Under Two Flags Part 35

"Cards," sighed the Colonel.

"Absinthe," muttered another.

"A comedy that was hissed."

"The spleen."

"The dice."

"The roulette."

"The natural desire of humanity to kill or to get killed!"

"Morbleu!" cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, "all those mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure enough; but the General named the worst. Look at that little Cora; the Minister of War should give her the Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Conscription does. Five fine fellows--of the vieille roche too--joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, and they have nothing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora."

"And there is not much to look at in her either," objected a captain, who commanded Turcos. "I saw her when our detachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as a cherub--a soft voice--a shape that looks as slight and as breakable as the stem of my gla.s.s--there is the end!"

The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; he had been a great lion of the fas.h.i.+onable world before he came out to his Indigenes.

"The end of Cora! The end of her is--My good Alcide--that 'baby face'

has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet, so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad too, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands, and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!"

"Why do you let her do it?" growled the vieille moustache, who had served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda.

"Ah, bah!" said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; "it is the thing to be ruined by Cora."

Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it.

"It was Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up--that woman--in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped me as bare as a pigeon. Her pa.s.sion was uncut emeralds just then. Well uncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d'Acier was a wonderful woman!--and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as ugly as sin."

"Ugly!"

"Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming than Venus. How she did it n.o.body knew; but men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month."

"Like Loto," chimed in the Tirailleur. "Loto has not a shred of beauty.

She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice and a villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order of n.o.bility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day.

She is a great creature, Loto; n.o.body knows her secret."

"Audacity, my friend! Always that!" said Chanrellon, with a twist of his superb mustaches. "It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win.

Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, you fell, too, among the Lotos and the Coeurs d'Acier once, I will warrant."

The Cha.s.seur, who was pa.s.sing, paused and smiled a little, as he saluted.

"Coeurs d'Acier are to be found in all ranks of the s.e.x, monsieur, I fancy!"

"Bah! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you out here?"

"No, monsieur--only chance."

"A fig for your chance! Women are the mischief that casts us adrift to chance."

"Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes."

"Dieu de Dieu! I doubt that. We should go straight enough if it were not for them."

The Cha.s.seur smiled again.

"M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, for the key to every black story, we ask, 'Who was she?'"

"Of course I do. Well! who was she? We are all quoting our tempters to-night. Give us your story, mon brave!"

"Monsieur, you have it in the folios, as well as my sword could write it."

"Good, good!" muttered the listening General. The soldier-like answer pleased him, and he looked attentively at the giver of it.

Chanrellon's brown eyes flashed a bright response.

"And your sword writes in a brave man's fas.h.i.+on--writes what France loves to read. But before you wore your sword here? Tell us of that. It was a romance--wasn't it?"

"If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur."

"Open it then! Come--what brought you out among us? Out with it!"

"Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier's duty; but I never heard that inquisitive annoyance was an officer's privilege."

These words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little haughty.

The manner of old habit, the instinct of buried pride spoke in them, and disregarded the barrier between a private of Cha.s.seurs who was but a sous-officier, and a Colonel Commandant who was also a n.o.ble of France.

Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little table, outside the cafe, turned and looked at him. The boldness of speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity upon him.

Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an instant's pa.s.sion gleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his three chairs down with a crash, as he shook his mighty frame like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a campaigner's frankness.

"A right rebuke!--fairly given, and well deserved. I thank you for the lesson."

The Cha.s.seur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, consideration and courtesy had been things long unshown to him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentleman. Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference in rank and station between them flashed on his memory, he was raising it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate to his superior, when Chanrellon's grasp closed on it readily. The victim of Coeur d'Acier was of as gallant a temper as ever blent the reckless condottiere with the thoroughbred n.o.ble.

The Cha.s.seur colored slightly, as he remembered that he had forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations.

"I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte," he said simply, as he gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and pa.s.sed onward rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have forgotten the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been guilty.

"Dieu!" muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the gla.s.ses shook. "I would give a year's pay to know that fine fellow's history. He is a gentleman--every inch of him."

"And a good soldier, which is better," growled the General of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow over the heavy tillage of Alsace.

"A private of Chateauroy's?" asked the Tirailleur, lifting his eye-gla.s.s to watch the Cha.s.seur as he went.

"Pardieu--yes--more's the pity," said Chanrellon, who spoke his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. "The Black Hawk hates him--G.o.d knows why--and he is kept down in consequence, as if he were the idlest lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at what he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finer Roumi in Africa--not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, there has not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that he has not had his share in. There has not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila that he had not gone out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouin steel. He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant's own hands. He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Cha.s.seurs together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs' center, and gave us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred more like stories of him--every one of them true as my saber--and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!"

"Superb!" said the General, with a grim significance. "Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then"--and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy--"but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders."