Under Two Flags Part 34

"So we have, sir; but we are what we always was, and always will be--one a gentleman, the other a scamp. If you think so be as I've done a good thing, side by side with you, now and then in the fighting, give me my own way and let me wait on you when I can. I can't do much on it when those other fellow's eyes is on us; but here I can and I will--begging your pardon--so there's an end of it. One may speak plain in this place with nothing but them Arabs about; and all the army know well enough, sir, that if it weren't for that black devil, Chateauroy, you'd have had your officer's commission, and your troop too, long before now--"

"Oh, no! There are scores of men in the ranks merit promotion better far than I do. And--leave the Colonel's name alone. He is our chief, whatever else he be."

The words were calm and careless, but they carried a weight with them that was not to be disputed. "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort" hung his head a little and went on unharnessing his Corporal in silence, contenting himself with muttering in his throat that it was true for all that, and the whole regiment knew it.

"You are happy enough in Algeria?" asked the one he served, as he stretched himself on the skins and carpets, and drank down a sherbet that his self-attached attendant had made with a skill learned from a pretty cantiniere, who had given him the lesson in return for a slas.h.i.+ng blow with which he had struck down two "Riz-pain-sels," who, as the best paid men in the army, had tried to cheat her in the price of her Cognac.

"I, sir? Never was so happy in my life, sir. I'd be discontented indeed if I wasn't. Always some spicy bit of fighting. If there aren't a fantasia, as they call it, in the field, there's always somebody to pot in a small way; and, if you're lying by in barracks, there's always a scrimmage hot as pepper to be got up with fellows that love the row just as well as you do. It's life, that's where it is; it ain't rusting."

"Then you prefer the French service?"

"Right and away, sir. You see this is how it is," and the redoubtable, yellow-haired "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort" paused in the vigorous cleansing and brus.h.i.+ng he was bestowing on his Corporal's uniform and stood at ease in his s.h.i.+rt and trousers; with his eloquence no way impeded by the brule-gueule that was always between his teeth. "Over there in England, you know, sir, pipe-clay is the deuce-and-all; you're always got to have the stock on, and look as stiff as a stake, or it's all up with you; you're that tormented about little things that you get riled and kick the traces before the great 'uns come to try you. There's a lot of lads would be game as game could be in battle--aye, and good lads to boot, doing their duty right as a trivet when it came to anything like war--that are clean drove out of the service in time o' peace, along with all them petty persecutions that worry a man's skin like mosquito-bites. Now here they know that, and Lord! what soldiers they do make through knowing of it! It's tight enough and stern enough in big things; martial law sharp enough, and obedience to the letter all through the campaigning; but that don't grate on a fellow; if he's worth his salt he's sure to understand that he must move like clockwork in a fight, and that he's to go to h.e.l.l at double-quick-march, and mute as a mouse, if his officers see fit to send him. There ain't better stuff to make soldiers out of nowhere than Englishmen, G.o.d bless 'em! But they're badgered, they're horribly badgered; and that's why the service don't take over there, let alone the way the country grudge 'em every bit of pay. In England you go in the ranks--well, they all just tell you you're a blackguard, and there's the lash, and you'd better behave yourself or you'll get it hot and hot; they take for granted you're a bad lot or you wouldn't be there, and in course you're riled and go to the bad according, seeing that it's what's expected of you. Here, contrariwise, you come in the ranks and get a welcome, and feel that it just rests with yourself whether you won't be a fine fellow or not; and just along of feeling that you're p.r.i.c.ked to show the best metal you're made on, and not to let n.o.body else beat you out of the race, like. Ah! it makes a wonderful difference to a fellow--a wonderful difference--whether the service he's come into look at him as a scamp that never will be nothing but a scamp, or as a rascal that's maybe got in him, all rascal though he is, the pluck to turn into a hero. And that's just the difference, sir, that France has found out, and England hasn't--G.o.d bless her, all the same!"

With which the soldier whom England had turned adrift, and France had won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to refill his Corporal's pipe.

"An army's just a machine, sir, in course," he concluded, as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. "But then it's a live machine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel's body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature goes wrong--there's the mischief."

Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung full-length on the skins.

"I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when--when I was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what you say. Yet--fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible blackguards!"

"In course they are, sir; they wouldn't be such larky company unless they was. But what I say is that they're scamps who're told they may be great men, if they like; not scamps who're told that, because they've once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the difference in life."

"Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!"

The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen pain pa.s.sing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.

"Won't there never be no hope, sir?" he whispered, while his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.

The Cha.s.seur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.

"Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny."

"No, sir," said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice. "You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----"

He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.

The other moved with a certain impatience.

"How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France?--forget as I have forgotten it!"

The audacious, irrepressible "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel.

"I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how his lords.h.i.+p's death--"

"No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death that some day an Arbico's lunge will give me; and that is a long time coming."

"Ah, for G.o.d's sake, Mr. Cecil, don't talk like this!"

The Cha.s.seur gave a short, sharp s.h.i.+ver, and started at this name, as if a bullet had struck him.

"Never say that again!"

Rake, Algerian-christened "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," stammered a contrite apology.

"I never have done, sir--not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me like--you talking of wanting death in that way----"

"Oh, I don't want death!" laughed the other, with a low, indifferent laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while. "I am of our friends the Spahis' opinion--that life is very pleasant with a handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one's saddle. Unhappily harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not better amused in the Cha.s.seurs than I was in the Household--specially when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals at the core, or we should never find such an infinite zest in the death grapple.

Good-night!"

He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the skins that made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the pipe still in his mouth, and its amber bowl resting on the carpet which the friends.h.i.+p and honor of Sidi-Ilderim had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the hills around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab of rock, or with the knowledge that at every instant the alarm might be given, the drums roll out over the night, and the enemy be down like lightning on the bivouac. But now a name--long unspoken to him--had recalled years he had buried far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi d'ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among its wild and brilliant soldiers.

Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light in the single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and died away, the Cha.s.seur d'Afrique lay wakeful; looking outward through the folds of the tent at the dark and silent camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory drift backward to a time that had grown to be to him as a dream--a time when another world than the world of Africa had known him as Bertie Cecil.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CIGARETTE EN BIENFAITRICE.

"Oh! We are a queer lot; a very queer lot. Sweepings of Europe," said Claude de Chanrellon, das.h.i.+ng some vermouth off his golden mustaches, where he lay full-length on three chairs outside the Cafe in the Place du Gouvernement, where the lamps were just lit, and s.h.i.+ning through the burnished moonlight of an Algerian evening, and the many-colored, many-raced, picturesque, and polyglot population of the town were all fluttering out with the sunset, like so many gay-colored moths.

"Hein! Diamonds are found in the rag-picker's sweepings," growled a General of Division, who was the most terrible martinet in the whole of the French service, but who loved "my children of h.e.l.l," as he was wont to term his men, with a great love, and who would never hear another disparage them, however he might order them blows of the stick, or exile them to Beylick himself.

"You are poetic, mon General," said Claude de Chanrellon; "but you are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal."

"But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that the devil made them if the drill have molded them!" urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes.

Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar.

"Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in this world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge of life, but devilry is its champagne!"

"Ventre bleu!" growled the General. "We have a right to praise the blackguards; without them our conscripts would be very poor trash. The conscript fights because he has to fight; the blackguard fights because he loves to fight. A great difference that."

The Colonel of Tirailleurs lifted his eyes; a slight, pale effeminate, dark-eyed Parisian, who looked scarcely stronger than a hot-house flower, yet who, as many an African chronicle could tell, was swift as fire, keen as steel, unerring as a leopard's leap, untiring as an Indian on trail, once in the field with his Indigenes.

"In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, mon General," he murmured; "what the catalogue of your crimes must be!"

The tough old campaigner laughed grimly; he took it as a high compliment.

"Sapristi! The cardinal virtues don't send anybody, I guess, into African service. And yet, pardieu, I don't know. What fellows I have known! I have had men among my Zephyrs--and they were the wildest insubordinates too--that would have ruled the world! I have had more wit, more address, more genius, more devotion, in some headlong scamp of a loustic than all the courts and cabinets would furnish. Such lives, such lives, too, morbleu!"

And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas s.h.i.+rt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.

"Faith!" laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General's observation, "if we all published our memoirs, the world would have a droll book.

Dumas and Terrail would be beat out of the field. The real recruiting sergeants that send us to the ranks would be soon found to be--"

"Women!" growled the General.