SEUL AU MONDE.
The errand on which he went was one, as he was well aware, from which it
were a thousand chances to one that he ever issued alive.
It was to reach a distant branch of the Army of Occupation with
dispatches for the chief in command there, and to do this he had to pass
through a fiercely hostile region, occupied by Arabs with whom no
sort of peace had ever been made, the most savage as well as the most
predatory of the wandering tribes. His knowledge of their tongue, and
his friendship with some men of their nation, would avail him nothing
here; for their fury against the Franks was intense, and it was said
that all prisoners who had fallen into their hands had been put to death
with merciless barbarities. This might be true or not true; wild tales
were common among Algerian campaigners; whichever it were, he thought
little of it as he rode out on to the lonely plains. Every kind of
hazardous adventure and every variety of peril had been familiar with
him in the African life; and now there were thoughts and memories on him
which deadened every recollection of merely physical risk.
“We must ride as hard and as fast as we can, and as silently,” were the
only words he exchanged with Rake, as he loosened his gray to a gallop.
“All right, sir,” answered the trooper, whose warm blood was dancing,
and whose blue eyes were alive like fire with delight. That he had
been absent on a far-away foraging raid on the day of Zaraila had been
nothing short of agony to Rake, and the choice made of him for this duty
was to him a gift of paradise. He loved fighting for fighting's sake;
and to be beside Cecil was the greatest happiness life held for him.
They had two hundred miles to traverse, and had received only the
command he had passed to Rake, to ride “hard, fast, and silently.” To
the hero of Zaraila the general had felt too much soldierly sympathy to
add the superfluous injunction to do his uttermost to carry safely and
successfully to their destination the papers that were placed in his
care. He knew well that the errand would be done, or the Chasseur would
be dead.
It was just nightfall; the after-glow had faded only a few moments
before. Giving their horses, which they were to change once, ten hours
for the distance, and two for bait and for rest, he reckoned that they
would reach the camp before the noon of the coming day, as the beasts,
fresh and fast in the camp, flew like greyhounds beneath them.
Another night ride that they had ridden together came to the minds of
both; but they spoke not a word as they swept on, their sabers shaken
loose in their sheaths, their lances well gripped, and the pistols with
which they had been supplied sprung in their belts, ready for instant
action if a call should come for it. Every rood of the way was as full
of unseen danger as if laid over mines. They might pass in safety;
they might any moment be cut down by ten score against two. From every
hanging scarp of rugged rock a storm of musket-balls might pour; from
every screen of wild-fig foliage a shower of lances might whistle
through the air; from every darkling grove of fir trees an Arab band
might spring and swoop on them; but the knowledge scarcely recurred
to the one save to make him shake his sword more loose for quick
disengagement, and only made the sunny blue eyes of the other sparkle
with a vivid and longing zest.
The night grew very chill as it wore on; the north wind rose, rushing
against them with a force and icy touch that seemed to freeze their
bones to the marrow after the heat of the day and the sun that had
scorched them so long. There was no regular road; they went across the
country, their way sometimes leading over level land, over which they
swept like lightning, great plains succeeding one another with wearisome
monotony; sometimes on the contrary, lying through ravines, and defiles,
and gloomy woods, and broken, hilly spaces, where rent, bare rocks were
thrown on one another in gigantic confusion, and the fantastic shapes of
the wild fig and the dwarf palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the
darkness. For there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by
the storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky; and the only
sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the shriek of the night
bird, and now and then the sound of shallow water-courses, where the
parched beds of hidden brooks had been filled by the autumnal rain.
The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, and the
horses lay well and warmly to their work. They halted to rest and bait
the beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered from the blasts of the bise,
and green with short, sweet grass, sprung up afresh after the summer
drought.
“Do you ever think of him, sir?” said Rake softly, with a lingering love
in his voice, as he stroked the grays and tethered them.
“Of whom?”
“Of the King, sir. If he's alive, he's getting a rare old horse now.”
“Think of him! I wish I did not, Rake.”
“Wouldn't you like to see him agen, sir?”
“What folly to ask! You know--”
“Yes, sir, I know,” said Rake slowly. “And I know--leastways I picked
it out of a old paper--that your elder brother died, sir, like the old
lord, and Mr. Berk's got the title.”
Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say this thing
which he had learned, and which he could not tell whether or no Cecil
knew likewise. His eyes looked with straining eagerness through the
gloom into his master's; he was uncertain how his words would be taken.
To his bitter disappointment, Cecil's face showed no change, no wonder.
“I have heard that,” he said calmly--as calmly as though the news had no
bearing on his fortunes, but was some stranger's history.
“Well, sir, but he ain't the lord!” pleaded Rake passionately. “He won't
never be while you're living, sir!”
“Oh, yes, he is! I am dead, you know.”
“But he won't, sir!” reiterated Rake. “You're Lord Royallieu if ever
there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever there will be one.”
“You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can claim none.”
The man looked very wistfully at him; all these years through he had
never learned why his master was thus “dead” in Africa, and he had too
loyal a love and faith ever to ask, or ever to doubt but that Cecil was
the wronged and not the wrong-doer.
“You ain't a outlaw, sir,” he muttered. “You could take the title, if
you would.”
“Oh, no! I left England under a criminal charge. I should have to
disprove that before I could inherit.”
Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. “You could
disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you chose.”
“No; or I should not have come here. Let us leave the subject. It was
settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royallieu. I would not disturb him,
if I had the power, and I have not it. Look, the horses are taking well
to their feed.”
Rake asked him no more. He had never had a harsh word from Cecil in
their lives; but he knew him too well, for all that, to venture to press
on him a question thus firmly put aside. But his heart ached sorely for
his master; he would so gladly have seen “the king among his own again,”
and would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a
Cavalier strove for the White Rose; and he sat in silence, perplexed
and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, dim,
desolate African landscape stretching before him, with here and there
a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept the clouds apart. His
volatile speech was chilled, and his buoyant spirits were checked. That
Cecil was justly outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason
to believe for one instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to
wrench up the great stones above him from their base as seek to change
the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant as a reed and
careless as a child.
They were before long in saddle again and off, the country growing
wilder at each stride the horses took.
“It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,” said Cecil, as
he settled himself in his saddle. “They have come northward and been
sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, and we shall blunder on some
of them sooner or later. If they cut me down, don't wait; but slash my
pouch loose and ride off with it.”
“All right, sir,” said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself,
“Leave you alone with them demons? Damn me if I will!”
And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness
of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy
drift of rising storm-clouds.
Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment. The
dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor
of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the
headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine
of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as
indispensable as the champagnes.
Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was
bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety,
like a kitten's play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first
time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In truth,
while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged
blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like
a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her,
and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the
starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great,
dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and
one who might never return.
It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present;
it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting,
unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear--she had never
known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him--a man whose
lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might
have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!
She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate
shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the
insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they
were shot to-day; and now he--he whose careless, calm caress would make
her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never
known--he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had
roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a
deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.
Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty
that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had
trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have
been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette
would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and
rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be
stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.
Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with
which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest
and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and
from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.
“What is your name?” she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the
amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the
officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.
“Well--some call me Seraph.”
“Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion? I should have though she
was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?”
“Lyonnesse.”
“What a droll name! What are you?”
“A soldier.”
“Good! What grade?”
“A Colonel of Guards.”
Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a
Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, “He has the seat
of the English Guards.”
“My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his title,” cried one
of the officers.
Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.
“Ouf! Titles are nothing to me. I am a child of the People. So you are
a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph? Well, that is not much, to my thinking.
Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats
here wearing privates' uniforms, and littering down their own horses.
Bah! Have you that sort of thing in Albion?”
“Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep crossings? Oh,
yes!” laughed her interlocutor. “But you speak of aristocrats in your
ranks--that reminds me. Have you not in this corps a soldier called
Louis Victor?”
He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who answered him in
the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with all her curiosity and all
her interest, that needed a deeper name, heightened and tight-strung.
“A fine fellow,” continued the Chef d'Escadron to whom he had appealed.
“He behaved magnificently the other day at Zaraila; he must be
distinguished for it. He is just sent on a perilous errand, but though
so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, and woe to the Arabs who slay him! Are
you acquainted with him?”
“Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of him. I have been
told he seems above his present position. Is it so?”
“Likely enough, monsieur; he seems a gentleman. But then we have
many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can make no difference for that.
Cigarette can tell you more of him; she used to complain that he bowed
like a Court chamberlain.”
“Oh, ha!--I did!” cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony because
pained and irritated by being appealed to on the subject. “And of
course, when so many of his officers have the manners of Pyrenean bears,
it is a little awkward for him to bring us the manner of a Palace!”
Which effectually chastised the Chef d'Escadron, who was one of those
who had a ton of the roughest manners, and piqued himself on his powers
of fence much more than on his habits of delicacy.
“Has this Victor any history?” asked the English Duke.
“He has written one with his sword; a fine one,” said Cigarette curtly.
“We are not given here to care much about any other.”
“Quite right; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen his carvings
wished to serve him, if it were possible; and--”
“Ho! That is Milady, is suppose!” Cigarette's eyes flashed fire
instantly, in wrath and suspicion. “What did she tell you about him?”
“I am ignorant of whom you speak?” he answered, with something of
surprise and annoyance.
“Are you?” said Cigarette, in derision. “I doubt that. Of whom should I
speak but of her? Bah? She insulted him, she offered him gold, she sent
my men the spoils of her table, as if they were paupers, and he thinks
it all divine because it is done by Mme. la Princesse Corona d'Amague!
Bah! when he was delirious, the other night, he could babble of nothing
but of her--of her--of her!”
The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every other thought; she
was a child in much, she was untutored in all; she had no thought that
by the scornful vituperation of “Milady” she could either harm Cecil or
betray herself. But she was amazed to see the English guest change
color with a haughty anger that he strove to subdue as he half rose and
answered her with an accent in his voice that reminded her--she knew not
why--of Bel-a-faire-peur and of Marquise.
“Mme. la Princess Corona d'Amague is my sister; why do you venture to
couple the name of this Chasseur with hers?”
Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, dared to
anything by the mere fact of being publicly arraigned.
“Pardieu! Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with the Eagles of
France?--a pretty idea, truly! So she is your sister, is she? Milady?
Well, then, tell her from me to think twice before she outrages a
soldier with 'patronage'; and tell her, too, that had I been he I would
have ground my ivory toys into powder before I would have let them
become the playthings of a grande dame who tendered me gold for them!”
The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was mingled with a
vivid sense of intense annoyance and irritated pride, that the name he
cherished closest should be thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the
lips of a vivandiere and in connection with a trooper of Chasseurs.
“I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle,” he said, with an
impatient stroke to his beard. “There is no occasion for it. Mme. Corona
d'Amague, my sister,” he continued, to the officers present, “became
accidentally acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of
yours; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding.
She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity--”
“M. le Duc!” cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and startling
as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, flushed with the
draughts of champagne and with the warmth of wrath at once jealous and
generous, “keep your compassion until it is asked of you. No soldier of
France needs it; that I promise you. I know this man that you talk of
'pitying.' Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up
his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the guidon;
I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from under his horse,
and his first conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to
a wretch who had thieved from him. Our life here is hell upon earth to
such as he, yet none ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone
to the chances of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses'
kisses; he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored. Such a one is not
to have the patronage of a Milady Corona, nor the pity of a stranger of
England. Let the first respect him; let the last imitate him!”
And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her eulogy with the
vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne
goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to
detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in
their lighted tent.
“C'est Cigarette!” said the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug of his
shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of
irreclaimable eccentricities.
“A strange little Amazon!” said their guest. “Is she in love with this
Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?”
The Major shrugged his shoulders.
“I don't know that, monsieur,” answered one. “She will defend a man in
his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly. Cigarette whirls
about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as
the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the
Tricolor.”
Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was
bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Chasseur's fortunes, he
should have brought in the name he loved so well--the purest, fairest,
haughtiest name in Europe--into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp
dinner.
Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence,
the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only
now he opened his lips for a few brief words:
“Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity. The
fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us.
He fights well--it is often a blackguard's virtue!”
His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at
the introduction of his sister's name into the discussion made him drop
the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.
Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper! If Cigarette had
been of his own sex he could have dashed the white teeth down her throat
for having spoken of the two in one breath.
And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his narrow camp
pallet, tired with a long day in saddle under the hot African sun, the
Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under his handsome golden head,
and thought no more of this unknown French trooper.
But Cigarette remained wakeful.
She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante,
with her head on the beast's glossy flank and her hand among his mane.
She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped
for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most
watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks,
the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his
hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.
To-night Etoile Filante slept, and his mistress was awake--wide-awake,
with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate
mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with
wrath. The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had
come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to
fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken--of that aristocrat whose
name had been on Cecil's lips when he had been delirious. She had kept
his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something
that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he
had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some
unknown French soldier. She could not tell what the history was, but
she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had
known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their
fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she
could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which
had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother's ring as the
sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were
lying in his coffin. No matter what the precise reason was--women, or
debt, or accident, or ruin--these two, who had been familiar comrades,
were now as strangers to each other; the one slumbered in ignorance near
her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes
of his friend recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled her,
it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even
now--this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of
the night chase one another along the dreary plains--a shot might
have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and
country; even now all might be over!
And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before,
at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright
French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between
her pretty teeth.
Mere de Dieu! he had touched her lips as carelessly as her own
kiss would have touched the rose-bud, waxen petals of a cluster of
oleander-blossoms; and she cared for him still!
While the Seraph slept dreamlessly, with the tents of the French camp
around him, and the sleepless eyes of Cigarette watched afar off the
dim, distant forms of the vedettes as they circled slowly round at their
outpost duty--eight leagues off, through a vast desert of shadow and
silence, the two horsemen swept swiftly on. Not a word had passed
between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were
scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds
obscured the skies. Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a
flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even
the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.
Every rood of the road was sown thick with peril. No frowning ledge of
rock, with pine-roots in its clefts, but might serve as the barricade
behind which some foe lurked; no knot of cypress-shrubs, black even on
that black sheet of shadow, but might be pierced with the steel tubes of
leveled, waiting muskets.
Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them
a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory
tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy
blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still
in arms, infesting the country everywhere southward; defying regular
pursuit, impervious to regular attacks; carrying on the harassing
guerilla warfare at which they were such adepts. And causing thus
to their Frankish foe more irritation and more loss than decisive
engagements would have produced. They feared nothing, had nothing to
lose, and could subsist almost upon nothing. They might be driven into
the desert, they might even be exterminated after long pursuit; but they
would never be vanquished. And they were scattered now far and wide over
the country; every cave might shelter, every ravine might inclose them;
they appeared here, they appeared there; they swooped down on a convoy,
they carried sword and flame into a settlement, they darted like a
flight of hawks upon a foraging party, they picked off any vedette, as
he wheeled his horse round in the moonlight; and every yard of the sixty
miles which the two gray chargers of the Chasseurs d'Afrique must cover
ere their service was done was as rife with death as though its course
lay over the volcanic line of an earthquake or a hollow, mined and
sprung.
They had reached the center of the plain when the sound they had long
looked for rang on their ears, piercing the heavy, breathless stillness
of the night. It was the Allah-il-Allah of their foes, the war-cry of
the Moslem. Out of the gloom--whether from long pursuit or some near
hiding-place they could not tell--there broke suddenly upon them the
fury of an Arab onslaught. In the darkness all they could see were the
flash of steel, the flame of fierce eyes against their own, the white
steam of smoking horses, the spray of froth flung off the snorting
nostrils, the rapid glitter of the curved flissas--whether two, or
twenty, or twice a hundred were upon them they could not know--they
never did know. All of which they were conscious was that in an instant,
from the tranquil melancholy around them of the great, dim, naked space,
they were plunged into the din, the fury, the heat, the close, crushing,
horrible entanglement of conflict, without the power to perceive or to
number their foes, and only able to follow the sheer, simple instincts
of attack and of defense. All they were sensible of was one of those
confused moments, deafening, blinding, filled with violence and rage and
din--an eternity in semblance, a second in duration--that can never be
traced, never be recalled; yet in whose feverish excitement men do that
which, in their calmer hours, would look to them a fable of some Amadis
of Gaul.
How they were attacked, how they resisted, how they struck, how they
were encompassed, how they thrust back those who were hurled on them in
the black night, with the north sea-wind like ice upon their faces, and
the loose African soil drifting up in clouds of sand around them, they
could never have told. Nor how they strained free from the armed ring
that circled them, and beat aside the shafts of lances and the blades of
swords, and forced their chargers breast to breast against the fence of
steel and through the tempest of rage, and blows, and shouts, and wind,
and driven sand, cut their way through the foe whose very face
they scarce could see, and plunged away into the shadows across the
desolation of the plain, pursued, whether by one or by the thousand they
could not guess; for the gallop was noiseless on the powdered soil, and
the Arab yell of baffled passion and slaughterous lust was half drowned
in the rising of the wind-storm. Had it been day, they would have seen
their passage across the level table-land traced by a crimson stream
upon the sand, in which the blood of Frank and Arab blended equally.
As it was, they dashed headlong down through the darkness that grew yet
denser and blacker as the storm rose. For miles the ground was level
before them, and they had only to let the half-maddened horses, that had
as by a miracle escaped all injury, rush on at their own will through
the whirl of the wind that drove the dust upward in spiral columns and
brought icy breaths of the north over the sear, sunburned, southern
wastes.
For a long space they had no sense but that of rapid, ceaseless motion
through the thick gloom and against the pressure of the violent blasts.
The speed of their gallop and the strength of the currents of air were
like some narcotic that drowned and that dizzied perception. In the
intense darkness neither could see, neither hear, the other; the
instinct of the beasts kept them together, but no word could be heard
above the roar of the storm, and no light broke the somber veil of
shadow through which they passed as fast as leopards course through the
night. The first faint streak of dawn grew gray in the east when Cecil
felt his charger stagger and sway beneath him, and halt, worn out and
quivering in every sinew with fatigue. He threw himself off the animal
in time to save himself from falling with it as it reeled and sank to
the ground.
“Massena cannot stir another yard,” he said. “Do you think they follow
us still?”
There was no reply.
He strained his sight to pierce the darkness, but he could distinguish
nothing; the gloom was still too deep. He spoke more loudly; still there
was no reply. Then he raised his voice in a shout; it rang through the
silence, and, when it ceased, the silence reigned again.
A deadly chill came on him. How had he missed his comrade? They must be
far apart, he knew, since no response was given to his summons; or--the
alternative rose before him with a terrible foreboding.
That intense quiet had a repose as of death in it, a ghastly loneliness
that seemed filled with desolation. His horse was stretched before him
on the sand, powerless to rise and drag itself a rood onward, and fast
expiring. From the plains around him not a sound came, either of friend
or foe. The consciousness that he was alone, that he had lost forever
the only friend left to him, struck on him with that conviction which
so often foreruns the assurance of calamity. Without a moment's pause
he plunged back in the direction he had come, leaving the charger on
the ground to pant its life out as it must, and sought to feel his way
along, so as to seek as best he could the companion he had deserted. He
still could not see a rood before him, but he went on slowly, with some
vague hope that he should ere long reach the man whom he knew death or
the fatality of accident alone would keep from his side. He could not
feel or hear anything that gave him the slightest sign or clew to aid
his search; he only wandered farther from his horse, and risked falling
afresh into the hands of his pursuers; he shouted again with all his
strength, but his own voice alone echoed over the plains, while his
heart stood still with the same frozen dread that a man feels when,
wrecked on some barren shore, his cry for rescue rings back on his own
ear over the waste of waters.
The flicker of the dawn was growing lighter in the sky, and he could see
dimly now, as in some winter day's dark twilight, though all around him
hung the leaden mist, with the wild winds driving furiously. It was with
difficulty also that he kept his feet against their force; but he was
blown onward by their current, though beaten from side to side, and he
still made his way forward. He had repassed the ground already traversed
by some hundred yards or more, which seemed the length of many miles in
the hurricane that was driving over the earth and sky, when some outline
still duskier than the dusky shadow caught his sight; it was the body of
a horse, standing on guard over the fallen body of a man.
Another moment and he was beside them.
“My God! Are you hurt?”
He could see nothing but an indistinct and shapeless mass, without form
or color to mark it out from the brooding gloom and from the leaden
earth. But the voice he knew so well answered him with the old love and
fealty in it; eager with fear for him.
“When did you miss me, sir? I didn't mean you to know; I held on as long
as I could; and when I couldn't no longer, I thought you was safe not to
see I'd knocked over, so dark as it was.”
“Great Heavens! You are hurt, then?”
“Just finished, sir. Lord! It don't matter. Only you ride on, Mr. Cecil;
ride on, I say. Don't mind me.”
“What is it? When were you struck? O Heaven! I never dreamt----”
Cecil hung over him, striving in vain through the shadows to read the
truth from the face on which he felt by instinct the seal of death was
set.
“I never meant you should know, sir. I meant just to drop behind and
die on the quiet. You see, sir, it was just this way; they hit me as we
forced through them. There's the lance-head in my loins now. I pressed
it in hard, and kept the blood from flowing, and thought I should hold
out so till the sun rose. But I couldn't do it so long; I got sick and
faint after a while, and I knew well enough it was death. So I dropped
down while I'd sense left to check the horse and get out of saddle in
silence. I hoped you wouldn't miss me, in the darkness and the noise the
wind was making; and you didn't hear me then, sir. I was glad.”
His voice was checked in a quick, gasping breath; his only thought had
been to lie down and die in the solitude so that his master might be
saved.
A great sob shook Cecil as he heard; no false hope came to him; he felt
that this man was lost to him forever, that this was the sole recompense
which the cruelty of Africa would give to a fidelity passing the
fidelity of woman; these throes of dissolution the only payment with
which fate would ever requite a loyalty that had held no travail weary,
no exile pain, and no danger worthy counting, so long as they were
encountered and endured in his own service.
“Don't take on about it, sir,” whispered Rake, striving to raise his
head that he might strain his eyes better through the gloom to see
his master's face. “It was sure to come some time; and I ain't in no
pain--to speak of. Do leave me, Mr. Cecil--leave me, for God's sake, and
save yourself!”
“Did you leave me?”
The answer was very low, and his voice shook as he uttered it; but
through the roar of the hurricane Rake heard it.
“That was different, sir,” he said simply. “Let me lie here, and go you
on. It'll soon be over, and there's naught to be done.”
“O God! is no help possible?”
“Don't take on, sir; it's no odds. I always was a scamp, and scamps die
game, you know. My life's been a rare spree, count it all and all; and
it's a great, good thing, you see, sir, to go off quick like this. I
might have been laid in hospital. If you'd only take the beast and ride
on, sir--”
“Hush! hush! Would you make me coward, or brute, or both?”
The words broke in an agony from him. The time had been when he had
been himself stretched in what he had thought was death, in just such
silence, in just such solitude, upon the bare, baked earth, far from
men's aid, and near only to the hungry eyes of watching beasts of prey.
Then he had been very calm, and waited with indifference for the end;
now his eyes swept over the remorseless wastes, that were growing
faintly visible under the coming dawn, with all the impatience, the
terror, of despair. Death had smitten down many beside him; buoyant
youth and dauntless manhood he had seen a thousand times swept under the
great waves of war and lost forever, but it had an anguish for him here
that he would never have known had he felt his own life-blood well out
over the sand. The whole existence of this man had been sacrificed for
him, and its only reward was a thrust of a lance in a midnight fray--a
grave in an alien soil.
His grief fell dully on ears half deafened already to the sounds of the
living world. The exhaustion that follows on great loss of blood was
upon the soldier who for the last half hour had lain there in the
darkness and the stillness, quietly waiting death, and not once seeking
even to raise his voice for succor lest the cry should reach and should
imperil his master.
The morning had broken now, but the storm had not lulled. The northern
winds were sweeping over the plains in tenfold violence, and the rains
burst and poured, with the fury of water-spouts on the crust of the
parched, cracked earth. Around them there was nothing heard or seen
except the leaden, angry mists, tossed to and fro under the hurricane,
and the white light of the coming day breaking lividly through
the clouds. The world held no place of more utter desolation, more
unspeakable loneliness; and in its misery Cecil, flung down upon
the sands beside him, could do nothing except--helpless to aid, and
powerless to save--watch the last breath grow feebler and feebler, until
it faded out from the only life that had been faithful to him.
By the fitful gleams of day he could see the blood slowly ebbing out
from the great gap where the lance-head was still bedded with its wooden
shaft snapped in two; he could see the drooped head that he had raised
upon his knee, with the yellow, northern curls that no desert suns had
darkened; and Rake's eyes, smiling so brightly and so bravely still,
looked up from under their weary lids to his.
“I'd never let you take my hand before, sir; just take it once now--will
you?--while I can see you still.”
Their hands met as he asked it, and held each other close and long; all
the loyal service of the one life, and all the speechless gratitude of
the other, told better than by all words in that one farewell.
A light that was not from the stormy dusky morning shone over the
soldier's face.
“Time was, sir,” he said, with a smile, “when I need to think as how,
some day or another, when I should have done something great and grand,
and you was back among your own again, and they here had given me the
Cross, I'd have asked you to have done that before all the Army, and
just to have said to 'em, if so you liked, 'He was a scamp, and he
wasn't thought good for naught; but he kept true to me, and you see it
made him go straight, and I aren't ashamed to call him my friend.' I
used to think that, sir, though 'twas silly, perhaps. But it's best as
it is--a deal best, no doubt. If you was only back safe in camp---”
“O God! cease! I am not worthy one thought of love like yours.”
“Yes, you are, sir--leastways, you was to me. When you took pity on me,
it was just a toss-up if I didn't go right to the gallows. Don't grieve
that way, Mr. Cecil. If I could just have seen you home again in your
place, I should have been glad--that's all. You'll go back one day, sir;
when you do, tell the King I ain't never forgot him.”
His voice grew faint as the last sentence stole from his lips; he lay
quite still, his head leaned back against his master; and the day came,
with the north winds driving over the plains and the gray mists tossed
by them to and fro like smoke.
There was a long silence, a pause in which the windstorm ceased, and
the clouds of the loosed sands sunk. Alone, with the wastes stretching
around them, were the living and the dying man, with the horse standing
motionless beside them, and, above, the gloom of the sullen sky. No aid
was possible; they could but wait, in the stupefaction of despair, for
the end of all to come.
In that awful stillness, in that sudden lull in the madness of the
hurricane, death had a horror which it never wore in the riot of the
battlefield, in the intoxication of the slaughter. There was no pity in
earth or heaven; the hard, hot ground sucked down its fill of blood; the
icy air enwrapped them like a shroud.
The faithfulness of love, the strength of gratitude, were of no avail;
the one perished in agony, the other was powerless to save.
In that momentary hush, as the winds sank low, the heavy eyes, half
sightless now, sought with their old wistful, doglike loyalty the face
to which so soon they would be blind forever.
“Would you tell me once, sir--now? I never asked--I never would have
done--but may be I might know in this last minute. You never sinned that
sin you bear the charge on?”
“God is my witness, no.”
The light, that was like sunlight, shone once more in the aching,
wandering eyes.
“I knew, I knew! It was--”
Cecil bowed his head over him, lower and lower.
“Hush! He was but a child; and I--”
With a sudden and swift motion, as though new life were thrilling in
him, Rake raised himself erect, his arms stretched outward to the east,
where the young day was breaking.
“I knew, I knew! I never doubted. You will go back to your own some day,
and men shall learn the truth--thank God! thank God!”
Then, with that light still on his face, his head fell backward; and
with one quick, brief sigh his life fled out forever.
The time passed on; the storm had risen afresh; the violence of the
gusts blew yellow sheets of sand whirling over the plains. Alone, with
the dead one across his knees, Cecil sat motionless as though turned to
stone. His eyes were dry and fixed; but ever and again a great, tearless
sob shook him from head to foot. The only life that linked him with
the past, the only love that had suffered all things for his sake,
were gone, crushed out as though they never had been, like some insect
trodden in the soil.
He had lost all consciousness, all memory, save of that lifeless thing
which lay across his knees, like a felled tree, like a broken log, with
the glimmer of the tempestuous day so chill and white upon the upturned
face.
He was alone on earth; and the solitudes around him were not more
desolate than his own fate.
He was like a man numbed and stupefied by intense cold; his veins seemed
stagnant, and his sight could only see those features that became so
terribly serene, so fearfully unmoved with the dread calm of death. Yet
the old mechanical instincts of a soldier guided him still; he vaguely
knew that his errand had to be done, must be done, let his heart ache as
it would, let him long as he might to lie down by the side of his only
friend, and leave the torture of life to grow still in him also for
evermore.
Instinctively, he moved to carry out the duty trusted to him. He looked
east and west, north and south; there was nothing in sight that could
bring him aid; there were only the dust clouds hurled in billows hither
and thither by the bitter winds still blowing from the sea. All that
could be done had to be done by himself alone. His own safety hung on
the swiftness of his flight; for aught he knew, at every moment, out
of the mist and the driven sheets of sand there might rush the desert
horses of his foes. But this memory was not with him; all he thought
of was that burden stretched across his limbs, which laid down one hour
here unwatched, would be the prey of the jackal and the vulture. He
raised it reverently in his arms, and with long, laborious effort drew
its weight up across the saddle of the charger which stood patiently
waiting by, turning its docile eyes with a plaintive, wondering sadness
on the body of the rider it had loved. Then he mounted himself; and with
the head of his lost comrade borne up upon his arm, and rested gently on
his breast, he rode westward over the great plain to where his mission
lay.
The horse paced slowly beneath the double load of dead and living; he
would not urge the creature faster on; every movement that shook
the drooping limbs, or jarred the repose of that last sleep, seemed
desecration. He passed the place where his own horse was stretched; the
vultures were already there. He shuddered; and then pressed faster on,
as though the beasts and birds of prey would rob him of his burden ere
he could give it sanctuary. And so he rode, mile after mile, over the
barren land, with no companion save the dead.
The winds blew fiercely in his teeth; the sand was in his eyes and hair;
the way was long, and weary, and sown thick with danger; but he knew of
nothing, felt and saw nothing save that one familiar face so strangely
changed and transfigured by that glory with which death had touched it.