THE GIFT OF THE CROSS.
One of the most brilliant of Algerian autumnal days shone over the great
camp in the south. The war was almost at an end for a time; the Arabs
were defeated and driven desertwards; hostilities irksome, harassing,
and annoying, like all guerrilla warfare, would long continue; but peace
was virtually established, and Zaraila had been the chief glory that had
been added by the campaign to the flag of Imperial France. The kites
and the vultures had left the bare bones by thousands to bleach upon the
sands, and the hillocks of brown earth rose in crowds where those, more
cared for in death, had been hastily thrust beneath the brown crust
of the earth. The dead had received their portion of reward--in the
jackal's teeth, in the crow's beak, in the worm's caress. And the
living received theirs in this glorious, rose-flecked, glittering autumn
morning, when the breath of winter made the air crisp and cool, but the
ardent noon still lighted with its furnace glow the hillside and the
plain.
The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the immense level of
the plateau to witness the presentation of the Cross of the Legion of
Honor.
It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on the deep,
sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched east and west, north
and south, formed up in three sides of one vast, massive square.
The battalions of Zouaves and of Zephyrs; the brigade of Chasseurs
d'Afrique; the squadrons of Spahis; the regiments of Tirailleurs and
Turcos; the batteries of Flying Artillery, were all massed there,
reassembled from the various camps and stations of the southern
provinces to do honor to the day--to do honor in especial to one by whom
the glory of the Tricolor had been saved unstained.
The red, white, and blue of the standards, the brass of the eagle
guidons; the gray, tossed manes of the chargers; the fierce, swarthy
faces of the soldiery; the scarlet of the Spahis' cloaks, and the snowy
folds of the Demi-Cavalry turbans; the shine of the sloped lances, and
the glisten of the carbine barrels, fused together in one sea of blended
color, flashed into a million prismatic hues against the somber shadow
of the sunburned plains and the clear blue of the skies.
It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had availed
nothing, except to drive the Arabs away from some hundred leagues of
useless and profitless soil; hundreds of French soldiers had fallen by
disease, and drought, and dysentery, as well as by shot and saber, and
were unrecorded save on the books of the bureaus; unlamented, save,
perhaps, in some little nestling hamlet among the great, green woods of
Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines of Provence,
where some woman, toiling till sunset among the fields, or praying
before some wayside saint's stone niche, would give a thought to the
far-off and devouring desert that had drawn down beneath its sands the
head that used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child's, or caressed
as a lover's.
But the drums rolled out their long, deep thunder over the water; and
the shot-torn standards fluttered gayly in the breeze blowing from the
west; and the clear, full music of the French bands echoed away to
the dim, distant, terrible south, where the desert-scorch and the
desert-thirst had murdered their bravest and best--and the Army was en
fete. En fete, for it did honor to its darling. Cigarette received the
Cross.
Mounted on her own little, bright bay, Etoile-Filante, with tricolor
ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy fringes of his mane,
the Little One rode among her Spahis. A scarlet kepi was set on her
thick, silken curls, a tricolor sash was knotted round her waist,
her wine-barrel was slung on her left hip, her pistols thrust in her
ceinturon, and a light carbine held in her hand with the butt-end
resting on her foot. With the sun on her childlike brunette face,
her eyes flashing like brown diamonds in the light, and her marvelous
horsemanship showing its skill in a hundred daring tricks, the little
Friend of the Flag had come hither among her half-savage warriors, whose
red robes surrounded her like a sea of blood.
And on a sea of blood she, the Child of War, had floated; never sinking
in that awful flood, but buoyant ever above its darkest waves; catching
ever some ray of sunlight upon her fair young head, and being oftentimes
like a star of hope to those over whom its dreaded waters closed.
Therefore they loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful
warriors, to whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred; by whom in
their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was spared, whose
law was license, and whose mercy was murder. They loved her, these
brutes whose greed was like the tiger's, whose hate was like the
devouring flame; and any who should have harmed a single lock of her
curling hair would have had the spears of the African Mussulmans buried
by the score in his body. They loved her, with the one fond, triumphant
love these vultures of the army ever knew; and to-day they gloried in
her with fierce, passionate delight. To-day she was to her wild wolves
of Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleurs was to her brethren of France. And
today was the crown of her young life.
In the fair, slight, girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a
courage as daring as Danton's, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud's,
a soul as aspiring as Napoleon's. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by
poet's words or patriot's bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the
blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child
of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die
greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition in the army of her country,
to have her name remembered in the roll-call; to be once shrined in the
love and honor of France, Cigarette--full of the boundless joys of life
that knew no weakness and no pain; strong as the young goat, happy
as the young lamb, careless as the young flower tossing on the summer
breeze--Cigarette would have died contentedly. And now, living, some
measure of this desire had been fulfilled to her, some breath of this
imperishable glory had passed over her. France had heard the story of
Zaraila; from the Throne a message had been passed to her; what was
far beyond all else to her, her own Army of Africa had crowned her,
and thanked her, and adored her as with one voice, and wheresoever she
passed the wild cheers rang through the roar of musketry, as through
the silence of sunny air, and throughout the regiments every sword would
have sprung from its scabbard in her defense if she had but lifted her
hand and said one word--“Zaraila!”
The Army looked on her with delight now. In all that mute, still,
immovable mass that stretched out so far, in such gorgeous array, there
was not one man whose eyes did not turn on her, whose pride did not
center in her--their Little One, who was so wholly theirs, and who had
been under the shadow of their Flag ever since the curls, so dark now,
had been yellow as wheat in her infancy. There was not one in all those
hosts whose eyes did not turn on her with gratitude, and reverence, and
delight in her as their own.
Not one; except where her own keen, rapid glance, far-seeing as the
hawk's, lighted on the squadrons of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, and found
among their ranks one face, grave, weary, meditative, with a gaze that
seemed looking far away from the glittering scene to a grave that lay
unseen leagues beyond, behind the rocky ridge.
“He is thinking of the dead man, not of me,” thought Cigarette; and the
first taint of bitterness entered into her cup of joy and triumph, as
such bitterness enters into most cups that are drunk by human lips. A
whole army was thinking of her, and of her alone; and there was a
void in her heart, a thorn in her crown, because one among that mighty
mass--one only--gave her presence little heed, but thought rather of a
lonely tomb among the desolation of the plains.
But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to quiver in
impotent impatience through her. The trumpets sounded, the salvoes
of artillery pealed out, the lances and the swords were carried up in
salute; on the ground rode the Marshal of France, who represented the
imperial will and presence, surrounded by his staff, by generals of
division and brigade, by officers of rank, and by some few civilian
riders. An aid galloped up to her where she stood with the corps of her
Spahis and gave her his orders. The Little One nodded carelessly, and
touched Etoile-Filante with the prick of the spur. Like lightning the
animal bounded forth from the ranks, rearing and plunging, and swerving
from side to side, while his rider, with exquisite grace and address,
kept her seat like the little semi-Arab that she was, and with a
thousand curves and bounds cantered down the line of the gathered
troops, with the west wind blowing from the far-distant sea, and fanning
her bright cheeks till they wore the soft, scarlet flush of the glowing
japonica flower. And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange,
longing murmur went--the buzz of the voices which, but that discipline
suppressed them, would have broken out in worshiping acclamations.
As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door of the As
de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the
impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in salute, with her
saucy, wayward laugh. He was the impersonation of that vast, silent,
awful, irresponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire,
stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of
France down into nameless graves, with the desert sand choking their
mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that
might be present. She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of
your thorough inborn democrat, all the gay, insouciant indifference to
station of the really free and untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a
dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without
a word or a moan, was greater than all the Marshals glittering in their
stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, with
rank--pooh! You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause in their
floating passage because they came between royalty and the sun. All the
sovereigns of Europe would have awed Cigarette not one whit more than a
gathering of muleteers. “Allied sovereigns--bah!” she would have said,
“what did that mean in '15? A chorus of magpies chattering over one
stricken eagle!”
So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the few great
personages whom Algeria could bring around them, as indifferently as she
had many a time reined up before a knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a
barrack-gate. He was nothing to her: it was her army that crowned her.
Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart beat fast
under its gold-laced packet as she reined up Etoile and saluted. In that
hot, clear sun all the eyes of that immense host were fastened on
her, and the hour of her longing desire was come at last. France had
recognized that she had done greatly. There was a group before her,
large and brilliant, but at them Cigarette never looked; what she saw
were the faces of her “children,” of men who, in the majority, were
old enough to be her grandsires, who had been with her through so many
darksome hours, and whose black and rugged features lightened and grew
tender whenever they looked upon their Little One. For the moment she
felt giddy with sweet, fiery joy; they were here to behold her thanked
in the name of France.
The Marshal, in advance of all his staff, doffed his plumed hat and
bowed to his saddle-bow as he faced her. He knew her well by sight, this
pretty child of his Army of Africa, who had, before then, suppressed
mutiny like a veteran, and led the charge like a Murat--this kitten with
a lion's heart, this humming-bird with an eagle's swoop.
“Mademoiselle,” he commenced, while his voice, well skilled to such
work, echoed to the farthest end of the long lines of troops, “I have
the honor to discharge to-day the happiest duty of my life. In conveying
to you the expression of the Emperor's approval of your noble conduct in
the present campaign, I express the sentiments of the whole Army. Your
action on the day of Zaraila was as brilliant in conception as it was
great in execution; and the courage you displayed was only equaled by
your patriotism. May the soldiers of many wars remember and emulate you.
In the name of France, I thank you. In the name of the Emperor, I bring
to you the Cross of the Legion of Honor.”
As the brief and soldierly words rolled down the ranks of the listening
regiments, he stooped forward from the saddle and fastened the red
ribbon on her breast; while from the whole gathered mass, watching,
hearing, waiting breathlessly to give their tribute of applause to
their darling also, a great shout rose as with one voice, strong, full,
echoing over and over again across the plains in thunder that joined her
name with the name of France and of Napoleon, and hurled it upward in
fierce, tumultuous, idolatrous love to those cruel, cloudless skies that
shone above the dead. She was their child, their treasure, their idol,
their young leader in war, their young angel in suffering; she was all
their own, knowing with them one common mother--France. Honor to her was
honor to them; they gloried with heart and soul in this bright, young
fearless life that had been among them ever since her infant feet had
waded through the blood of slaughter-fields, and her infant lips had
laughed to see the tricolor float in the sun above the smoke of battle.
And as she heard, her face became very pale, her large eyes grew dim and
very soft, her mirthful mouth trembled with the pain of a too intense
joy. She lifted her head, and all the unutterable love she bore her
country and her people thrilled through the music of her voice.
“Francais!”
That was all she said; in that one word of their common nationality she
spoke alike to the Marshal of the Empire and to the conscript of the
ranks. “Francais!” That one title made them all equal in her sight;
whoever claimed it was honored in her eyes, and was precious to her
heart, and when she answered them that it was nothing, this thing which
they glorified in her, she answered but what seemed the simple truth in
her code. She would have thought it “nothing” to have perished by
shot, or steel, or flame, in day-long torture for that one fair sake of
France.
Vain in all else, and to all else wayward, here she was docile and
submissive as the most patient child; here she deemed the greatest and
the hardest thing that she could ever do far less than all that she
would willingly have done. And as she looked upon the host whose
thousand and ten thousand voices rang up to the noonday sun in her
homage, and in hers alone, a light like a glory beamed upon her face
that for once was white and still and very grave--none who saw her face
then ever forgot that look.
In that moment she touched the full sweetness of a proud and pure
ambition, attained and possessed in all its intensity, in all its
perfect splendor. In that moment she knew that divine hour which, born
of a people's love and of the impossible desires of genius in its youth,
comes to so few human lives--knew that which was known to the young
Napoleon when, in the hot hush of the nights of July, France welcomed
the Conqueror of Italy. And in that moment there was an intense
stillness; the Army crowned as its bravest and its best a woman-child in
the springtime of her girlhood.
Then Cigarette laid her hand on the Cross that had been the dream of her
years since she had first seen the brazen glisten of the eagles above
her wondering eyes of infancy, and loosened it from above her heart, and
stretched her hand out with it to the great Chief.
“M. le Marshal, this is not for me.”
“Not for you! The Emperor bestows it----”
Cigarette saluted with her left hand, still stretching to him the
decoration with the other.
“It is not for me--not while I wear it unjustly.”
“Unjustly! What is your meaning? My child, you talk strangely. The gifts
of the Empire are not given lightly.”
“No; and they shall not be given unfairly. Listen.” The color had
flushed back, bright and radiant, to her cheeks; her eyes glanced with
their old daring; her contemptuous, careless eloquence returned, and her
voice echoed, every note distinct as the notes of a trumpet-call, down
the ranks of the listening soldiery. “Hark you! The Emperor sends me
this Cross; France thanks me; the Army applauds me. Well, I thank them,
one and all. Cigarette was never yet ungrateful; it is the sin of
the coward. But I say I will not take what is unjustly mine, and this
preference to me is unjust. I saved the day at Zaraila? Oh, ha! And
how?--by scampering fast on my mare, and asking for a squadron or two
of my Spahis--that was all. If I had not done so much--I, a soldier of
Africa--why, I should have deserved to have been shot like a cat--bah!
should I not? It was not I who saved the battle. Who was it? It was
a Chasseur d'Afrique, I tell you. What did he do? Why, this. When his
officers were all gone down, he rallied, and gathered his
handful of men, and held the ground with them all through the
day--two--four--six--eight--ten hours in the scorch of the sun. The
Arbicos, even were forced to see that was grand; they offered him life
if he would yield. All his answer was to form his few horsemen into line
as well as he could for the slain, and charge--a last charge in which
he knew not one of his troop could live through the swarms of the Arabs
around them. That I saw with my own eyes. I and my Spahis just reached
him in time. Then who is it that saved the day, I pray you?--I, who just
ran a race for fun and came in at the fag-end of the thing, or this man
who lived the whole day through in the carnage, and never let go of the
guidon, but only thought how to die greatly? I tell you, the Cross is
his, and not mine. Take it back, and give it where it is due.”
The Marshal listened, half amazed, half amused--half prepared to resent
the insult to the Empire and to discipline, half disposed to award that
submission to her caprice which all Algeria gave to Cigarette.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, with a grave smile, “the honors of the Empire
are not to be treated thus. But who is this man for whom you claim so
much?”
“Who is he?” echoed Cigarette, with all her fiery disdain for authority
ablaze once more like brandy in a flame. “Oh, ha! Napoleon Premier would
not have left his Marshals to ask that! He is the finest soldier in
Africa, if it be possible for one to be finer than another where all
are so great. They know that; they pick him out for all the dangerous
missions. But the Black Hawk hates him, and so France never hears the
truth of all that he does. I tell you, if the Emperor had seen him as I
saw him on the field of Zaraila, his would have been the Cross, and not
mine.”
“You are generous, my Little One.”
“No; I am just.”
Her brave eyes glowed in the sun, her voice rang as clear as a bell. She
raised her head proudly and glanced down the line of her army. She was
just--that was the one virtue in Cigarette's creed without which you
were poltroon, or liar, or both.
She alone knew what neglect, what indifference, what unintentional, but
none the less piercing, insults she had to avenge; she alone knew of
that pain with which she had heard the name of his patrician rival
murmured in delirious slumber after Zaraila; she alone knew of that
negligent caress of farewell with which her lips had been touched as
lightly as his hand caressed a horse's neck or a bird's wing. But these
did not weigh with her one instant to make her withhold the words that
she deemed deserved; these did not balance against him one instant the
pique and the pain of her own heart, in opposition to the due of his
courage and his fortitude.
Cigarette was rightly proud of her immunity from the weakness of her
sex; she had neither meanness nor selfishness.
The Marshal listened gravely, the groups around him smilingly. If it had
been any other than the Little One, it would have been very different;
as it was, all France and all Algeria knew Cigarette.
“What may be the name of this man whom you praise so greatly, my pretty
one?” he asked her.
“That I cannot tell, M. le Marshal. All I know is he calls himself here
Louis Victor.”
“Ah! I have heard much of him. A fine soldier, but--”
“A fine soldier without a 'but,'” interrupted Cigarette, with rebellious
indifference to the rank of the great man she corrected, “unless you
add, 'but never done justice by his Chief.'”
As she spoke, her eyes for the first time glanced over the various
personages who were mingled among the staff of the Marshal, his invited
guests for the review upon the plains. The color burned more duskily
in her cheek, her eyes glittered with hate; she could have bitten her
little, frank, witty tongue through and through for having spoken
the name of that Chasseur who was yonder, out of earshot, where the
lance-heads of his squadrons glistened against the blue skies. She saw
a face which, though seen but once before, she knew instantly again--the
face of “Milady.” And she saw it change color, and lose its beautiful
hue, and grow grave and troubled as the last words passed between
herself and the French Marshal.
“Ah! can she feel?” wondered Cigarette, who, with a common error of such
vehement young democrats as herself, always thought that hearts never
ached in the Patrician Order, and thought so still when she saw the
listless, proud tranquility return, not again to be altered, over the
perfect features that she watched with so much violent, instinctive
hate. “Did she heed his name, or did she not? What are their faces in
that Order? Only alabaster masks!” mused the child. And her heart sank,
and bitterness mingled with her joy, and the soul that had a moment
before been so full of all pure and noble emotion, all high and
patriotic and idealic thought, was dulled and soiled and clogged with
baser passions. So ever do unworthy things drag the loftier nature
earthward.
She scarcely heard the Marshal's voice as it addressed her with a kindly
indulgence, as to a valued soldier and a spoiled pet in one.
“Have no fear, Little One. Victor's claims are not forgotten, though
we may await our own time to investigate and reward them. No one ever
served the Empire and remained unrewarded. For yourself, wear your Cross
proudly. It glitters above not only the bravest, but the most generous,
heart in the service.”
None had ever won such warm words from the redoubted chief, whose speech
was commonly rapid and stern as his conduct of war, and who usually
recompensed his men for fine service rather with a barrel of brandy to
season their rations than with speeches of military eulogium. But it
failed to give delight to Cigarette. She felt resting upon her the calm
gaze of those brilliant azure eyes; and she felt, as she had done once
in her rhododendron shelter, as though she were some very worthless,
rough, rude, untaught, and coarse little barbarian, who was, at best,
but fit for a soldier's jest and a soldier's riot in the wild license of
the barrack room or the campaigning tent. It was only the eyes of
this woman, whom he loved, which ever had the power to awaken that
humiliation, that impatience of herself, that consciousness of something
lost and irrevocable, which moved her now.
Cigarette was proud with an intense pride of all her fiery liberty from
every feminine trammel, of all her complete immunity from every scruple
and every fastidiousness of her sex. But, for once, within sight of that
noble and haughty beauty, a poignant, cruel, wounding sense of utter
inferiority, of utter debasement, possessed and weighed down her lawless
and indomitable spirit. Some vague, weary feeling that her youth was
fair enough in the sight of men, but that her older years would be very
dark, very terrible, came on her even in this hour of the supreme joy,
the supreme triumph of her life. Even her buoyant and cloudless nature
did not escape that mortal doom which pursues and poisons every ambition
in the very instant of its full fruition.
The doubt, the pain, the self-mistrust were still upon her as she
saluted once again and paced down the ranks of the assembled divisions;
while every lance was carried, every sword lifted, every bayonet
presented to the order as she went; greeted as though she were an
empress, for that cross which glittered on her heart, for that courage
wherewith she had saved the Tricolor.
The great shouts rent the air; the clash of the lowered arms saluted
her; the drums rolled out upon the air; the bands of the regiments of
Africa broke into the fiery rapture of a war-march; the folds of
the battle-torn flags were flung out wider and wider on the breeze.
Gray-bearded men gazed on her with tears of delight upon their grizzled
lashes, and young boys looked at her as the children of France once
gazed upon Jeanne d'Arc, where Cigarette, with the red ribbon on her
breast, road slowly in the noonday light along the line of troops.
It was the paradise of which she had dreamed; it was the homage of
the army she adored; it was one of those hours in which life is
transfigured, exalted, sublimated into a divine glory by the pure love
of a people; and yet in that instant, so long, so passionately desired,
the doom of all genius was hers. There was the stealing pain of a weary
unrest amid the sunlit and intoxicating joy of satisfied aspiration.
The eyes of Venetia Corona followed her with something of ineffable
pity. “Poor little unsexed child!” she thought. “How pretty and how
brave she is! and--how true to him!”
The Seraph, beside her in the group around the flagstaff, smiled and
turned to her.
“I said that little Amazon was in love with this fellow Victor; how
loyally she stood up for him. But I dare say she would be as quick to
send a bullet through him, if he should ever displease her.”
“Why? Where there is so much courage there must be much nobility, even
in the abandonment of such a life as hers.”
“Ah, you do not know what half-French, half-African natures are. She
would die for him just now very likely; but if he ever forsake her, she
will be quite as likely to run her dirk through him.”
“Forsake her! What is he to her?”
There was a certain impatience in the tone, and something of
contemptuous disbelief, that made her brother look at her in wonder.
“What on earth can the loves of a camp concern her?” he thought, as he
answered: “Nothing that I know of. But this charming little tigress
is very fond of him. By the way, can you point the man out to me? I am
curious to see him.”
“Impossible! There are ten thousand faces, and the cavalry squadrons are
so far off.”
She spoke with indifference, but she grew a little pale as she did so,
and the eyes that had always met his so frankly, so proudly, were
turned from him. He saw it, and it troubled him with a trouble the more
perplexed that he could assign to himself no reason for it. That it
could be caused by any interest felt for a Chasseur d'Afrique by the
haughtiest lady in all Europe would have been too preposterous and too
insulting a supposition for it ever to occur to him. And he did not
dream the truth--the truth that it was her withholding, for the first
time in all her life, any secret from him which caused her pain; that it
was the fear lest he should learn that his lost friend was living thus
which haunted her with that unspoken anxiety.
They were traveling here with the avowed purpose of seeing the military
operations of the south; she could not have prevented him from accepting
the Marshal's invitation to the review of the African Army without
exciting comment and interrogation; she was forced to let events
take their own course, and shape themselves as they would; yet an
apprehension, a dread, that she could hardly form into distant shape,
pursued her. It weighed on her with an infinite oppression--this story
which she alone had had revealed to her; this life whose martyrdom she
alone had seen, and whose secret even she could not divine. It affected
her more powerfully, it grieved her more keenly, than she herself knew.
It brought her close, for the only time in her experience, to a life
absolutely without a hope, and one that accepted the despair of such
a destiny with silent resignation; it moved her as nothing less, as
nothing feebler or of more common type could ever have found power to
do. There were a simplicity and a greatness in the mute, unpretentious,
almost unconscious, heroism of this man, who, for the sheer sake of
that which he deemed the need of “honor,” accepted the desolation of his
entire future, which attracted her as nothing else had ever done, which
made her heart ache when she looked at the glitter of the Franco-Arab
squadrons, where their sloped lances glistened in the sun, with a
pang that she had never felt before. Moreover, as the untutored,
half-barbaric, impulsive young heart of Cigarette had felt, so felt the
high-bred, cultured, world-wise mind of Venetia Corona--that this
man's exile was no shame, but some great sacrifice; a sacrifice whose
bitterness smote her with its own suffering, whose mystery wearied her
with its own perplexity, as she gazed down the line of the regiments to
where the shot-bruised Eagle of Zaraila gleamed above the squadrons of
the Chasseurs d'Afrique.
He, in his place among those squadrons, knew her, though so far distant,
and endured the deadliest trial of patience which had come to him while
beneath the yoke of African discipline. To leave his place was to incur
the heaviest punishment; yet he could almost have risked that sentence
rather than wait there. Only seven days had gone by since he had been
with her under the roof of the caravanserai; but it seemed to him as
if these days had aged him more than all the twelve years that he had
passed upon the Algerian soil. He was thankful that the enmity of his
relentless chief had placed such shadow of evil report between his name
and the rewards due to his service, that even the promised recognition
of his brilliant actions at Zaraila and elsewhere was postponed a while
on the plea of investigation. He was thankful that the honors which
the whole Army expected for him, and which the antagonism of Chateauroy
would soon be powerless to avert any longer from their meet bestowal,
did not force him to go up there in the scorching light of the noon, and
take those honors as a soldier of France, under the eyes of the man he
loved, of the woman he adored.
As it was, he sat motionless as a statue in his saddle, and never looked
westward to where the tricolors of the flagstaff drooped above the head
of Venetia Corona.
Thus, he never heard the gallant words spoken in his behalf by the loyal
lips that he had not cared to caress. As she passed down the ranks,
indeed, he saw and smiled on his little champion; but the smile had only
a weary kindness of recognition in it and it wounded Cigarette more than
though he had struck her through the breast with his lance.
The moment that he had dreaded came; the troops broke up and marched
past the representative of their empire, the cavalry at the head of the
divisions. He passed among the rest; he raised his lance so that it hid
his features as much as its slender shaft could do; the fair and noble
face on which his glance flashed was very pale and very grave; the one
beside her was sunny and frank, and unchanged by the years that had
drifted by, and its azure eyes, so like her own, sweeping over the
masses with all the swift, keen appreciation of a military glance, were
so eagerly noting carriage, accouterment, harness, horses, that they
never once fell upon the single soldier whose heart so unutterably
longed for, even while it dreaded, his recognition.
Venetia gave a low, quick breath of mingled pain and relief as the last
of the Chasseurs passed by. The Seraph started, and turned his head.
“My darling! Are you not well?”
“Perfectly!”
“You do not look so; and you forgot now to point me out this special
trooper. I forgot him too.”
“He goes there--the tenth from here.”
Her brother looked; it was too late.
“He is taller than the others. That is all I can see now that his back
is turned. I will seek him out when--”
“Do no such thing!”
“And why? It was your own request that I inquired--”
“Think me changeable as you will. Do nothing to seek him, to inquire for
him--”
“But why? A man who at Zaraila--”
“Never mind! Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur d'Afrique at my
instance.”
The color flushed her face as she spoke; it was with the scorn, the
hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which she for the sole time
in life soiled her lips. He, noting it, shook himself restlessly in his
saddle. If he had not known her to be the noblest and the haughtiest of
all the imperial women who had crowned his house with their beauty and
their honor, he could have believed that some interest, degrading as
disgrace, moved her toward this foreign trooper, and caused her altered
wishes and her silence. As it was, so much insult to her as would have
existed in the mere thought was impossible to him; yet it left him
annoyed and vaguely disquieted.
The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout the
entertainments that succeeded to the military inspection in the great
white tent glistening with gilded bees and brightened with tricolor
standards which the ingenuity of the soldiers of the administration had
reared as though by magic amid the barrenness of the country, and in
which the skill of camp cooks served up a delicate banquet. The scene
was very picturesque, and all the more so for the widespread, changing
panorama without the canvas city of the camp. It was chiefly designed to
pleasure the great lady who had come so far southward; all the resources
which could be employed were exhausted to make the occasion memorable
and worthy of the dignity of the guests whom the Viceroy of the Empire
delighted to honor. Yet she, seated there on his right hand, where
the rich skins and cashmeres and carpets were strewn on a dais, saw in
reality little save a confused blending of hues, and metals, and orders,
and weapons, and snowy beards, and olive faces, and French elegance and
glitter fused with the grave majesty of Arab pomp. For her thoughts were
not with the scene around her, but with the soldier who was without in
that teeming crowd of tents, who lived in poverty, and danger, and the
hard slavery of unquestioning obedience, and asked only to be as one
dead to all who had known and loved him in his youth. It was in
vain that she repelled the memory; it usurped her, and would not be
displaced.
Meantime, in another part of the camp, the heroine of Zaraila was
feasted, not less distinctively, if more noisily and more familiarly, by
the younger officers of the various regiments. La Cigarette, many a time
before the reigning spirit of suppers and carouses, was banqueted with
all the eclat that befitted that cross which sparkled on her blue and
scarlet vest. High throned on a pyramid of knapsacks, canteens, and
rugs, toasted a thousand times in all brandies and red wines that the
stores would yield, sung of in improvised odes that were chanted by
voices which might have won European fame as tenor or as basso, caressed
and sued with all the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and lightly-go love of
the camp, with twice a hundred flashing, darkling eyes bent on her in
the hot admiration that her vain, coquette spirit found delight in,
ruling as she would with jest, and caprice, and command, and bravado
all these men who were terrible as tigers to their foes, the Little One
reigned alone; and--like many who have reigned before her--found lead in
her scepter, dross in her diadem, satiety in her kingdom.
When it was over, this banquet that was all in her honor, and that three
months before would have been a paradise to her, she shook herself free
of the scores of arms outstretched to keep her captive, and went out
into the night alone. She did not know what she ailed, but she was
restless, oppressed, weighed down with a sense of dissatisfied weariness
that had never before touched the joyous and elastic nature of the child
of France.
And this, too, in the moment when the very sweetest and loftiest of her
ambitions was attained! When her hand wandered to that decoration on her
heart which had been ever in her sight what the crown of wild olive and
the wreath of summer grasses were to the youths and to the victors
of the old, dead classic years! As she stood in solitude under the
brilliancy of the stars, tears, unfamiliar and unbidden, rose in her
eyes as they gazed over the hosts around her.
“How they live only for the slaughter! How they perish like the beasts
of the field!” she thought. Upon her, as on the poet or the patriot
who could translate and could utter the thought as she could not, there
weighed the burden of that heart-sick consciousness of the vanity of the
highest hope, the futility of the noblest effort, to bring light into
the darkness of the suffering, toiling, blind throngs of human life.
“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.