by Ouida
“Always eloquent, pretty one!” he growled. “Are you sure he did not begin the fray?”
“Don’t I tell you the four Arabs were like four devils! They knocked down an old colon, and Bel-a-faire-peur tried to prevent their doing more mischief, and they set on him like so many wild-cats. He kept his temper wonderfully; he always tries to preserve order; you can’t say so much of your riff-raff, Captain Vireflau, commonly! Here! this is his horse. Send some men to him; and mind the thing is reported fairly, and to his credit, to-morrow.”
With which command, given as with the air of a commander-in-chief, in its hauteur and its nonchalance, Cigarette vaulted off the charger, flung the bridle to a soldier, and was away and out of sight before Francois Vireflau had time to consider whether he should laugh at her caprices, as all the army did, or resent her insolence to his dignity. But he was a good-natured man, and, what was better, a just one; and Cigarette had judged rightly that the tale she had told would weigh well with him to the credit side of his Corporal, and would not reach his Colonel in any warped version that could give pretext for any fresh exercise of tyranny over “Bel-a-faire-peur” under the title of “discipline.”
“Dieu de Dieu!” thought his champion as she made her way through the gas-lit streets. “I swore to have my vengeance on him. It is a droll vengeance, to save his life, and plead his cause with Vireflau! No matter! One could not look on and let a set of Arbicos kill a good lascar of France; and the thing that is just must be said, let it go as it will against one’s grain. Public Welfare before Private Pique!”
A grand and misty generality which consoled Cigarette for an abandonment of her sworn revenge which she felt was a weakness utterly unworthy of her, and too much like that inconsequent weathercock, that useless, insignificant part of creation, those objects of her supreme derision and contempt, those frivolous trifles which she wondered the good God had ever troubled himself to make — namely, “Les Femmes.”
“Hola, Cigarette!” cried the Zouave Tata, leaning out of a little casement of the As de Pique as she passed it. “A la bonne heure, ma belle! Come in; we have the devil’s own fun here—”
“No doubt!” retorted the Friend of the Flag. “It would be odd if the master-fiddler would not fiddle for his own!”
Through the window, and over the sturdy shoulders, in their canvas shirt, of the hero Tata, the room was visible — full of smoke, through which the lights glimmered like the sun in a fog; reeking with bad wines, crowded with laughing, bearded faces, and the battered beauty of women revelers, while on the table, singing with a voice Mario himself could not have rivaled for exquisite sweetness, was a slender Zouave gesticulating with the most marvelous pantomime, while his melodious tones rolled out the obscenest and wittiest ballad that ever was caroled in a guinguette.
“Come in, my pretty one!” entreated Tata, stretching out his brawn arms. “You will die of laughing if you hear Gris-Gris to-night — such a song!”
“A pretty song, yes — for a pigsty!” said Cigarette, with a glance into the chamber; and she shook his hand off her, and went on down the street. A night or two before a new song from Gris-Gris, the best tenor in the whole army, would have been paradise to her, and she would have vaulted through the window at a single bound into the pandemonium. Now, she did not know why, she found no charm in it.
And she went quietly home to her little straw-bed in her garret, and curled herself up like a kitten to sleep; but for the first time in her young life sleep did not come readily to her, and when it did come, for the first time found a restless sigh upon her laughing mouth.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE MISTRESS OF THE WHITE KING.
“Fighting in the Kabaila, life was well enough; but here!” thought Cecil as, earlier awake than those of his Chambree, he stood looking down the lengthy, narrow room where the men lay asleep along the bare floor.
Tired as overworked cattle, and crouched or stretched like worn-out, homeless dogs, they had never wakened as he had noiselessly harnessed himself, and he looked at them with that interest in other lives that had come to him through adversity; for if misfortune had given him strength it had also given him sympathy.
They were of marvelously various types — these sleepers brought under one roof by fates the most diverse. Close beside a huge and sinewy brute of an Auvergnat, whose coarse, bestial features and massive bull’s head were fitter for a galley-slave than a soldier, were the lithe, exquisite limbs and the oval, delicate face of a man from the Valley of the Rhone. Beneath a canopy of flapping, tawny wild-beast skins, the spoils of his own hands, was flung the torso of one of the splendid peasants of the Sables d’Olonne; one steeped so long in blood and wine and alcohol that he had forgotten the blue, bright waves that broke on the western shores of his boyhood’s home, save when he muttered thirstily in his dreams of the cool sea, as he was muttering now. Next him, curled, dog-like, with its round, black head meeting its feet, was a wiry frame on which every muscle was traced like network, and the skin burned black as jet under twenty years of African sun. The midnight streets of Paris had seen its birth, the thieves’ quarter had been its nest; it had no history, it had almost no humanity; it was a perfect machine for slaughter, no more — who had ever tried to make it more?
Further on lay, sleeping fitfully, a boy of scarcely more than seventeen, with rounded cheeks and fair, white brow like a child’s, whose uncovered chest was delicate as a girl’s, and through whose long, brown lashes tears in his slumber were stealing as his rosy mouth murmured, “Mere! Mere! Pauvre mere!” He was a young conscript taken from the glad vine-country of the Loire, and from the little dwelling up in the rock beside the sunny, brimming river, and half-buried under its grape leaves and coils, that was dearer to him than is the palace to its heir. There were many others beside these; and Cecil looked at them with those weary, speculative, meditative fancies which, very alien to his temperament, stole on him occasionally in the privations and loneliness of his existence here — loneliness in the midst of numbers, the most painful of all solitude.
Life was bearable enough to him in the activity of campaigning, in the excitement of warfare; there were times even when it yielded him absolute enjoyment, and brought him interests more genuine and vivid than any he had known in his former world. But, in the monotony and the confinement of the barrack routine, his days were often intolerable to him. Morning after morning he rose to the same weary round of duty, the same series of petty irritations, of physical privations, of irksome repetitions, to take a toss of black, rough coffee, and begin the day knowing it would bring with it endless annoyances without one gleam of hope. Rose to spend hours on the exercise-ground in the glare of a burning sun, railed at if a trooper’s accouterments were awry, or an insubordinate scoundrel had pawned his regulation shirt; to be incessantly witness of tyrannies and cruelties he was powerless to prevent, and which he continually saw undo all he had done, and render men desperate whom he had spent months in endeavoring to make contented; to have as the only diversions for his few instants of leisure loathsome pleasures that disgusted the senses they were meant to indulge, and that brought him to scenes of low debauchery from which all the old, fastidious instincts of his delicate, luxurious taste recoiled. With such a life as this, he often wondered regretfully why, out of the many Arab swords that had crossed his own, none had gone straight to his heart; why, out of the many wounds that had kept him hovering on the confines of the grave, none had ever brought him the end and the oblivion of death.
Had he been subject to all the miseries and personal hardships of his present career, but had only owned the power to command, to pardon, to lead, and to direct, as Alan Bertie before him had done with his Irregular Cavalry in the Indian plains, — such a thought would never have crossed him; he was far too thorough a soldier not then to have been not only satisfied, but happy. What made his life in the barracks of Algiers so bitter were the impotency, the subjection, the compelled obedience to a bidding that he knew often caprici
ous and unjust as it was cruel; which were so unendurable to his natural pride, yet to which he had hitherto rendered undeviating adhesion and submission, less for his own sake than for that of the men around him, who, he knew, would back him in revolt to the death, and be dealt with, for such loyalty to him, in the fashion that the vivandiere’s words had pictured with such terrible force and truth.
“Is it worth while to go on with it? Would it not be the wiser way to draw my own saber across my throat?” he thought, as the brutalized companionship in which his life was spent struck on him all the more darkly because, the night before, a woman’s voice and a woman’s face had recalled memories buried for twelve long years.
But, after so long a stand-up fight with fate, so long a victory over the temptation to let himself drift out in an opium-sleep from the world that had grown so dark to him, it was not in him to give under now. In his own way he had found a duty to do here, though he would have laughed at anyone who should have used the word “duty” in connection with him. In his own way, amid these wild spirits, who would have been blown from the guns’ mouths to serve him, he had made good the “Coeur vaillant se fait Royaume” of his House. And he was, moreover, by this time, a French soldier at heart and in habit, in almost all things — though the English gentleman was not dead in him under the harness of a Chasseur d’Afrique.
This morning he roused the men of his Chambree with that kindly gentleness which had gone so far in its novelty to attach their liking; went through the customary routine of his past with that exactitude and punctuality of which he was always careful to set the example; made his breakfast off some wretched onion-soup and a roll of black bread; rode fifty miles in the blazing heat of the African day at the head of a score of his chasses-marais on convoy duty, bringing in escort a long string of maize-wagons from the region of the Kabaila, which, without such guard, might have been swooped down on and borne off by some predatory tribe; and returned, jaded, weary, parched with thirst, scorched through with heat, and covered with white dust, to be kept waiting in his saddle, by his Colonel’s orders, outside the barrack for three-quarters of an hour, whether to receive a command or a censure he was left in ignorance.
When the three-quarters had passed, he was told M. le Commandant had gone long ago, and did not require him!
Cecil said nothing.
Yet he reeled slightly as he threw himself out of saddle; a nausea and a giddiness had come on him. To have passed nigh an hour motionless in his stirrups, with the skies like brass above him, while he was already worn with riding from sunrise well-nigh to sunset, with little to appease hunger and less to slake thirst, made him, despite himself, stagger dizzily under a certain sense of blindness and exhaustion as he dismounted.
The Chasseur who had brought him the message caught his arm eagerly.
“Are you hurt, mon Caporal?”
Cecil shook his head. The speaker was one known in the regiment as Petit Picpon, who had begun life as a gamin of Paris, and now bade fair to make one of the most brilliant of the soldiers of Africa. Petit Picpon had but one drawback to this military career — he was always in insubordination; the old gamin dare-devilry was not dead in him, and never would die; and Petit Picpon accordingly was perpetually a hero in the field and a ragamuffin in the times of peace. Of course he was always arrayed against authority, and now — being fond of his galonne with that curious doglike, deathless attachment that these natures, all reckless, wanton, destructive, and mischievous though they may be, so commonly bestow — he muttered a terrible curse under his fiercely curled mustaches.
“If the Black Hawk were nailed up in the sun like a kite on a barn-door, I would drive twenty nails through his throat!”
Cecil turned rapidly on him.
“Silence, sir! or I must report you. Another speech like that, and you shall have a turn at Beylick.”
It went to his heart to rebuke the poor fellow for an outburst of indignation which had its root in regard for himself, but he knew that to encourage it by so much even as by an expression of gratitude for the affection borne him, would be to sow further and deeper the poison-seeds of that inclination to mutiny and that rebellious hatred against their chief already only planted too strongly in the squadrons under Chateauroy’s command.
Petit Picpon looked as crestfallen as one of his fraternity could; he knew well enough that what he had said could get him twenty blows of the stick, if his corporal chose to give him up to judgment; but he had too much of the Parisian in him still not to have his say, though he should be shot for it.
“Send me to Beylick, if you like, Corporal,” he said sturdily; “I was in wrath for you — not for myself.”
Cecil was infinitely more touched than he dared, for the sake of discipline, for sake of the speaker himself, to show; but his glance dwelt on Petit Picpon with a look that the quick, black, monkey-like eyes of the rebel were swift to read.
“I know,” he said gravely. “I do not misjudge you, but at the same time, my name must never serve as a pretext for insubordination. Such men as care to pleasure me will best do so in making my duty light by their own self-control and obedience to the rules of their service.”
He led his horse away, and Petit Picpon went on an errand he had been sent to do in the streets for one of the officers. Picpon was unusually thoughtful and sober in deportment for him, since he was usually given to making his progress along a road, taken unobserved by those in command over him, with hands and heels in the dexterous somersaults of his early days.
Now he went along without any unprofessional antics, biting the tip of a smoked-out cigar, which he had picked up off the pavement in sheer instinct, retained from the old times when he had used to rush in, the foremost of la queue, into the forsaken theaters of Bouffes or of Varietes in search for those odds and ends which the departed audience might have left behind them — one of the favorite modes of seeking a livelihood with the Parisian night-birds.
“Dame! I will give it up then,” resolved Picpon, half aloud, valorously.
Now Picpon had come forth on evil thoughts intent.
His officer — a careless and extravagant man, the richest man in the regiment — had given him a rather small velvet bag, sealed, with directions to take it to a certain notorious beauty of Algiers, whose handsome Moresco eyes smiled — or, at least, he believed so — exclusively for the time on the sender. Picpon was very quick, intelligent, and much liked by his superiors, so that he was often employed on errands; and the tricks he played in the execution thereof were so adroitly done that they were never detected. Picpon had chuckled to himself over this mission. It was but the work of an instant for the lithe, nimble fingers of the ex-gamin to undo the bag without touching the seal; to see that it contained a hundred Napoleons with a note; to slip the gold into the folds of his ceinturon; to fill up the sack with date-stones; to make it assume its original form so that none could have imagined it had been touched, and to proceed with it thus to the Moorish lionne’s dwelling. The negro who always opened her door would take it in; Picpon would hint to him to be careful, as it contained some rare and rich sweetmeats, negro nature, he well knew, would impel him to search for the bonbons; and the bag, under his clumsy treatment, would bear plain marks of having been tampered with, and, as the African had a most thievish reputation, he would never be believed if he swore himself guiltless. Voila! Here was a neat trick! If it had a drawback, it was that it was too simple, too little risque. A child might do it.
Still — a hundred Naps! What fat geese, what flagons of brandy, what dozens of wine, what rich soups, what tavern banquets they would bring! Picpon had chuckled again as he arranged the little bag so carefully, with its date-stones, and pictured the rage of the beautiful Moor when she should discover the contents and order the stick to her negro. Ah! that was what Picpon called fun!
To appreciate the full force of such fun, it is necessary to have also appreciated the gamin. To understand the legitimate aspect such a theft bore, it is necessar
y to have also understood the unrecordable codes that govern the genus pratique, into which the genus gamin, when at maturity, develops.
Picpon was quite in love with his joke; it was only a good joke in his sight; and, indeed, men need to live as hardly as an African soldier lives, to estimate the full temptation that gold can have when you have come to look on a cat as very good eating, and to have nothing to gnaw but a bit of old shoe-leather through the whole of the long hours of a burning day of fatigue-duty; and to estimate, as well, the full width and depth of the renunciation that made him mutter now so valorously, “Dame! I will give it up, then!”
Picpon did not know himself as he said it. Yet he turned down into a lonely, narrow lane, under marble walls, overtopped with fig and palm from some fine gardens; undid the bag for the second time; whisked out the date-stones and threw them over the wall, so that they should be out of his reach if he repented; put back the Napoleons, closed the little sack, ran as hard as he could scamper to his destination, delivered his charge into the fair lady’s own hands, and relieved his feelings by a score of somersaults along the pavement as fast as ever he could go.
“Ma cantche!” he thought, as he stood on his head, with his legs at an acute angle in the air, in position very favored by him for moments of reflection — he said his brain worked better upside down. “Ma cantche! What a weakness, what a weakness! What remorse to have yielded to it! Beneath you, Picpon — utterly beneath you. Just because that ci-devant says such follies please him in us!”
Picpon (then in his gamin stage) had been enrolled in the Chasseurs at the same time with the “ci-devant,” as they called Bertie, and, following his gamin nature, had exhausted all his resources of impudence, maliciousness, and power of tormenting, on the “aristocrat” — somewhat disappointed, however, that the utmost ingenuities of his insolence and even his malignity never succeeded in breaking the “aristocrat’s” silence and contemptuous forbearance from all reprisal. For the first two years the hell-on-earth — which life with a Franco-Arab regiment seemed to Cecil — was a hundredfold embittered by the brutalized jests and mosquito-like torments of this little odious chimpanzee of Paris.