“JE VOUS ACHETE VOTRE VIE.”
Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. The hurricane never
abated, and the blinding dust rose around him in great waves. The horse
fell lame; he had to dismount, and move slowly and painfully over the
loose, heavy soil on foot, raising the drooping head of the lifeless
rider. It was bitter, weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labor, of
an intolerable pain.
Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment all
consciousness; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield and leave
the vultures, hovering aloft, their prey. He was still somewhat weakened
by the wounds of Zaraila; he had been bruised and exhausted by the
skirmish of the past night; he was weary and heart-broken; but he did
not yield to his longing to sink down on the sands, and let his life
ebb out; he held patiently onward through the infinite misery of
the passage. At last he drew near the caravanserai where he had been
directed to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway in the distance
that he had to traverse, and almost alone when the face of the country
changed, and was more full of color, and more broken into rocky and
irregular surfaces.
As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward its shelter,
as its irregular corner towers became dimly perceptible to him through
the dizzy mists that had obscured his sight. By sheer instinct he found
his route straight toward the open arch of its entrance-way, and into
the square courtyard thronged with mules and camels and horses; for the
caravanserai stood on the only road that led through that district to
the south, and was the only house of call for drovers, or shelter for
travelers and artists of Europe who might pass that way. The groups in
the court paused in their converse and in their occupations, and looked
in awe at the gray charger with its strange burden, and the French
Chasseur who came so blindly forward like a man feeling his passage
through the dark. There was something in the sight that had a vague
terror for them before they clearly saw what this thing was which was
thus brought into their presence. Cecil moved slowly on into their
midst, his hand on the horse's rein; then a great darkness covered his
sight; he swayed to and fro, and fell senseless on the gray stone of the
paved court, while the muleteer and the camel-drivers, the Kabyls and
the French, who were mingled there, crowded around him in fear and in
wonder. When consciousness returned to him he was lying on a stone bench
in the shadow of the wall, and a throng of lean, bronzed, eager faces
about him in the midday sunlight which had broken through the windstorm.
Instantly he remembered all.
“Where is he?” he asked.
They knew he meant the dead man, and answered him in a hushed murmur of
many voices. They had placed the body gently down within, in a darkened
chamber.
A shiver passed over him; he stretched his hand out for water that they
held to him.
“Saddle me a fresh horse; I have my work to do.”
He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or self-pity
might a soldier pause by the wayside while his errand was still undone,
his duty unfulfilled.
He drank the water thirstily; then, reeling slightly still, from the
weakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting their offers of
aid. “Take me to him,” he said simply. They understood him; there were
French soldiers among them, and they took him, without question or
comment, across the court to the little square stone cell within one of
the towers, where they had laid the corpse, with nothing to break the
quiet and the solitude except the low, soft cooing of some doves that
had their homes in its dark corners, and flew in and out at pleasure
through the oval aperture that served as window.
He motioned them all back with his hand, and went into the gloom of the
chamber alone. Not one among them followed.
When he came forth again the reckless and riotous soldiers of France
turned silently and reverentially away, so that they should not look
upon his face. For it was well known throughout the army that no common
tie had bound together the exiles of England, and the fealty of comrade
to comrade was sacred in their sight.
The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. He crossed
the court, moving still like a man without sense of what he did; he
had the instinct to carry out the mission trusted to him, instantly and
accurately, but he had no distinct perception or memory of aught else,
save of those long-familiar features of which, ere he could return, the
cruel sun of Africa would not have spared one trace.
He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch--a shadow black and
intense against the golden light which, with the ceasing of the storm,
flooded the land in the full morning. There were movement, noise,
changes, haste in the entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachment
of the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of some
travelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of the
humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that some
of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke through
his stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman whom, however
madly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utter
hopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him:
“You are of the Princesse Corona's suite? What does she do here?”
“Madame travels to see the country and the war.”
“The war? This is no place for her. The land is alive with danger--rife
with death.”
“Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother. Milady does not know what
fear is.”
“But----”
The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloom
of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a face
unseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing and
careless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale with
the pallor of an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and
altered with a wholly different emotion--emotion that was, above all, of
an intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood motionless
and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint,
Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with the
impassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger,
and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.
He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped that
his brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who bore
resemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead and
gone. The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved
him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin
of his mother's darling as his own.
Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to
him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between
him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the
knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and
the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's
grave.
Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent of
the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned
to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last
offices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived;
all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists was
gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the
detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a
while.
It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars
shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the
single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a
pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats.
The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem;
and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and
play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod,
its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.
When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to
rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon the
grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonely
and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand
marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage
lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost
youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the
years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had
followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for
his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled
forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished,
unavenged! It seemed to him like murder--murder with which his own hand
was stained.
The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the
storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the
young goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the black
lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a
grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his
fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land
of his exile.
He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the
silence he heard a name whispered--the name of his childhood, of his
past.
He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw once
more his brother's face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained with
an agonizing dread. Concealment was no longer possible. The younger
man knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistible
certainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in
its chill, leaden, merciless conviction.
For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable memories choked
thought or word in both. They knew each other--all was said in that.
Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer with a rapid
movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other's shoulder.
“Have you lived stainlessly since?”
The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His brother shuddered
beneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.
“God is my witness, yes! But you--you--they said that you were dead!”
Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the words which
smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there was
the accent of regret.
“I am dead,” he said simply; “dead to the world and you.”
He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.
“How have you lived?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Honorably. Let that suffice. And you?”
The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal--the old, timorous,
terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy's face,
strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.
“In honor too, I swear! That was my first disgrace, and my last. You
bore the weight of my shame? Good God, what can I say? Such nobility,
such sacrifice----”
He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who had
lost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, but
only love. As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone.
While crushed with the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, he
still was filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness
of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy. Even in
the very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believed
dead was living--living and bearing the burden of the guilt he should
have borne--what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.
Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish loveliness he
remembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of the
man. He saw that life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with this
weak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to
evil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world.
He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw that
happiness had done for this character what adversity had done for his
own. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity would
have wrecked. He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word;
whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.
The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in those
pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.
“We believed you were dead,” he murmured wildly. “They said so; there
seemed every proof. But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you--I knew
you, though you passed me as a stranger. I stayed on here; they told me
you would return. God! what agony this day and night have been!”
Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lest
he should be living.
There were many emotions at war in him--scorn, and pity, and wounded
love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote a
sacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held him
speechless. To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to count
and claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile
the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own
to rest upon him--to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago he had
accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undo
now all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the
one whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and
forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded for
so long--this was not possible to him. Though it would be but his own
birthright that he would demand, his own justification that he would
establish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craven
thing. No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made was
unworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade him
now to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his
early fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might
even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother's place
to receive the shame of his brother's action; but it had been done so
long before--done on the spur of generous affection, and actuated by the
strange hazard that made the keeping of a woman's secret demand the same
reticence which also saved the young lad's name; to draw back from it
now would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.
All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another. He
could not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false to
the fair repute of their name--and he would not speak with harshness. He
felt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught
of his brother's life. It had been saved from temptation, and therefore
saved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.
The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In the many years
that had passed by, although his character had not changed, his position
had altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all the
power that wealth and independence and the accession to his title could
bestow. He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him
by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing,
ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole
existence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet,
base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder's place, and accept
this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.
“Bertie--Bertie!” he stammered, in hurried appeal--and the name of his
youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment
forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race--“on
my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No one
did. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have
said that you were innocent; I would--I would have told them how I
forged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate that
I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and I
thought then--then--it was not worth while; it would have broken my
father's heart. God help me! I was a coward!”
He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein lay
the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude.
Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness
holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that
moved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic
endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had
learned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused
his wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done.
Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been brought
upon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in his
sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who
was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon,
the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the
irresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that should
tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to
kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril--all
these kept him silent.
His brother misinterpreted that silence.
“I am in your power--utterly in your power,” he moaned in his fear. “I
stand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and our
brother are dead? All I have inherited is yours. Do you know that, since
you have never claimed it?”
“I know it.”
“And you have never come forward to take your rights?”
“What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merely
to hold a title.”
The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his words
fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature. The man
who lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, and
the purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple,
necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco
soldier.
“But--great Heaven!--this life of yours? It must be wretchedness?”
“Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it.”
The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had suffered
himself to show. It stung down to his listener's soul.
“No--no!” he murmured. “You are happier than I. You have no remorse to
bear! And yet--to tell the world that I am guilty----”
“You need never tell it; I shall not.”
He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, and had well
weighed, all he surrendered in that promise--the promise to condemn
himself to a barren and hopeless fate forever.
“You will not?”
The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched tongue. The
one passion of fear upon him was for himself; even in that moment of
supplication his disordered thoughts hovered wildly over the chances
of whether, if his elder brother even now asserted his innocence and
claimed his birthright, the world and its judges would ever believe him.
Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly made
grave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of his own race and
of his own Order never had been. His heart was full. The ingratitude and
the self-absorption of this life for which his own had been destroyed
smote him with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours before he
had looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; a
deadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, and
the world's love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his early
days to believe him dead after a deed of shame.
His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, sinking his
head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had not changed him greatly;
it had merely made him more intensely desirous of the pleasures and the
powers of life, more intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the
contempt of the world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had
stooped to any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was
capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His was one
of those natures which, having no love of evil for evil's sake, still
embrace any form of evil which may save them from the penalty of their
own weakness. Now, thus meeting one who for twelve years he had believed
must rise from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung
his every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness--the desire,
at all costs, to be saved.
Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. He had loved
his brother as a youth--loved him well enough to take and bear a heavy
burden of disgrace in his stead. The old love was not dead; but stronger
than itself was his hatred of the shame that had touched their race by
the wretched crime that had driven him into exile, and his wondering
scorn for the feeble and self-engrossed character that had lived
contentedly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by a
fictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; he did
not know how to support the intolerable pain that oppressed him in the
presence of the only living creature of his race; he could not answer
for himself what passionate and withering words might not escape him;
every instant of their interview was a horrible temptation to him--the
temptation to demand from this coward his own justification before
the world--the temptation to seize out of those unworthy hands his
birthright and his due.
But the temptation--sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened by the
strength of right, and well-nigh overwhelming with all its fair,
delicious promise for the future--did not conquer him. What resisted
it was his own simple instinct of justice; an instinct too straight and
true either to yield to self-pity or to passionate desire--justice which
made him feel that, since he had chosen to save this weakling once for
their lost mother's sake, he was bound forever not to repent nor to
retract. He gazed a while longer, silently, at the younger man, who
sat, still rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of the
freshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on his brother's
shoulder. The other started and trembled; he remembered that touch in
days of old.
“Do not fear me,” he said, gently and very gravely. “I have kept your
secret twelve years; I will keep it still. Be happy--be as happy as you
can. All I bid of you in return is so to live that in your future your
past shall be redeemed.”
The words of the saint to the thief were not more merciful, not more
noble, than the words with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of his
own life, the redemption of his brother's. The other looked at him with
a look that was half of terror--terror at the magnitude of this ransom
that was given to save him from the bondage of evil.
“My God! You cannot mean it! And you----”
“I shall lead the life fittest for me. I am content in it. It is
enough.”
The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utterance. Before his
memory rose one fair, proud face. “Content!” Ah, Heaven! It was the only
lie that had ever passed his lips.
His hand lay still upon his brother's shoulder, leaning more heavily
there, in the silence that brooded over the hushed plains.
“Let us part now, and forever. Leave Algeria at once. That is all I
ask.”
Then, without another word that could add reproach or seek for
gratitude, he turned and went away over the great, dim level of the
African waste, while the man whom he had saved sat as in stupor; gazing
at the brown shadows, and the sleeping herds, and the falling stars that
ran across the sky, and doubting whether the voice he had head and the
face upon which he had looked were not the visions of a waking dream.