There was a colder and more utterly amazed hauteur in the interrogation than had come into her voice throughout the interview, yet on her fair face a faint warmth rose.

The words were out, and Cigarette was reckless what she said; almost unconscious, indeed, in the violence of the many emotions in her.

“The man who carves the toys you give your dog to break!” she answered bitterly. “Dieu de Dieu! he loves you. When he was down with his wounds after Zaraila, he said so; but he never knew what he said, and he never knew that I heard him. You are like the women of his old world; though through you he got treated like a dog, he loves you!”

“Of whom do you venture to speak?”

The cold, calm dignity of the question, whose very tone was a rebuke, came strangely after the violent audacity of Cigarette’s speech.

“Sacre bleu! Of him, I tell you, who was made to bring his wares to you like a hawker. And you think it insult, I will warrant!—insult for a soldier who has nothing but his courage, and his endurance, and his heroism under suffering to ennoble him, to dare to love Mme. la Princesse Corona! I think otherwise. I think that Mme. la Princesse Corona never had a love of so much honor, though she has had princes and nobles and all the men of her rank, no doubt, at her feet, through that beauty that is like a spell!”

Hurried headlong by her own vehemence, and her own hatred for her rival, which drove her to magnify the worth of the passion of which she was so jealous, that she might lessen, if she could, the pride of her on whom it was lavished, she never paused to care what she said, or heed what its consequences might become. She felt incensed, amazed, irritated, to see no trace of any emotion come on her hearer’s face; the hot, impetuous, expansive, untrained nature underrated the power for self-command of the Order she so blindly hated.

“You speak idly and at random, like the child you are,” the grande dame answered her with chill, contemptuous rebuke. “I do not imagine that the person you allude to made you his confidante in such a matter?”

“He!” retorted Cigarette. “He belongs to your class, Milady. He is as silent as the grave. You might kill him, and he would never show it hurt. I only know what he muttered in his fever.”

“When you attended him?”

“Not I!” cried Cigarette, who saw for the first time that she was betraying herself. “He lay in the scullion’s tent where I was; that was all; and he was delirious with the shot-wounds. Men often are—”

“Wait! Hear me a little while, before you rush on in this headlong and foolish speech,” interrupted her auditor, who had in a moment’s rapid thought decided on her course with this strange, wayward nature. “You err in the construction you have placed on the words, whatever they were, which you heard. The gentleman—he is a gentleman—whom you speak of bears me no love. We are almost strangers. But by a strange chain of circumstances he is connected with my family; he once had great friendship with my brother; for reasons that I do not know, but which are imperative with him, he desires to keep his identity unsuspected by everyone; an accident alone revealed it to me, and I have promised him not to divulge it. You understand?”

Cigarette gave an affirmative gesture. Her eyes were fastened suddenly, yet with a deep, bright glow in them, upon her companion; she was beginning to see her way through his secret—a secret she was too intrinsically loyal even now to dream of betraying.

“You spoke very nobly for him to-day. You have the fealty of one brave character to another, I am sure!” pursued Venetia Corona, purposely avoiding all hints of any warmer feeling on her listener’s part, since she saw how tenacious the girl was of any confession of it. “You would do him service if you could, I fancy. Am I right?”

“Oh, yes!” answered Cigarette, with an over-assumption of carelessness. “He is bon zig; we always help each other. Besides, he is very good to my men. What is it you want of me?”

“To preserve secrecy on what I have told you for his sake; and to give him a message from me.”

Cigarette laughed scornfully; she was furious with herself for standing obediently like a chidden child to hear this patrician’s bidding, and to do her will. And yet, try how she would, she could not shake off the spell under which those grave, sweet, lustrous eyes of command held her.

“Pardieu, Milady! Do you think I babble like any young drunk with his first measure of wine? As for your message, you had better let him come and hear what you have to say; I cannot promise to remember it!”

“Your answer is reckless; I want a serious one. You spoke like a brave and a just friend to him to-day; are you willing to act as such to-night? You have come here strangely, rudely, without pretext or apology; but I think better of you than you would allow me to do, if I judged only from the surface. I believe that you have loyalty, as I know that you have courage.”

Cigarette set her teeth hard.

“What of that?”

“This of it. That one who has them will never cherish malice unjustifiably, or fail to fulfill a trust.”

Cigarette’s clear, brown skin grew very red.

“That is true,” she muttered reluctantly. Her better nature was growing uppermost, though she strove hard to keep the evil one predominant.

“Then you will cease to feel hatred toward me for so senseless a reason as that I belong to an aristocracy that offends you; and you will remain silent on what I tell you concerning the one whom you know as Louis Victor?”

Cigarette nodded assent; the sullen fire-glow still burned in her eyes, but she succumbed to the resistless influence which the serenity, the patience, and the dignity of this woman had over her. She was studying Venetia Corona all this while with the keen, rapid perceptions of envy and of jealousy; studying her features, her form, her dress, her attitude, all the many various and intangible marks of birth and breeding which were so new to her, and which made her rival seem so strange, so dazzling, so marvelous a sorceress to her; and all the while the sense of her own inferiority, her own worthlessness, her own boldness, her own debasement was growing upon her, eating, sharply into the metal of her vanity and her pride, humiliating her unbearably, yet making her heart ache with a sad, pathetic pity for herself.

“He is of your Order, then?” she asked abruptly.

“He was—yes.”

“Oh, ha!” cried Cigarette, with her old irony. “Then he must be always, mustn’t he? You think too much of your blue blood, you patricians, to fancy it can lose its royalty, whether it run under a King’s purple or a Roumi’s canvas shirt. Blood tells, they say! Well, perhaps it does. Some say my father was a Prince of France—maybe! So, he is of your Order? Bah! I knew that the first day I saw his hands. Do you want me to tell you why he lives among us, buried like this?”

“Not if you violate any confidence to do so.”

“Pardieu! He makes no confidence, I promise you. Not ten words will Monsieur say, if he can help it, about anything. He is as silent as a lama. But we learn things without being told in camp; and I know well enough he is here to save someone else, in someone’s place; it is a sacrifice, look you, that nails him down to this martyrdom.”

Her auditor was silent; she thought as the vivandiere thought, but the pride in her, the natural reticence and reserve of her class, made her shrink from discussing the history of one whom she knew—shrink from having any argument on his past or future with a saucy, rough, fiery young camp-follower, who had broken thus unceremoniously on her privacy. Yet she needed greatly to be able to trust Cigarette; the child was the only means through which she could send him a warning that must be sent; and there were a bravery and a truth in her which attracted the “aristocrat,” to whom she was so singular and novel a rarity as though she were some young savage of desert western isles.

“Look you, Milady,” said Cigarette, half sullenly, half passionately, for the words were wrenched out of her generosity, and choked her in their utterance, “that man suffers; his life here is a hell upon earth—I don’t mean for the danger, he is bon soldat; but for the indignity, the subordination, the license, the brutality, the tyranny. He is as if he were chained to the galleys. He never says anything. Oh, no! he is of your kind you know! But he suffers. Mort de Dieu! he suffers. Now, if you be his friend, can you do nothing for him? Can you ransom him in no way? Can you go away out of Africa and leave him in this living death to get killed and thrust into the sand, like his comrade the other day?”

Her hearer did not answer; the words made her heart ache; they cut her to the soul. It was not for the first time that the awful desolation of his future had been present before her; but it was the first time that the fate to which she would pass away and leave him had been so directly in words before her. Cigarette, obeying the generous impulses of her better nature, and abandoning self with the same reckless impetuosity with which a moment before she would, if she could, have sacrificed her rival, saw the advantage gained, and pursued it with rapid skill. She was pleading against herself; no matter. In that instant she was capable of crucifying herself, and only remembering mercy to the absent.

“I have heard,” she went on vehemently, for the utterance to which she forced herself was very cruel to her, “that you of the Noblesse are stanch as steel to your own people. It is the best virtue that you have. Well, he is of your people. Will you go away in your negligent indifference, and leave him to eat his heart out in bitterness and misery? He was your brother’s friend; he was known to you in his early time; you said so. And are you cold enough and cruel enough, Milady, not to make one effort to redeem him out of bondage?—to go back to your palaces, and your pleasures, and your luxuries, and your flatteries, and be happy, while this man is left on bearing his yoke here?—and it is a yoke that galls, that kills!—bearing it until, in some day of desperation, a naked blade cuts its way to his heart, and makes its pulse cease forever? If you do, you patricians are worse still than I thought you!”

Venetia heard her without interruption; a great sadness came over her face as the vivid phrases followed each other. She was too absorbed in the subject of them to heed the challenge and the insolence of their manner. She knew that the Little One who spoke them loved him, though so tenacious to conceal her love; and she was touched, not less by the magnanimity which, for his sake, sought to release him from the African service, than by the hopelessness of his coming years as thus prefigured before her.

“Your reproaches are unneeded,” she replied, slowly and wearily. “I could not abandon one who was once the friend of my family to such a fate as you picture without very great pain. But I do not see how to alter this fate, as you think I could do with so much ease. I am not in its secret; I do not know the reason of its seeming suicide; I have no more connection with its intricacies than you have. This gentleman has chosen his own path; it is not for me to change his choice or spy into his motives.”

Cigarette’s flashing, searching eyes bent all their brown light on her.

“Mme. Corona, you are courageous; to those who are so, all things are possible.”

“A great fallacy! You must have seen many courageous men vanquished. But what would you imply by it?”

“That you can help this man, if you will.”

“Would that I could; but I can discern no means—”

“Make them.”

Even in that moment her listener smiled involuntarily at the curt, imperious tones, decisive as Napoleon’s “Partons!” before the Passage of the Alps.

“Be certain, if I can, I will. Meantime, there is one pressing danger of which you must be my medium to warn him. He and my brother must not meet. Tell him that the latter, knowing him only as Louis Victor, and interested in the incidents of his military career, will seek him out early to-morrow morning before we quit the camp. I must leave it to him to avoid the meeting as best he may be able.”

Cigarette smiled grimly.

“You do not know much of the camp. Victor is only a bas-officier; if his officers call him up, he must come, or be thrashed like a slave for contumacy. He has no will of his own.”

Venetia gave an irrepressible gesture of pain.

“True; I forgot. Well, go and send him to me. My brother must be taken into his confidence, whatever that confidence reveals. I will tell him so. Go and send him to me; it is the last chance.”

Cigarette gave no movement of assent; all the jealous rage in her flared up afresh to stifle the noble and unselfish instincts under which she had been led during the later moments. A coarse and impudent scoff rose to her tongue, but it remained unuttered; she could not speak it under that glance, which held the evil in her in subjection, and compelled her reluctant reverence against her will.

“Tell him to come here to me,” repeated Venetia, with the calm decision of one to whom any possibility of false interpretation of her motives never occurred, and who was habituated to the free action that accompanied an unassailable rank. “My brother must know what I know. I shall be alone, and he can make his way hither, without doubt, unobserved. Go and say this to him. You are his loyal little friend and comrade.”

“If I be, I do not see why I am to turn your lackey, Madame,” said Cigarette bitterly. “If you want him, you can send for him by other messengers!”

Venetia Corona looked at her steadfastly, with a certain contempt in the look.

“Then your pleading for him was all insincere? Let the matter drop, and be good enough to leave my presence, which, you will remember, you entered unsummoned and undesired.”

The undeviating gentleness of the tone made the rebuke cut deeper, as her first rebuke had cut, than any sterner censure or more peremptory dismissal could have done. Cigarette stood irresolute, ashamed, filled with rage, torn by contrition, impatient, wounded, swayed by jealous rage and by the purer impulses she strove to stifle.

The Cross she had tossed down caught her sight as it glittered on the carpet strewn over the hard earth; she stooped and raised it; the action sufficed to turn the tide with her impressionable, ardent, capricious nature; she would not disgrace that.

“I will go,” she muttered in her throat; “and you—you—O God! no wonder men love you when even I cannot hate you!”

Almost ere the words were uttered she had dashed aside the hangings before the tent entrance, and had darted out into the night air. Venetia Corona gazed after the swiftly flying figure as it passed over the starlit ground, lost in amazement, in pity, and in regret; wondering afresh if she had only dreamed of this strange interview in the Algerian camp, which seemed to have come and gone with the blinding rapidity of lightning.

“A little tigress!” she thought; “and yet with infinite nobility, with wonderful germs of good in her. Of such a nature what a rare life might have been made! As it is, her childhood we smile at and forgive; but, great Heaven! what will be her maturity, her old age! Yet how she loves him! And she is so brave she will not show it.”

With the recollection came the remembrance of Cigarette’s words as to his own passion for herself, and she grew paler as it did so. “God forbid he should have that pain, too!” she murmured. “What could it be save misery for us both!”

Yet she did not thrust the fancy from her with contemptuous nonchalance as she had done every other of the many passions she had excited and disdained; it had a great sadness and a greater terror for her. She dreaded it slightly for herself.

She wished now that she had not sent for him. But it was done; it was for sake of their old friendship; and she was not one to vainly regret what was unalterable, or to desert what she deemed generous and right for the considerations of prudence or of egotism.

CHAPTER XXXV
ORDEAL BY FIRE

Amid the mirth, the noise, the festivity, which reigned throughout the camp as the men surrendered themselves to the enjoyment of the largesses of food and of wine allotted to them by their Marshal’s command in commemoration of Zaraila, one alone remained apart; silent and powerless to rouse himself even to the forced semblance, the forced endurance, of their mischief and their pleasure. They knew him well, and they also loved him too well to press such participation on him. They knew that it was no lack of sympathy with them that made him so grave amid their mirth, so mute amid their volubility. Some thought that he was sorely wounded by the delay of the honors promised him. Others, who knew him better, thought that it was the loss of his brother-exile which weighed on him, and made all the scene around him full of pain. None approached him; but while they feasted in their tents, making the celebration of Zaraila equal to the Jour de Mazagran, he sat alone over a picket-fire on the far outskirts of the camp.

His heart was sick within him. To remain here was to risk with every moment that ordeal of recognition which he so utterly dreaded; and to flee was to leave his name to the men, with whom he had served so long, covered with obloquy and odium, buried under all the burning shame and degradation of a traitor’s and deserter’s memory. The latter course was impossible to him; the only alternative was to trust that the vastness of that great concrete body, of which he was one unit, would suffice to hide him from the discovery of the friend whose love he feared as he feared the hatred of no foe. He had not been seen as he had passed the flag-staff; there was little fear that in the few remaining hours any chance could bring the illustrious guest of a Marshal to the outpost of the scattered camp.

Yet he shuddered as he sat in the glow of the fire of pinewood; she was so near, and he could not behold her!—though he might never see her face again; though they must pass out of Africa, home to the land that he desired as only exiles can desire, while he still remained silent, knowing that, until death should release him, there could be no other fate for him, save only this one, hard, bitter, desolate, uncompanioned, unpitied, unrewarded life. But to break his word as the price of his freedom was not possible to his nature or in his creed. This fate was, in chief, of his own making; he accepted it without rebellion, because rebellion would have been in this case both cowardice and self-pity.

He was not conscious of any heroism in this; it seemed to him the only course left to a man who, in losing the position, had not abandoned the instincts of a gentleman.

The evening wore away, unmeasured by him; the echoes of the soldiers’ mirth came dimly on his ear; the laughter, and the songs, and the music were subdued into one confused murmur by distance; there was nothing near him except a few tethered horses, and far way the mounted figure of the guard who kept watch beyond the boundaries of the encampment. The fire burned on, for it had been piled high before it was abandoned; the little white dog of his regiment was curled at his feet; he sat motionless, sunk in thought, with his head drooped upon his breast. The voice of Cigarette broke on his musing.

“Beau sire, you are wanted yonder.”

He looked up wearily; could he never be at peace? He did not notice that the tone of the greeting was rough and curt; he did not notice that there was a stormy darkness, a repressed bitterness, stern and scornful, on the Little One’s face; he only thought that the very dogs were left sometimes at rest and unchained, but a soldier never.

“You are wanted!” repeated Cigarette, with imperious contempt.

He rose on the old instinct of obedience.

“For what?”

She stood looking at him without replying; her mouth was tightly shut in a hard line that pressed inward all its soft and rosy prettiness. She was seeing how haggard his face was, how heavy his eyes, how full of fatigue his movements. Her silence recalled him to the memory of the past day.

“Forgive me, my dear child, if I have seemed without sympathy in all your honors,” he said gently, as he laid his hand on her shoulder. “Believe me, it was unintentional. No one knows better than I how richly you deserved them; no one rejoices more that you should have received them.”

The very gentleness of the apology stung her like a scorpion; she shook herself roughly out of his hold.

“Point de phrases! All the army is at my back; do you think I cannot do without you? Sympathy too! Bah! We don’t know those fine words in camp. You are wanted, I tell you—go!”

“But where?”

“To your Silver Pheasant yonder—go!”

“Who? I do not—”

“Dame! Can you not understand? Milady wants to see you; I told her I would send you to her. You can use your dainty sentences with her; she is of your Order!”

“What! she wishes—”

“Go!” reiterated the Little One with a stamp of her boot. “You know the great tent where she is throned in honor—Morbleu!—as if the oldest and ugliest hag that washes out my soldiers’ linen were not of more use and more deserved such lodgment than Mme. la Princesse, who has never done aught in her life, not even brushed out her own hair of gold! She waits for you. Where are your palace manners? Go to her, I tell you. She is of your own people; we are not!”

The vehement, imperious phrases coursed in disorder one after another, rapid and harsh, and vibrating with a hundred repressed emotions. He paused one moment, doubting whether she did not play some trick upon him; then, without a word, left her, and went rapidly through the evening shadows.

Cigarette stood looking after him with a gaze that was very evil, almost savage, in its wrath, in its pain, in its fiery jealousy, that ached so hotly in her, and was chained down by that pride which was as intense in the Vivandiere of Algeria as ever it could be in any Duchess of a Court. Reckless, unfeminine, hardened, vitiated in much, as all her sex would have deemed, and capable of the utmost abandonment to her passion had it been returned, the haughty young soul of the child of the People was as sensitively delicate in this one thing as the purest and chastest among women could have been; she dreaded above every other thing that he should ever suspect that she loved him, or that she desired his love.

Her honor, her generosity, her pity for him, her natural instinct to do the thing that was right, even to her foes, any one of the unstudied and unanalyzed qualities in her had made her serve him even at her rival’s bidding. But it had cost her none the less hardly because so manfully done; none the less did all the violent, ruthless hate, the vivid, childlike fury, the burning, intolerable jealousy of her nature combat in her with the cruel sense of her own unlikeness with that beauty which had subdued even herself, and with that nobler impulse of self-sacrifice which grew side by side with the baser impulses of passion.

As she crouched down by the side of the fire all the gracious, spiritual light that had been upon her face was gone; there was something of the goaded, dangerous, sullen ferocity of a brave animal hard-pressed and over-driven.

Her native generosity, the loyal disinterestedness of her love for him, had overborne the jealousy, the wounded vanity, and the desire of vengeance that reigned in her. Carried away by the first, she had, for the hour, risen above the last, and allowed the nobler wish to serve and rescue him to prevail over the baser egotism. Nothing with her was ever premeditated; all was the offspring of the caprices of the impulse of the immediate moment. And now the reaction followed; she was only sensible of the burning envy that consumed her of this woman who seemed to her more than mortal in her wonderful, fair loveliness, in her marvelous difference from everything of their sex that the camp and the barrack ever showed.

“And I have sent him to her when I should have fired my pistol into her breast!” she thought, as she sat by the dying embers. And she remembered once more the story of the Marseilles fisherwoman. She understood that terrible vengeance under the hot, southern sun, beside the ruthless, southern seas.

Meanwhile he, who so little knew or heeded how he occupied her heart, passed unnoticed through the movements of the military crowds, crossed the breadth that parted the encampment from the marquees of the generals and their guests, gave the countersign and approached unarrested, and so far unseen save by the sentinels, the tents of the Corona suite. The Marshal and his male visitors were still over their banquet wines; she had withdrawn early, on the plea of fatigue; there was no one to notice his visit except the men on guard, who concluded that he went by command. In the dusky light, for the moon was very young, and the flare of the torches made the shadows black and uncertain, no one recognized him; the few soldiers stationed about saw one of their own troopers, and offered him no opposition, made him no question. He knew the password; that was sufficient. The Levantine waiting near the entrance drew the tent-folds aside and signed to him to enter. Another moment, and he was in the presence of her mistress, in that dim, amber light from the standing candelabra, in that heavy, soft-scented air perfumed from the aloe-wood burning in a brazier, through which he saw, half blinded at first coming from the darkness without, that face which subdued and dazzled even the antagonism and the lawlessness of Cigarette.

He bowed low before her, preserving that distant ceremonial due from the rank he ostensibly held to hers.

“Madame, this is very merciful! I know not how to thank you.”

She motioned to him to take a seat near to her, while the Levantine, who knew nothing of the English tongue, retired to the farther end of the tent.

“I only kept my word,” she answered, “for we leave the camp to-morrow; Africa next week.”

“So soon!”

She saw the blood forsake the bronzed fairness of his face, and leave the dusky pallor there. It wounded her as if she suffered herself. For the first time she believed what the Little One had said—that this man loved her.

“I sent for you,” she continued hurriedly, her graceful languor and tranquillity for the first time stirred and quickened by emotion, almost by embarrassment. “It was very strange, it was very painful, for me to trust that child with such a message. But you know us of old; you know we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest or outward semblance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue constructions. There are many things I desire to say to you–”

She paused; he merely bent his head; he could not trust the calmness of his voice in answer.

“First,” she continued, “I must entreat you to allow me to tell Philip what I know. You cannot conceive how intensely oppressive it becomes to me to have any secret from him. I never concealed so much as a thought from my brother in all my life, and to evade even a mute question from his brave, frank eyes makes me feel a traitress to him.”

“Anything else,” he muttered. “Ask me anything else. For God’s sake, do not let him dream that I live!”

“But why? You still speak to me in enigmas. To-morrow, moreover, before we leave, he intends to seek you out as what he thinks you—a soldier of France. He is interested by all he hears of your career; he was first interested by what I told him of you when he saw the ivory carvings at my villa. I asked the little vivandiere to tell you this, but, on second thoughts it seemed best to see you myself once more, as I had promised.”

There was a slow weariness in the utterance of the words. She had said that she could not reflect on leaving him to such a fate as this of his in Africa without personal suffering, or without an effort to induce him to reconsider his decision to condemn himself to it for evermore.

“That French child,” she went on rapidly, to cover both the pain that she felt and that she dealt, “forced her entrance here in a strange fashion; she wished to see me, I suppose, and to try my courage too. She is a little brigand, but she had a true and generous nature, and she loves you very loyally.”

“Cigarette?” he asked wearily; his thoughts could not stay for either the pity or interest for her in this moment. “Oh, no! I trust not. I have done nothing to win her love, and she is a fierce little condottiera who disdains all such weakness. She forced her way in here? That was unpardonable; but she seems to bear a singular dislike to you.”

“Singular, indeed! I never saw her until to-day.”

He answered nothing; the conviction stole on him that Cigarette hated her because he loved her.

“And yet she brought you my message?” pursued his companion. “That seems her nature—violent passions, yet thorough loyalty. But time is precious. I must urge on you what I bade you come to hear. It is to implore you to put your trust, your confidence in Philip. You have acknowledged to me that you are guiltless—no one who knows what you once were could ever doubt it for an instant—then let him hear this, let him be your judge as to what course is right and what wrong for you to pursue. It is impossible for me to return to Europe knowing you are living thus and leaving you to such a fate. What motive you have to sentence yourself to such eternal banishment I am ignorant; but all I ask of you is, confide in him. Let him learn that you live; let him decide whether or not this sacrifice of yourself be needed. His honor is an punctilious as that of any man on earth; his friendship you can never doubt. Why conceal anything from him?”

His eyes turned on her with that dumb agony which once before had chilled her to the soul.