Under Two Flags Part 69

"I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a pair of epaulettes that will content it."

She understood him; she comprehended the bitter mockery that the tawdry, meretricious rewards of regimental decoration seemed to the man who had waited to die at Zaraila as patiently and as grandly as the Old Guard at Waterloo.

"I understand! The rewards are pitifully disproportionate to the services in the army. Yet how magnificently you and your men, as I have been told, held your ground all through that fearful day!"

"We did our duty--nothing more."

"Well! is not that the rarest thing among men?"

"Not among soldiers, madame."

"Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is actuated by the finest and most impersonal sentiment that can actuate human beings!"

"I will not say that. Poor wretches! They are degraded enough, too often. But I believe that more or less in every good soldier, even when he is utterly unconscious of it, is an impersonal love for the honor of his Flag, an uncalculating instinct to do his best for the reputation of his corps. We are called human machines; we are so, since we move by no will of our own; but the lowest among us will at times be propelled by one single impulse--a desire to die greatly. It is all that is left to most of us to do."

She looked at him with that old look which he had seen once or twice before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and wonder, all in one. He spoke to her as he had never spoken to any living being. The grave, quiet, listless impa.s.siveness that still was habitual with him--relic of the old habits of his former life--was very rarely broken, for his real nature or his real thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far removed from him by position and by circ.u.mstance, and distant with him as a great lady could not but be with a soldier of whose antecedents and whose character she knew nothing, gave him sympathy, a sympathy that was sweet and rather felt than uttered; and it was like balm to a wound, like sweet melodies on a weary ear, to the man who had carried his secret so silently and so long, without one to know his burden or to soothe his pain.

"Yes," she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of her face there pa.s.sed a shadow. "There must be infinite n.o.bility among these men, who live without hope--live only to die. That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own death rather than leave the body to the carrion-birds--you have heard of him? What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that poor fellow's heart!"

"Oh, no! That was nothing."

"Nothing! They have told me he came every inch of the way in danger of the Arabs' shot and steel. He had suffered so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down insensible on his entrance here."

"You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far greater than any act like that could ever repay."

"You! Was it you?"

"Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold more of such n.o.bility as you have praised than I."

"Ah! Tell me of him," she said simply; but he saw that the l.u.s.trous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in them that was more precious and more pitiful than a million utterances of regret could ever have been.

Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the grief of other lives. He obeyed her bidding now, and told her, in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos spoken there, where without, through the oval, unglazed cas.e.m.e.nt in the distance, there was seen the tall, dark, leaning pine that overhung the grave of yesternight--the story over which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and which he could have related to no other save herself. It had an intense melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with the gray gloom of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden sunlight from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital. Her face grew paler as she heard, and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes; that death in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the grand simplicity of its unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke little of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman's sympathies, how he who told her this thing had suffered by it--suffered far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in the grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats were at rest on the sod. When he ceased, there was a long silence; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory of the death that he had painted to her; and she was moved with that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half regret, with which the contemplation of calamities that have never touched, and that can never touch them, will move women far more callous, far more world-chilled than herself.

In the silence her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel bonbonniere, whose silver had lost all its bright enameling, and was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead. The lid came off at her touch as she musingly moved it round and round; the chain and the ring fell into her lap; the lid remained in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded in its center with a name in turquoise letters--"Venetia."

She started as the word caught her eye and broke her reverie; the color came warmer into her cheek; she looked closer and closer at the box; then, with a rapid movement, turned her head and gazed at her companion.

"How did you obtain this?"

"The chain, madame? It had fallen in the water."

"The chain! No! the box!"

He looked at her in surprise.

"It was given me very long ago."

"And by whom?"

"By a young child, madame."

Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened; the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had said only wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was quickened with a thousand shadows of thought.

"The box is mine! I gave it! And you?"

He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before her, breathless and mute.

"And you?" she repeated.

He was silent still, gazing at her. He knew her now--how had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, as never to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem of golden hair could belong alone but to the women of one race?

"And you?" she cried once more, while she stretched her hand out to him.

"And you--you are Philip's friend? you are Bertie Cecil?"

Silently he bowed his head; not even for his brother's sake, or for the sake of his pledged word, could he have lied to her.

But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not take. The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched between them.

"Pet.i.te Reine!" he murmured. "Ah, G.o.d! how could I be so blind?"

She grew very pale as she sank back again upon the couch from which she had risen. It seemed to her as though a thousand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this man under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had kissed her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift. And now--they had met thus!

He said nothing. He stood paralyzed, gazing at her. There had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which he drank for his brother's sake, yet this bitterness surpa.s.sed all other; it seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the belief that he was guilty. She in whom all fair and gracious things were met; she who was linked by her race to his past and his youth; she whose clear eyes in her childhood had looked upon him in that first hour of the agony that he had suffered then, and still suffered on, in the cause of a coward and an ingrate.

She was pale still; and her eyes were fixed on him with a gaze that recalled to him the look with which "Pet.i.te Reine" had promised that summer day to keep his secret, and tell none of that misery of which she had been witness.

"They thought that you were dead," she said at length, while her voice sank very low. "Why have you lived like this?"

He made no answer.

"It was cruel to Philip," she went on, while her voice still shook.

"Child though I was, I remember his pa.s.sion of grief when the news came that you had lost your life. He has never forgotten you. So often now he will still speak of you! He is in your camp. We are traveling together.

He will be here this evening. What delight it will give him to know his dearest friend is living! But why--why--have kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside?"

Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not tell; the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary moments.

"Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly! I knew that you were far higher than your grade in Africa; I felt that in all things, save in some accident of position, we were equals. But why have you condemned yourself to this misery? Your life is brave, is n.o.ble, but it must be a constant torture to such as you? I remember well what you were--so well, that I wonder we have never recognized each other before now. The existence you lead in Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of indolence."

He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his head on his hands for some moments. He knew that he must leave this woman whom he loved, and who knew him now as one whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and welcomed by all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, mean, and fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had quitted her country.

Great dews of intense pain gathered on his forehead; his whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted against this brand of a guilt not his own that was stamped on him; he could have cried out to her the truth in all the eloquence of a breaking heart.

But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own choice forever; and the old habits of his early life were strong upon him still. He lifted his head and spoke gently, and very quietly, though she caught the tremor that shook through the words.

"Do not let us speak of myself. You see what my life is; there is no more to be said. Tell me rather of your own story--you are no longer the Lady Venetia? You have been wedded and widowed, they say?"

"The wife of an hour--yes! But it is of yourself that I would hear.

Why have left the world, and, above all, why have left us, to think you dead? I was not so young when we last saw you, but that I remember well how all my people loved you."