Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  The first five-and-twenty miles passed without interruption, and the horses lay well and warmly to their work. They halted to rest and bait the beasts in a rocky hollow, sheltered from the blasts of the bise, and green with short, sweet grass, sprung up afresh after the summer drought.

  “Do you ever think of him, sir?” said Rake softly, with a lingering love in his voice, as he stroked the grays and tethered them.

  “Of whom?”

  “Of the King, sir. If he’s alive, he’s getting a rare old horse now.”

  “Think of him! I wish I did not, Rake.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see him agen, sir?”

  “What folly to ask! You know—”

  “Yes, sir, I know,” said Rake slowly. “And I know — leastways I picked it out of a old paper — that your elder brother died, sir, like the old lord, and Mr. Berk’s got the title.”

  Rake had longed and pined for an opportunity to dare say this thing which he had learned, and which he could not tell whether or no Cecil knew likewise. His eyes looked with straining eagerness through the gloom into his master’s; he was uncertain how his words would be taken. To his bitter disappointment, Cecil’s face showed no change, no wonder.

  “I have heard that,” he said calmly — as calmly as though the news had no bearing on his fortunes, but was some stranger’s history.

  “Well, sir, but he ain’t the lord!” pleaded Rake passionately. “He won’t never be while you’re living, sir!”

  “Oh, yes, he is! I am dead, you know.”

  “But he won’t, sir!” reiterated Rake. “You’re Lord Royallieu if ever there was a Lord Royallieu, and if ever there will be one.”

  “You mistake. An outlaw has no civil rights, and can claim none.”

  The man looked very wistfully at him; all these years through he had never learned why his master was thus “dead” in Africa, and he had too loyal a love and faith ever to ask, or ever to doubt but that Cecil was the wronged and not the wrong-doer.

  “You ain’t a outlaw, sir,” he muttered. “You could take the title, if you would.”

  “Oh, no! I left England under a criminal charge. I should have to disprove that before I could inherit.”

  Rake crushed bitter oaths into muttered words as he heard. “You could disprove it, sir, of course, right and away, if you chose.”

  “No; or I should not have come here. Let us leave the subject. It was settled long ago. My brother is Lord Royallieu. I would not disturb him, if I had the power, and I have not it. Look, the horses are taking well to their feed.”

  Rake asked him no more. He had never had a harsh word from Cecil in their lives; but he knew him too well, for all that, to venture to press on him a question thus firmly put aside. But his heart ached sorely for his master; he would so gladly have seen “the king among his own again,” and would have striven for the restoration as strenuously as ever a Cavalier strove for the White Rose; and he sat in silence, perplexed and ill satisfied, under the shelter of the rock, with the great, dim, desolate African landscape stretching before him, with here and there a gleam of light upon it when the wind swept the clouds apart. His volatile speech was chilled, and his buoyant spirits were checked. That Cecil was justly outlawed he would have thought it the foulest treason to believe for one instant; yet he felt that he might as soon seek to wrench up the great stones above him from their base as seek to change the resolution of this man, whom he had once known pliant as a reed and careless as a child.

  They were before long in saddle again and off, the country growing wilder at each stride the horses took.

  “It is all alive with Arabs for the next ten leagues,” said Cecil, as he settled himself in his saddle. “They have come northward and been sweeping the country like a locust-swarm, and we shall blunder on some of them sooner or later. If they cut me down, don’t wait; but slash my pouch loose and ride off with it.”

  “All right, sir,” said Rake obediently; but he thought to himself, “Leave you alone with them demons? Damn me if I will!”

  And away they went once more, in speed and in silence, the darkness of full night closing in on them, the skies being black with the heavy drift of rising storm-clouds.

  Meanwhile Cigarette was feasting with the officers of the regiment. The dinner was the best that the camp-scullions could furnish in honor of the two or three illustrious tourists who were on a visit to the headquarters of the Algerian Army; and the Little One, the heroine of Zaraila, and the toast of every mess throughout Algeria, was as indispensable as the champagnes.

  Not that she was altogether herself to-night; she was feverish, she was bitter, she was full of stinging ironies; but that delicious gayety, like a kitten’s play, was gone from her, and its place, for the first time in her life was supplied by unreal and hectic excitation. In truth, while she laughed, and coquetted, and fenced with the bright two-edged blade of her wit, and tossed down the wines into her little throat like a trooper, she was thinking nothing at all of what was around her, and very little of what she said or she did. She was thinking of the starless night out yonder, of the bleak, arid country, of the great, dim, measureless plains; of one who was passing through them all, and one who might never return.

  It was the first time that the absent had ever troubled her present; it was the first time that ever this foolish, senseless, haunting, unconquerable fear for another had approached her: fear — she had never known it for herself, why should she feel it now for him — a man whose lips had touched her own as lightly, as indifferently, as they might have touched the leaves of a rose or the curls of a dog!

  She felt her face burn with the flash of a keen, unbearable passionate shame. Men by the score had wooed her love, to be flouted with the insouciant mischief of her coquetry, and forgotten to-morrow if they were shot to-day; and now he — he whose careless, calm caress would make her heart vibrate and her limbs tremble with an emotion she had never known — he valued her love so little that he never even knew that he had roused it! To the proud young warrior of France a greater degradation, a deadlier humiliation, than this could not have come.

  Yet she was true as steel to him; true with the strong and loyal fealty that is inborn with such natures as hers. To have betrayed what he had trusted to her, because she was neglected and wounded by him, would have been a feminine baseness of which the soldier-like soul of Cigarette would have been totally incapable. Her revenge might be fierce, and rapid, and sure, like the revenge of a soldier; but it could never be stealing and traitorous, and never like the revenge of a woman.

  Not a word escaped her that could have given a clew to the secret with which he had involuntarily weighted her; she only studied with interest and keenness the face and the words of this man whom he had loved, and from whom he had fled as criminals flee from their accusers.

  “What is your name?” she asked him curtly, in one of the pauses of the amorous and witty nonsense that circulated in the tent in which the officers of Chasseurs were entertaining him.

  “Well — some call me Seraph.”

  “Ah! you have petite names, then, in Albion? I should have though she was too somber and too stiff for them. Besides?”

  “Lyonnesse.”

  “What a droll name! What are you?”

  “A soldier.”

  “Good! What grade?”

  “A Colonel of Guards.”

  Cigarette gave a little whistle to herself; she remembered that a Marshal of France had once said of a certain Chasseur, “He has the seat of the English Guards.”

  “My pretty catechist, M. le Duc does not tell you his title,” cried one of the officers.

  Cigarette interrupted him with a toss of her head.

  “Ouf! Titles are nothing to me. I am a child of the People. So you are a Duke, are you, M. le Seraph? Well, that is not much, to my thinking. Bah! there is Fialin made a Duke in Paris, and there are aristocrats here wearing privates’ uniforms, and littering down their own horses. Bah! Have you that sort of thing
in Albion?”

  “Attorneys throned on high, and gentlemen glad to sweep crossings? Oh, yes!” laughed her interlocutor. “But you speak of aristocrats in your ranks — that reminds me. Have you not in this corps a soldier called Louis Victor?”

  He had turned as he spoke to one of the officers, who answered him in the affirmative; while Cigarette listened with all her curiosity and all her interest, that needed a deeper name, heightened and tight-strung.

  “A fine fellow,” continued the Chef d’Escadron to whom he had appealed. “He behaved magnificently the other day at Zaraila; he must be distinguished for it. He is just sent on a perilous errand, but though so quiet he is a croc-mitaine, and woe to the Arabs who slay him! Are you acquainted with him?”

  “Not in the least. But I wished to hear all I could of him. I have been told he seems above his present position. Is it so?”

  “Likely enough, monsieur; he seems a gentleman. But then we have many gentlemen in the ranks, and we can make no difference for that. Cigarette can tell you more of him; she used to complain that he bowed like a Court chamberlain.”

  “Oh, ha! — I did!” cried Cigarette, stung into instant irony because pained and irritated by being appealed to on the subject. “And of course, when so many of his officers have the manners of Pyrenean bears, it is a little awkward for him to bring us the manner of a Palace!”

  Which effectually chastised the Chef d’Escadron, who was one of those who had a ton of the roughest manners, and piqued himself on his powers of fence much more than on his habits of delicacy.

  “Has this Victor any history?” asked the English Duke.

  “He has written one with his sword; a fine one,” said Cigarette curtly. “We are not given here to care much about any other.”

  “Quite right; I asked because a friend of mine who had seen his carvings wished to serve him, if it were possible; and—”

  “Ho! That is Milady, is suppose!” Cigarette’s eyes flashed fire instantly, in wrath and suspicion. “What did she tell you about him?”

  “I am ignorant of whom you speak?” he answered, with something of surprise and annoyance.

  “Are you?” said Cigarette, in derision. “I doubt that. Of whom should I speak but of her? Bah? She insulted him, she offered him gold, she sent my men the spoils of her table, as if they were paupers, and he thinks it all divine because it is done by Mme. la Princesse Corona d’Amague! Bah! when he was delirious, the other night, he could babble of nothing but of her — of her — of her!”

  The jealous, fiery impatience in her vanquished every other thought; she was a child in much, she was untutored in all; she had no thought that by the scornful vituperation of “Milady” she could either harm Cecil or betray herself. But she was amazed to see the English guest change color with a haughty anger that he strove to subdue as he half rose and answered her with an accent in his voice that reminded her — she knew not why — of Bel-a-faire-peur and of Marquise.

  “Mme. la Princess Corona d’Amague is my sister; why do you venture to couple the name of this Chasseur with hers?”

  Cigarette sprang to her feet, vivacious, imperious, reckless, dared to anything by the mere fact of being publicly arraigned.

  “Pardieu! Is it insult to couple the silver pheasant with the Eagles of France? — a pretty idea, truly! So she is your sister, is she? Milady? Well, then, tell her from me to think twice before she outrages a soldier with ‘patronage’; and tell her, too, that had I been he I would have ground my ivory toys into powder before I would have let them become the playthings of a grande dame who tendered me gold for them!”

  The Englishman looked at her with astonishment that was mingled with a vivid sense of intense annoyance and irritated pride, that the name he cherished closest should be thus brought in, at a camp dinner, on the lips of a vivandiere and in connection with a trooper of Chasseurs.

  “I do not understand your indignation, mademoiselle,” he said, with an impatient stroke to his beard. “There is no occasion for it. Mme. Corona d’Amague, my sister,” he continued, to the officers present, “became accidentally acquainted with the skill at sculpture of this Corporal of yours; he appeared to her a man of much refinement and good breeding. She chanced to name him to me, and feeling some pity—”

  “M. le Duc!” cried the ringing voice of Cigarette, loud and startling as a bugle-note, while she stood like a little lioness, flushed with the draughts of champagne and with the warmth of wrath at once jealous and generous, “keep your compassion until it is asked of you. No soldier of France needs it; that I promise you. I know this man that you talk of ‘pitying.’ Well, I saw him at Zaraila three weeks ago; he had drawn up his men to die with them rather than surrender and yield up the guidon; I dragged him half dead, when the field was won, from under his horse, and his first conscious act was to give the drink that I brought him to a wretch who had thieved from him. Our life here is hell upon earth to such as he, yet none ever heard a lament wrung out of him; he is gone to the chances of death to-night as most men go to their mistresses’ kisses; he is a soldier Napoleon would have honored. Such a one is not to have the patronage of a Milady Corona, nor the pity of a stranger of England. Let the first respect him; let the last imitate him!”

  And Cigarette, having pronounced her defense and her eulogy with the vibrating eloquence of some orator from a tribune, threw her champagne goblet down with a crash, and, breaking through the arms outstretched to detain her, forced her way out despite them, and left her hosts alone in their lighted tent.

  “C’est Cigarette!” said the Chef d’Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities.

  “A strange little Amazon!” said their guest. “Is she in love with this Victor, that I have offended her so much with his name?”

  The Major shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t know that, monsieur,” answered one. “She will defend a man in his absence, and rate him to his face most soundly. Cigarette whirls about like a little paper windmill, just as the breeze blows; but, as the windmill never leaves its stick, so she is always constant to the Tricolor.”

  Their guest said little more on the subject; in his own thoughts he was bitterly resentful that, by the mention of this Chasseur’s fortunes, he should have brought in the name he loved so well — the purest, fairest, haughtiest name in Europe — into a discussion with a vivandiere at a camp dinner.

  Chateauroy, throughout, had said nothing; he had listened in silence, the darkness lowering still more heavily upon his swarthy features; only now he opened his lips for a few brief words:

  “Mon cher Duc, tell Madame not to waste the rare balm of her pity. The fellow you inquire for was an outcast and an outlaw when he came to us. He fights well — it is often a blackguard’s virtue!”

  His guest nodded and changed the subject; his impatience and aversion at the introduction of his sister’s name into the discussion made him drop the theme unpursued, and let it die out forgotten.

  Venetia Corona associated with an Algerian trooper! If Cigarette had been of his own sex he could have dashed the white teeth down her throat for having spoken of the two in one breath.

  And as, later on, he stretched his gallant limbs out on his narrow camp pallet, tired with a long day in saddle under the hot African sun, the Seraph fell asleep with his right arm under his handsome golden head, and thought no more of this unknown French trooper.

  But Cigarette remained wakeful.

  She lay curled up in the straw against her pet horse, Etoile Filante, with her head on the beast’s glossy flank and her hand among his mane. She often slept thus in camp, and the horse would lie still and cramped for hours rather than awaken her, or, if he rose, would take the most watchful heed to leave unharmed the slender limbs, the flushed cheeks, the frank, fair brow of the sleeper beneath him, that one stroke of his hoof could have stamped out into a bruised and shapeless mass.

  To-night Etoile Fi
lante slept, and his mistress was awake — wide-awake, with her eyes looking out into the darkness beyond, with a passionate mist of unshed tears in them, and her mouth quivering with pain and with wrath. The vehement excitation had not died away in her, but there had come with it a dull, spiritless, aching depression. It had roused her to fury to hear the reference to her rival spoken — of that aristocrat whose name had been on Cecil’s lips when he had been delirious. She had kept his secret loyally, she had defended him vehemently; there was something that touched her to the core in the thought of the love with which he had recognized this friend who, in ignorance, spoke of him as of some unknown French soldier. She could not tell what the history was, but she could divine nearly enough to feel its pathos and its pain. She had known, in her short life, more of men and of their passions and of their fortunes than many lives of half a century in length can ever do; she could guess, nearly enough to be wounded with its sorrow, the past which had exiled the man who had kept by him his lost mother’s ring as the sole relic of years to which he was dead so utterly as though he were lying in his coffin. No matter what the precise reason was — women, or debt, or accident, or ruin — these two, who had been familiar comrades, were now as strangers to each other; the one slumbered in ignorance near her, the other had gone out to the close peril of death, lest the eyes of his friend recognize his face and read his secret. It troubled her, it weighed on her, it smote her with a pang. It might be that now, even now — this very moment, while her gaze watched the dusky shadows of the night chase one another along the dreary plains — a shot might have struck down this life that had been stripped of name and fame and country; even now all might be over!

  And Cigarette felt a cold, sickly shudder seize her that never before, at death or danger, had chilled the warm, swift current of her bright French blood. In bitter scorn at herself, she muttered hot oaths between her pretty teeth.