Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida Part 53

She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old Invalide had done in the '89--a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere who had loved one above her rank, a n.o.ble who deserted her for a woman of his own order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter, and the languid l.u.s.tre of sweet contemptuous eyes. The Ma.r.s.eillaise bore her wrong in silence--she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced with the salt las.h.i.+ng of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the bridal of their _chatelaine_ in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days.

She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the axe fall down on the proud snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips had kissed, a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out, and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the mult.i.tudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make their feast. "_Voila tes secondes noces!_" she cried where she stood, and laughed by the side of the gray angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed.

"There is only one thing worth doing--to die greatly!" thought the aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously returning to the only end that the genius and the greatness of Greece could find as issue to the terrible jest, the mysterious despair, of all existence.

A very old man--one who had been a conscript in the bands of Young France, and marched from his Pyrenean village to the battle-tramp of the Ma.r.s.eillaise, and charged with the Enfans de Paris across the plains of Gemappes; who had known the pa.s.sage of the Alps, and lifted the long curls from the dead brow of Desaix, at Marengo, and seen in the sultry noonday dust of a glorious summer the Guard march into Paris, while the people laughed and wept with joy, surging like the mighty sea around one pale frail form, so young by years, so absolute by genius.

A very old man; long broken with poverty, with pain, with bereavement, with extreme old age; and by a long course of cruel accidents, alone, here in Africa, without one left of the friends of his youth, or of the children of his name, and deprived even of the charities due from his country to his services--alone save for the little Friend of the Flag, who, for four years, had kept him on the proceeds of her wine trade, in this Moorish attic, tending him herself when in town, taking heed that he should want for nothing when she was campaigning.

She hid, as her lawless courage would not have stooped to hide a sin, had she chosen to commit one, this compa.s.sion which she, the young _condottiera_ of Algeria, showed with so tender a charity to the soldier of Bonaparte. To him, moreover, her fiery imperious voice was gentle as the dove, her wayward dominant will was pliant as the reed, her contemptuous sceptic spirit was reverent as a child's before an altar.

In her sight the survivor of the Army of Italy was sacred; sacred the eyes which, when full of light, had seen the sun glitter on the breastplates of the Hussars of Murat, the Dragoons of Kellerman, the Cuira.s.siers of Milhaud; sacred the hands which, when nervous with youth, had borne the standard of the Republic victorious against the gathered Teuton host in the Thermopylae of Champagne; sacred the ears which, when quick to hear, had heard the thunder of Arcola, of Lodi, of Rivoli, and, above even the tempest of war, the clear, still voice of Napoleon; sacred the lips which, when their beard was dark in the fulness of manhood, had quivered, as with a woman's weeping, at the farewell in the spring night in the moonlit Cour des Adieux.

Cigarette had a religion of her own; and followed it more closely than most disciples follow other creeds.

The way was long; the road ill-formed, leading for the most part across a sere and desolate country, with nothing to relieve its barrenness except long stretches of the great spear-headed reeds. At noon the heat was intense; the little cavalcade halted for half an hour under the shade of some black towering rocks which broke the monotony of the district, and commenced a more hilly and more picturesque portion of the country. Cigarette came to the side of the temporary ambulance in which Cecil was placed. He was asleep--sleeping for once peacefully with little trace of pain upon his features, as he had slept the previous night. She saw that his face and chest had not been touched by the stinging insect-swarm; he was doubly screened by a s.h.i.+rt hung above him dexterously on some bent sticks.

"Who has done that?" thought Cigarette. As she glanced round she saw--without any linen to cover him, Zackrist had reared himself up and leaned slightly forward over against his comrade. The s.h.i.+rt that protected Cecil was his; and on his own bare shoulders and mighty chest the tiny armies of the flies and gnats were fastened, doing their will uninterrupted.

As he caught her glance, a sullen ruddy glow of shame shone through the black hard skin of his sunburnt visage--shame to which he had been never touched when discovered in any one of his guilty and barbarous actions.

"_Dame!_" he growled savagely; "he gave me his wine; one must do something in return. Not that I feel the insects--not I; my skin is leather, see you; they can't get through it; but his is _peau de femme_--white and soft--bah! like tissue paper!"

"I see, Zackrist; you are right. A French soldier can never take a kindness from an English fellow without outrunning him in generosity.

Look--here is some drink for you."

She knew too well the strange nature with which she had to deal to say a syllable of praise to him for his self-devotion, or to appear to see that, despite his boast of his leather skin, the stings of the cruel winged tribes were drawing his blood and causing him alike pain and irritation which, under that sun, and added to the torment of his gunshot wound, were a martyrdom as great as the n.o.blest saint ever endured.

"_Tiens! tiens!_ I did him wrong," murmured Cigarette. "That is what they are--the children of France--even when they are at their worst, like that devil, Zackrist. Who dare say they are not the heroes of the world?"

And all through the march she gave Zackrist a double portion of her water dashed with red wine, that was so welcome and so precious to the parched and aching throats; and all through the march Cecil lay asleep, and the man who had thieved from him, the man whose soul was stained with murder, and pillage, and rapine, sat erect beside him, letting the insects suck his veins and pierce his flesh.

It was only when they drew near the camp of the main army that Zackrist beat off the swarm and drew his old s.h.i.+rt over his head. "You do not want to say anything to him," he muttered to Cigarette. "I am of leather, you know; I have not felt it."

She nodded; she understood him. Yet his shoulders and his chest were well-nigh flayed, despite the tough and h.o.r.n.y skin of which he made his boast.

"_Dieu!_ we are droll!" mused Cigarette. "If we do a good thing, we hide it as if it were a bit of stolen meat, we are so afraid it should be found out; but, if they do one in the world there, they bray it at the tops of their voices from the houses' roofs, and run all down the streets screaming about it for fear it should be lost. _Dieu!_ we are droll!"

And she dashed the spurs into her mare and galloped off at the height of her speed into camp--a very city of canvas, buzzing with the hum of life, regulated with the marvellous skill and precision of French warfare, yet with the carelessness and the picturesqueness of the desert-life pervading it.

Like wave rus.h.i.+ng on wave of some tempestuous ocean, the men swept out to meet her in one great surging tide of life, impetuous, pa.s.sionate, idolatrous, exultant, with all the vivid ardour, all the uncontrolled emotion, of natures south-born, sun-nurtured. They broke away from their mid-day rest as from their military toil, moved as by one swift breath of fire, and flung themselves out to meet her, the chorus of a thousand voices ringing in deafening _vivas_ to the skies. She was enveloped in that vast sea of eager, furious lives, in that dizzy tumult of vociferous cries, and stretching hands, and upturned faces. As her soldiers had done the night before, so these did now--kissing her hands, her dress, her feet, sending her name in thunder through the sunlit air, lifting her from off her horse, and bearing her, in a score of stalwart arms, triumphant in their midst.

She was theirs--their own--the Child of the Army, the Little One whose voice above their dying brethren had the sweetness of an angel's song, and whose feet, in their hours of revelry, flew like the swift and dazzling flight of gold-winged orioles. And she had saved the honour of their Eagles; she had given to them and to France their G.o.d of Victory.

They loved her--O G.o.d, how they loved her!--with that intense, breathless, intoxicating love of a mult.i.tude which, though it may stone to-morrow what it adores to-day, has yet for those on whom it has once been given thus a power no other love can know--a pa.s.sion unutterably sad, deliriously strong.

That pa.s.sion moved her strangely.

As she looked down upon them, she knew that not one man breathed among that tumultuous ma.s.s but would have died that moment at her word; not one mouth moved among that countless host but breathed her name in pride, and love, and honour.

She might be a careless young coquette, a lawless little brigand, a child of sunny caprices, an elf of dauntless mischief; but she was more than these. The divine fire of genius had touched her, and Cigarette would have perished for her country not less surely than Jeanne d'Arc.

The holiness of an impersonal love, the glow of an imperishable patriotism, the melancholy of a pa.s.sionate pity for the concrete and unnumbered sufferings of the people were in her, instinctive and inborn, as fragrance in the heart of flowers. And all these together moved her now, and made her young face beautiful as she looked down upon the crowded soldiery.

"It was nothing," she answered them; "it was nothing. It was for France."

For France! They shouted back the beloved word with tenfold joy; and the great sea of life beneath her tossed to and fro in stormy triumph, in frantic paradise of victory, ringing her name with that of France upon the air, in thunder-shouts like spears of steel smiting on s.h.i.+elds of bronze.

But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.

"Hus.h.!.+" she said softly, with an accent in her voice that hushed the riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the lull in a storm.

"Give me no honour while _they_ sleep yonder. With the dead lies the glory!"

Thoughts are very good grain, but if they are not whirled round, round, round, and winnowed and ground in the millstones of talk, they remain little, hard, useless kernels, that not a soul can digest.

Love was all very well, so Cigarette's philosophy had always reckoned; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to flavour an idle moment. "_Vin et Venus_" she had always been accustomed to see wors.h.i.+pped together, as became their alliterative; it was a bit of fun--that was all. A pa.s.sion that had pain in it had never touched the Little One; she had disdained it with lightest, airiest contumely.

"If your sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, eat the sugar, and throw the almond away, you goose! that is simple enough, isn't it? Bah! I don't pity the people who eat the bitter almond; not I--_ce sont bien betes, ces gens!_" she had said once, when arguing with an officer on the absurdity of a melancholy love which possessed him, and whose sadness she rallied most unmercifully. Now, for once in her young life, the Child of France found that it was remotely possible to meet with almonds so bitter that the taste will remain and taint all things, do what philosophy may to throw its acridity aside.

There were before them death, deprivation, long days of famine, long days of drought and thirst; parching sun-baked roads; bitter chilly nights; fiery furnace-blasts of sirocco; killing, pitiless, northern winds; hunger, only sharpened by a s.n.a.t.c.h of raw meat or a handful of maize; and the probabilities, ten to one, of being thrust under the sand to rot, or left to have their skeletons picked clean by the vultures.

But what of that? There were also the wild delight of combat, the freedom of lawless warfare, the joy of deep strokes thrust home, the chance of plunder, of wine-skins, of cattle, of women; above all, that l.u.s.t for slaughter which burns so deep down in the hidden souls of men, and gives them such brotherhood with wolf and vulture, and tiger, when once its flames burst forth.

The levelled carbines covered him; he stood erect with his face full toward the sun; ere they could fire, a shrill cry pierced the air--

"Wait! in the name of France."

Dismounted, breathless, staggering, with her arms flung upward, and her face bloodless with fear, Cigarette appeared upon the ridge of rising ground.

The cry of command pealed out upon the silence in the voice that the Army of Africa loved as the voice of their Little One. And the cry came too late; the volley was fired, the crash of sound thrilled across the words that bade them pause, the heavy smoke rolled out upon the air, the death that was doomed was dealt.

But beyond the smoke-cloud he staggered slightly, and then stood erect still, almost unharmed, grazed only by some few of the b.a.l.l.s. The flash of fire was not so fleet as the swiftness of her love; and on his breast she threw herself, and flung her arms about him, and turned her head backward with her old dauntless sunlit smile as the b.a.l.l.s pierced her bosom, and broke her limbs, and were turned away by that s.h.i.+eld of warm young life from him.

Her arms were gliding from about his neck, and her shot limbs were sinking to the earth as he caught her up where she dropped to his feet.

"O G.o.d! my child! they have killed you!"

He suffered more, as the cry broke from him, than if the bullets had brought him that death which he saw at one glance had stricken down for ever all the glory of her childhood, all the gladness of her youth.