by Ouida
“I have saved his life twice,” she thought, looking at him; “beware of the third time, they say!”
He moved restlessly, and she went to him. His face was flushed now; his breath came rapidly and shortly; there was some fever on him. The linen was displaced from his wounds; she dipped it again in water, and laid the cooled bands on them. “Ah, bah! If I were not unsexed enough for this, how would it be with you now?” she said in her teeth. He tossed wearily to and fro; detached words caught her ear as he muttered them.
“Let it be, let it be — he is welcome! How could I prove it at his cost? I saved him — I could do that. It was not much — —”
She listened with intent anxiety to hear the other whispers ending the sentence, but they were stifled and broken.
“Tiens!” she murmured below her breath. “It is for some other he has ruined himself.”
She could not catch the words that followed. They were in an unknown language to her, for she knew nothing of English, and they poured fast and obscure from his lips as he moved in feverish unrest; the wine that had saved him from exhaustion inflaming his brain in his sleep. Now and then French phrases crossed the English ones; she leaned down to seize their meaning till her cheek was against his forehead, till her lips touched his hair; and at that half caress her heart beat, her face flushed, her mouth trembled with a too vivid joy, with an impulse, half fear and half longing, that had never so moved her before.
“If I had my birthright,” he muttered in her own tongue. “If I had it — would she look so cold then? She might love me — women used once. O God! if she had not looked on me, I had never known all I had lost!”
Cigarette started as if a knife had stabbed her, and sprang up from her rest beside him.
“She — she — always she!” she muttered fiercely, while her face grew duskily scarlet in the fire-glow of the tent; and she went slowly away, back to the low wood fire.
This was to be ever her reward!
Her eyes glistened and flashed with the fiery, vengeful passions of her hot and jealous instincts. Cigarette had in her the violence, as she had the nobility, of a grand nature that has gone wholly untutored and unguided; and she had the power of southern vengeance in her, though she had also the swift temper. It was bitter, beyond any other bitterness that could have wounded her, for the spoilt, victorious, imperious, little empress of the Army of Algeria to feel that, though she had given his life twice back to the man, she was less to him than the tiny white dog that nestled in his breast; that she, who never before had endured a slight, or known what neglect could mean, gave care, and pity, and aid, and even tenderness, to one whose only thought was for a woman who had accorded him nothing but a few chill syllables of haughty condescension!
He lay there unconscious of her presence, tossing wearily to and fro in fevered, unrefreshing sleep, murmuring incoherent words of French and English strangely mingled; and Cigarette crouched on the ground, with the firelight playing all over her picturesque, childlike beauty, and her large eyes strained and savage, yet with a strange, wistful pain in them; looking out at the moonlight where the headless body lay in a cold, gray sea of shadow.
Yet she did not leave him.
She was too generous for that. “What is right is right. He is a soldier of France,” she muttered, while she kept her vigil. She felt no want of sleep; a hard, hateful wakefulness seemed to have banished all rest from her; she stayed there all the night so, with the touch of water on his forehead, or of cooled wine to his lips, by the alteration of the linen on his wounds, or the shifting of the rough forage that made his bed. But she did it without anything of that loving, lingering attendance she had given before; she never once drew out the task longer than it needed, or let her hands wander among his hair, or over his lips, as she had done before.
And he never once was conscious of it; he never once knew that she was near. He did not waken from the painful, delirious, stupefied slumber that had fallen on him; he only vaguely felt that he was suffering pain; he only vaguely dreamed of what he murmured of — his past, and the beauty of the woman who had brought all the memories of that past back on him.
And this was Cigarette’s reward — to hear him mutter wearily of the proud eyes and of the lost smile of another!
The dawn came at last; her constant care and the skill with which she had cooled and dressed his wounds had done him infinite service; the fever had subsided, and toward morning his incoherent words ceased, his breathing grew calmer and more tranquil; he fell asleep — sleep that was profound, dreamless, and refreshing.
She looked at him with a tempestuous shadow darkening her face, that was soft with a tenderness that she could not banish. She hated him; she ought to have stabbed or shot him rather than have tended him thus; he neglected her, and only thought of that woman of his old Order. As a daughter of the People, as a child of the Army, as a soldier of France, she ought to have killed him rather than have caressed his hair and soothed his pain! Pshaw! She ground one in another her tiny white teeth, that were like a spaniel’s.
Then gently, very gently, lest she should waken him, she took her tunic skirt with which she had covered him from the chills of the night, put more broken wood on the fading fire, and with a last, lingering look at him where he slept, passed out from the tent as the sun rose in a flushed and beautiful dawn. He would never know that she had saved him thus: he never should know it, she vowed in her heart.
Cigarette was very haughty in her own wayward, careless fashion. At a word of love from him, at a kiss from his lips, at a prayer from his voice, she would have given herself to him in all the abandonment of a first passion, and have gloried in being known as his mistress. But she would have perished by a thousand deaths rather than have sought him through his pity or through his gratitude; rather than have accepted the compassion of a heart that gave its warmth to another; rather than have ever let him learn that he was any more to her than all their other countless comrades who filled up the hosts of Africa.
“He will never know,” she said to herself, as she passed through the disordered camp, and in a distant quarter coiled herself among the hay of a forage-wagon, and covered up in dry grass, like a bird in a nest, let her tired limbs lie and her aching eyes close in repose. She was very tired; and every now and then, as she slept, a quick, sobbing breath shook her as she slumbered, like a worn-out fawn who has been wounded while it played.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LEATHERN ZACKRIST.
With the reveille and the break of morning Cigarette woke, herself again; she gave a little petulant shake to her fairy form when she thought of what folly she had been guilty. “Ah, bah! you deserve to be shot,” she said to herself afresh. “One would think you were a Silver Pheasant — you grow such a little fool!”
Love was all very well, so Cigarette’s philosophy had always reckoned; a chocolate bonbon, a firework, a bagatelle, a draught of champagne, to flavor an idle moment. “Vin et Venus” she had always been accustomed to see worshiped together, as became their alliterative; it was a bit of fun — that was all. A passion that had pain in it had never touched the Little One; she had disdained it with the lightest, airiest contumely. “If your sweetmeat has a bitter almond in it, eat the sugar and throw the almond away, you goose! That is simple enough, isn’t it? Bah? I don’t pity the people who eat the bitter almond; not I!” she had said once, when arguing with an officer on the absurdity of a melancholy love that possessed him, and whose sadness she rallied most unmercifully. Now, for once in her young life, the Child of France found that it was remotely possible to meet with almonds so bitter that the taste will remain and taint all things, do what philosophy may to throw its acridity aside.
With the reveille she awoke, herself again, though she had not had more than an hour’s slumber, it is true, with a dull ache at her heart that was very new and bitterly unwelcome to her, but with the buoyant vivacity and the proud carelessness of her nature in arms against it, and with that gayety of childhood
inherent to her repelling, and very nearly successfully, the foreign depression that weighted on it.
Her first thought was to take care that he should never learn what she had done for him. The Princesse Corona would not have been more utterly disdained to solicit regard through making a claim upon gratitude than the fiery little warrior of France would have done. She went straight to the Tringlo who had known her at her mission of mercy.
“Georges, mon brave,” said the Little One, with that accent of authority which was as haughty as any General’s, “do you know how that Chasseur is that we brought in last night?”
“Not heard, ma belle,” said the cheery little Tringlo, who was hard pressed; for there was much to be done, and he was very busy.
“What is to be done with the wounded?”
Georges lifted his eyebrows.
“Ma belle! There are very few. There are hundreds of dead. The few there are we shall take with an escort of Spahis to headquarters.”
“Good. I will go with you. Have a heed, Georges, never to whisper that I had anything to do with saving that man I called to you about.”
“And why, my Little One?”
“Because I desire it!” said Cigarette, with her most imperious emphasis. “They say he is English, and a ruined Milord, pardieu! Now, I would not have an Englishman think I thought his six feet of carcass worth saving, for a ransom.”
The Tringlo chuckled; he was an Anglophobist. In the Chinese expedition his share of “loot” had been robbed from him by a trick of which two English soldiers had been the concocters, and a vehement animosity against the whole British race had been the fruit of it in him.
“Non, non, non!” he answered her heartily. “I understand. Thou art very bright, Cigarette. If we have ever obliged an Englishman, he thinks his obligation to us opens him a neat little door through which to cheat us. It is very dangerous to oblige the English; they always hate you for it. That is their way. They may have virtues; they may,” he added dubiously, but with an impressive air of strictest impartiality, “but among them is not written gratitude. Ask that man, Rac, how they treat their soldiers!” and M. Georges hurried away to this mules and his duties; thinking with loving regret of the delicious Chinese plunder of which the dogs of Albion had deprived him.
“He is safe!” thought Cigarette; of the patrol who had seen her, she was not afraid — he had never noticed with whom she was when he had put his head into the scullion’s tent; and she made her way toward the place where she had left him, to see how it went with this man who she as so careful should never know that which he had owed to her.
It went well with him, thanks to her; care, and strengthening nourishment, and the skill of her tendance had warded off all danger from his wound. The bruise and pressure from the weight of the horse had been more ominous, and he could not raise himself or even breathe without severe pain; but his fever had left him, and he had just been lifted into a mule-drawn ambulance-wagon as Cigarette reached the spot.
“How goes the day, M. Victor? So you got sharp scratches, I hear? Ah! that was a splendid thing we had yesterday! When did you go down? We charged together!” she cried gayly to him; then her voice dropped suddenly, with an indescribable sweetness and change of tone. “So! — you suffer still?” she asked softly.
Coming close up to where he lay on the straw, she saw the exhausted languor of his regard, the heavy darkness under his eyelids, the effort with which his lips moved as the faint words came broken through them.
“Not very much, ma belle, I thank you. I shall be fit for harness in a day or two. Do not let them send me into hospital. I shall be perfectly — well — soon.”
Cigarette swayed herself upon the wheel and leaned toward him, touching and changing his bandages with clever hands.
“They have dressed your wound ill; whose doing is that?”
“It is nothing. I have been half cut to pieces before now; this is a mere bagatelle. It is only—”
“That it hurts you to breathe? I know! Have they given you anything to eat this morning?”
“No. Everything is in confusion. We — —”
She did not stay for the conclusion of his sentence; she had darted off, quick as a swallow. She knew what she had left in her dead scullion’s tent. Everything was in confusion, as he had said. Of the few hundreds that had been left after the terrific onslaught of the past day, some were employed far out, thrusting their own dead into the soil; others were removing the tents and all the equipage of the camp; others were busied with the wounded, of whom the greatest sufferers were to be borne to the nearest hospital (that nearest many leagues away over the wild and barren country); while those who were likely to be again soon ready for service were to be escorted to the headquarters of the main army. Among the latter Cecil had passionately entreated to be numbered; his prayer was granted to the man who had kept at the head of his Chasseurs and borne aloft the Tricolor through the whole of the war-tempest on which the dawn had risen, and which had barely lulled and sunk by the setting of the sun. Chateauroy was away with the other five of his squadrons; and the Zouave chef-de-bataillon, the only officer of any rank who had come alive through the conflict, had himself visited Bertie, and given him warm words of eulogy, and even of gratitude, that had soldierly sincerity and cordiality in them.
“Your conduct was magnificent,” he had said, as he had turned away. “It shall be my care that it is duly reported and rewarded.”
Cigarette was but a few seconds absent; she soon bounded back like the swift little chamois she was, bringing with her a huge bowlful of red wine with bread broken in it.
“This is the best I could get,” she said; “it is better than nothing. It will strengthen you.”
“What have you had yourself, petite?”
“Ah, bah! Leave off thinking for others; I have breakfasted long ago,” she answered him. (She had only eaten a biscuit well-nigh as hard as a flint.) “Take it — here, I will hold it for you.”
She perched herself on the wheel like a bird on a twig; she had a bird’s power of alighting and sustaining herself on the most difficult and most airy elevation; but Cecil turned his eyes on the only soldier in the cart besides himself, one of the worst men in his regiment — a murderous, sullen, black-browed, evil wretch, fitter for the bench of the convict-galley than for the ranks of the cavalry.
“Give half to Zackrist,” he said. “I know no hunger; and he has more need of it.”
“Zackrist! That is the man who stole your lance and accouterments, and got you into trouble by taking them to pawn in your name, a year or more ago.”
“Well, what of that? He is not the less hungry.”
“What of that? Why, you were going to be turned into the First Battalion,[*] disgraced for the affair, because you would not tell of him; if Vireflau had not found out the right of the matter in time!”
[*] The Battalion of the criminal outcasts of all corps,
whether horse or foot.
“What has that to do with it?”
“This, M. Victor, that you are a fool.”
“I dare say I am. But that does not make Zackrist less hungry.”
He took the bowl from her hands and, emptying a little of it into the wooden bidon that hung to her belt, kept that for himself and, stretching his arm across the straw, gave the bowl to Zackrist, who had watched it with the longing, ravenous eyes of a starving wolf, and seized it with rabid avidity.
A smile passed over Cecil’s face, amused despite the pain he suffered.
“That is one of my ‘sensational tricks,’ as M. de Chateauroy calls them. Poor Zackrist! Did you see his eyes?”
“A jackal’s eyes, yes!” said Cigarette, who, between her admiration for the action and her impatience at the waste of her good bread and wine, hardly knew whether to applaud or to deride him. “What recompense do you think you will get? He will steal your things again, first chance.”
“May be. I don’t think he will. But he is very hungry, all the same;
that is about the only question just now,” he answered her as he drank and ate his portion, with a need of it that could willingly have made him take thrice as much, though for the sake of Zackrist, he had denied his want of it.
Zackrist himself, who could hear perfectly what was said, uttered no word; but when he had finished the contents of the bowl, lay looking at his corporal with an odd gleam in the dark, sullen savage depths of his hollow eyes. He was not going to say a word of thanks; no! none had ever heard a grateful or a decent word from him in his life; he was proud of that. He was the most foul-mouthed brute in the army, and, like Snake in the School for Scandal, thought a good action would have ruined his character forever. Nevertheless, there came into his cunning and ferocious eyes a glisten of the same light which had been in the little gamin’s when, first by the bivouac fire, he had murmured, “Picpon s’en souviendra.”
“When anybody stole from me,” muttered Cigarette, “I shot him.”
“You would have fed him, had he been starving. Do not belie yourself, Cigarette; you are too generous ever to be vindictive.”
“Pooh! Revenge is one’s right.”
“I doubt that. We are none of us good enough to claim it, at any rate.”
Cigarette shrugged her shoulders in silence; then, posing herself on the wheel, she sprang from thence on to the back of her little mare, which she had brought up; having the reins in one of her hands and the wine-bowl in the other, and was fresh and bright after the night’s repose.
“I will ride with you, with my Spahis,” she said, as a young queen might have promised protection for her escort. He thanked her, and sank back among the straw, exhausted and worn out with pain and with languor; the weight that seemed to oppress his chest was almost as hard to bear as when the actual pressure of his dead charger’s body had been on him.
Yet, as he had said, it was but a bagatelle, beside the all but mortal wounds, the agonizing neuralgia, the prostrating fever, the torture of bullet-torn nerves, and the scorching fire of inflamed sword-wounds that had in their turn been borne by him in his twelve years of African service — things which, to men who have never suffered them, sound like the romanced horrors of an exaggerated imagination; yet things which are daily and quietly borne, by such soldiers of the Algerian Army, as the natural accompaniments of a military life — borne, too, in brave, simple, unconscious heroism by men who know well that the only reward for it will be their own self-contentment at having been true to the traditions of their regiment.