Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “In proportion as one loves powder, one has been a scoundrel, mon General,” he murmured; “what the catalogue of your crimes must be!”

  The tough old campaigner laughed grimly; he took it as a high compliment.

  “Sapristi! The cardinal virtues don’t send anybody, I guess, into African service. And yet, pardieu, I don’t know. What fellows I have known! I have had men among my Zephyrs — and they were the wildest insubordinates too — that would have ruled the world! I have had more wit, more address, more genius, more devotion, in some headlong scamp of a loustic than all the courts and cabinets would furnish. Such lives, such lives, too, morbleu!”

  And he drained his absinthe thoughtfully, musing on the marvelous vicissitudes of war, and on the patrician blood, the wasted wit, the Beaumarchais talent, the Mirabeau power, the adventures like a page of fairy tale, the brains whose strength could have guided a scepter, which he had found and known, hidden under the rough uniform of a Zephyr; buried beneath the canvas shirt of a Roumi; lost forever in the wild, lawless escapades of rebellious insubordinates, who closed their days in the stifling darkness of the dungeons of Beylick, or in some obscure skirmish, some midnight vedette, where an Arab flissa severed the cord of the warped life, and the death was unhonored by even a line in the Gazettes du Jour.

  “Faith!” laughed Chanrellon, regardless of the General’s observation, “if we all published our memoirs, the world would have a droll book. Dumas and Terrail would be beat out of the field. The real recruiting sergeants that send us to the ranks would be soon found to be—”

  “Women!” growled the General.

  “Cards,” sighed the Colonel.

  “Absinthe,” muttered another.

  “A comedy that was hissed.”

  “The spleen.”

  “The dice.”

  “The roulette.”

  “The natural desire of humanity to kill or to get killed!”

  “Morbleu!” cried Chanrellon, as the voices closed, “all those mischiefs beat the drum, and send volunteers to the ranks, sure enough; but the General named the worst. Look at that little Cora; the Minister of War should give her the Cross. She sends us ten times more fire-eaters than the Conscription does. Five fine fellows — of the vieille roche too — joined to-day, because she has stripped them of everything, and they have nothing for it but the service. She is invaluable, Cora.”

  “And there is not much to look at in her either,” objected a captain, who commanded Turcos. “I saw her when our detachment went to show in Paris. A baby face, innocent as a cherub — a soft voice — a shape that looks as slight and as breakable as the stem of my glass — there is the end!”

  The Colonel of Tirailleurs laughed scornfully, but gently; he had been a great lion of the fashionable world before he came out to his Indigenes.

  “The end of Cora! The end of her is — My good Alcide — that ‘baby face’ has ruined more of us than would make up a battalion. She is so quiet, so tender; smiles like an angel, glides like a fawn; is a little sad too, the innocent dove; looks at you with eyes as clear as water, and paf! before you know where you are, she has pillaged with both hands, and you wake one fine morning bankrupt!”

  “Why do you let her do it?” growled the vieille moustache, who had served under Junot, when a little lad, and had scant knowledge of the ways and wiles of the sirens of the Rue Breda.

  “Ah, bah!” said the Colonel, with a shrug of his shoulders; “it is the thing to be ruined by Cora.”

  Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it. “It was Coeur d’Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up — that woman — in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped me as bare as a pigeon. Her passion was uncut emeralds just then. Well uncut emeralds made an end of me, and sent me out here. Coeur d’Acier was a wonderful woman! — and the chief wonder of her was, that she was as ugly as sin.”

  “Ugly!”

  “Ugly as sin! But she had the knack of making herself more charming than Venus. How she did it nobody knew; but men left the prettiest creatures for her; and she ruined us, I think, at the rate of a score a month.”

  “Like Loto,” chimed in the Tirailleur. “Loto has not a shred of beauty. She is a big, angular, raw-boned Normande, with a rough voice and a villainous patois; but to be well with Loto is to have achieved distinction at once. She will have nothing under the third order of nobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day. She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret.”

  “Audacity, my friend! Always that!” said Chanrellon, with a twist of his superb mustaches. “It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win. Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah! Bel-a-faire-peur, you fell, too, among the Lotos and the Coeurs d’Acier once, I will warrant.”

  The Chasseur, who was passing, paused and smiled a little, as he saluted.

  “Coeurs d’Acier are to be found in all ranks of the sex, monsieur, I fancy!”

  “Bah! you beg the question. Did not a woman send you out here?”

  “No, monsieur — only chance.”

  “A fig for your chance! Women are the mischief that casts us adrift to chance.”

  “Monsieur, we cast ourselves sometimes.”

  “Dieu de Dieu! I doubt that. We should go straight enough if it were not for them.”

  The Chasseur smiled again.

  “M. le Viscomte thinks we are sure to be right, then, if, for the key to every black story, we ask, ‘Who was she?’”

  “Of course I do. Well! who was she? We are all quoting our tempters to-night. Give us your story, mon brave!”

  “Monsieur, you have it in the folios, as well as my sword could write it.”

  “Good, good!” muttered the listening General. The soldier-like answer pleased him, and he looked attentively at the giver of it.

  Chanrellon’s brown eyes flashed a bright response.

  “And your sword writes in a brave man’s fashion — writes what France loves to read. But before you wore your sword here? Tell us of that. It was a romance — wasn’t it?”

  “If it were, I have folded down the page, monsieur.”

  “Open it then! Come — what brought you out among us? Out with it!”

  “Monsieur, direct obedience is a soldier’s duty; but I never heard that inquisitive annoyance was an officer’s privilege.”

  These words were calm, cold, a little languid, and a little haughty. The manner of old habit, the instinct of buried pride spoke in them, and disregarded the barrier between a private of Chasseurs who was but a sous-officier, and a Colonel Commandant who was also a noble of France.

  Involuntarily, all the men sitting round the little table, outside the cafe, turned and looked at him. The boldness of speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity upon him.

  Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an instant’s passion gleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his three chairs down with a crash, as he shook his mighty frame like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a campaigner’s frankness.

  “A right rebuke! — fairly given, and well deserved. I thank you for the lesson.”

  The Chasseur looked surprised and moved; in truth, he was more touched than he showed. Under the rule of Chateauroy, consideration and courtesy had been things long unshown to him. Involuntarily, forgetful of rank, he stretched his hand out, on the impulse of soldier to soldier, of gentleman to gentleman. Then, as the bitter remembrance of the difference in rank and station between them flashed on his memory, he was raising it proudly, deferentially, in the salute of a subordinate to his superior, when Chanrellon’s grasp closed on it readily. The victim of Coeur d’Acier was of as gallant a temper as ever blent the reckless condottiere with the thoroughbred noble.

  The Chasseur colored slightly, as he remem
bered that he had forgotten alike his own position and their relative stations.

  “I beg your pardon, M. le Viscomte,” he said simply, as he gave the salute with ceremonious grace, and passed onward rapidly, as though he wished to forget and to have forgotten the momentary self-oblivion of which he had been guilty.

  “Dieu!” muttered Chanrellon, as he looked after him, and struck his hand on the marble-topped table till the glasses shook. “I would give a year’s pay to know that fine fellow’s history. He is a gentleman — every inch of him.”

  “And a good soldier, which is better,” growled the General of Brigade, who had begun life in his time driving an ox-plow over the heavy tillage of Alsace.

  “A private of Chateauroy’s?” asked the Tirailleur, lifting his eye-glass to watch the Chasseur as he went.

  “Pardieu — yes — more’s the pity,” said Chanrellon, who spoke his thoughts as hastily as a hand-grenade scatters its powder. “The Black Hawk hates him — God knows why — and he is kept down in consequence, as if he were the idlest lout or the most incorrigible rebel in the service. Look at what he has done. All the Bureaux will tell you there is not a finer Roumi in Africa — not even among our Schaouacks! Since he joined, there has not been a hot and heavy thing with the Arabs that he has not had his share in. There has not been a campaign in Oran or Kabaila that he had not gone out with. His limbs are slashed all over with Bedouin steel. He rode once twenty leagues to deliver dispatches with a spear-head in his side, and fell, in a dead faint, out of his saddle just as he gave them up to the commandant’s own hands. He saved the day, two years ago, at Granaila. We should have been cut to pieces, as sure as destiny, if he had not collected a handful of broken Chasseurs together, and rallied them, and rated them, and lashed them with their shame, till they dashed with him to a man into the thickest of the fight, and pierced the Arabs’ center, and gave us breathing room, till we all charged together, and beat the Arbicos back like a herd of jackals. There are a hundred more like stories of him — every one of them true as my saber — and, in reward, he has just been made a galonne!”

  “Superb!” said the General, with a grim significance. “Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then” — and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy— “but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders.”

  “The Black Hawk can read, too,” said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the “petit nom,” that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. “No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons — pong! — till the thing drops dead — even where he strikes a bird of his own brood.”

  “That is bad,” said the old General sententiously. “There are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship’s skipper, and a military chief.”

  With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert.

  Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cosmopolitan groups of the great square. A little farther onward, laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen — a yachting party, whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment; and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiar words. As he bent his head, no one saw the shadow of pain that passed over his face.

  But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. “The deuce,” he murmured to the man nearest him, “who the dickens is it that French soldier’s like?”

  The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city — uneasy lest he should be recognized by any passer-by or tourist.

  “I need not fear that, though,” he thought with a smile. “Ten years! — why, in that world, we used to forget the blackest ruin in ten days, and the best life among us ten hours after its grave was closed. Besides, I am safe enough. I am dead!”

  And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the cigar under the chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black eyes of veiled women flashed lovingly on his tall, lithe form, with the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as a woman’s still, despite the tawny glow of the African sun that had been on it for so long.

  He was “dead”; therein had lain all his security; thereby had “Beauty of the Brigades” been buried beyond all discovery in “Bel-a-faire-peur” of the 2nd Chasseurs d’Afrique. When, on the Marseilles rails, the maceration and slaughter of as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rushing through the midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left himself and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by little less than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen from discovery or pursuit.

  Leaving the baggage where it was jammed among the debris, he had struck across the country with Rake for the few leagues that still lay between them and the city, and had entered Marseilles as weary foot travelers, before half the ruin on the rails had been seen by the full noon sun.

  As it chanced a trading yawl was loading in the port, to run across to Algiers that very day. The skipper was short of men, and afraid of the Lascars, who were the only sailors that he seemed likely to find to fill up the vacant places in his small crew.

  Cecil offered himself and his comrade for the passage. He had only a very few gold pieces on his person, and he was willing to work his way across, if he could.

  “But you’re a gentleman,” said the skipper, doubtfully eyeing him, and his velvet dress, and his black sombrero with its eagle’s plume. “I want a rare, rough, able seaman, for there’ll like to be foul weather. She looks too fair to last,” he concluded, with a glance upward at the sky.

  He was a Liverpool man, master and owner of his own rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself in far seas, with a likely run before her.

  “You’re a swell, that’s what you are,” emphasized the skipper. “You bean’t no sort of use to me.”

  “Wait a second,” answered Cecil. “Did you ever chance to hear of a schooner called ‘Regina’?”

  The skipper’s face lighted in a moment.

  “Her as was in the Biscay, July come two years? Her as drove through the storm like a mad thing, and flew like a swallow, when everything was splitting and foundering, and shipping seas around her? Her as was the first to bear down to the great ‘Wrestler,’ a-lying there hull over in water, and took aboard all as ever she could hold o’ the passengers; a-pitching out her own beautiful cabin fittings to have as much room for the poor wretches as ever she could? Be you a-meaning her?”

  Cecil nodded assent.

  “She was my yacht, that’s all; and I was without a captain through that storm. Will you think me a good enough sailor now?”

  The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.

  “Good enough! Blast my timbers! There aren’t one will beat you in any waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke of work shall you do atween my decks. I never did think as how one of your yachting-nobs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me, if the Club make such sailors as you it’s a rare ‘un! Lord a mercy! Why, my wife was in the ‘Wrestler.’ I’ve heard her tell scores of times as how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might be able to carry more passengers, and fed ’em, and gave ’em champagne all around, and treated ’em like a prince, till he ran ’em straight into Brest Harbor. But, damn me! that ever a swell like you should—”

  “Let’s weigh anchor,” said Bertie quietly.

  And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidings went that the mutilated form, crushed
between iron and wood, on the Marseilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful, ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rushing trains had met, as meet the thunder-clouds. The world thought him dead; as such the journals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to make the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered at Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, loving force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt: — and he, leaving them in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of his Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound — Louis Victor — and laid aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil.

  He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in any of the larger towns since he had joined. His only danger of recognition, had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well in Paris and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African troops.

  Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards’ distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to note a chain loose, a belt awry, a sword specked with rust, if such a sin there were against “les ordonnances” in all the glittering squadrons; and swept over him, seeing in him but one among thousands — a unit in the mighty aggregate of the “raw material” of war.

  The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, “Why don’t they all ride like that man? He has the seat of the English Guards.” But that it was in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own, who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader never dreamed.

  From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil. From a life where every sense was gratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured. He had led the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant. He had been used to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarse black bread of the army as a rich repast. He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies’ ears; he came where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial. He had known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement, refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.