Under Two Flags Part 43

Cecil looked up from his musing. He thought what a pity it was this pretty, graceful French kitten was such a bloodthirsty young panther at heart.

"I scarcely know what to do," he answered her doubtfully. "Put him across my saddle, poor wretch, I suppose; the fray must be reported."

"Leave that to me," said Cigarette decidedly, and with a certain haughty patronage. "I shot him--I will see the thing gets told right. It might be awkward for you; they are growing so squeamish about the Roumis killing the natives. Draw him to one side there, and leave him. The crows will finish his affair."

The coolness with which this handsome child disposed of the fate of what, a moment or two before, had been a sentient, breathing, vigorous frame, sent a chill through her hearer, though he had been seasoned by a decade of slaughter.

"No," he said briefly. "Suspicion might fall on some innocent pa.s.ser-by.

Besides--he shall have a decent burial."

"Burial for an Arab--pouf!" cried Cigarette in derision. "Parbleu, M.

Bel-a-faire-peau, I have seen hundreds of our best soldiers lie rotting on the plains with the birds' beaks at their eyes and the jackals' fangs in their flesh. What was good enough for them is surely good enough for him. You are an eccentric fellow--you--"

He laughed a little.

"Time was when I should have begged you not to call me any such 'bad form'! Eccentric! I have not genius enough for that."

"Eh?" She did not understand him. "Well, you want that carrion poked into the earth, instead of lying atop of it. I don't see much difference myself. I would like to be in the sun as long as I could, I think, dead or alive. Ah! how odd it is to think one will be dead some day--never wake for the reveille--never hear the cannon or the caissons roll by--never stir when the trumpets sound the charge, but lie there dead--dead--dead--while the squadrons thunder above one's grave! Droll, eh?"

A momentary pathos softened her voice, where she stood in the glistening moonlight. That the time would ever come when her glad laughter would be hushed, when her young heart would beat no more, when the bright, abundant, pa.s.sionate blood would bound no longer through her veins, when all the vivacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended for her forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home to her than a bird that sings in the light of the sun could be made to know that the time would come when its little, melodious throat would be frozen in death, and give song never more.

The tone touched him--made him think less and less of her as a dare-devil boy, as a reckless child-soldier, and more of her as what she was, than he had done before; he touched her almost caressingly.

"Pauvre enfant! I hope that day will be very distant from you. And yet--how bravely you risked death for me just now!"

Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the camp, flushed ever so slightly at the mere caress of his hand.

"I risked nothing!" she said rapidly. "As for death--when it comes, it comes. Every soldier carries it in his wallet, and it may jump out on him any minute. I would rather die young than grow old. Age is nothing else but death that is conscious."

"Where do you get your wisdom, little one?"

"Wisdom? Bah! living is learning. Some people go through life with their eyes shut, and then grumble there is nothing to see in it! Well--you want that Arab buried? What a fancy! Look you, then; stay by him, since you are so fond of him, and I will go and send some men to you with a stretcher to carry him down to the town. As for reporting, leave that to me. I shall tell them I left you on guard. That will square things if you are late at the barrack."

"But that will give you so much trouble, Cigarette."

"Trouble? Morbleu! Do you think I am like that silver pheasant yonder?

Lend me your horse, and I shall be in the town in ten minutes!"

She vaulted, as she spoke, into the saddle; he laid his hand on the bridle and stopped her.

"Wait! I have not thanked you half enough, my brave little champion. How am I to show you my grat.i.tude?"

For a moment the bright, brown, changeful face, that could look so fiercely scornful, so sunnily radiant, so tempestuously pa.s.sionate, and so tenderly childlike, in almost the same moment, grew warm as the warm suns that had given their fire to her veins; she glanced at him almost shyly, while the moonlight slept l.u.s.trously in the dark softness of her eyes; there was an intense allurement in her in that moment--the allurement of a woman's loveliness, bitterly as she disdained a woman's charms. It might have told him, more plainly than words, how best he could reward her for the shot that had saved him; yet, though a man on whom such beguilement usually worked only too easily and too often, it did not now touch him. He was grateful to her, but, despite himself, he was cold to her; despite himself, the life which that little hand that he held had taken so lightly made it the hand of a comrade to be grasped in alliance, but never the hand of a mistress to steal to his lips and to lie in his breast.

Her rapid and unerring instinct made her feel that keenly and instantly; she had seen too much pa.s.sion not to know when it was absent. The warmth pa.s.sed off her face, her teeth clinched; she shook the bridle out of his hold.

"Take grat.i.tude to the silver pheasant there! She will value fine words; I set no count on them. I did no more for you than I have done scores of times for my Spahis. Ask them how many I have shot with my own hand!"

In another instant she was away like a sirocco; a whirlwind of dust, that rose in the moonlight, marking her flight as she rode full gallop to Algiers.

"A kitten with the tigress in her," thought Cecil, as he seated himself on a broken pile of stone to keep his vigil over the dead Arab. It was not that he was callous to the generous nature of the little Friend of the Flag, or that he was insensible either to the courage that beat so dauntlessly in her pulses, or to the piquant, picturesque grace that accompanied even her wildest actions; but she had nothing of her s.e.x's charm for him. He thought of her rather as a young soldier than as a young girl. She amused him as a wayward, bright, mischievous, audacious boy might have done; but she had no other interest for him. He had given her little attention; a waltz, a cigar, a pa.s.sing jest, were all he had bestowed on the little lionne of the Spahis corps; and the deepest sentiment she had ever awakened in him was an involuntary pity--pity for this flower which blossomed on the polluted field of war, and under the poison-dropping branches of lawless crime. A flower, bright-hued and sun-fed, glancing with the dews of youth now, when it had just unclosed, in all its earliest beauty, but already soiled and tainted by the bed from which it sprang, and doomed to be swept away with time, scentless and loveless, down the rapid, noxious current of that broad, black stream of vice on which it now floated so heedlessly.

Even now his thoughts drifted from her almost before the sound of the horse's hoofs had died where he sat on a loose pile of stones, with the lifeless limbs of the Arab at his feet.

"Who was it in my old life that she is like?" he was musing. It was the deep-blue, dreaming haughty eyes of the Princesse that he was bringing back to memory, not the brown, mignon face that had been so late close to his in the light of the moon.

Meanwhile, on his good gray, Cigarette rode like a true Cha.s.seur herself. She was used to the saddle, and would ride a wild desert colt without stirrup or bridle; balancing her supple form now on one foot, now on the other, on the animal's naked back, while they flew at full speed. Not so fantastically, but full as speedily, she dashed down into the city, scattering all she met with right and left, till she rode straight up to the barracks of the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique. At the entrance, as she reined up, she saw the very person she wanted, and signed him to her as carelessly as if he were a conscript instead of that powerful officer, Francois Vireflau, captain and adjutant.

"Hola!" she cried, as she signaled him; Cigarette was privileged all through the army. "Adjutant Vireflau, I come to tell you a good story for your folios. There is your Corporal there--le beau Victor--has been attacked by four drunken dogs of Arbicos, dead-drunk, and four against one. He fought them superbly, but he would only parry, not thrust, because he knows how strict the rules are about dealing with the scoundrels--even when they are murdering you, parbleu! He has behaved splendidly. I tell you so. And he was so patient with those dogs that he would not have killed one of them. But I did; shot one straight through the brain--a beautiful thing--and he lies on the Oran road now. Victor would not leave him, for fear some pa.s.ser-by should be thought guilty of a murder. So I came on to tell you, and ask you to send some men up for the jackal's body. Ah! he is a fine soldier, that Bel-a-faire-peur of yours. Why don't you give him a step--two steps--three steps? Diantre!

It is not like France to leave him a Corporal!"

Vireflau listened attentively--a short, lean, black-visaged campaigner, who yet relaxed into a grim half-smile as the vivandiere addressed him with that air, as of a generalissimo addressing a subordinate, which always characterized Cigarette the more strongly the higher the grade of her companion or opponent.

"Always eloquent, pretty one!" he growled. "Are you sure he did not begin the fray?"

"Don't I tell you the four Arabs were like four devils! They knocked down an old colon, and Bel-a-faire-peur tried to prevent their doing more mischief, and they set on him like so many wild-cats. He kept his temper wonderfully; he always tries to preserve order; you can't say so much of your riff-raff, Captain Vireflau, commonly! Here! this is his horse. Send some men to him; and mind the thing is reported fairly, and to his credit, to-morrow."

With which command, given as with the air of a commander-in-chief, in its hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted off the charger, flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away and out of sight before Francois Vireflau had time to consider whether he should laugh at her caprices, as all the army did, or resent her insolence to his dignity.

But he was a good-natured man, and, what was better, a just one; and Cigarette had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh well with him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would not reach his Colonel in any warped version that could give pretext for any fresh exercise of tyranny over "Bel-a-faire-peur" under the t.i.tle of "discipline."

"Dieu de Dieu!" thought his champion as she made her way through the gas-lit streets. "I swore to have my vengeance on him. It is a droll vengeance, to save his life, and plead his cause with Vireflau! No matter! One could not look on and let a set of Arbicos kill a good lascar of France; and the thing that is just must be said, let it go as it will against one's grain. Public Welfare before Private Pique!"

A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for an abandonment of her sworn revenge which she felt was a weakness utterly unworthy of her, and too much like that inconsequent weatherc.o.c.k, that useless, insignificant part of creation, those objects of her supreme derision and contempt, those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good G.o.d had ever troubled himself to make--namely, "Les Femmes."

"Hola, Cigarette!" cried the Zouave Tata, leaning out of a little cas.e.m.e.nt of the As de Pique as she pa.s.sed it. "A la bonne heure, ma belle! Come in; we have the devil's own fun here--"

"No doubt!" retorted the Friend of the Flag. "It would be odd if the master-fiddler would not fiddle for his own!"

Through the window, and over the st.u.r.dy shoulders, in their canvas s.h.i.+rt, of the hero Tata, the room was visible--full of smoke, through which the lights glimmered like the sun in a fog; reeking with bad wines, crowded with laughing, bearded faces, and the battered beauty of women revelers, while on the table, singing with a voice Mario himself could not have rivaled for exquisite sweetness, was a slender Zouave gesticulating with the most marvelous pantomime, while his melodious tones rolled out the obscenest and wittiest ballad that ever was caroled in a guinguette.

"Come in, my pretty one!" entreated Tata, stretching out his brawn arms.

"You will die of laughing if you hear Gris-Gris to-night--such a song!"

"A pretty song, yes--for a pigsty!" said Cigarette, with a glance into the chamber; and she shook his hand off her, and went on down the street. A night or two before a new song from Gris-Gris, the best tenor in the whole army, would have been paradise to her, and she would have vaulted through the window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Now, she did not know why, she found no charm in it.

And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her garret, and curled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for the first time in her young life sleep did not come readily to her, and when it did come, for the first time found a restless sigh upon her laughing mouth.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING.

"Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough; but here!" thought Cecil as, earlier awake than those of his Chambree, he stood looking down the lengthy, narrow room where the men lay asleep along the bare floor.

Tired as overworked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out, homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives that had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him strength it had also given him sympathy.

They were of marvelously various types--these sleepers brought under one roof by fates the most diverse. Close beside a huge and sinewy brute of an Auvergnat, whose coa.r.s.e, b.e.s.t.i.a.l features and ma.s.sive bull's head were fitter for a galley-slave than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite limbs and the oval, delicate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone.