Under Two Flags Part 42

"I owe you my life!" he said rapidly. "But--good G.o.d!--you have shot the fellow dead----"

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous glance at the Bedouin's corpse.

"To be sure--I am not a bungler."

"Happily for me, or I had been where he lies now. But wait--let me look; there may be breath in him yet."

Cigarette laughed, offended and scornful, as with the offense and scorn of one whose first science was impeached.

"Look and welcome; but if you find any life in that Arab, make a laugh of it before all the army to-morrow."

She was at her fiercest. A thousand new emotions had been roused in her that night, bringing pain with them, that she bitterly resented; and, moreover, this child of the Army of Africa caught fire at the flame of battle with instant contagion, and had seen slaughter around her from her first infancy.

Cecil, disregarding her protest, stooped and raised the fallen Bedouin.

He saw at a glance that she was right; the lean, dark, l.u.s.tful face was set in the rigidity of death; the bullet had pa.s.sed straight through the temples.

"Did you never see a dead man before?" demanded Cigarette impatiently, as he lingered--even in this moment he had more thought of this Arab than he had of her!

He laid the Arab's body gently down, and looked at her with a glance that, rightly or wrongly, she thought had a rebuke in it.

"Very many. But--it is never a pleasant sight. And they were in drink; they did not know what they did."

"Pardieu! What divine pity! Good powder and ball were sore wasted, it seems; you would have preferred to lie there yourself, it appears. I beg your pardon for interfering with the preference."

Her eyes were flas.h.i.+ng, her lips very scornful and wrathful. This was his grat.i.tude!

"Wait, wait," said Cecil rapidly, laying his hand on her shoulder, as she flung herself away. "My dear child, do not think me ungrateful. I know well enough I should be a dead man myself had it not been for your gallant a.s.sistance. Believe me, I thank you from my heart."

"But you think me 'uns.e.xed' all the same! I see, beau lion!"

The word had rankled in her; she could launch it now with telling reprisal.

He smiled; but he saw that this phrase, which she had overheard, had not alone incensed, but had wounded her.

"Well, a little, perhaps," he said gently. "How should it be otherwise?

And, for that matter, I have seen many a great lady look on and laugh her soft, cruel laughter, while the pheasants were falling by hundreds, or the stags being torn by the hounds. They called it 'sport,' but there was not much difference--in the mercy of it, at least--from your war.

And they had not a t.i.the of your courage."

The answer failed to conciliate her; there was an accent of compa.s.sion in it that ill-suited her pride, and a lack of admiration that was not less new and unwelcome.

"It was well for you that I was uns.e.xed enough to be able to send an ounce of lead into a drunkard!" she pursued with immeasurable disdain.

"If I had been like that dainty aristocrate down there--pardieu! It had been worse for you. I should have screamed, and fainted, and left you to be killed, while I made a tableau. Oh, ha! that is to be 'feminine,' is it not?"

"Where did you see that lady?" he asked in some surprise.

"Oh, I was there!" answered Cigarette, with a toss of her head southward to where the villa lay. "I went to see how you would keep your promise."

"Well, you saw I kept it."

She gave her little teeth a sharp click like the click of a trigger.

"Yes. And I would have forgiven you if you had broken it."

"Would you? I should not have forgiven myself."

"Ah! you are just like the Marquise. And you will end like him."

"Very probably."

She knitted her pretty brows, standing there in his path with her pistols thrust in her sash, and her hands resting lightly on her hips, as a good workman rests after a neatly finished job, and her dainty fez set half on one side of her brown, tangled curls, while upon them the intense l.u.s.ter of the moonlight streamed, and in the dust, well-nigh at their feet, lay the gaunt, while-robed form of the dead Arab, with the olive, saturnine face turned upward to the stars.

"Why did you give the chessmen to that silver pheasant?" she asked him abruptly.

"Silver pheasant?"

"Yes. See how she sweeps--sweeps--sweeps so languid, so brilliant, so useless--bah! Why did you give them?"

"She admired them. It was not much to give."

"You would not have given them to a daughter of the people."

"Why not?"

"Why not? Oh, ha! because her hands would be hard, and brown, and coa.r.s.e, not fit for those ivory puppets; but hers are white like the ivory, and cannot soil it. She will handle them so gracefully, for five minutes; and then buy a new toy, and let her lapdog break yours!"

"Like enough." He said it with his habitual gentle temper, but there was a shadow of pain in the words. The chessmen had become in some sort like living things to him, through long a.s.sociation; he had parted from them not without regret, though for the moment courtesy and generosity of instinct had overcome it; and he knew that it was but too true how in all likelihood these trifles of his art, that had brought him many a solace and been his companion through many a lonely hour, would be forgotten by the morrow, where he had bestowed them, and at best put aside in a cabinet to lie unnoticed among bronzes or porcelain, or be set on some boudoir table to be idled with in the mimic warfare that would serve to cover some listless flirtation.

Cigarette, quick to sting, but as quick to repent using her sting, saw the regret in him; with the rapid, uncalculating liberality of an utterly unselfish and intensely impulsive nature, she hastened to make amends by saying what was like gall on her tongue in the utterance:

"Tiens!" she said quickly. "Perhaps she will value them more than that. I know nothing of the aristocrats--not I! When you were gone, she championed you against the Black Hawk. She told him that if you had not been a gentleman before you came into the ranks, she had never seen one.

She spoke well, if you had but heard her."

"She did!"

She saw his glance brighten as it turned on her in a surprised gratification.

"Well! What is there so wonderful?"

Cigarette asked it with a certain petulance and doggedness; taking a namesake out of her breast-pocket, biting its end off, and striking a fusee. A word from this aristocrate was more welcome to him than a bullet that had saved his life!

Her generosity had gone very far, and, like most generosity, got nothing for its pains.

He was silent a few moments, tracing lines in the dust with the point of his scabbard. Cigarette, with the cigar in her mouth, stamped her foot impatiently.

"Corporal Victor! Are you going to dream there all night? What is to be done with this dog of an Arab?"

She was angered by him; she was in the mood to make herself seem all the rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more callous. She had shot the man--pouf! What of that? She had shot men before, as all Africa knew.

She would defend a half-fledged bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out old cur; but a man! Men were the normal and natural food for pistols and rifles, she considered. A state of society in which firearms had been unknown was a thing Cigarette had never heard of, and in which she would have contumeliously disbelieved if she had been told of it.