“I will remember,” she said simply, while a thoughtful sadness passed over her brilliant face. “Adieu, M. le Caporal; and if you should think better of your choice, and will allow your name to be mentioned by me to his Majesty, send me word through my people. There is my card.”
The carriage whirled away down the crooked street. He stood under the tawny awning of the Moorish house, with the thin, glazed card in his hand. On it was printed:
“Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amague,
“Hotel Corona, Paris.”
In the corner was written, “Villa Aiaussa, Algiers.” He thrust it in the folds of his sash, and turned within.
“Do you know her?” he asked Ben Arsli.
The old man shook his head.
“She is the most beautiful of thy many fair Frankish women. I never saw her till to-day. But listen here. Touching these ivory toys—if thou does not bring henceforth to me all the work in them that thou doest, thou shalt never come here more to meet the light of her eyes.”
Cecil smiled and pressed the Moslem’s hand.
“I kept them away because you would have given me a hundred piasters for what had not been worth one. As for her eyes, they are stars that shine on another world than an African trooper’s. So best!”
Yet they were stars of which he thought more, as he wended his way back to the barracks, than of the splendid constellations of the Algerian evening that shone with all the luster of the day, but with the soft, enchanted light which transfigured sea, and earth, and sky as never did the day’s full glow, as he returned to the mechanical duties, to the thankless services, to the distasteful meal, to the riotous mirth, to the coarse comradeship, which seemed to him to-night more bitter than they had ever done since his very identity, his very existence, had been killed and buried past recall, past resurrection, under the kepi d’ordonnance of a Chasseur d’Afrique.
Meanwhile the Princess Corona drove homeward—homeward to where a temporary home had been made by her in the most elegant of the many snow-white villas that stud the sides of the Sahel and face the bright bow of the sunlit bay; a villa with balconies, and awnings, and cool, silent chambers, and rich, glowing gardens, and a broad, low roof, half hidden in bay and orange and myrtle and basilica, and the liquid sound of waters bubbling beneath a riotous luxuriance of blossom.
Mme. la Princesse passed from her carriage to her own morning room and sank down on a couch, a little listless and weary with her search among the treasures of the Algerine bazaars. It was purposeless work, after all. Had she not bronzes, and porcelains, and bric-a-brac, and objets d’art in profusion in her Roman villa, her Parisian hotel, her great, grim palace in Estremadura.
“Not one of those things do I want—not one shall I look at twice. The money would have been better at the soldiers’ hospital,” she thought, while her eyes dwelt on a chess-table near her—a table on which the mimic hosts of Chasseurs and Arabs were ranged in opposite squadrons.
She took the White King in her hand and gazed at it with a certain interest.
“That man has been noble once,” she thought. “What a fate—what a cruel fate!”
It touched her to great pity; although proud with too intense a pride, her nature was exceedingly generous, and, when once moved, deeply compassionate. The unerring glance of a woman habituated to the first society of Europe had told her that the accent, the bearing, the tone, the features of this soldier, who only asked of life “oblivion,” were those of one originally of gentle blood; and the dignity and patience of his acceptance of the indignities which his present rank entailed on him had not escaped her any more than the delicate beauty of his face as she had seen it, weary, pale, and shadowed with pain, in the unconscious revelation of sleep.
“How bitter his life must be!” she mused. “When Philip comes, perhaps he will show some way to aid him. And yet—who can serve a man who only desires to be forgotten?”
Then, with a certain impatient sense of some absurd discrepancy, of some unseemly occupation, in her thus dwelling on the wishes and the burdens of a sous-officier of Light Cavalry, she laughed a little, and put the White Chief back once more in his place. Yet even as she set the king among his mimic forces, the very carvings themselves served to retain their artist in her memory.
There was about them an indescribable elegance, an exceeding grace and beauty, which spoke of a knowledge of art and of refinement of taste far beyond those of a mere military amateur in the one who had produced them.
“What could bring a man of that talent, with that address, into the ranks?” she mused. “Persons of good family, of once fine position, come here, they say, and live and die unrecognized under the Imperial flag. It is usually some dishonor that drives them out of their own worlds; it may be so with him. Yet he does not look like one whom shame has touched; he is proud still—prouder than he knows. More likely it is the old, old story—a high name and a narrow fortune—the ruin of thousands! He is French, I suppose; a French aristocrat who has played au roi depouille, most probably, and buried himself and his history forever beneath those two names that tell one nothing—Louis Victor. Well, it is no matter of mine. Very possibly he is a mere adventurer with a good manner. This army here is a pot-pourri, they say, of all the varied scoundrelisms of Europe!”
She left the chess-table and went onward to the dressing and bath and bed chambers, which opened in one suite from her boudoir, and resigned herself to the hands of her attendants for her dinner toilet.
The Moslem had said aright of her beauty; and now, as her splendid hair was unloosened and gathered up afresh with a crescent-shaped comb of gold that was not brighter than the tresses themselves, the brilliant, haughty, thoughtful face was of a truth, as he had said, the fairest that had ever come from the Frankish shores to the hot African sea-board. Many beside the old Moslem had thought it “the fairest that e’er the sun shone on,” and held one grave, lustrous glance of the blue imperial eyes above aught else on earth. Many had loved her—all without return. Yet, although only twenty years had passed over her proud head, the Princesse Corona d’Amague had been wedded and been widowed.
Wedded, with no other sentiment than that of a certain pity and a certain honor for the man whose noble Spanish name she took. Widowed, by a death that was the seal of her marriage sacrament, and left her his wife only in name and law.
The marriage had left no chain upon her; it had only made her mistress of wide wealth, of that villa on the Sicilian Sea, of that light, spacious palace-dwelling in Paris that bore her name, of that vast majestic old castle throned on brown Estremaduran crags, and looking down on mighty woods of cork and chestnut, and flashing streams of falling water hurling through the gorges. The death had left no regret upon her; it only gave her for a while a graver shadow over the brilliancy of her youth and of her beauty, and gave her for always—or for so long, at least, as she chose to use it—a plea for that indifference to men’s worship of her which their sex called heartlessness; which her own sex thought an ultra-refined coquetry; and which was, in real truth, neither the one nor the other, but simply the negligence of a woman very difficult to touch, and, as it had seemed, impossible to charm.
None knew quite aright the history of that marriage. Some were wont to whisper “ambition”; and, when that whisper came round to her, her splendid lips would curl with as splendid a scorn.
“Do they not know that scarce any marriage can mate us equally?” she would ask; for she came of a great Line that thought few royal branches on equality with it; and she cherished as things of strictest creed the legends that gave her race, with its amber hair and its eyes of sapphire blue, the blood of Arthur in their veins.
Of a surety it was not ambition that had allied her, on his death-bed, with Beltran Corona d’Amague; but what it was the world could never tell precisely. The world would not have believed it if it had heard the truth—the truth that it had been, in a different fashion, a gleam of something of the same compassion that now made her merciful to a common trooper of Africa which had wedded her to the dead Spanish Prince—compassion which, with many another rich and generous thing, lay beneath her coldness and her pride as the golden stamen lies folded within the white, virginal, chill cup of the lily.
She had never felt a touch of even passing preference to any one out of the many who had sought her high-born beauty; she was too proud to be easily moved to such selection, and she was far too habituated to homage to be wrought upon by it, ever so slightly. She was of a noble, sun-lit, gracious nature, she had been always happy, always obeyed, always caressed, always adored; it had rendered her immeasurably contemptuous of flattery; it had rendered her a little contemptuous of pain. She had never had aught to regret; it was not possible that she could realize what regret was.
Hence men called and found her very cold; yet those of her own kin whom she loved knew that the heart of a summer rose was not warmer, nor sweeter, nor richer than hers. And first among these was her brother—at once her guardian and her slave—who thought her perfect, and would no more have crossed her will than he would have set his foot on her beautiful, imperial head. Corona d’Amague had been his friend; the only one for whom he had ever sought to break her unvarying indifference to her lovers, but for whom even he had pleaded vainly until one autumn season, when they had stayed together at a great archducal castle in South Austria. In one of the forest-glades, awaiting the fanfare of the hunt, she rejected, for the third time, the passionate supplication of the superb noble who ranked with the D’Ossuna and the Medina-Sidonia. He rode from her in great bitterness, in grief that no way moved her—she was importuned with these entreaties to weariness. An hour after he was brought past her, wounded and senseless; he had saved her brother from imminent death at his own cost, and the tusks of the mighty Styrian boar had plunged through and through his frame, as they had met in the narrow woodland glade.
“He will be a cripple—a paralyzed cripple—for life!” said the one whose life had been saved by his devotion to her that night; and his lips shook a little under his golden beard as he spoke.
She looked at him; she loved him well, and no homage to herself could have moved her as this sacrifice for him had done.
“You think he will live?” she asked.
“They say it is sure. He may live on to old age. But how? My God! what a death in life! And all for my sake, in my stead!”
She was silent several moments; then she raised her face, a little paler than it had been, but with a passionless resolve set on it.
“Philip, we do not leave our debts unpaid. Go; tell him I will be his wife.”
“His wife—now! Venetia–”
“Go!” she said briefly. “Tell him what I say.”
“But what a sacrifice! In your beauty, your youth—”
“He did not count cost. Are we less generous? Go—tell him.”
He was told; and was repaid. Such a light of unutterable joy burned through the misty agony of his eyes as never, it seemed to those who saw, had beamed before in mortal eyes. He did not once hesitate at the acceptance of her self-surrender; he only pleaded that the marriage ceremony should pass between them that night.
There were notaries and many priests in the great ducal household; all was done as he desired. She consented without wavering; she had passed her word, she would not have withdrawn it if it had been a thousand times more bitter in its fulfillment. The honor of her house was dearer to her than any individual happiness. This man for them had lost peace, health, joy, strength, every hope of life; to dedicate her own life to him, as he had vainly prayed her when in the full glow and vigor of his manhood, was the only means by which their vast debt to him could be paid. To so pay it was the instant choice of her high code of honor, and of her generosity that would not be outrun. Moreover, she pitied him unspeakably, though her heart had no tenderness for him; she had dismissed him with cold disdain, and he had gone from her to save the only life she loved, and was stretched a stricken, broken, helpless wreck, with endless years of pain and weariness before him!
At midnight, in the great, dim magnificence of the state chamber where he lay, and with the low, soft chanting of the chapel choir from afar echoing through the incensed air, she bent her haughty head down over his couch, and the marriage benediction was spoken over them.
His voice was faint and broken, but it had the thrill of a passionate triumph in it. When the last words were uttered, he lay a while, exhausted, silent; only looking ever upward at her with his dark, dreamy eyes, in which the old love glanced so strangely through the blindness of pain. Then he smiled as the last echo of the choral melodies died softly on the silence.
“That is joy enough! Ah! have no fear. With the dawn you will be free once more. Did you think that I could have taken your sacrifice? I knew well, let them say as they would, that I should not live the night through. But, lest existence should linger to curse me, to chain you, I rent the linen bands off my wounds an hour ago. All their science will not put back the life now! My limbs are dead, and the cold steals up! Ah, love! Ah, love! You never thought how men can suffer! But have no grief for me. I am happy. Bend your head down, and lay your lips on mine once. You are my own!—death is sweeter than life!”
And before sunrise he died.
Some shadow from that fatal and tragic midnight marriage rested on her still. Though she was blameless, some vague remorse ever haunted her; though she had been so wholly guiltless of it, this death for her sake ever seemed in some sort of her bringing. Men thought her only colder, only prouder; but they erred. She was one of those women who, beneath the courtly negligence of a chill manner, are capable of infinite tenderness, infinite nobility, and infinite self-reproach.
A great French painter once, in Rome, looking on her from a distance, shaded his eyes with his hand, as if her beauty, like the sun dazzled him. “Exquisite—superb!” he muttered; and he was a man whose own ideals were so matchless that living women rarely could wring out his praise. “She is nearly perfect, your Princesse Corona!”
“Nearly!” cried a Roman sculptor. “What, in Heaven’s name, can she want?”
“Only one thing!”
“And that is–”
“To have loved.”
Wherewith he turned into the Greco.
He had found the one flaw—and it was still there. What he missed in her was still wanting.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE LITTLE LEOPARD OF FRANCE
“V’la ce que c’est la gloire—au grabat!”
The contemptuous sentence was crushed through Cigarette’s tight-pressed, bright-red lips, with an irony sadder than tears. She was sitting on the edge of a grabat, hard as wood, comfortless as a truss of straw, and looking down the long hospital room, with its endless rows of beds and its hot sun shining blindingly on its glaring, whitewashed walls.
She was well known and well loved there. When her little brilliant-hued figure fluttered, like some scarlet bird of Africa, down the dreary length of those chambers of misery, bloodless lips, close-clinched in torture, would stir with a smile, would move with a word of welcome. No tender-voiced, dove-eyed Sister of Orders of Mercy, gliding gray and soft, and like a living psalm of consolation, beside those couches of misery, bore with them the infinite, inexpressible charm that the Friend of the Flag brought to the sufferers. The Sisters were good, were gentle, were valued as they merited by the greatest blackguard prostrate there; but they never smiled, they never took the dying heart of a man back with one glance to the days of his childhood, they never gave a sweet, wild snatch of song like a bird’s on a spring-blossoming bough that thrilled through half-dead senses, with a thousand voices from a thousand buried hours. “But the Little One,” as said a gaunt, gray-bearded Zephyr once, where he lay with the death-chill stealing slowly up his jagged, torn frame—“the Little One—do you see—she is youth, she is life; she is all we have lost. That is her charm! The Sisters are good women, they are very good; but they only pity us. The Little One, she loves us. That is the difference; do you see?”
It was all the difference—a wide difference; she loved them all, with the warmth and fire of her young heart, for the sake of France and of their common Flag. And though she was but a wild, wayward, mischievous gamin,—a gamin all over, though in a girl’s form,—men would tell in camp and hospital, with great tears coursing down their brown, scarred cheeks, how her touch would lie softly as a snowflake on their heated foreheads; how her watch would be kept by them through long nights of torment; how her gifts of golden trinkets would be sold or pawned as soon as received to buy them ice or wine; and how in their delirium the sweet, fresh voice of the child of the regiment would soothe them, singing above their wretched beds some carol or chant of their own native province, which it always seemed she must know by magic; for, were it Basque or Breton, were it a sea-lay of Vendee or a mountain-song of the Orientales, were it a mere, ringing rhyme for the mules of Alsace, or a wild, bold romanesque from the country of Berri—Cigarette knew each and all, and never erred by any chance, but ever sung to every soldier the rhythm familiar from his infancy, the melody of his mother’s cradle-song and of his first love’s lips. And there had been times when those songs, suddenly breaking through the darkness of night, suddenly lulling the fiery anguish of wounds, had made the men who one hour before had been like mad dogs, like goaded tigers—men full of the lusts of slaughter and the lust of the senses, and chained powerless and blaspheming to a bed of agony—tremble and shudder at themselves, and turn their faces to the wall and weep like children, and fall asleep, at length, with wondering dreams of God.
“V’la ce que c’est la gloire—au grabat!” said Cigarette, now grinding her pretty teeth. She was in her most revolutionary and reckless mood, drumming the rataplan with her spurred heels, and sitting smoking on the corner of old Miou-Matou’s mattress. Miou-Matou, who had acquired that title among the joyeux for his scientific powers of making a tomcat into a stew so divine that you could not tell it from rabbit, being laid up with a ball in his hip, a spear-head between his shoulders, a rib or so broken, and one or two other little trifling casualties.
Miou-Matou, who looked very like an old grizzly bear, laughed in the depths of his great, hairy chest. “Dream of glory, and end on a grabat! Just so, just so. And yet one has pleasures—to sweep off an Arbico’s neck nice and clean—swish!” and he described a circle with his lean, brawny arm with as infinite a relish as a dilettante, grown blind, would listen thirstily to the description of an exquisite bit of Faience or Della Quercia work.
“Pleasures! My God! Infinite, endless misery!” murmured a man on her right hand. He was not thirty years of age; with a delicate, dark, beautiful head that might have passed as model to a painter for a St. John. He was dying fast of the most terrible form of pulmonary maladies.
Cigarette flashed her bright, falcon glance over him.
“Well! is it not misery that is glory?”
“We think that it is when we are children. God help me!” murmured the man who lay dying of lung-disease.
“Ouf! Then we think rightly! Glory! Is it the cross, the star, the baton? No!3 He who wins those runs his horse up on a hill, out of shot range, and watches through his glass how his troops surge up, wave on wave, in the great sea of blood. It is misery that is glory—the misery that toils with bleeding feet under burning suns without complaint; that lies half-dead through the long night with but one care—to keep the torn flag free from the conqueror’s touch; that bears the rain of blows in punishment, rather than break silence and buy release by betrayal of a comrade’s trust; that is beaten like the mule, and galled like the horse, and starved like the camel, and housed like the dog, and yet does the thing which is right, and the thing which is brave, despite all; that suffers, and endures, and pours out his blood like water to the thirsty sands, whose thirst is never stilled, and goes up in the morning sun to the combat, as though death were paradise that the Arbicos dream; knowing the while, that no paradise waits save the crash of the hoof through the throbbing brain, or the roll of the gun-carriage over the writhing limb. That is glory. The misery that is heroism because France needs it, because a soldier’s honor wills it. That is glory. It is here to-day in the hospital as it never is in the Cour des Princes, where the glittering host of the marshals gather!”
Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in her bright cheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there was in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world mistily calls genius.
There were men lying in that sick-chamber brutalized, crime-stained, ignorant as the bullocks of the plains, and, like them, reared and driven for the slaughter; yet there was not one among them to whom some ray of light failed to come from those words, through whom some thrill failed to pass as they heard them. Out yonder in the free air, in the barrack court, or on the plains, the Little One would rate them furiously, mock them mercilessly, rally them with the fist of a saber, if they were mutinous, and lash them with the most pitiless ironies if they were grumbling; but here, in the hospital, the Little One loved them, and they knew it, and that love gave a flute-like music to the passion of her voice.
Then she laughed, and drummed the rataplan again with her brass heel.
“All the same, one is not in paradise au grabat; eh, Pere Matou?” she said curtly. She was half impatient of her own momentary lapse into enthusiasm, and she knew the temper of her “children” as accurately as a bugler knows the notes of the reveille—knew that they loved to laugh even with the death-rattle in their throats, and with their hearts half breaking over a comrade’s corpse, would cry in burlesque mirth, “Ah, the good fellow! He’s swallowed his own cartouche!”
“Paradise!” growled Pere Matou. “Ouf! Who wants that? If one had a few bidons of brandy, now–”
“Brandy? Oh, ha! you are to be much more of aristocrats now than that!” cried Cigarette, with an immeasurable satire curling on her rosy piquant lips. “The Silver Pheasants have taken to patronize you. If I were you, I would not touch a glass, nor eat a fig; you will not, if you have the spirit of a rabbit. You! Fed like dogs with the leavings of her table—pardieu! That is not for soldiers of France!”
“What dost thou say?” growled Miou-Matou, peering up under his gray, shaggy brows.
“Only that a grande dame has sent you champagne. That is all. Sapristi! How easy it is to play the saint and Samaritan with two words to one’s maitre d’hotel, and a rouleau of gold that one never misses! The rich they can buy all things, you see, even heaven, so cheap!” With which withering satire Cigarette left Pere Matou in the conviction that he must be already dead and among the angels if the people began to talk of champagne to him; and flitting down between the long rows of beds with the old disabled veterans who tended them, skimmed her way, like a bird as she was, into another great chamber, filled, like the first, with suffering in all stages and at all years, from the boy-conscript, tossing in African fever, to the white-haired campaigner of a hundred wounds.
Cigarette was as caustic as a Voltaire this morning. Coming through the entrance of the hospital, she had casually heard that Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amague had made a gift of singular munificence and mercy to the invalid soldiers—a gift of wine, of fruit, of flowers, that would brighten their long, dreary hours for many weeks. Who Mme. la Princesse might be she knew nothing; but the title was enough; she was a silver pheasant—bah! And Cigarette hated the aristocrats—when they were of the sex feminine. “An aristocrat in adversity is an eagle,” she would say, “but an aristocrat in prosperity is a peacock.” Which was the reason why she flouted glittering young nobles with all the insolence imaginable, but took the part of “Marquise,” of “Bel-a-faire-peur,” and of such wanderers like them, who had buried their sixteen quarterings under the black shield of the Battalion of Africa. With a word here and a touch there,—tender, soft, and bright,—since, however ironic her mood, she never brought anything except sunshine to those who lay in such sore need of it, beholding the sun in the heavens only through the narrow chink of a hospital window; at last she reached the bed she came most specially to visit—a bed on which was stretched the emaciated form of a man once beautiful as a Greek dream of a god.
The dews of a great agony stood on his forehead; his teeth were tight clinched on lips white and parched; and his immense eyes, with the heavy circles round them, were fastened on vacancy with the yearning misery that gleams in the eyes of a Spanish bull when it is struck again and again by the matador, and yet cannot die.
She bent over him softly.
“Tiens, M. Leon! I have brought you some ice.”
His weary eyes turned on her gratefully; he sought to speak, but the effort brought the spasm on his lungs afresh; it shook him with horrible violence from head to foot, and the foam on his auburn beard was red with blood.
There was no one by to watch him; he was sure to die; a week sooner or later—what mattered it! He was useless as a soldier; good only to be thrown into a pit, with some quicklime to hasten destruction and do the work of the slower earthworms.
Cigarette said not a word, but she took out of some vine-leaves a cold, hard lump of ice, and held it to him; the delicious coolness and freshness in that parching, noontide heat stilled the convulsion; his eyes thanked her, though his lips could not; he lay panting, exhausted, but relieved; and she—thoughtfully for her—slid herself down on the floor, and began singing low and sweetly, as a fairy might sing on the raft of a water-lily leaf. She sung quadriales, to be sure, Beranger’s songs and odes of the camp; for she knew of no hymn but the “Marseillaise,” and her chants were all chants like the “Laus Veneris.” But the voice that gave them was pure as the voice of a thrush in the spring, and the cadence of its music was so silvery sweet that it soothed like a spell all the fever-racked brains, all the pain-tortured spirits.
“Ah, that is sweet,” murmured the dying man. “It is like the brooks—like the birds—like the winds in the leaves.”
He was but half conscious; but the lulling of that gliding voice brought him peace. And Cigarette sung on, only moving to reach him some fresh touch of ice, while time traveled on, and the first afternoon shadows crept across the bare floor. Every now and then, dimly through the openings of the windows, came a distant roll of drums, a burst of military music, an echo of the laughter of a crowd; and then her head went up eagerly, an impatient shade swept across her expressive face.
It was a fete-day in Algiers; there were flags and banners fluttering from the houses; there were Arab races and Arab maneuvers; there was a review of troops for some foreign general; there were all the mirth and the mischief that she loved, and that never went on without her; and she knew well enough that from mouth to mouth there was sure to be asking, “Mais ou done est Cigarette?” Cigarette, who was the Generalissima of Africa!
But still she never moved; though all her vivacious life was longing to be out and in their midst, on the back of a desert horse, on the head of a huge drum, perched on the iron support of a high-hung lantern, standing on a cannon while the Horse Artillery swept full gallop, firing down a volley of argot on the hot homage of a hundred lovers, drinking creamy liqueurs and filling her pockets with bonbons from handsome subalterns and aids-de-camp, doing as she had done ever since she could remember her first rataplan. But she never moved. She knew that in the general gala these sick-beds would be left more deserted and less soothed than ever. She knew, too, that it was for the sake of this man, lying dying here from the lunge of a Bedouin lance through his lungs, that the ivory wreaths and crosses and statuettes had been sold.
And Cigarette had done more than this ere now many a time for her “children.”
The day stole on; Leon Ramon lay very quiet; the ice for his chest and the song for his ear gave him that semi-oblivion, dreamy and comparatively painless, which was the only mercy which could come to him. All the chamber was unusually still; on three of the beds the sheet had been drawn over the face of the sleepers, who had sunk to a last sleep since the morning rose. The shadows lengthened, the hours followed one another; Cigarette sang on to herself with few pauses; whenever she did so pause to lay soaked linen on the soldier’s hot forehead, or to tend him gently in those paroxysms that wrenched the clotted blood from off his lungs, there was a light on her face that did not come from the golden heat of the African sun.
Such a light those who know well the Children of France may have seen, in battle or in insurrection, grow beautiful upon the young face of a conscript or a boy-insurgent as he lifted a dying comrade, or pushed to the front to be slain in another’s stead; the face that a moment before had been keen for the slaughter as the eyes of a kite, and recklessly gay as the saucy refrain the lips caroled.