeping of a woman's secret demand the samereticence which also saved the young lad's name; to draw back from itnow would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.
All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another. Hecould not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false tothe fair repute of their name--and he would not speak with harshness. Hefelt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aughtof his brother's life. It had been saved from temptation, and thereforesaved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.
The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In the many yearsthat had passed by, although his character had not changed, his positionhad altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all thepower that wealth and independence and the accession to his title couldbestow. He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to himby the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing,ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his wholeexistence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet,base beyond all baseness, to remain
in his elder's place, and acceptthis sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.
"Bertie--Bertie!" he stammered, in hurried appeal--and the name of hisyouth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the momentforget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race--"onmy soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No onedid. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would havesaid that you were innocent; I would--I would have told them how Iforged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate thatI scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and Ithought then--then--it was not worth while; it would have broken myfather's heart. God help me! I was a coward!"
He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein laythe whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude.Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishnessholds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn thatmoved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroicendurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he hadlearned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear rousedhis wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done.Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been broughtupon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in hissight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, whowas the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon,the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, theirresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that shouldtell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough tokill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril--allthese kept him silent.
His brother misinterpreted that silence.
"I am in your power--utterly in your power," he moaned in his fear. "Istand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and ourbrother are dead? All I have inherited is yours. Do you know that, sinceyou have never claimed it?"
"I know it."
"And you have never come forward to take your rights?"
"What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merelyto hold a title."
The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his wordsfell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature. The manwho lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, andthe purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple,necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Francosoldier.
"But--great Heaven!--this life of yours? It must be wretchedness?"
"Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it."
The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had sufferedhimself to show. It stung down to his listener's soul.
"No--no!" he murmured. "You are happier than I. You have no remorse tobear! And yet--to tell the world that I am guilty----"
"You need never tell it; I shall not."
He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, and had wellweighed, all he surrendered in that promise--the promise to condemnhimself to a barren and hopeless fate forever.
"You will not?"
The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched tongue. Theone passion of fear upon him was for himself; even in that moment ofsupplication his disordered thoughts hovered wildly over the chancesof whether, if his elder brother even now asserted his innocence andclaimed his birthright, the world and its judges would ever believe him.
Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly madegrave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of his own race andof his own Order never had been. His heart was full. The ingratitude andthe self-absorption of this life for which his own had been destroyedsmote him with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours before hehad looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; adeadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, andthe world's love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his earlydays to believe him dead after a deed of shame.
His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, sinking hishead upon his arms with a low moan. Time had not changed him greatly;it had merely made him more intensely desirous of the pleasures and thepowers of life, more intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of thecontempt of the world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he hadstooped to any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he wascapable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His was oneof those natures which, having no love of evil for evil's sake, stillembrace any form of evil which may save them from the penalty of theirown weakness. Now, thus meeting one who for twelve years he had believedmust rise from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrunghis every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness--the desire,at all costs, to be saved.
Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. He had lovedhis brother as a youth--loved him well enough to take and bear a heavyburden of disgrace in his stead. The old love was not dead; but strongerthan itself was his hatred of the shame that had touched their race bythe wretched crime that had driven him into exile, and his wonderingscorn for the feeble and self-engrossed character that had livedcontentedly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by afictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; he didnot know how to support the intolerable pain that oppressed him in thepresence of the only living creature of his race; he could not answerfor himself what passionate and withering words might not escape him;every instant of their interview was a horrible temptation to him--thetemptation to demand from this coward his own justification beforethe world--the temptation to seize out of those unworthy hands hisbirthright and his due.
But the temptation--sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened by thestrength of right, and well-nigh overwhelming with all its fair,delicious promise for the future--did not conquer him. What resistedit was his own simple instinct of justice; an instinct too straight andtrue either to yield to self-pity or to passionate desire--justice whichmade him feel that, since he had chosen to save this weakling once fortheir lost mother's sake, he was bound forever not to repent nor toretract. He gazed a while longer, silently, at the younger man, whosat, still rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of thefreshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on his brother'sshoulder. The other started and trembled; he remembered that touch indays of old.
"Do not fear me," he said, gently and very gravely. "I have kept yoursecret twelve years; I will keep it still. Be happy--be as happy as youcan. All I bid of you in return is so to live that in your future yourpast shall be redeemed."
The words of the saint to the thief were not more merciful, not morenoble, than the words with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of hisown life, the redemption of his brother's. The other looked at him witha look that was half of terror--terror at the magnitude of this ransomthat was given to save him from the bondage of evil.
"My God! You cannot mean it! And you----"
"I shall lead the life fittest for me. I am content in it. It isenough."
The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utterance. Before hismemory rose one fair, proud face. "Content!" Ah, Heaven! It was the onlylie that had ever passed his lips.
His hand lay still upon his brother's shoulder, leaning more heavilythere, in the silence that brooded over the hushed plains.
"Let us part now, and forever. Leave Algeria at once. That is all Iask."
Then, without another word that could add reproach or seek forgratitude, he turned and went away over the great, dim level of theAfrican waste, while the man whom he had saved sat as in stupor; gazingat the brown shadows, and the sleeping herds, and the falling stars thatran across the sky, and doubting whether the voice he had head and theface upon which he had looked were not the visions of a waking dream.