Under Two Flags Part 81

She was still a moment; her white, parched mouth quivering as though she were under physical torture, her strained eyes fastened on the empty air, the veins in her throat swelling and throbbing till they glowed to purple. Then she crushed the letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any antelope through the streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the city to the quay.

The people ever gave way before her; but now they scattered like frightened sheep from her path. There was something that terrified them in that bloodless horror set upon her face, and in that fury of resistless speed with which she rushed upon her way.

Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she paused; it was as one face, on which the strong light of the noontide poured, came before her. The senseless look changed in her eyes; she wheeled out of her route, and stopped before the man who had thus arrested her. He was leaning idly over the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped his arm before he saw her.

"You have his face!" she muttered. "What are you to him?"

He made no answer; he was too amazed.

"You are of his race," she persisted. "You are brethren by your look.

What are you to him?"

"To whom?"

"To the man who calls himself Louis Victor! A Cha.s.seur of my army!"

Her eyes were fastened entirely on him; keen, ruthless, fierce, in this moment as a hawk's. He grew pale and murmured an incoherent denial. He sought to shake her off, first gently, then more rudely; he called her mad, and tried to fling her from him; but the lithe fingers only wound themselves closer on his arm.

"Be still--fool!" she muttered; and there was that in the accent that lent a strange force and dignity in that moment to the careless and mischievous plaything of the soldiery--force that overcame him, dignity that overawed him. "You are of his people; you have his eyes, and his look, and his features. He disowns you, or you him. No matter which.

He is of your blood; and he lies under sentence of death. Do you know that?"

With a stifled cry, the other recoiled from her; he never doubted that she spoke the truth; nor could any who had looked upon her face.

"Do not lie to me," she said curtly. "It avails you nothing. Read that."

She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; his hand trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that moment that this strange creature--half soldier, half woman, half brigand, half child--knew all his story and all his shame from his brother.

"Shot!" he echoed hoa.r.s.ely, as she had done, when he had read on to the end. "Shot! Oh, my G.o.d! and I----"

She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the bazaar, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled with the horror, the remorse, the overwhelming shock of his brother's doom.

"He will be shot," she said with a strange calmness. "We shoot down many men in our army. I knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not doubt; but discipline will not stay for that--"

"Silence, for mercy's sake! Is there no hope--no possibility?"

Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came through them. "None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant.

It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?"

"I am his brother!"

She was silent; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her strange that she should thus have met one of his blood in the crowds of Algiers.

She was absorbed in the one catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat her very life away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage remained at their keenest and strongest.

"You are his brother," she said slowly, so much as an affirmation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relations.h.i.+p and their history from Cecil. "You must go to him, then."

He shook from head to foot.

"Yes, yes! But it will be too late!"

She did not know that the words were cried out in all the contrition of an unavailing remorse; she gave them only their literal significance, and shuddered as she answered him.

"That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I must know more.

Tell me his name, his rank."

He was silent; coward and egotist though he was, both cowardice and egotism were killed in him under the overwhelming horror with which he felt himself as truly by moral guilt a fratricide as though he had stabbed his elder through the heart.

"Speak!" hissed Cigarette through her clenched teeth. "If you have any kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your blood, who will be shot there like a dog, do not waste a second--answer me, tell me all."

He turned his wild, terrified glance upon her; he had in that moment no sense but to seize some means of reparation, to declare his brother's rights, to cry out to the very stones of the streets his own wrong and his victim's sacrifice.

"He is the head of my house!" he answered her, scarce knowing what he answered. "He should bear the t.i.tle that I bear now. He is here, in this misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of living souls! If he dies, it is not they who have killed him; it is I!"

She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.

"Settle with yourself for that sin," she said bitterly. "Your remorse will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be sincere. Write me out here that t.i.tle you say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your house; then sign it, and give it to me."

He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.

"Who are you? What are you? If you have the power to do it, for the love of G.o.d rescue him! It is I who have murdered him--I--who have let him live on in this h.e.l.l for my sake!"

"For your sake!"

She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public chastis.e.m.e.nt. The courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous fear and his living lie. His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now.

She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and wondering disdain that there should be on earth a male life capable of such fear and of such ignominy as this. Then the strong and rapid power in her took its instant ascendancy over the weaker nature.

"Monsieur, I do not know your story, I do not want. I am not used to men who let others suffer for them. What I want is your written statement of your brother's name and station; give it me."

He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized him. She brought him pens and paper from the Turk's store, and dictated what he wrote:

"I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England. I hereby also acknowledge that I have succeeded to and borne the t.i.tle illegally, under the supposition of his death.

"BERKELEY CECIL." (Signed)

He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the torture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let circ.u.mstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve long years. He let her draw the paper from him and fold it away in her belt. He watched her with a curious, dreamy sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her bidding.

"What is it you will do?" he asked her.

"The best that shall lie in my power. Do you the same."

"Can his life yet be saved?"

"His honor may--his honor shall."

Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke though it was stern and rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over it. She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would choose the vindication of his honor before the rescue of his life. He laid his hand on her as she moved.

"Stay!--stay! One word----"