THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE.
The warm, transparent light of an African autumnal noon shone down
through the white canvas roof of a great tent in the heart of the
encamped divisions at the headquarters of the Army of the South. In
the tent there was a densely packed throng--an immense, close, hushed,
listening crowd, of which every man wore the uniform of France, of which
the mute, undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be
broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something that was
almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness in their eyes and
the strained absorption of their countenances; for they were in court,
and that court was the Council of War of their own southern camp.
The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that can be laid
against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the many eyes of the
military crowd turned on him where he stood surrounded by his guard,
his crime against his chief was forgotten, and they only
remembered--Zaraila.
Many of those present had seen him throughout that day of blood, at the
head of his decimated squadron, with the guidon held aloft above every
foe; to them that tall, slender form standing there, with a calm,
weary dignity, that had nothing of the passion of the mutinous or the
consciousness of the criminal in its serene repose, had shed upon it the
luster of a heroism that made them ready almost to weep like women that
the death of a mutineer should be the sole answer given by France to the
savior of her honor.
He preserved entire reticence in court. The instant the accusation had
been read to him, he had seen that his chief would not dare to couple
with it the proud, pure name he had dared to outrage; his most bitter
anxiety was thus at an end. For all the rest, he was tranquil.
No case could be clearer, briefer, less complex, more entirely incapable
of defense. The soldiers of the guard gave evidence as to the violence
and fury of the assault. The sentinel bore witness to having heard the
refusal to reply; a moment after, he had seen the attack made and the
blow given. The accuser merely stated that, meeting his sous-officier
out of the bounds of the cavalry camp, he had asked him where he had
been, and why he was there, and, on his commanding an answer, had been
assaulted in the manner described, with violence sufficient to have cost
his life had not the guard been so near at hand. When questioned as to
what motive he could assign for the act, he replied that he considered
his corporal had always incited evil feeling and mutinous conduct in
the squadrons, and had, he believed, that day attributed to himself his
failure to receive the Cross. The statement passed without contradiction
by the prisoner, who, to the interrogations and entreaties of his legal
defender, only replied that the facts were stated accurately as they
occurred, and that his reasons for the deed he declined to assert.
When once more questioned as to his country and his past by the
president, he briefly declined to give answer. When asked if the names
by which he was enrolled were his own, he replied that they were two of
his baptismal names, which had served his purpose on entering the army.
When asked if he accepted as true the charge of exciting sedition among
the troops, he replied that it was so little true that, over and over
again, the men would have mutinied if he had given them a sign, and that
he had continually induced them to submit to discipline sheerly by force
of his own example. When interrogated as to the cause of the language
he had used to his commanding officer, he said briefly that the language
deserved the strongest censure as for a soldier to his colonel, but that
it was justified as he had used it, which was as man to man, though
he was aware the plea availed nothing in military law, and was
impermissible for the safety of the service. When it was inquired of him
if he had not repeatedly inveighed against his commanding officer for
severity, he briefly denied it; no man had ever heard him say a syllable
that could have been construed into complaint; at the same time, he
observed that all the squadrons knew perfectly well personal enmity and
oppression had been shown him by his chief throughout the whole time of
his association with the regiment. When pressed as to the cause that he
assigned for this, he gave, in a few comprehensive outlines, the story
of the capture and the deliverance of the Emir's bride; this was all
that could be elicited from him; and even this was answered only out
of deference to the authority of the court, and from his unwillingness,
even now, to set a bad example before the men with whom he had served so
long. When it was finally demanded of him if he had aught to urge in his
own extenuation, he paused a moment, with a gaze under which even
the hard, eagle eyes grew restless, looked across to Chateauroy, and
addressed his antagonist rather than the president.
“Only this: that a tyrant, a liar, and a traducer cannot wonder if men
prefer death to submission beneath insult. But I am well aware this is
no vindication of my act as a soldier, and I have no desire to say words
which, whatever their truth, might become hereafter dangerous legacies,
and dangerous precedents to the army.”
That was all which he answered, and neither his counsel nor his accusers
could extort another syllable from him.
He knew that what he had done was justified to his own conscience, but
he did not seek to dispute that it was unjustifiable in military law.
True, had all been told, it was possible enough that his judges would
exonerate him morally, even if they condemned him legally; his act
would be seen blameless as a man's, even while still punishable as a
soldier's; but to purchase immunity for himself at the cost of bringing
the fairness of her fame into the coarse babble of men's tongues was an
alternative, craven and shameful, which never even once glanced across
his thoughts.
He had kept faith to a woman whom he had known heartless and well-nigh
worthless; it was not to the woman whom he loved with all the might of
an intense passion, and whom he knew pure and glorious as the morning
sun, that he would break his faith now.
All through the three days that the council sat his look and his manner
never changed--the first was quite calm, though very weary; the latter
courteous, but resolute, with the unchanged firmness of one who knew his
own past action justified. For the rest, many noticed that, during the
chief of the long, exhausting hours of his examination and his trial,
his thoughts seemed far away, and he appeared to recall them to the
present with difficulty, and with nothing of the vivid suspense of an
accused, whose life and death swung in the judgment-balance.
In truth, he had no dread as he had no hope left; he knew well enough
that by the blow which had vindicated her honor he had forfeited his own
existence. All he wished was that his sentence had been dealt without
this formula of debate and of delay, which could have issue but in one
end. There was not one man in court who was not more moved than he, more
quick to terror and regret for his doom. To many among his comrades
who had learned to love the gentle, silent “aristocrat,” who bore every
hardship so patiently, and humanized them so imperceptibly by the simple
force of an unvaunted example, those three days were torture. Wild,
brutal brigands, whose year was one long razzia of plunder, rapine, and
slaughter, felt their lips tremble like young girls' when they asked how
the issue went for him; and the blood-stained marauders, who thought as
little of assassination for a hidden pot of gold as butchers of drawing
a knife across a sheep's throat, grew still and fear-stricken with a
great awe when the muttering passed through the camp that they would see
no more among their ranks that “woman's face” which they had beheld
so often foremost in the fight, with a look on it that thrilled their
hearts like their forbidden chant of the Marseillaise. For when the
third day closed, they knew that he must die.
There were men, hard as steel, ravenous of blood as vultures, who, when
they heard that sentence given, choked great, deep sobs down into the
cavernous depths of their broad, seared, sinewy breasts; but he never
gave sigh or sign. He never moved once while the decree of death was
read to him; and there was no change in the weary calmness of his eyes.
He bent his head in acquiescence.
“C'est bien!” he said simply.
It seemed well to him. Dead, his secret would lie in the grave with him,
and the long martyrdom of his life be ended.
In the brightness of the noon Cigarette leaned out of her little oval
casement that framed her head like an old black oak carving--a head with
the mellow bloom on its cheeks, and the flash of scarlet above its dark
curls, and the robin-like grace of poise and balance as it hung out
there in the sun.
Cigarette had been there a whole hour in thought; she who never had
wasted a moment in meditation or reverie, and who found the long African
day all too short for her busy, abundant, joyous life, that was always
full of haste and work, just as a bird's will seem so, though the bird
have no more to do than to fly at its will through summer air, and feed
at its will from brook and from berry, from a ripe ear of the corn or
from a deep cup of the lily. For the first time she was letting time
drift away in the fruitless labor of vain, purposeless thought, because,
for the first time also, happiness was not with her.
They were gone forever--all the elastic joyance, all the free, fair
hours, all the dauntless gayety of childhood, all the sweet, harmonious
laughter of a heart without a care. They were gone forever; for the
touch of love and of pain had been laid on her; and never again would
her radiant eyes smile cloudlessly, like the young eagle's, at a sun
that rose but to be greeted as only youth can great another dawn of life
that is without a shadow.
And she leaned wearily there, with her cheek lying on the cold, gray
Moorish stone; the color and the brightness were in the rays of the
light, in the rich hues of her hair and her mouth, in the scarlet glow
of her dress; there was no brightness in her face. The eyes were vacant
as they watched the green lizard glide over the wall beyond, and the
lips were parted with a look of unspeakable fatigue; the tire, not
of the limbs, but of the heart. She had come thither, hoping to leave
behind her on the desert wind that alien care, that new, strange
passion, which sapped her strength, and stung her pride, and made her
evil with such murderous lust of vengeance; and they were with her
still. Only something of the deadly, biting ferocity of jealousy had
changed into a passionate longing to be as that woman was who had his
love; into a certain hopeless, sickening sense of having forever lost
that which alone could have given her such beauty and such honor in the
sight of men as those this woman had.
To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had his passion
should not return it. To the child of the camp, though she often mocked
at caste, all the inexorable rules, all the reticent instincts of
caste, were things unknown. She would have failed to comprehend all the
thousand reasons which would have forbidden any bond between the great
aristocrat and a man of low grade and of dubious name. She only thought
of love as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly cherished, wildly
indulged, and without tie or restraint.
“And I came without my vengeance!” she mused. To the nature that felt
the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, there was wounding
humiliation in her knowledge that she had left her rival unharmed, and
had come hither, out from his sight and his presence, lest he should
see in her one glimpse of that folly which she would have killed herself
under her own steel rather than have been betrayed, either for his
contempt or his compassion.
“And I came without my vengeance!” she mused, in that oppressive noon,
in that gray and lonely place, in that lofty tower-solitude, where there
was nothing between her and the hot, hard, cruel blue of the heavens,
vengeance looked the only thing that was left her; the only means
whereby that void in her heart could be filled, that shame in her life
be washed out. To love! and to love a man who had no love for her, whose
eyes only beheld another's face, whose ears only thirsted for
another's voice! Its degradation stamped her a traitress in her own
sight--traitress to her code, to her pride, to her country, to her flag!
And yet, at the core of her heart so tired a pang was aching! She who
had gloried in being the child of the whole people, the daughter of
the whole army, felt lonely and abandoned, as though she were some bird
which an hour ago had been flying in all its joy among its brethren
and now, maimed with one shot, had fallen, with broken pinion and torn
plumage, to lie alone upon the sand and die.
The touch of a bird's wing brushing her hair brought the dreamy
comparison to her wandering thoughts. She started and lifted her head;
it was a blue carrier-pigeon, one of the many she fed at that casement,
and the swiftest and surest of several she sent with messages for the
soldiers between the various stations and corps. She had forgotten she
had left the bird at the encampment.
She caressed it absently, while the tired creature sank down on her
bosom; then only she saw that there was a letter beneath one wing. She
unloosed it, and looked at it without being able to tell its meaning;
she could not read a word, printed or written. Military habits were too
strong with her for the arrival not to change her reverie into action;
whoever it was for, it must be seen. She gave the pigeon water and
grain, then wound her way down the dark, narrow stairs, through the
height of the tower, out into the passage below.
She found an old French cobbler sitting at a stall in a casement,
stitching leather; he was her customary reader and scribe in this
quarter. She touched him with the paper. “Bon Mathieu! Wilt thou read
this to me?”
“It is for thee, Little One, and signed 'Petit Pot-de-terre.'”
Cigarette nodded listlessly.
“'Tis a good lad, and a scholar,” she answered absently. “Read on!”
And he read aloud:
“'There is ill news. I send the bird on a chance to find thee.
Bel-a-faire-peau struck the Black Hawk--a slight blow, but with threat
to kill following it. He has been tried, and is to be shot. There is
no appeal. The case is clear; the Colonel could have cut him down, were
that all. I thought you should know. We are all sorry. It was done on
the night of the great fete. I am thy humble lover and slave.'”
So the boy-Zouave's scrawl, crushed, and blotted, and written with great
difficulty, ran in its brief phrases that the slow muttering of the old
shoemaker drew out in tedious length.
Cigarette heard; she never made a movement or gave a sound, but all
the blood fled out of her brilliant face, leaving it horribly blanched
beneath its brown sun-scorch; and her eyes--distended, senseless,
sightless--were fastened on the old man's slowly moving mouth.
“Read it again!” she said simply, when all was ended. He started and
looked up at her face; the voice had not one accent of its own tone
left.
He obeyed, and read it once more to the end. Then a loud, shuddering
sigh escaped her, like the breath of one stifling under flames.
“Shot!” she said vacantly. “Shot!”
Her vengeance had come without her once lifting her hand to summon it.
The old man rose hurriedly.
“Child! Art thou ill?”
“The blow was struck for her!” she muttered. “It was that night, you
hear--that night!”
“What night? Thou lookest so strangely! Dost thou love this doomed
soldier?”
Cigarette laughed--a laugh whose echo thrilled horribly through the
lonely Moresco courtway.
“Love? Love? I hated him, look you! So I said. And I longed for my
vengeance. It is come!”
She was still a moment; her white, parched mouth quivering as though
she were under physical torture, her strained eyes fastened on the empty
air, the veins in her throat swelling and throbbing till they glowed to
purple. Then she crushed the letter in one hand, and flew, fleet as any
antelope through the streets of the Moorish quarter, and across the city
to the quay.
The people ever gave way before her; but now they scattered like
frightened sheep from her path. There was something that terrified
them in that bloodless horror set upon her face, and in that fury of
resistless speed with which she rushed upon her way.
Once only in her headlong career through the throngs she paused; it
was as one face, on which the strong light of the noontide poured, came
before her. The senseless look changed in her eyes; she wheeled out of
her route, and stopped before the man who had thus arrested her. He was
leaning idly over the stall of a Turkish bazaar, and her hand grasped
his arm before he saw her.
“You have his face!” she muttered. “What are you to him?”
He made no answer; he was too amazed.
“You are of his race,” she persisted. “You are brethren by your look.
What are you to him?”
“To whom?”
“To the man who calls himself Louis Victor! A Chasseur of my army!”
Her eyes were fastened entirely on him; keen, ruthless, fierce, in this
moment as a hawk's. He grew pale and murmured an incoherent denial. He
sought to shake her off, first gently, then more rudely; he called her
mad, and tried to fling her from him; but the lithe fingers only wound
themselves closer on his arm.
“Be still--fool!” she muttered; and there was that in the accent that
lent a strange force and dignity in that moment to the careless and
mischievous plaything of the soldiery--force that overcame him, dignity
that overawed him. “You are of his people; you have his eyes, and his
look, and his features. He disowns you, or you him. No matter which.
He is of your blood; and he lies under sentence of death. Do you know
that?”
With a stifled cry, the other recoiled from her; he never doubted that
she spoke the truth; nor could any who had looked upon her face.
“Do not lie to me,” she said curtly. “It avails you nothing. Read that.”
She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; his hand
trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that moment that
this strange creature--half soldier, half woman, half brigand, half
child--knew all his story and all his shame from his brother.
“Shot!” he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when he had read on to the
end. “Shot! Oh, my God! and I----”
She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the
bazaar, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled with the horror, the
remorse, the overwhelming shock of his brother's doom.
“He will be shot,” she said with a strange calmness. “We shoot down many
men in our army. I knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not
doubt; but discipline will not stay for that--”
“Silence, for mercy's sake! Is there no hope--no possibility?”
Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came
through them. “None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant.
It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?”
“I am his brother!”
She was silent; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her strange
that she should thus have met one of his blood in the crowds of Algiers.
She was absorbed in the one catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat
her very life away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage
remained at their keenest and strongest.
“You are his brother,” she said slowly, so much as an affirmation that
his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relationship
and their history from Cecil. “You must go to him, then.”
He shook from head to foot.
“Yes, yes! But it will be too late!”
She did not know that the words were cried out in all the contrition of
an unavailing remorse; she gave them only their literal significance,
and shuddered as she answered him.
“That you must risk. You must go to him. But, first, I must know more.
Tell me his name, his rank.”
He was silent; coward and egotist though he was, both cowardice and
egotism were killed in him under the overwhelming horror with which
he felt himself as truly by moral guilt a fratricide as though he had
stabbed his elder through the heart.
“Speak!” hissed Cigarette through her clenched teeth. “If you have any
kindness, any pity, any love for the man of your blood, who will be shot
there like a dog, do not waste a second--answer me, tell me all.”
He turned his wild, terrified glance upon her; he had in that moment no
sense but to seize some means of reparation, to declare his brother's
rights, to cry out to the very stones of the streets his own wrong and
his victim's sacrifice.
“He is the head of my house!” he answered her, scarce knowing what he
answered. “He should bear the title that I bear now. He is here, in this
misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most
long-suffering of living souls! If he dies, it is not they who have
killed him; it is I!”
She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command
which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or
interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the
few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.
“Settle with yourself for that sin,” she said bitterly. “Your remorse
will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be
sincere. Write me out here that title you say he should bear, and your
statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your
house; then sign it, and give it to me.”
He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.
“Who are you? What are you? If you have the power to do it, for the love
of God rescue him! It is I who have murdered him--I--who have let him
live on in this hell for my sake!”
“For your sake!”
She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance
of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who
would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a
whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote
him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public
chastisement. The courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous
fear and his living lie. His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her
gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now.
She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and wondering disdain
that there should be on earth a male life capable of such fear and of
such ignominy as this. Then the strong and rapid power in her took its
instant ascendancy over the weaker nature.
“Monsieur, I do not know your story, I do not want. I am not used to men
who let others suffer for them. What I want is your written statement of
your brother's name and station; give it me.”
He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away his soul, if he
could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized him. She brought him
pens and paper from the Turk's store, and dictated what he wrote:
“I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs d'Afrique
under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil,
lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England. I
hereby also acknowledge that I have succeeded to and borne the title
illegally, under the supposition of his death.
“BERKELEY CECIL.” (Signed)
He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the torture of his
own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo in an instant the
whole web of falsehood that he had let circumstance weave on and on to
shelter him through twelve long years. He let her draw the paper from
him and fold it away in her belt. He watched her with a curious, dreamy
sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her
bidding.
“What is it you will do?” he asked her.
“The best that shall lie in my power. Do you the same.”
“Can his life yet be saved?”
“His honor may--his honor shall.”
Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke though it was stern and
rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over it. She, the waif and
stray of a dissolute camp, knew better than the scion of his own race
how the doomed man would choose the vindication of his honor before the
rescue of his life. He laid his hand on her as she moved.
“Stay!--stay! One word----”
She flung him off her again.
“This is no time for words. Go to him--coward!--and let the balls that
kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of manhood left in you!”
Then, swiftly as a swallow darts, she quitted him and flew on her
headlong way, down through the pressure of the people, and the throngs
of the marts, and the noise, and the color, and the movement of the
streets.
The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode out of the
city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as the antelope and as
wild, with her only equipment some pistols in her holsters, and a bag of
rice and a skin of water slung at her saddle-bow.
They asked her where she went; she never answered. The hoofs struck
sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered
like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers. Her
comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh
on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed
them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright,
brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.
“What is it with the Cigarette?” they asked each other. None could tell;
the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies. The
gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that
wore the resolve of a Napoleon's on it were the last they ever saw of
Cigarette.
All her fluent, untiring speech was gone--gone with the rose hue from
her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child's joyance
from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a
soldier's courage, with a martyr's patience.
And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the
sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who
should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies
at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened
colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a
holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant's hands in
fearless glee to the mane of roughriders' chargers. She never swerved,
she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot
currents of the cleft air with only one sense--that she went so slowly,
so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few
moments of a charmed life fled away!
She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and
there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who
was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal--no
more--betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay
was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the
evening of the day to the dawn of the second day following; and some
slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command
ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could
be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the
carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She could not tell how long he
had to live.
There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader's horse
had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of
D'Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do. Once
only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his
foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where
a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite
motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best
save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during
those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in
her eyes--the worst hunger--that which craves Time and cannot seize it
fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.
She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of
peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise;
nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over
the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched,
monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage,
the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination;
the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet
return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the
waters to Circe.
The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing
from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw
herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quivering, to the ground.
Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France,
who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress
of inspection throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round
her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand
questions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal
with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with
the other.
“Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief.”
She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those
who heard. She was not the Child of the Army whom they knew so well. She
was a creature, desperate, hard-pressed, mute as death, strong as steel;
above all, hunted by despair.
They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding. The one whom she
sought was great and supreme here as a king; they dreaded to approach
his staff, to ask his audience.
Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her Cross and held it
out to an adjutant standing beneath the gates.
“Take that to the man who gave it me. Tell him Cigarette waits; and with
each moment that she waits a soldier's life is lost. Go!”
The adjutant took it, and went. Over and over again she had brought
intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a contemplated razzia, warning
of an internal revolt, or tidings of an encounter on the plains, that
had been of priceless value to the army which she served. It was not
lightly that Cigarette's words were ever received when she spoke as she
spoke now; nor was it impossible that she now brought to them that which
would brook neither delay nor trifling.
She waited patiently; all the iron discipline of military life had never
bound her gay and lawless spirit down; but now she was singularly still
and mute. Only there gleamed thirstily in her eyes that fearful avarice
which begrudges every moment in its flight as never the miser grudged
his hoarded gold into the robber's grasp.
A few minutes and the decoration was brought back to her, and her demand
granted. She was summoned to the Marshal's presence. It was the ordnance
room, a long, vast, silent chamber filled with stands of arms, with all
the arts and appliances of war brought to their uttermost perfection,
and massed in all the resource of a great empire against the sons of
the desert, who had nothing to oppose to them save the despair of a
perishing nationality and a stifled freedom.
The Marshal, leaning against a brass field-piece, turned to her with a
smile in his keen, stern eyes.
“You, my young one! What brings you here?”
She came up to him with her rapid leopard-like grace, and he started as
he saw the change upon her features. She was covered with sand and dust,
and with the animal's blood-flecked foam. The beating of her heart from
the fury of the gallop had drained every hue from her face; her voice
was scarcely articulate in its breathless haste as she saluted him.
“Monsieur, I have come from Algiers since noon--”
“From Algiers!” He and his officers echoed the name of the city in
incredulous amaze; they knew how far from them down along the sea-line
the white town lay.
“Since noon, to rescue a life--the life of a great soldier, of a
guiltless man. He who saved the honor of France at Zaraila is to die the
death of a mutineer at dawn!”
“What!--your Chasseur!”
A dusky, scarlet fire burned through the pallor of her face; but her
eyes never quailed, and the torrent of her eloquence returned under the
pangs of shame that were beaten back under the noble instincts of her
love.
“Mine!--since he is a soldier of France; yours, too, by that title. I am
come here, from Algiers, to speak the truth in his name, and to save him
for his own honor and the honor of my Empire. See here! At noon, I have
this paper, sent by a swift pigeon. Read it! You see how he is to die,
and why. Well, by my Cross, by my Flag, by my France, I swear that not a
hair of his head shall be touched, and not a drop of blood in his veins
shall be shed!”
He looked at her, astonished at the grandeur and the courage which could
come on this child of razzias and revelries, and give to her all the
splendor of a fearless command of some young empress. But his face
darkened and set sternly as he read the paper; it was the greatest crime
in the sight of a proud soldier, this crime against discipline, of the
man for whom she pleaded.
“You speak madly,” he said, with cold brevity. “The offense merits the
chastisement. I shall not attempt to interfere.”
“Wait! You will hear, at least, Monsieur?”
“I will hear you--yes, but I tell you, once for all, I never change
sentences that are pronounced by councils of war; and this crime is the
last for which you should attempt to plead for mercy with me.”
“Hear me, at least!” she cried, with passionate ferocity--the ferocity
of a dumb animal wounded by a shot. “You do not know what this man
is--how he has had to endure; I do. I have watched him; I have seen the
brutal tyranny of his chief, who hated him because the soldiers loved
him. I have seen his patience, his obedience, his long-suffering beneath
insults that would have driven any other to revolt and murder. I have
seen him--I have told you how--at Zaraila, thinking never of death or
life, only of our Flag, that he has made his own, and under which he has
been forced to lead the life of a galley slave--”
“The finer soldier he be, the less pardonable his offense.”
“That I deny! If he were a dolt, a brute, a thing of wood as many are,
he would have no right to vengeance; as it is, he is a gentleman, a
hero, a martyr; may he not forget for one hour that he is a slave?
Look you! I have seen him so tried that I told him--I, who love my army
better than any living thing under the sun--that I would forgive him if
he forgot duty and dealt with his tyrant as man to man. And he always
held his soul in patience. Why? Not because he feared death--he desired
it; but because he loved his comrades, and suffered in peace and in
silence lest, through him, they should be led into evil----”
His eyes softened as he heard her; but the inflexibility of his voice
never altered.
“It is useless to argue with me,” he said briefly; “I never change a
sentence.”
“But I say that you shall!” As the audacious words were flung forth, she
looked him full in the eyes, while her voice rang with its old imperious
oratory. “You are a great chief; you are as a monarch here; you hold the
gifts and the grandeur of the Empire; but, because of that--because you
are as France in my eyes--I swear, by the name of France, that you shall
see justice done to him; after death, if you cannot in life. Do you know
who he is--this man whom his comrades will shoot down at sunrise as they
shoot down the murderer and the ravisher in their crimes?”
“He is a rebellious soldier; it is sufficient.”
“He is not! He is a man who vindicated a woman's honor; he is a man who
suffers in a brother's place; he is an aristocrat exiled to a martyrdom;
he is a hero who has never been greater than he will be great in
his last hour. Read that! What you refuse to justice, and mercy, and
courage, and guiltlessness, you will grant, maybe, to your Order.”
She forced into his hand the written statement of Cecil's name and
station. All the hot blood was back in her cheek, all the fiery passion
back in her eyes. She lashed this potent ruler with the scourge of her
scorn as she had lashed a drunken horde of plunderers with her whip. She
was reckless of what she said; she was conscious only of one thing--the
despair that consumed her.
The French Marshal glanced his eye on the fragment, carelessly and
coldly. As he saw the words, he started, and read on with wondering
eagerness.
“Royallieu!” he muttered--“Royallieu!”
The name was familiar to him; he it was who, when he had murmured, “That
man has the seat of the English Guards,” as a Chasseur d'Afrique had
passed him, had been ignorant that in that Chasseur he saw one whom he
had known in many a scene of court splendor and Parisian pleasure. The
years had been many since Cecil and he had met, but not so many but that
the name brought memories of friendship with it, and moved him with a
strange emotion.
He turned with grave anxiety to Cigarette.
“You speak strangely. How came this in your hands?”
“Thus: the day that you gave me the Cross, I saw Mme. la Princesse
Corona. I hated her, and I went--no matter! From her I learned that he
whom we call Louis Victor was of her rank, was of old friendship with
her house, was exiled and nameless, but for some reason unknown to her.
She needed to see him; to bid him farewell, so she said. I took the
message for her; I sent him to her.” Her voice grew husky and savage,
but she forced her words on with the reckless sacrifice of self that
moved her. “He went to her tent, alone, at night; that was, of course,
whence he came when Chateauroy met him. I doubt not the Black Hawk
had some foul thing to hint of his visit, and that blow was struck for
her--for her! Well; in the streets of Algiers I saw a man with a face
like his own, different, but the same race, look you. I spoke to him; I
taxed him. When he found that the one whom I spoke of was under sentence
of death, he grew mad; he cried out that he was his brother and had
murdered him--that it was for his sake that the cruelty of this
exile had been borne--that, if his brother perished, he would be his
destroyer. Then I bade him write down that paper, since these English
names were unknown to me, and I brought it hither to you that you might
see, under his hand and with your own eyes, that I have uttered the
truth. And now, is that man to be killed like a mad beast whom you fear?
Is that death the reward France will give for Zaraila?”
Her eyes were fixed with a fearful intensity of appeal upon the stern
face bent over her; her last arrow was sped; if this failed, all was
over. As he heard, he was visibly moved; he remembered the felon's shame
that in years gone by had fallen across the banished name of Bertie
Cecil; the history seemed clear as crystal to him, seen beneath the
light shed on it from other days.
His hand fell heavily on the gun-carriage.
“Mort de Dieu! it was his brother's sin, not his!”
There was a long silence; those present, who knew nothing of all that
was in his memory, felt instinctively that some dead weight of alien
guilt was lifted off a blameless life forever.
She drew a deep, long, sighing breath; she knew that he was safe. Her
hands unconsciously locked on the great chief's arms; her eyes looked
up, senselessly in their rapture and their dread, to his.
“Quick, quick!” she gasped. “The hours go so fast; while we speak here
he----”
The words died in her throat. The Marshal swung around with a rapid sign
to a staff officer.
“Pens and ink! Instantly! My brave child, what can we say to you? I will
send an aid to arrest the execution of the sentence. It must be deferred
till we know the whole truth of this. If it be as it looks now, he shall
be saved if the Empire can save him!”
She looked up in his eyes with a look that froze his very heart.
“His honor!” she muttered; “his honor--if not his life!”
He understood her; he bowed his haughty head low down to hers.
“True. We will cleanse that, if all other justice be too late.”
The answer was infinitely gentle, infinitely solemn. Then he turned and
wrote his hurried order, and bade his aid go with it without a second's
loss. But Cigarette caught it from his hand.
“To me! to me! No other will go so fast!”
“But, my child, you are worn out already.”
She turned on him her beautiful, wild eyes, in which the blinding,
passionate tears were floating.
“Do you think I would tarry for that? Ah! I wish that I had let them
tell me of God, that I might ask Him now to bless you! Quick, quick!
Lend me your swiftest horse! One that will not tire. And send a second
order by your aid-de-camp; the Arabs may kill me as I go, and then, they
will not know!”
He stooped and touched her little, brown, scorched, feverish hand with
reverence.
“My child, Africa has shown me much heroism, but none like yours. If you
fall, he shall be safe, and France will know how to avenge its darling's
loss.”
She turned and gave him one look, infinitely sweet, infinitely eloquent.
“Ah, France!” she said, so softly that the last word was but a sign
of unutterable tenderness. The old, imperishable early love was not
dethroned; it was there, still before all else. France was without rival
with her.
Then, without another second's pause, she flew from them, and vaulting
into the saddle of a young horse which stood without in the court-yard,
rode once more, at full speed out into the pitiless blaze of the sun,
out to the wasted desolation of the plains.
The order of release, indeed, was in her bosom; but the chances were as
a million to one that she would reach him with it in time, ere with the
rising of the sun his life would have set forever.
All the horror of remorse was on her; to her nature the bitter jealousy
in which she had desired vengeance on him seemed to have rendered her a
murderess. She loved him--loved him with an exceeding passion; and only
in this extremity, when it was confronted with the imminence of death,
did the fullness and the greatness of that love make their way out of
the petulant pride and the wounded vanity which had obscured them. She
had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck at
him she changed--she became a woman and a martyr.
And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had done through
the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the keen instinct of a
trooper, her hand always on the butt of her belt pistol. For she knew
well what the danger was of these lonely, unguarded, untraveled leagues
that yawned in so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs,
beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those
plains with the old guerrilla skill, the old marvelous rapidity. She
knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reeling from
her saddle; that with every moment she might be surrounded by some
desperate band who would spare neither her sex nor her youth. But that
intoxication of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from her infancy,
was all which sustained her in that race with death. It filled her veins
with their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with
their old matchless courage; but for it she would have dropped,
heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done; under
it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained
force, and the supernatural strength of some young hunted animal. They
might slay her, so that she left perforce her mission unaccomplished;
but no dread of such a fate had even an instant's power to appall her or
arrest her. While there should be breath in her, she would go on to the
end.
There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swiftest pace
her horse could make; and she was already worn by the leagues already
traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time
flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim, solitary,
barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now
and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the
weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and
succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand, as she had passed
through the fortress gates, a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab
fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed
over herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be
veiled by clouds. With that single, starry gleam aslant on a level with
her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains;
now flooded with luster as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as
the stormy western winds drove the cirrhi over it. But neither darkness
nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk
with strong wine, and she had but one dread--that the power of her horse
would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she
would reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen
forever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise fall.
Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver
under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he
strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the
racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell,
and beat him down, despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would
have killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving
her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this
thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun.
She did not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing,
to fulfill the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate
blindness of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern
blood. If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would
have given the word for their destruction without a moment's pause.
Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was fired at
her, and flew within a hair's breadth of her brain; she never even
looked around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab
prowler of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled
lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And
as she felt the hours steal on--so fast, so hideously fast--with that
horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for
no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of
her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain.
What she dreaded came.
Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed,
the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps to answer the demand
made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded
onward. In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the
racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and
blood, his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his
heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, he would
drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon
the poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill,
wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the
cry of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all: the breaking of the
rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the
few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines
gleaming in the first rays of the sun. . . She had seen it so many
times--seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the
morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.
That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her gave to the
abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. With that one
cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself;
she knew that action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward
and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which
she could get aid. If there were none, the horse must drop down to die,
and with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun would
rise.
Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and there by
fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance of some yet
darker thing, moving rapidly--a large cloud skimming the earth. She let
the horse, which had paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck,
stand still a while, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud
till, with the marvelous surety of her desert-trained vision, she
disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering shadows and
recognized it, as it was, a band of Arabs.
If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength of her
horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from their pursuit,
or even from their perception, for they were coming straightly and
swiftly across the plain. If she were seen by them, she was certain
of her fate; they could only be the desperate remnant of the decimated
tribes, the foraging raiders of starving and desperate men, hunted
from refuge to refuge, and carrying fire and sword in their vengeance
wherever an unprotected caravan or a defenseless settlement gave them
the power of plunder and of slaughter, that spared neither age nor sex.
She was known throughout the length and the breadth of the land to the
Arabs; she was neither child nor woman to them; she was but the soldier
who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe
who had seen them defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their
pursuit in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful
days. Some among them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful
death if ever they made her captive, for they held her in superstitious
awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish successes would be broken
if she were slain. She knew that; yet, knowing it, she looked at
their advancing band one moment, then turned her horse's head and rode
straight toward them.
“They will kill me, but that may save him,” she thought. “Any other way
he is lost.”
So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed their front,
and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, with the cloth
torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full about her, as she
held it above her head. In an instant they knew her. They were the
remnant who had escaped from the carnage of Zaraila; they knew her
with all the rapid, unerring surety of hate. They gave the shrill, wild
war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted
figures with their weapons whirling round their heads inclosed her; a
cloud of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks upon
one young silvery-plumed falcon.
She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that flashed above
her; there was no fear upon her face, only a calm, resolute, proud
beauty--very pale, very still in the light that gleamed on it from the
lantern rays.
“I surrender,” she said briefly; she had never thought to say these
words of submission to her scorned foes; she would not have been brought
to utter them to spare her own existence. Their answer was a yell of
furious delight, and their bare blades smote each other with a clash of
brutal joy. They had her, the Frankish child who had brought shame and
destruction on them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their steel
across the fair young throat, to plunge their lances into the bright,
bare bosom, to twine her hair round their spear handles, to rend her
delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the antelope, to torture, to
outrage, to wreak their vengeance on her. Their chief, only, motioned
their violence back from her, and bade them leave her untouched. At him
she looked still with the same fixed, serene, scornful resolve; she had
encountered these men so often in battle, she knew so well how rich a
prize she was to him. But she had one thought alone with her; and for it
she subdued contempt, and hate, and pride, and every passion in her.
“I surrender,” she said, with the same tranquillity. “I have heard that
you have sworn by your God and your Prophet to tear me limb from limb
because that I--a child, and a woman-child--brought you to shame and to
grief on the day of Zaraila. Well, I am here; do it. You can slake your
will on me. But that you are brave men, and that I have ever met you in
fair fight, let me speak one word with you first.”
Through the menaces and the rage around her, fierce as the yelling of
starving wolves around a frozen corpse, her clear, brave tones reached
the ear of the chief in the lingua sabir that she used. He was a young
man, and his ear was caught by that tuneful voice, his eyes by that
youthful face. He signed upward the swords of his followers, and
motioned them back as their arms were stretched to seize her, and their
shouts clamored for her slaughter.
“Speak on,” he said briefly to her.
“You have sworn to take my body, sawn in two, to Ben-Ihreddin?” she
pursued, naming the Arab leader whom her Spahis had driven off the field
of Zaraila. “Well, here it is; you can take it to him; and you will
receive the piasters, and the horses, and the arms that he has promised
to whoever shall slay me. I have surrendered; I am yours. But you are
bold men, and the bold are never mean; therefore, I will ask one thing
of you. There is a man yonder, in my camp, condemned to death with the
dawn. He is innocent. I have ridden from Algiers to-day with the order
of his release. If it is not there by sunrise he will be shot; and he
is guiltless as a child unborn. My horse is worn out; he could not go
another half league. I knew that, since he had failed, my comrade would
perish, unless I found a fresh beast or a messenger to go in my stead.
I saw your band come across the plain. I knew that you would kill me,
because of your oath and of your Emir's bride; but I thought that you
would have greatness enough in you to save this man who is condemned,
without crime, and who must perish unless you, his foes, have pity on
him. Therefore I came. Take the paper that frees him; send your fleetest
and surest with it, under a flag of truce, into our camp by the dawn;
let him tell them there that I, Cigarette, gave it him. He must say no
word of what you have done to me, or his white flag will not protect him
from the vengeance of my army--and then receive your reward from your
chief, Ben-Ihreddin, when you lay my head down for his horse's hoofs to
trample into the dust. Answer me--is the compact fair? Ride on with this
paper northward, and then kill me with what torments you choose.”
She spoke with calm, unwavering resolve, meaning that which she uttered
to its very uttermost letter. She knew that these men had thirsted for
her blood; she offered it to be shed to gain for him that messenger on
whose speed his life was hanging. She knew that a price was set upon her
head; but she delivered herself over to the hands of her enemies so that
thereby she might purchase his redemption.
As they heard, silence fell upon the brutal, clamorous herd around--the
silence of amaze and of respect. The young chief listened gravely; by
the glistening of his keen, black eyes, he was surprised and moved,
though, true to his teaching, he showed neither emotion as he answered
her.
“Who is this Frank for whom you do this thing?”
“He is the warrior to whom you offered life on the field of Zaraila
because his courage was as the courage of gods.”
She knew the qualities of the desert character; knew how to appeal to
its reverence and to its chivalry.
“And for what does he perish?” he asked.
“Because he forgot for once that he was a slave, and because he has
borne the burden of guilt that was not his own.”
They were quite still now, closed around her; these ferocious
plunderers, who had been thirsty a moment before to sheathe their
weapons in her body, were spellbound by the sympathy of courageous
souls, by some vague perception that there was a greatness in this
little tigress of France, whom they had sworn to hunt down and
slaughter, which surpassed all they had known or dreamed.
“And you have given yourself up to us that, by your death, you may
purchase a messenger from us for this errand?” pursued their leader. He
had been reared as a boy in the high tenets and the pure chivalries of
the school of Abd-el-Kader; and they were not lost in him, despite the
crimes and the desperation of his life.
She held the paper out to him, with a passionate entreaty breaking
through the enforced calm of despair with which she had hitherto spoken.
“Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save him, as you
are brave men, as you are generous foes!”
With a single sign of his hand their leader waved them back where they
crowded around her, and leaped down from his saddle, and led the horse
he had dismounted to her.
“Maiden,” he said gently, “we are Arabs, but we are not brutes. We swore
to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are not vile enough to accept a
martyrdom. Take my horse--he is the swiftest of my troop--and go you on
your errand. You are safe from me.”
She looked at him in stupor; the sense of his words was not tangible
to her; she had had no hope, no thought, that they would ever deal thus
with her; all she had ever dreamed of was so to touch their hearts and
their generosity that they would spare one from among their troop to do
the errand of mercy she had begged of them.
“You play with me!” she murmured, while her lips grew whiter and her
great eyes larger in the intensity of her emotion. “Ah! for pity's sake,
make haste and kill me, so that this only may reach him!”
The chief, standing by her, lifted her up in his sinewy arms, up on to
the saddle of his charger. His voice was very solemn, his glance was
very gentle; all the nobility of the highest Arab nature was aroused
in him at the heroism of a child, a girl, an infidel--one, in his sight
abandoned and shameful among her sex.
“Go in peace,” he said simply; “it is not with such as thee that we
war.”
Then, and then only, as she felt the fresh reins placed in her hand, and
saw the ruthless horde around her fall back and leave her free, did she
understand his meaning; did she comprehend that he gave her back both
liberty and life, and, with the surrender of the horse he loved, the
noblest and most precious gift that the Arab ever bestows or ever
receives. The unutterable joy seemed to blind her, and gleam upon her
face like the blazing light of noon, as she turned her burning eyes full
on him.
“Ah! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally with Christians!
If I live, thou shalt see me back ere another night; if I die, France
will know how to thank thee!”
“We do not do the thing that is right for the sake that men may
recompense us,” he answered her gently. “Fly to thy friend, and
hereafter do not judge that those who are in arms against thee must
needs be as the brutes that seek out whom they shall devour.”
Then, with one word in his own tongue, he bade the horse bear her
southward, and, as swiftly as a spear launched from his hand, the animal
obeyed him and flew across the plains. He looked after a while, through
the dim, tremulous darkness that seemed cleft by the rush of the gallop
as the clouds are cleft by lightning, while his tribe sat silent on
their horses in moody, unwilling consent; savage in that they had been
deprived of prey, moved in that they were sensible of this martyrdom
which had been offered to them.
“Verily the courage of a woman has put the best among us unto shame,”
he said, rather to himself than them, as he mounted the stallion brought
him from the rear and rode slowly northward; unconscious that the thing
he had done was great, because conscious only that it was just.
And, borne by the fleetness of the desert-bred beast, she went away
through the heavy, bronze-hued dullness of the night. Her brain had no
sense, her hands had no feeling, her eyes had no sight; the rushing of
waters was loud on her ears, the giddiness of fasting and of fatigue
sent the gloom eddying round and round like a whirlpool of shadow. Yet
she had remembrance enough left to ride on, and on, and on without once
flinching from the agonies that racked her cramped limbs and throbbed in
her beating temples; she had remembrance enough to strain her blind eyes
toward the east and murmur, in her terror of that white dawn, that must
soon break, the only prayer that had been ever uttered by the lips no
mother's kiss had ever touched:
“O God! keep the day back!”