She was a dilettante in handsome men; she nodded her head now to where, some yards off, at another of the camp-fires, stood, with some officers of the regiment, one of the tourists; a very tall, very fair man, with a gallant bearing, and a tawny beard that glittered to gold in the light of the flames.
Cecil’s glance followed Cigarette’s. With a great cry he sprang to his feet and stood entranced, gazing at the stranger. She saw the startled amaze, the longing love, the agony of recognition, in his eyes; she saw the impulse in him to spring forward, and the shuddering effort with which the impulse was controlled. He turned to her almost fiercely.
“He must not see me! Keep him away—away, for God’s sake!”
He could not leave his men; he was fettered there where his squadron was camped. He went as far as he could from the flame-light into the shadow, and thrust himself among the tethered horses. Cigarette asked nothing; comprehended at a glance with all the tact of her nation; and sauntered forward to meet the officers of the regiment as they came up to the picket-fire with the yellow-haired English stranger. She knew how charming a picture there, with her hands lightly resting on her hips, and her bright face danced on by the ruddy fire-glow, she made; she knew she could hold thus the attention of a whole brigade. The eyes of the stranger lighted on her, and his voice laughed in mellow music to his companions and ciceroni.
“Your intendance is perfect; your ambulance is perfect; your camp-cookery is perfect, messieurs; and here you have even perfect beauty, too! Truly, campaigning must be pleasant work in Algeria!”
Then he turned to her with compliments frank and gay, and full of a debonair grace that made her doubt he could be of Albion.
Retort was always ready to her; and she kept the circle of officers in full laughter round the fire with a shower of repartee that would have made her fortune on the stage. And every now and then her glance wandered to the shadow where the horses were tethered.
Bah! why was she always doing him service? She could not have told.
Still she went on—and did it.
It was a fantastic picture by the bright scarlet light of the camp-fire, with the Little One in her full glory of mirth and mischief, and her circle of officers laughing on her with admiring eyes; nearest her the towering height of the English stranger, with the gleam of the flame in the waves of his leonine beard.
From the darkness, where the scores of gray horses were tethered, Cecil’s eyes were riveted on it. There were none near to see him; had there been, they would have seen an agony in his eyes that no physical misery, no torture of the battlefield, had brought there. His face was bloodless, and his gaze strained through the gleam on to the fire-lit group with a passionate intensity of yearning—he was well used to pain, well used to self-control, well used to self-restraint, but for the first time in his exile the bitterness of a struggle almost vanquished him. All the old love of his youth went out to this man, so near to him, yet so hopelessly severed from him; looking on the face of his friend, a violence of longing shook him. “O God, if I were dead!” he thought, “they might know then–”
He would have died gladly to have had that familiar hand once more touch his; those familiar eyes once more look on him with the generous, tender trust of old.
His brain reeled, his thoughts grew blind, as he stood there among his horses, with the stir and tumult of the bivouac about him. There was nothing simpler, nothing less strange, than that an English soldier should visit the Franco-Arab camp; but to him it seemed like a resurrection of the dead.
Whether it was a brief moment, or an hour through, that the circle stood about the great, black caldron that was swinging above the flames, he could not have told; to him it was an eternity. The echo of the mellow, ringing tones that he knew so well came to him from the distance, till his heart seemed breaking with but one forbidden longing—to look once more in those brave eyes that made every coward and liar quail, and say only, “I was guiltless.”
It is bitter to know those whom we love dead; but it is more bitter to be as dead to those who, once having loved us, have sunk our memory deep beneath oblivion that is not the oblivion of the grave.
A while, and the group broke up and was scattered; the English traveler throwing gold pieces by the score among the waiting troopers. “A bientot!” they called to Cigarette, who nodded farewell to them with a cigar in her mouth, and busied herself pouring some brandy into the old copper caldron in which some black coffee and muddy water, three parts sand, was boiling. A few moments later, and they were out of sight among the confusion, the crowds, and the flickering shadows of the camp. When they were quite gone, she came softly to him; she could not see him well in the gloom, but she touched his hand.
“Dieu! how cold you are! He is gone.”
He could not answer her to thank her, but he crushed in his the little, warm, brown palm. She felt a shiver shake his limbs.
“Is he your enemy?” she asked.
“No.”
“What, then?”
“The man I love best on earth.”
“Ah!” She had felt a surprise she had not spoke that he should flee thus from any foe. “He thinks you dead, then?”
“Yes.”
“And must always think so?”
“Yes.” He held her hand still, and his own wrung it hard—the grasp of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman. “Child, you are bold, generous, pitiful; for God’s sake, get me sent out of this camp to-night. I am powerless.”
There was that in the accent which struck his listener to the heart. He was powerless, fettered hand and foot as though he were a prisoner; a night’s absence, and he would be shot as a deserter. He had grown accustomed to this rendering up of all his life to the rules of others; but now and then the galled spirit chafed, the netted stag strained at the bonds.
“I will try,” said Cigarette simply, without any of her audacity or of her vanity in the answer. “Go you to the fire; you are cold.”
“Are you sure he will not return?”
“Not he. They are gone to eat and drink; I go with them. What is it you fear?”
“My own weakness.”
She was silent. She could just watch his features by the dim light, and she saw his mouth quiver under the fullness of his beard. He felt that if he looked again on the face of the man he loved he might be broken into self-pity, and unloose his silence, and shatter all the work of so many years. He had been strong where men of harder fiber and less ductile temper might have been feeble; but he never thought that he had been so; he only thought that he had acted on impulse, and had remained true to his act through the mere instinct of honor—an instinct inborn in his blood and his Order—an instinct natural and unconscious with him as the instinct by which he drove his breath.
“You are a fine soldier,” said Cigarette musingly; “such men are not weak.”
“Why? We are only strong as tigers are strong—just the strength of the talon and fang. I do not know. I was weak as water once; I may be again, if—if–”
He scarcely knew that he was speaking aloud; he had forgotten her! His whole heart seemed burned as with fire by the memory of that one face so familiar, so well loved, yet from which he must shrink as though some cowardly sin were between them. The wretchedness on him seemed more than he could bear; to know that this man was so near that the sound of his voice raised could summon him, yet that he must remain as dead to him—remain as one dead after a craven and treacherous guilt.
He turned suddenly, almost violently, upon Cigarette.
“You have surprised my folly from me; you know my secret so far; but you are too brave to betray me, you are too generous to tell of this? I can trust you to be silent?”
Her face flushed scarlet with astonished anger; her little, childlike form grew instinct with haughty and fiery dignity.
“Monsieur, that question from one soldier of France to another is insult. We are not dastards!”
There was a certain grave reproach that mingled with the indignant scorn of the answer, and showed that her own heart was wounded by the doubt, as well as her military pride by the aspersion. Even amid the conflict of pain at war in him he felt that, and hastened to soothe it.
“Forgive me, my child; I should not have wronged you with the question. It is needless, I know. Men can trust you to the death, they say.”
“To the death—yes.”
The answer was thoughtful, dreamy, almost sad, for Cigarette. His thoughts were too far from her in their tumult of awakened memories to note the tone as he went rapidly on:
“You have ingenuity, compassion, tact; you have power here, too, in your way. For the love of Heaven get me sent out on some duty before dawn! There is Biribi’s murder to be avenged—would they give the errand to me?”
She thought a moment.
“We will see,” she said curtly. “I think I can do it. But go back, or you will be missed. I will come to you soon.”
She left him, then, rapidly; drawing her hand quickly out of the clasp of his.
Cigarette felt her heart aching to its core for the sorrow of this man who was nothing to her. He did not know what she had done for him in his suffering and delirium; he did not know how she had watched him all that night through, when she was weary, and bruised, and thirsting for sleep; he did not know; he held her hand as one comrade another’s, and never looked to see if her eyes were blue or were black, were laughing or tear-laden. And yet she felt pain in his pain; she was always giving her life to his service. Many besides the little Friend of the Flag beat back as folly the noblest and purest thing in them.
Cecil mechanically returned to the fire at which the men of his tribe were cooking their welcome supper, and sat down near them; rejecting, with a gesture, the most savory portion which, with their customary love and care for him, they were careful to select and bring to him. There had never been a time when they had found him fail to prefer them to himself, or fail to do them kindly service, if of such he had a chance; and they returned it with all that rough and silent attachment that can be so strong and so stanch in lives that may be black with crime or red with slaughter.
He sat like a man in a dream, while the loosened tongues of the men ran noisily on a hundred themes as they chaffed each other, exchanged a fire of bivouac jokes more racy than decorous, and gave themselves to the enjoyment of their rude meal, that had to them that savor which long hunger alone can give. Their voices came dull on his ear; the ruddy warmth of the fire was obscured to his sight; the din, the laughter, the stir all over the great camp, at the hour of dinner were lost on him. He was insensible to everything except the innumerable memories that thronged upon him, and the aching longing that filled his heart with the sight of the friend of his youth.
“He said once that he would take my hand before all the world always, come what would,” he thought. “Would he take it now, I wonder? Yes; he never believed against me.”
And, as he thought, the same anguish of desire that had before smitten him to stand once more guiltless in the presence of men, and once more bear, untarnished, the name of his race and the honor of his fathers, shook him now as strong winds shake a tree that yet is fast rooted at its base, though it sway a while beneath the storm.
“How weak I am!” he thought bitterly. “What does it matter? Life is so short, one is a coward indeed to fret over it. I cannot undo what I did. I cannot, if I could. To betray him now! God! not for a kingdom, if I had the chance! Besides, she may live still; and, even were she dead, to tarnish her name to clear my own would be a scoundrel’s baseness—baseness that would fail as it merited; for who could be brought to believe me now?”
The thoughts unformed drifted through his mind, half dulled, half sharpened by the deadly pain, and the rush of old brotherly love that had arisen in him as he had seen the face of his friend beside the watch-fire of the French bivouac. It was hard; it was cruelly hard; he had, after a long and severe conflict, brought himself into contentment with his lot, and taught himself oblivion of the past, and interest in the present, by active duties and firm resolve; he had vanquished all the habits, controlled most of the weaknesses, and banished nearly all the frailties and indulgences of his temperament in the long ordeal of African warfare. It was cruelly hard that now when he had obtained serenity, and more than half attained forgetfulness, these two—her face and his—must come before him; one to recall the past, the other to embitter the future!
As he sat with his head bent down and his forehead leaning on his arm, while the hard biscuit that served for a plate stood unnoticed beside him, with the food that the soldiers had placed on it, he did not hear Cigarette’s step till she touched him on the arm. Then he looked up; her eyes were looking on him with a tender, earnest pity.
“Hark! I have done it,” she said gently. “But it will be an errand very close to death that you must go on—”
He raised himself erect, eagerly.
“No matter that! Ah, mademoiselle, how I thank you!”
“Chut! I am no Paris demoiselle!” said Cigarette, with a dash of her old acrimony. “Ceremony in a camp—pouf! You must have been a court chamberlain once, weren’t you? Well, I have done it. Your officers were talking yonder of a delicate business; they were uncertain who best to employ. I put in my speech—it was dead against military etiquette, but I did it. I said to M. le General: ‘You want the best rider, the most silent tongue, and the surest steel in the squadrons? Take Bel-a-faire-peur, then.’ ‘Who is that?’ asked the general; he would have sent out of camp anybody but Cigarette for the interruption. ‘Mon General,’ said I, ‘the Arabs asked that, too, the other day, at Zaraila.’ ‘What!’ he cried, ‘the man Victor—who held the ground with his Chasseurs? I know—a fine soldier. M. le Colonel, shall we send him?’ The Black Hawk had scowled thunder on you; he hates you more still since that affair of Zaraila, especially because the general has reported your conduct with such praise that they cannot help but promote you. Well, he had looked thunder, but now he laughed. ‘Yes, mon General,’ he answered him, ‘take him, if you like. It is fifty to one whoever goes on that business will not come back alive, and you will rid me of the most insolent fine gentleman in my squadrons.’ The general hardly heard him; he was deep in thought; but he asked a good deal about you from the Hawk, and Chateauroy spoke for your fitness for the errand they are going to send you on, very truthfully, for a wonder. I don’t know why; but he wants you to be sent, I think; most likely that you may be cut to pieces. And so they will send for you in a minute. I have done it as you wished.”
There was something of her old brusquerie and recklessness in the closing sentences; but it had not her customary debonair lightness. She knew too well that the chances were as a hundred to one that he would never return alive from this service on which he had entreated to be dispatched. Cecil grasped both her hands in his with warm gratitude, that was still, like the touch of his hands, the gratitude of comrade to comrade, not of man to woman.
“God bless you, Cigarette! You are a true friend, my child. You have done me immeasurable benefits—”
“Oh! I am a true friend,” said the Little One, somewhat pettishly. She would have preferred another epithet. “If a man wants to get shot as a very great favor, I always let him pleasure himself. Give a man his own way, if you wish to be kind to him. You are children, all of you, nothing but children, and if the toy that pleases you best is death, why—you must have it. Nothing else would content you. I know you. You always want what flies from you, and are tired of what lies to your hand. That is always a man.”
“And a woman, too, is it not?”
Cigarette shrugged her shoulders.
“Oh, I dare say! We love what is new—what is strange. We are humming-tops; we will only spin when we are fresh wound up with a string to our liking.”
“Make an exception of yourself, my child. You are always ready to do a good action, and never tire of that. From my heart I thank you. I wish to Heaven I could prove it better.”
She drew her hands away from him.
“A great thing I have done, certainly! Got you permission to go and throw a cartel at old King Death; that is all! There! That is your summons.”
The orderly approached, and brought the bidding of the general in command of the Cavalry for Cecil to render himself at once to his presence. These things brook no second’s delay in obedience; he went with a quick adieu to Cigarette, and the little Friend of the Flag was left in his vacant place beside the fire.
And there was a pang at her heart.
“Ten to one he goes to his death,” she thought. But Cigarette, little mischief-maker though she was, could reach very high in one thing; she could reach a love that was unselfish, and one that was heroic.
A few moments, and Cecil returned.
“Rake,” he said rapidly, in the French he habitually used, “saddle my horse and your own. I am allowed to choose one of you to accompany me.”
Rake, in paradise, and the envied of every man in the squadron, turned to his work—with him a task of scarce more than a second; and Cecil approached his little Friend of the Flag.
“My child, I cannot attempt to thank you. But for you, I should have been tempted to send my lance through my own heart.”
“Keep its lunge for the Arbicos, mon ami,” said Cigarette brusquely—the more brusquely because that new and bitter pang was on her. “As for me, I want no thanks.”
“No; you are too generous. But not the less do I wish I could render them more worthily than by words. If I live, I will try; if not, keep this in my memory. It is the only thing I have.”
He put into her hand the ring she had seen in the little bon-bon box; a ring of his mother’s that he had saved when he had parted with all else, and had put off his hand and into the box of Petite Reine’s gift the day he entered the Algerian army.
Cigarette flushed scarlet with passions he could not understand, and she could not have disentangled.
“The ring of your mistress! Not for me, if I know it! Do you think I want to be paid?”
“The ring was my mother’s,” he answered her simply. “And I offer it only as souvenir.”
She lost all her color and all her fiery wrath; his grave and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled and rebuked her; but she raised the ring off the ground where she had flung it, and placed it back in his hand.
“If so, still less should you part with it. Keep it; it will bring you happiness one day. As for me, I have done nothing!”
“You have done what I value the more for that noble disclaimer. May I thank you thus, Little One?”
He stooped and kissed her; a kiss that the lips of a man will always give to the bright, youthful lips of a women, but a kiss, as she knew well, without passion, even without tenderness in it.
With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and a refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested herself from him, her face burning, her heart panting, and plunged away from him into the depth of the shadow; and he never sought to follow her, but threw himself into saddle as his gray was brought up. Another instant, and, armed to the teeth, he rode out of the camp into the darkness of the silent, melancholy, lonely Arab night.
CHAPTER XXX
SEUL AU MONDE
The errand on which he went was one, as he was well aware, from which it were a thousand chances to one that he ever issued alive.
It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation with dispatches for the chief in command there, and to do this he had to pass through a fiercely hostile region, occupied by Arabs with whom no sort of peace had ever been made, the most savage as well as the most predatory of the wandering tribes. His knowledge of their tongue, and his friendship with some men of their nation, would avail him nothing here; for their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was said that all prisoners who had fallen into their hands had been put to death with merciless barbarities. This might be true or not true; wild tales were common among Algerian campaigners; whichever it were, he thought little of it as he rode out on to the lonely plains. Every kind of hazardous adventure and every variety of peril had been familiar with him in the African life; and now there were thoughts and memories on him which deadened every recollection of merely physical risk.
“We must ride as hard and as fast as we can, and as silently,” were the only words he exchanged with Rake, as he loosened his gray to a gallop.
“All right, sir,” answered the trooper, whose warm blood was dancing, and whose blue eyes were alive like fire with delight. That he had been absent on a far-away foraging raid on the day of Zaraila had been nothing short of agony to Rake, and the choice made of him for this duty was to him a gift of paradise. He loved fighting for fighting’s sake; and to be beside Cecil was the greatest happiness life held for him.
They had two hundred miles to traverse, and had received only the command he had passed to Rake, to ride “hard, fast, and silently.” To the hero of Zaraila the general had felt too much soldierly sympathy to add the superfluous injunction to do his uttermost to carry safely and successfully to their destination the papers that were placed in his care. He knew well that the errand would be done, or the Chasseur would be dead.
It was just nightfall; the after-glow had faded only a few moments before. Giving their horses, which they were to change once, ten hours for the distance, and two for bait and for rest, he reckoned that they would reach the camp before the noon of the coming day, as the beasts, fresh and fast in the camp, flew like greyhounds beneath them.
Another night ride that they had ridden together came to the minds of both; but they spoke not a word as they swept on, their sabers shaken loose in their sheaths, their lances well gripped, and the pistols with which they had been supplied sprung in their belts, ready for instant action if a call should come for it. Every rood of the way was as full of unseen danger as if laid over mines. They might pass in safety; they might any moment be cut down by ten score against two. From every hanging scarp of rugged rock a storm of musket-balls might pour; from every screen of wild-fig foliage a shower of lances might whistle through the air; from every darkling grove of fir trees an Arab band might spring and swoop on them; but the knowledge scarcely recurred to the one save to make him shake his sword more loose for quick disengagement, and only made the sunny blue eyes of the other sparkle with a vivid and longing zest.
The night grew very chill as it wore on; the north wind rose, rushing against them with a force and icy touch that seemed to freeze their bones to the marrow after the heat of the day and the sun that had scorched them so long. There was no regular road; they went across the country, their way sometimes leading over level land, over which they swept like lightning, great plains succeeding one another with wearisome monotony; sometimes on the contrary, lying through ravines, and defiles, and gloomy woods, and broken, hilly spaces, where rent, bare rocks were thrown on one another in gigantic confusion, and the fantastic shapes of the wild fig and the dwarf palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the darkness. For there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by the storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky; and the only sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the shriek of the night bird, and now and then the sound of shallow water-courses, where the parched beds of hidden brooks had been filled by the autumnal rain.
The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, and the horses lay well and warmly to their work. They halted to rest and bait the beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered from the blasts of the bise, and green with short, sweet grass, sprung up afresh after the summer drought.
“Do you ever think of him, sir?” said Rake softly, with a lingering love in his voice, as he stroked the grays and tethered them.
“Of whom?”
“Of the King, sir. If he’s alive, he’s getting a rare old horse now.”
“Think of him! I wish I did not, Rake.”
“Wouldn’t you like to see him agen, sir?”
“What folly to ask! You know—”
“Yes, sir, I know,” said Rake slowly. “And I know—leastways I picked it out of a old paper—that your elder brother died, sir, like the old lord, and Mr. Berk’s got the title.”
Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say this thing which he had learned, and which he could not tell whether or no Cecil knew likewise. His eyes looked with straining eagerness through the gloom into his master’s; he was uncertain how his words would be taken. To his bitter disappointment, Cecil’s face showed no change, no wonder.
“I have heard that,” he said calmly—as calmly as though the news had no bearing on his fortunes, but was some stranger’s history.
“Well, sir, but he ain’t the lord!” pleaded Rake passionately. “He won’t never be while you’re living, sir!”
“Oh, yes, he is! I am dead, you know.”
“But he won’t, sir!” reiterated Rake. “You’re Lord Royallieu if ever there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever there will be one.”
“You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can claim none.”
The man looked very wistfully at him; all these years through he had never learned why his master was thus “dead” in Africa, and he had too loyal a love and faith ever to ask, or ever to doubt but that Cecil was the wronged and not the wrong-doer.
“You ain’t a outlaw, sir,” he muttered. “You could take the title, if you would.”
“Oh, no! I left England under a criminal charge. I should have to disprove that before I could inherit.”
Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. “You could disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you chose.”
“No; or I should not have come here. Let us leave the subject. It was settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royallieu. I would not disturb him, if I had the power, and I have not it. Look, the horses are taking well to their feed.”
Rake asked him no more. He had never had a harsh word from Cecil in their lives; but he knew him too well, for all that, to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put aside. But his heart ached sorely for his master; he would so gladly have seen “the king among his own again,” and would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a Cavalier strove for the White Rose; and he sat in silence, perplexed and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, dim, desolate African landscape stretching before him, with here and there a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept the clouds apart. His volatile speech was chilled, and his buoyant spirits were checked. That Cecil was justly outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason to believe for one instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to wrench up the great stones above him from their base as seek to change the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant as a reed and careless as a child.
They were before long in saddle again and off, the country growing wilder at each stride the horses took.
“It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,” said Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle. “They have come northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later. If they cut me down, don’t wait; but slash my pouch loose and ride off with it.”
“All right, sir,” said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself, “Leave you alone with them demons? Damn me if I will!”
And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds.
Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the champagnes.
Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety, like a kitten’s play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and one who might never return.
It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear—she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him—a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!
She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he—he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known—he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.