Under Two Flags Part 36

"The Black Hawk can read, too," said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the "pet.i.t nom," that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. "No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons--pong!--till the thing drops dead--even where he strikes a bird of his own brood."

"That is bad," said the old General sententiously. "There are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a s.h.i.+p's skipper, and a military chief."

With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert.

Meanwhile, the Cha.s.seur went his way through the cosmopolitan groups of the great square. A little farther onward, laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen--a yachting party, whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment; and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiar words. As he bent his head, no one saw the shadow of pain that pa.s.sed over his face.

But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. "The deuce,"

he murmured to the man nearest him, "who the d.i.c.kens is it that French soldier's like?"

The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city--uneasy lest he should be recognized by any pa.s.ser-by or tourist.

"I need not fear that, though," he thought with a smile. "Ten years!--why, in that world, we used to forget the blackest ruin in ten days, and the best life among us ten hours after its grave was closed.

Besides, I am safe enough. I am dead!"

And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the cigar under the chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black eyes of veiled women flashed lovingly on his tall, lithe form, with the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as a woman's still, despite the tawny glow of the African sun that had been on it for so long.

He was "dead"; therein had lain all his security; thereby had "Beauty of the Brigades" been buried beyond all discovery in "Bel-a-faire-peur"

of the 2nd Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique. When, on the Ma.r.s.eilles rails, the maceration and slaughter of as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rus.h.i.+ng through the midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left himself and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by little less than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen from discovery or pursuit.

Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the debris, he had struck across the country with Rake for the few leagues that still lay between them and the city, and had entered Ma.r.s.eilles as weary foot travelers, before half the ruin on the rails had been seen by the full noon sun.

As it chanced a trading yawl was loading in the port, to run across to Algiers that very day. The skipper was short of men, and afraid of the Lascars, who were the only sailors that he seemed likely to find to fill up the vacant places in his small crew.

Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the pa.s.sage. He had only a very few gold pieces on his person, and he was willing to work his way across, if he could.

"But you're a gentleman," said the skipper, doubtfully eyeing him, and his velvet dress, and his black sombrero with its eagle's plume. "I want a rare, rough, able seaman, for there'll like to be foul weather. She looks too fair to last," he concluded, with a glance upward at the sky.

He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself in far seas, with a likely run before her.

"You're a swell, that's what you are," emphasized the skipper. "You bean't no sort of use to me."

"Wait a second," answered Cecil. "Did you ever chance to hear of a schooner called 'Regina'?"

The skipper's face lighted in a moment.

"Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years? Her as drove through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swallow, when everything was splitting and foundering, and s.h.i.+pping seas around her? Her as was the first to bear down to the great 'Wrestler,' a-lying there hull over in water, and took aboard all as ever she could hold o' the pa.s.sengers; a-pitching out her own beautiful cabin fittings to have as much room for the poor wretches as ever she could? Be you a-meaning her?"

Cecil nodded a.s.sent.

"She was my yacht, that's all; and I was without a captain through that storm. Will you think me a good enough sailor now?"

The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.

"Good enough! Blast my timbers! There aren't one will beat you in any waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks. I never did think as how one of your yachting-n.o.bs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me, if the Club make such sailors as you it's a rare 'un! Lord a mercy! Why, my wife was in the 'Wrestler.' I've heard her tell scores of times as how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more pa.s.sengers, and fed 'em, and gave 'em champagne all around, and treated 'em like a prince, till he ran 'em straight into Brest Harbor. But, d.a.m.n me! that ever a swell like you should--"

"Let's weigh anchor," said Bertie quietly.

And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidings went that the mutilated form, crushed between iron and wood, on the Ma.r.s.eilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rus.h.i.+ng trains had met, as meet the thunder-clouds. The world thought him dead; as such the journals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to make the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered at Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with pa.s.sionate, loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt:--and he, leaving them in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of his Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound--Louis Victor--and laid aside forever his ident.i.ty as Bertie Cecil.

He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in any of the larger towns since he had joined. His only danger of recognition, had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African troops.

Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards'

distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against "les ordonnances" in all the glittering squadrons; and swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands--a unit in the mighty aggregate of the "raw material" of war.

The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, "Why don't they all ride like that man? He has the seat of the English Guards." But that it was in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own, who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader never dreamed.

From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hards.h.i.+p, poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every sense was gratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured. He had led the fas.h.i.+on; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been used to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coa.r.s.e black bread of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies' ears; he came where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He had known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amus.e.m.e.nt, refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coa.r.s.e obscenity, agonized pain, and pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.

A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man's endurance. No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, more staunchly than did the "dandy of the Household."

The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him.

Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant's jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace. Misery, when hunger and thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the half-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood, which the men round him seized so ravenously. Misery, when the dreary dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of petty tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy duty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and the weary night fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blasphemy and befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even the peace and oblivion of sleep. They were years of infinite wretchedness oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who had followed him into his exile. But, however wretched, they never wrung a single regret or lament from Cecil. He had come out to this life; he took it as it was. As, having lost the t.i.tle to command, the high breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience which was the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the altered fortunes of his career. The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not bear himself with more apparent content and more absolute fort.i.tude than did the man who had used to think it a cruelty to ride with his troop from Windsor to Wormwood Scrubs, and had never taken the trouble to load his own gun any shooting season, or to draw off his own coat any evening. He suffered acutely many times; suffered till he was heart-sick of his life; but he never sought to escape the slightest penalty or hards.h.i.+p, and not even Rake ever heard from him a single syllable of irritation or of self-pity.

Moreover, the war-fire woke in him.

In one shape or another active service was almost always his lot, and hot, severe campaigning was his first introduction to military life in Algeria. The latent instinct in him--the instinct that had flashed out during his lazy, fas.h.i.+onable calm in all moments of danger, in all days of keen sport; the instinct that had made him fling himself into the duello with the French boar, and made him mutter to Forest King, "Kill me if you like, but don't fail me!"--was the instinct of the born soldier. In peril, in battle, in reckless bravery, in the rush of the charge and the excitement of the surprise, in the near presence of death, and in the chase of a foe through a hot African night when both were armed to the teeth, and one or both must fall when the grapple came--in all these that old instinct, aroused and unloosed, made him content; made him think that the life which brought them was worth the living.

There had always been in him a reckless dare-devilry, which had slept under the serene, effeminate insouciance of his careless temper and his pampered habits. It had full rein now, and made him, as the army affirmed, one of the most intrepid, victorious, and chivalrous lascars of its fiery ranks. Fate had flung him off his couch of down into the tempest of war; into the sternness of life spent ever on the border of the grave; ruled over by an iron code, requiring at every step self-negation, fort.i.tude, submission, courage, patience; the self-control which should take the uttermost provocation from those in command without even a look of reprisal, and the courageous recklessness which should meet death and deal death; which should be as the eagle to swoop, as the lion to rend. And he was not found wanting in it.

He was too thoroughbred to attempt to claim a superiority that fortune no longer conferred on him; to seek to obtain a deference that he had no longer the position to demand. He was too quiet, too courteous, too calmly listless; he had too easy a grace, too soft a voice, and too many gentleman habits, for them. But when they found that he could fight like a Zouave, ride like an Arab, and bear shot-wounds or desert-thirst as though he were of bronze, it grew a delight to them to see of what granite and steel this dainty patrician was made; and they loved him with a rough, ardent, dog-like love, when they found that his last crust, in a long march, would always be divided: that the most desperate service of danger was always volunteered for by him; that no severity of personal chastis.e.m.e.nt ever made him clear himself of a false charge at a comrade's expense; and that all his pay went in giving a veteran a stoup of wine, or a sick conscript a tempting meal, or a prisoner of Beylick some food through the grating, scaled too at risk of life and limb.

He had never before been called on to exert either thought or action; the necessity for both called many latent qualities in him into play.

The same nature, which had made him wish to be killed over the Grand Military course, rather than live to lose the race, made him now bear privation as calmly, and risk death as recklessly, as the heartiest and most fiery loustic of the African regiments.

On the surface it seemed as though never was there a life more utterly thrown away than the life of a Guardsman and a gentleman, a man of good blood, high rank, and talented gifts--had he ever chosen to make anything of them--buried in the ranks of the Franco-African army; risking a nameless grave in the sand with almost every hour, a.s.sociated with the roughest riffraff of Europe, liable any day to be slain by the slash of an Arab flissa, and rewarded for ten years' splendid service by the distinctive badge of a corporal.

Yet it might be doubted if any life would have done for him what this had done; it might be questioned if, judging a career not by its social position, but by its effect on character, any other would have been so well for him, or would equally have given steel and strength to the indolence and languor of his nature as this did. In his old world he would have lounged listlessly through fas.h.i.+onable seasons, and in an atmosphere that encouraged his profound negligence of everything; and his natural listlessness would have glided from refinement to effeminacy, and from lazy grace to blase inertia.

The severity and the dangers of the campaigns with the French army had roused the sleeping lion in him, and made him as fine a soldier as ever ranged under any flag. He had suffered, braved, resented, fought, loved, hated, endured, and even enjoyed, here in Africa, with a force and a vividness that he had never dreamed possible in his calm, pa.s.sionless, insouciant world of other days. It developed him into a magnificent soldier--too true a soldier not to make thoroughly his the service he had adopted; not to, oftentimes, almost forget that he had ever lived under any other flag than that tricolor which he followed and defended now.

The quaint, heroic Norman motto of his ancestors, carved over the gates of Royallieu--"Coeur Vaillant Se Fait Royaume"--verified itself in his case. Outlawed, beggared, robbed at a stroke of every hope and prospect--he had taken his adversity boldly by the beard, and had made himself at once a country and a kingdom among the brave, fierce, reckless, loyal hearts of the men who came from north, south, east, and west--driven by every accident, and scourged by every fate--to fill up the battalions of North Africa.

As he went now, in the warmth of the after-glow, he turned up into the Rue Babazoum, and paused before the entrance of a narrow, dark, tumble-down, picturesque shop, half like a stall of a Cairo bazaar; half like a Jew's den in a Florentine alley.

A cunning, wizen head peered out at him from the gloom.

"Ah, ha! Good-even, Corporal Victor!"

Cecil, at the words, crossed the sill and entered.

"Have you sold any?" he asked. There was a slight constraint and hesitation in the words, as of one who can never fairly bend his spirit to the yoke of barter.

The little, hideous, wrinkled, dwarf-like creature, a trader in curiosities, grinned with a certain gratification in disappointing this lithe-limbed, handsome Cha.s.seur.

"Not one. The toys don't take. Daggers now, or anything made out of spent b.a.l.l.s, or flissas one can tell an Arab story about, go off like wild-fire; but your ivory bagatelles are no sort of use, M. le Caporal."

"Very well--no matter," said Cecil simply, as he paused a moment before some delicate little statuettes and carvings--miniature things, carved out of a piece of ivory, or a block of marble the size of a horse's hoof, such as could be picked up in dry river channels or broken off stray boulders; slender crucifixes, wreathes of foliage, branches of wild fig, figures of Arabs and Moors, dainty heads of dancing-girls, and tiny chargers fretting like Bucephalus. They were perfectly conceived and executed. He had always had a gift that way, though, in common with all his gifts, he had utterly neglected all culture of it, until, cast adrift on the world, and forced to do something to maintain himself, he had watched the skill of the French soldiers at all such expedients to gain a few coins, and had solaced many a dreary hour in barracks and under canvas with the toy-sculpture, till he had attained a singular art at it. He had commonly given Rake the office of selling them, and as commonly spent all the proceeds on all other needs save his own.