by Ouida
The trampling of horses on the pavement below roused his attention. A thrill of hope went through him that his brother might have lingering conscience, latent love enough, to have made him refuse to obey the bidding to leave Africa. He rose and leaned out. Amid the little throng of riding-horses, grooms, and attendants who made an open way through the polyglot crowd of an Algerian caravanserai at noon, he saw the one dazzling face of which he had so lately dreamed by the water-freshet in the plains. It was but a moment’s glance, for she had already dismounted from her mare, and was passing within with two other ladies of her party; but in that one glance he knew her. His discovery of the chain gave him a plea to seek her. Should he avail himself of it? He hesitated a while. It would be safest, wisest, best, to deliver up the trinket to her courier, and pass on his way without another look at that beauty which could never be his, which could never lighten for him even with the smile that a woman may give her equal or her friend. She could never be aught to him save one more memory of pain, save one remembrance the more to embitter the career which not even hope would ever illumine. He knew that it was only madness to go into her presence, and feed, with the cadence of her voice, the gold light of her hair, the grace and graciousness of her every movement, the love which she would deem such intolerable insult, that, did he ever speak it, she would order her people to drive him from her like a chidden hound. He knew that; but he longed to indulge the madness, despite it; and he did so. He went down into the court below, and found her suite.
“Tell your mistress that I, Louis Victor, have some jewels which belong to her, and ask her permission to restore them to her hands,” he said to one of her equerries.
“Give them to me, if you have picked them up,” said the man, putting out his hand for them.
Cecil closed his own upon them.
“Go and do as I bid you.”
The equerry paused, doubtful whether or no to resist the tone and the words. A Frenchman’s respect for the military uniform prevailed. He went within.
In the best chamber of the caravanserai Venetia Corona was sitting, listless in the heat, when her attendant entered. The grandes dames who were her companions in their tour through the seat of war were gone to their siesta. She was alone, with a scarlet burnous thrown about her, and upon her all the languor and idleness common to the noontide, which was still very warm, though, in the autumn, the nights were so icily cold on the exposed level of the plains. She was lost in thought, moreover. She had heard, the day before, a story that had touched her — of a soldier who had been slain crossing the plains, and had been brought, through the hurricane and the sandstorm, at every risk, by his comrade, who had chosen to endure all peril and wretchedness rather than leave the dead body to the vultures and the kites. It was a nameless story to her — the story of two obscure troopers, who, for aught she knew, might have been two of the riotous and savage brigands that were common in the Army of Africa. But the loyalty and the love shown in it had moved her; and to the woman whose life had been cloudless and cradled in ease from her birth, there was that in the suffering and the sacrifice which the anecdote suggested, that had at once the fascination of the unknown, and the pathos of a life so far removed from her, so little dreamed of by her, that all its coarser cruelty was hidden, while only its unutterable sadness and courage remained before her sight.
Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, watched and read and understood it, she would have been too intensely revolted to have perceived the actual, latent nobility possible in such an existence. As it was she heard but of it in such words as alone could meet the ear of a great lady; she gazed at it only in pity from a far-distant height, and its terrible tragedy had solemnity and beauty for her.
When her servant approached her now with Cecil’s message she hesitated some few moments in surprise. She had not known that he was in her vicinity. The story she had heard had been simply of two unnamed Chasseurs d’Afrique, and he himself might have fallen on the field weeks before, for aught that she had heard of him. Some stray rumors of his defense of the encampment of Zaraila, and of the fine prowess shown in his last charge, alone had drifted to her. He was but a trooper; and he fought in Africa. The world had no concern with him, save the miniature world of his own regiment.
She hesitated some moments; then gave the required permission. “He has once been a gentleman; it would be cruel to wound him,” thought the imperial beauty, who would have refused a prince or neglected a duke with chill indifference, but who was too generous to risk the semblance of humiliation to the man who could never approach her save upon such sufferance as was in itself mortification to one whose pride survived his fallen fortunes.
Moreover, the interest he had succeeded in awakening in her, the mingling of pity and of respect that his words and his bearing had aroused, was not extinct; had, indeed, only been strengthened by the vague stories that had of late floated to her of the day of Zaraila; of the day of smoke and steel and carnage, of war in its grandest yet its most frightful shape, of the darkness of death which the courage of human souls had power to illumine as the rays of the sun the tempest-cloud. Something more like quickened and pleasured expectation than any one among her many lovers had ever had power to rouse, moved her as she heard of the presence of the man who, in that day, had saved the honor of his Flag. She came of a heroic race; she had heroic blood in her; and heroism, physical and moral, won her regard as no other quality could ever do. A man capable of daring greatly, and of suffering silently, was the only man who could ever hope to hold her thoughts.
The room was darkened from the piercing light without; and in its gloom, as he was ushered in, the scarlet of her cashmere and the gleam of her fair hair was all that, for the moment, he could see. He bowed very low that he might get his calmness back before he looked at her; and her voice in its lingering music came on his ear.
“You have found my chain, I think? I lost it in riding yesterday. I am greatly indebted to you for taking care of it.”
She felt that she could only thank, as she would have thanked an equal who should have done her this sort of slight service, the man who had brought to her the gold pieces with which his Colonel had insulted him.
“It is I, madame, who am the debtor of so happy an accident.”
His words were very low, and his voice shook a little over them; he was thinking not of the jeweled toy that he came here to restore, but of the inheritance that had passed away from him forever, and which, possessed, would have given him the title to seek what his own efforts could do to wake a look of tenderness in those proud eyes which men ever called so cold, but which he felt might still soften, and change, and grow dark with the thoughts and the passions of love, if the soul that gazed through them were but once stirred from its repose.
“Your chain is here, madame, though broken, I regret to see,” he continued, as he took the little box from his coat and handed it to her. She took it, and thanked him, without, for the moment, opening the enamel case as she motioned him to a seat at a little distance from her own.
“You have been in terrible scenes since I saw you last,” she continued. “The story of Zaraila reached us. Surely they cannot refuse you the reward of your service now?”
“It will make little difference, madame, whether they do or not.”
“Little difference! How is that?”
“To my own fate, I meant. Whether I be captain or a corporal cannot alter — —”
He paused; he dreaded lest the word should escape him which should reveal to her that which she would regard as such intolerable offense, such insolent indignity, when felt for her by a soldier in the grade he held.
“No? Yet such recognition is usually the ambition of every military life.”
A very weary smile passed over his face.
“I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a pair of epaulettes that will content it.”
She understood him; she comprehended the bitter mockery that the tawdry, meretri
cious rewards of regimental decoration seemed to the man who had waited to die at Zaraila as patiently and as grandly as the Old Guard at Waterloo.
“I understand! The rewards are pitifully disproportionate to the services in the army. Yet how magnificently you and your men, as I have been told, held your ground all through that fearful day!”
“We did our duty — nothing more.”
“Well! is not that the rarest thing among men?”
“Not among soldiers, madame.”
“Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is actuated by the finest and most impersonal sentiment that can actuate human beings!”
“I will not say that. Poor wretches! They are degraded enough, too often. But I believe that more or less in every good soldier, even when he is utterly unconscious of it, is an impersonal love for the honor of his Flag, an uncalculating instinct to do his best for the reputation of his corps. We are called human machines; we are so, since we move by no will of our own; but the lowest among us will at times be propelled by one single impulse — a desire to die greatly. It is all that is left to most of us to do.”
She looked at him with that old look which he had seen once or twice before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and wonder, all in one. He spoke to her as he had never spoken to any living being. The grave, quiet, listless impassiveness that still was habitual with him — relic of the old habits of his former life — was very rarely broken, for his real nature or his real thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far removed from him by position and by circumstance, and distant with him as a great lady could not but be with a soldier of whose antecedents and whose character she knew nothing, gave him sympathy, a sympathy that was sweet and rather felt than uttered; and it was like balm to a wound, like sweet melodies on a weary ear, to the man who had carried his secret so silently and so long, without one to know his burden or to soothe his pain.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of her face there passed a shadow. “There must be infinite nobility among these men, who live without hope — live only to die. That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own death rather than leave the body to the carrion-birds — you have heard of him? What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that poor fellow’s heart!”
“Oh, no! That was nothing.”
“Nothing! They have told me he came every inch of the way in danger of the Arabs’ shot and steel. He had suffered so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down insensible on his entrance here.”
“You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far greater than any act like that could ever repay.”
“You! Was it you?”
“Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold more of such nobility as you have praised than I.”
“Ah! Tell me of him,” she said simply; but he saw that the lustrous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in them that was more precious and more pitiful than a million utterances of regret could ever have been.
Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the grief of other lives. He obeyed her bidding now, and told her, in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos spoken there, where without, through the oval, unglazed casement in the distance, there was seen the tall, dark, leaning pine that overhung the grave of yesternight — the story over which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and which he could have related to no other save herself. It had an intense melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with the gray gloom of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden sunlight from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital. Her face grew paler as she heard, and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes; that death in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the grand simplicity of its unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke little of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman’s sympathies, how he who told her this thing had suffered by it — suffered far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in the grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats were at rest on the sod. When he ceased, there was a long silence; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory of the death that he had painted to her; and she was moved with that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half regret, with which the contemplation of calamities that have never touched, and that can never touch them, will move women far more callous, far more world-chilled than herself.
In the silence her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel bonbonniere, whose silver had lost all its bright enameling, and was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead. The lid came off at her touch as she musingly moved it round and round; the chain and the ring fell into her lap; the lid remained in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded in its center with a name in turquoise letters— “Venetia.”
She started as the word caught her eye and broke her reverie; the color came warmer into her cheek; she looked closer and closer at the box; then, with a rapid movement, turned her head and gazed at her companion.
“How did you obtain this?”
“The chain, madame? It had fallen in the water.”
“The chain! No! the box!”
He looked at her in surprise.
“It was given me very long ago.”
“And by whom?”
“By a young child, madame.”
Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened; the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had said only wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was quickened with a thousand shadows of thought.
“The box is mine! I gave it! And you?”
He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before her, breathless and mute.
“And you?” she repeated.
He was silent still, gazing at her. He knew her now — how had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, as never to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem of golden hair could belong alone but to the women of one race?
“And you?” she cried once more, while she stretched her hand out to him. “And you — you are Philip’s friend? you are Bertie Cecil?”
Silently he bowed his head; not even for his brother’s sake, or for the sake of his pledged word, could he have lied to her.
But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not take. The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched between them.
“Petite Reine!” he murmured. “Ah, God! how could I be so blind?”
She grew very pale as she sank back again upon the couch from which she had risen. It seemed to her as though a thousand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this man under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had kissed her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift. And now — they had met thus!
He said nothing. He stood paralyzed, gazing at her. There had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which he drank for his brother’s sake, yet this bitterness surpassed all other; it seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the belief that he was guilty. She in whom all fair and gracious things were met; she who was linked by her race to his past and his youth; she whose clear eyes in her childhood had looked upon him in that first hour of the agony that he had suffered then, and still suffered on, in the cause of a coward and an ingrate.
She was pale still; and her eyes were fixed on him with a gaze that recalled to him the look with which “Petite Reine” had promised that summer day to keep his secret, and tell none of that misery of which she had been witness.
“They thought that you were dead,” she said at length, while her voice sank very low. “Why have you lived like this?”
He made no answer.
“It was cruel to Philip,” she went on, while her voice still shook. “Child though I was, I remembe
r his passion of grief when the news came that you had lost your life. He has never forgotten you. So often now he will still speak of you! He is in your camp. We are traveling together. He will be here this evening. What delight it will give him to know his dearest friend is living! But why — why — have kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside?”
Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not tell; the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary moments.
“Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly! I knew that you were far higher than your grade in Africa; I felt that in all things, save in some accident of position, we were equals. But why have you condemned yourself to this misery? Your life is brave, is noble, but it must be a constant torture to such as you? I remember well what you were — so well, that I wonder we have never recognized each other before now. The existence you lead in Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of indolence.”
He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his head on his hands for some moments. He knew that he must leave this woman whom he loved, and who knew him now as one whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and welcomed by all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, mean, and fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had quitted her country. Great dews of intense pain gathered on his forehead; his whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted against this brand of a guilt not his own that was stamped on him; he could have cried out to her the truth in all the eloquence of a breaking heart.