by Ouida
He dipped his long mustaches again into another beaker of still. Talking was thirsty work; the story was well known in all the African army, but the piou-piou, having served in China, was new to the soil.
“The General was ill-pleased when he heard it, and half for arresting Rire-pour-tout; but — sacre! — the thing was done; our honor was involved; he had engaged to fight these men, and engaged for us to let them go in peace afterward; there was no more to be said, unless we had looked like cowards, or traitors, or both. There was a wide, level plateau in front of our camp, and the hills were at our backs — a fine field for the duello; and, true to time, the Arabs filed on to the plain, and fronted us in a long line, with their standards, and their crescents, and their cymbals and reed-pipes, and kettle-drums, all glittering and sounding. Sac a papier! There was a show, and we could not fight one of them! We were drawn up in line — Horse, Foot, and Artillery — Rire-pour-tout all alone, some way in advance; mounted, of course. The General and the Sheik had a conference; then the play began. There were six Arabs picked out — the flower of the army — all white and scarlet, and in their handsomest bravery, as if they came to an aouda. They were fine men — diable! — they were fine men. Now the duel was to be with swords; these had been selected; and each Arab was to come against Rire-pour-tout singly, in succession. Our drums rolled the pas de charge, and their cymbals clashed; they shouted ‘Fantasia!’ and the first Arab rode at him. Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went his steel through the Bedouin’s lung, before you could cry hola! — a death-stroke, of course; Rire-pour-tout always killed: that was his perfect science. Another and another and another came, just as fast as the blood flowed. You know what the Arabs are — vous autres? How they wheel and swerve and fight flying, and pick up their saber from the ground, while their horse is galloping ventre a terre, and pierce you here and pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks? You know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after another, more like devils than men. Mort de Dieu! it was a magnificent sight! He was gashed here and gashed there; but they could never unseat him, try how they would; and one after another he caught them sooner or later, and sent them reeling out of their saddles, till there was a great red lake of blood all round him, and five of them lay dead or dying down in the sand. He had mounted afresh twice, three horses had been killed underneath him, and his jacket all hung in strips where the steel had slashed it. It was grand to see, and did one’s heart good; but — ventre bleu! — how one longed to go in too.
“There was only one left now — a young Arab, the Sheik’s son, and down he came like the wind. He thought with the shock to unhorse Rire-pour-tout, and finish him then at his leisure. You could hear the crash as they met, like two huge cymbals smashing together. Their chargers hit and tore at each other’s manes; they were twined in together there as if they were but one man and one beast; they shook and they swayed and they rocked; the sabers played about their heads so quick that it was like lightning, as they flashed and twirled in the sun; the hoofs trampled up the sand till a yellow cloud hid their struggle, and out of it all you could see was the head of a horse tossing up and spouting with foam, or a sword-blade lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled down a little, the sand mist cleared away, the Arab’s saddle was empty — but Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock. The old Chief bowed his head. ‘It is over! Allah is great!’ And he knew his son lay there dead. Then we broke from the ranks, and we rushed to the place where the chargers and men were piled like so many slaughtered sheep. Rire-pour-tout laughed such a gay, ringing laugh as the desert never had heard. ‘Vive la France!’ he cried. ‘And now bring me my toss of brandy.’ Then down headlong out of his stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse; and when we lifted him up there were two broken sword-blades buried in him, and the blood was pouring fast as water out of thirty wounds and more. That was how Rire-pour-tout died, piou-piou; laughing to the last. Sacre bleu! It was a splendid end; I wish I were sure of the like.”
And Claude de Chanrellon drank down his third beaker, for overmuch speech made him thirsty.
The men around him emptied their glasses in honor of the dead hero.
“Rire-pour-tout was a croc-mitaine,” they said solemnly, with almost a sigh; so tendering by their words the highest funeral oration.
“You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose?” asked a voice in very pure French. The speaker was leaning against the open door of the cafe; a tall, lightly built man, dressed in a velvet shooting tunic, much the worse for wind and weather, a loose shirt, and jack-boots splashed and worn out.
“When we are at it, monsieur,” returned the Chasseur. “I only wish we had more.”
“Of course. Are you in need of recruits?”
“They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves,” smiled Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. “Still, a good sword brings its welcome. Do you ask seriously, monsieur?”
The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little piou-piou drowning his mortification in some curacoa, the idlers reading the “Akbah” or the “Presse,” the Chasseurs lounging over their drink, the ecarte players lost in their game, all looked up at the newcomer. They thought he looked a likely wearer of the dead honors of Rire-pour-tout.
He did not answer the question literally, but came over from the doorway and seated himself at the little marble table opposite Claude, leaning his elbows on it.
“I have a doubt,” he said. “I am more inclined to your foes.”
“Dieu de Dieu!” exclaimed Chanrellon, pulling at his tawny mustaches. “A bold thing to say before five Chasseurs.”
He smiled, a little contemptuously, a little amusedly.
“I am not a croc-mitaine, perhaps; but I say what I think, with little heed of my auditors, usually.”
Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. “He is a croc-mitaine,” he thought. “He is not to be lost.”
“I prefer your foes,” went on the other, quite quietly, quite listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of French soldiers. “In the first place, they are on the losing side; in the second, they are the lords of the soil; in the third, they live as free as air; and in the fourth, they have undoubtedly the right of the quarrel!”
“Monsieur!” cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on their swords, fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily up from under the long lashes of his lids, and went on, as though they had not spoken.
“I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours, Rire-pour-tout, did, but I don’t think it’s worth while,” he said carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. “Brawling’s bad style; we don’t do it. I was saying, I like your foes best; mere matter of taste; no need to quarrel over it — that I see. I shall go into their service or into yours, monsieur — will you play a game of dice to decide?”
“Decide? — but how?”
“Why — this way,” said the other, with the weary listlessness of one who cares not two straws how things turn. “If I win, I go to the Arabs; if you win, I come to your ranks.”
“Mort de Dieu! it is a droll gambling,” murmured Chanrellon. “But — if you win, do you think we shall let you go off to our enemies? Pas si bete, monsieur!”
“Yes, you will,” said the other quietly. “Men who knew what honor meant enough to redeem Rire-pour-tout’s pledge of safety to the Bedouins, will not take advantage of an openly confessed and unarmed adversary.”
A murmur of ratification ran through his listeners.
Chanrellon swore a mighty oath.
“Pardieu, no. You are right. If you want to go, you shall go. Hola there! bring the dice. Champagne, monsieur? Vermouth? Cognac?”
“Nothing, I thank you.”
He leaned back with an apathetic indolence and indifference oddly at contrast with the injudicious daring of his war-provoking words and the rough campaigning that he sought. The assembled Ch
asseurs eyed him curiously; they liked his manner and they resented his first speeches; they noted every particular about him — his delicate white hands, his weather-worn and travel-stained dress, his fair, aristocratic features, his sweeping, abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless way; and they were uncertain what to make of him.
The dice were brought.
“What stakes, monsieur?” asked Chanrellon.
“Ten napoleons a side — and — the Arabs.”
He set ten napoleons down on the table; they were the only coins he had in the world; it was very characteristic that he risked them.
They threw the main — two sixes.
“You see,” he murmured, with a half smile, “the dice know it is a drawn duel between you and the Arabs.”
“C’est un drole, c’est un brave!” muttered Chanrellon; and they threw again.
The Chasseur cast a five; his was a five again.
“The dice cannot make up their minds,” said the other listlessly, “they know you are Might and the Arabs are Right.”
The Frenchmen laughed; they could take a jest good-humoredly, and alone amid so many of them, he was made sacred at once by the very length of odds against him.
They rattled the boxes and threw again — Chanrellon’s was three; his two.
“Ah!” he murmured. “Right kicks the beam and loses; it always does, poor devil!”
The Chasseur leaned across the table, with his brown, fearless sunny eyes full of pleasure.
“Monsieur! never lament such good fortune for France. You belong to us now; let me claim you!”
He bowed more gravely than he had borne himself hitherto.
“You do me much honor; fortune has willed it so. One word only in stipulation.”
“Chanrellon assented courteously.
“As many as you choose.”
“I have a companion who must be brigaded with me, and I must go on active service at once.”
“With infinite pleasure. That doubtless can be arranged. You shall present yourself to-morrow morning; and for to-night, this is not the season here yet; and we are triste a faire fremir; still I can show you a little fun, though it is not Paris!”
But he rose and bowed again.
“I thank you, not to-night. You shall see me at your barracks with the morning.”
“Ah, ah! monsieur!” cried the Chasseur eagerly, and a little annoyed. “What warrant have we that you will not dispute the decree of the dice, and go off to your favorites, the Arabs?”
He turned back and looked full in Chanrellon’s face his own eyes a little surprised, and infinitely weary.
“What warrant? My promise.”
Then, without another syllable, he lounged slowly out through the soldiers and the idlers, and disappeared in the confused din and chiar-oscuro of the gas-lit street without, through the press of troopers, grisettes, merchants, beggars, sweetmeat-sellers, lemonade-sellers, curacoa sellers, gaunt Bedouins, negro boys, shrieking muleteers, laughing lorettes, and glittering staff officers.
“That is done!” he murmured to his own thoughts. “Now for life under another flag!”
Claude de Chanrellon sat mute and amazed a while, gazing at the open door; then he drank a fourth beaker of champagne and flung the emptied glass down with a mighty crash.
“Ventre bleu! Whoever he is, that man will eat fire, bons garcons!”
CHAPTER XIV.
“DE PROFUNDIS” BEFORE “PLUNGING.”
Three months later it was guest-night in the messroom of a certain famous light cavalry regiment, who bear the reputation of being the fastest corps in the English service. Of a truth, they do “plunge” a little too wildly; and stories are told of bets over ecarte in their anteroom that have been prompt extinction forever and aye to the losers, for they rarely play money down, their stakes are too high, and moderate fortunes may go in a night with the other convenient but fatal system. But, this one indiscretion apart, they are a model corps for blood, for dash, for perfect social accord, for the finest horseflesh in the kingdom, and the best president at a mess-table that ever drilled the cook to matchlessness, and made the ice dry, and the old burgundies, the admired of all newcomers.
Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had a couple of hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were showing the Ridings that they could “go like birds,” and were using up their second horses with every day out, in the first of the season. A cracker over the best of the ground with the York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate things quick as lightning, and both closed with a kill, had filled the day; and they were dining with a fair quantity of county guests, and all the splendor of plate, and ceremony, and magnificent hospitalities which characterize those beaux sabreurs wheresoever they go. At one part of the table a discussion was going on but they drank singularly little; it was not their “form” ever to indulge in that way; and the Chief, as dashing a sabreur as ever crossed a saddle, though lenient to looseness in all other matters, and very young for his command, would have been down like steel on “the boys,” had any of them taken to the pastime of overmuch drinking in any shape.
“I can’t get the rights of the story,” said one of the guests, a hunting baronet, and M. F. H. “It’s something very dark, isn’t it?”
“Very dark,” assented a tall, handsome man, with a habitual air of the most utterly exhausted apathy ever attained by the human features, but who, nevertheless, had been christened, by the fiercest of the warrior nations of the Punjaub, as the Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil One, so terrible had the circling sweep of one back stroke of his, when he was quite a boy, become to them.
“Guard cut up fearfully rough,” murmured one near him, known as “the Dauphin.” “Such a low sort of thing, you know; that’s the worst of it. Seraph’s name, too.”
“Poor old Seraph! He’s fairly bowled over about it,” added a third. “Feels it awfully — by Jove, he does! It’s my belief he paid those Jew fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit slackened.”
“So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a cracker by it. I dare say! Jews always do,” muttered a fourth. “First Life would have given Beauty a million sooner than have him do it. Horrible thing for the Household.”
“But is he dead?” pursued their guest.
“Beauty? Yes; smashed in that express, you know.”
“But there was no evidence?”
“I don’t know what you call evidence,” murmured “the Dauphin.” “Horses are sent to England from Paris; clearly shows he went to Paris. Marseilles train smashes; twenty people ground into indistinguishable amalgamation; two of the amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage alone; only traps in carriage with them, Beauty’s traps, with name clear on the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things inside; two men ground to atoms, but traps safe; two men, of course Beauty and servant; man was a plucky fellow, sure, to stay with him.”
And having given the desired evidence in lazy little intervals of speech, he took some Rhenish.
“Well — yes; nothing could be more conclusive, certainly,” assented the Baronet, resignedly convinced. “It was the best thing that could happen under the unfortunate circumstances; so Lord Royallieu thinks, I suppose. He allowed no one to wear mourning, and had his unhappy son’s portrait taken down and burned.”
“How melodramatic!” reflected Leo Charteris. “Now what the deuce can it hurt a dead man to have his portrait made into a bonfire? Old lord always did hate Beauty, though. Rock does all the mourning; he’s cut up no end; never saw a fellow so knocked out of time. Vowed at first he’d sell out, and go into the Austrian service; swore he couldn’t stay in the Household, but would get a command of some Heavies, and be changed to India.”
“Duke didn’t like that — didn’t want him shot; nobody else, you see, for the title. By George! I wish you’d seen Rock the other day on the Heath; little Pulteney came up to him.”
“What Pulteney? — Jimmy, or the Earl?”
“Oh, the Earl! Jimmy would have known better. These new men never know anything. ‘You purchased that famous steeple-chaser of his from Mr. Cecil’s creditors, didn’t you!’ asks Pulteney. Rock just looks him over. Such a look, by George! ‘I received Forest King as my dead friend’s last gift.’ Pulteney never takes the hint — not he. On he blunders: ‘Because, if you were inclined to part with him, I want a good new hunting strain, with plenty of fencing power, and I’d take him for the stud at any figure you liked.’ I thought the Seraph would have knocked him down — I did, upon my honor! He was red as this wine in a second with rage, and then as white as a woman. ‘You are quite right,’ he says quietly, and I swear each word cut like a bullet, ‘you do want a new strain with something like breeding in it, but — I hardly think you’ll get it for the three next generations. You must learn to know what it means first.’ Then away he lounges. By Jove! I don’t think the Cotton-Earl will forget this Cambridgeshire in a hurry, or try horse-dealing on the Seraph again.”
Laughter loud and long greeted the story.
“Poor Beauty,” said the Dauphin, “he’d have enjoyed that. He always put down Pulteney himself. I remember his telling me he was on duty at Windsor once when Pulteney was staying there. Pulteney’s always horribly funked at Court; frightened out of his life when he dines with any royalties; makes an awful figure too in a public ceremony; can’t walk backward for any money, and at his first levee tumbled down right in the Queen’s face. Now at the Castle one night he just happened to come down a corridor as Beauty was smoking. Beauty made believe to take him for a servant, took out a sovereign, and tossed it to him. ‘Here, keep a still tongue about my cigar, my good fellow!’ Pulteney turned hot and cold, and stammered out God knows what, about his mighty dignity being mistaken for a valet. Bertie just laughed a little, ever so softly, ‘Beg your pardon — thought you were one of the people; wouldn’t have done it for worlds; I know you’re never at ease with a sovereign!’ Now Pulteney wasn’t likely to forget that. If he wanted the King, I’ll lay any money it was to give him to some wretched mount who’d break his back over a fence in a selling race.”