by Ouida
“But this is folly — madness — —”
“No; it is neither. I have told you I should stand as a felon in the eyes of the English law; I should have no civil rights; the greatest mercy fate can show me is to let me remain forgotten here. It will not be long, most likely, before I am thrust into the African sand, to rot like that brave soul out yonder. Berkeley will be the lawful holder of the title then; leave him in peace and possession now.”
He spoke the words out to the end — calmly, and with unfaltering resolve. But she saw the great dews gather on his temples, where silver threads were just glistening among the bright richness of his hair and she heard the short, low, convulsive breathing with which his chest heaved as he spoke. She stood close beside him, and gazed once more full in his eyes, while the sweet, imperious cadence of her voice answered him:
“There is more than I know of here. Either you are the greatest madman, or the most generous man that ever lived. You choose to guard your own secret; I will not seek to persuade it from you. But tell me one thing — why do you thus abjure your rights, permit a false charge to rest on you, and consign yourself forever to this cruel agony?”
His lips shook under his beard as he answered her.
“Because I can do no less in honor. For God’s sake, do not you tempt me!”
“Forgive me,” she said, after a long pause. “I will never ask you that again.”
She could honor honor too well, and too well divine all that he suffered for its sake, ever to become his temptress in bidding him forsake it; yet, with a certain weariness, a certain dread, wholly unfamiliar to her, she realized that what he had chosen was the choice not of his present or of his future. It could have no concern for her, — save that long years ago he had been the best-loved friend of her best-loved relative, — whether or no he remained lost to all the world under the unknown name of a French Chasseur. And yet it smote her with a certain dull, unanalyzed pain; it gave her a certain emotion of powerlessness and of hopelessness to realize that he would remain all his years through, until an Arab’s shot should set him free, under this bondage of renunciation, beneath this yoke of service. She stood silent long, leaning against the oval of the casement, with the sun shed over the glowing cashmeres that swept round her. He stood apart in silence also. What could he say to her? His whole heart longed with an unutterable longing to tell her the truth, and bid her be his judge between him and his duty; but his promise hung on him like a leaden weight. He must remain speechless — and leave her, for doubt to assail her, and for scorn to follow it in her thoughts of him, if so they would.
Heavy as had been the curse to him of that one hour in which honor had forbade him to compromise a woman’s reputation, and old tenderness had forbade him to betray a brother’s sin, he had never paid so heavy a price for his act as that which he paid now.
Through the yellow sunlight without, over the barren, dust-strewn plains, in the distance there approached three riders, accompanied by a small escort of Spahis, with their crimson burnous floating in the autumnal wind. She started, and turned to him.
“It is Philip! He is coming for me from your camp to-day.”
His eyes strained through the sun-glare.
“Ah, God! I cannot meet him — I have not strength. You do not know — —”
“I know how well he loved you.”
“Not better than I him! But I cannot — I dare not. Unless I could meet him as we never shall meet upon earth, we must be apart forever. For Heaven’s sake promise me never to speak my name!”
“I promise until you release me.”
“And you can believe me innocent still, in face of all?”
She stretched her hands to him once more. “I believe. For I know what you once were.”
Great, burning tears fell from his eyes upon her hands as he bent over them.
“God bless you! You were an angel of pity to me in your childhood; in your womanhood you give me the only mercy I have known since the last day you looked upon my face! We shall be far sundered forever. May I come to you once more?”
She paused in hesitation and in thought a while, while for the first time in all her years a tremulous tenderness passed over her face; she felt an unutterable pity for this man and for his doom. Then she drew her hands gently away from him.
“Yes, I will see you again.”
So much concession to such a prayer Venetia Corona had never before given. He could not command his voice to answer, but he bowed low before her as before an empress — another moment, and she was alone.
She stood looking out at the wide, level country beyond, with the glare of the white, strong light and the red burnous of the Franco-Arabs glowing against the blue, but cloudless sky; she thought that she must be dreaming some fantastic story born of these desert solitudes.
Yet her eyes were dim with tears, and her heart ached with another’s woe. Doubt of him never came to her; but there was a vague, terrible pathos in the mystery of his fate that oppressed her with a weight of future evil, unknown, and unmeasured.
“Is he a madman?” she mused. “If not, he is a martyr; one of the greatest that ever suffered unknown to other men.”
In the coolness of the late evening, in the court of the caravanserai, her brother and his friends lounged with her and the two ladies of their touring and sketching party, while they drank their sherbet, and talked of the Gerome colors of the place, and watched the flame of the afterglow burn out, and threw millet to the doves and pigeons straying at their feet.
“My dear Venetia!” cried the Seraph, carelessly tossing handfuls of grain to the eager birds, “I inquired for your Sculptor-Chasseur — that fellow Victor — but I failed to see him, for he had been sent on an expedition shortly after I reached the camp. They tell me he is a fine soldier; but by what the Marquis said, I fear he is but a handsome blackguard, and Africa, after all, may be his fittest place.”
She gave a bend of her head to show she heard him, stroking the soft throat of a little dove that had settled on the bench beside her.
“There is a charming little creature there, a little fire-eater — Cigarette, they call her — who is in love with him, I fancy. Such a picturesque child! — swears like a trooper, too,” continued he who was now Duke of Lyonnesse. “By the way, is Berkeley gone?”
“Left yesterday.”
“What for? — where to?”
“I was not interested to inquire.”
“Ah! you never liked him! Odd enough to leave without reason or apology?”
“He had his reasons, doubtless.”
“And made his apology to you?”
“Oh, yes!”
Her brother looked at her earnestly; there was a care upon her face new to him.
“Are you well, my darling?” he asked her. “Has the sun been too hot, or la bise too cold for you?”
She rose, and gathered her cashmeres about her, and smiled somewhat wearily her adieu to him.
“Both, perhaps. I am tired. Good-night.”
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE GIFT OF THE CROSS.
One of the most brilliant of Algerian autumnal days shone over the great camp in the south. The war was almost at an end for a time; the Arabs were defeated and driven desertwards; hostilities irksome, harassing, and annoying, like all guerrilla warfare, would long continue; but peace was virtually established, and Zaraila had been the chief glory that had been added by the campaign to the flag of Imperial France. The kites and the vultures had left the bare bones by thousands to bleach upon the sands, and the hillocks of brown earth rose in crowds where those, more cared for in death, had been hastily thrust beneath the brown crust of the earth. The dead had received their portion of reward — in the jackal’s teeth, in the crow’s beak, in the worm’s caress. And the living received theirs in this glorious, rose-flecked, glittering autumn morning, when the breath of winter made the air crisp and cool, but the ardent noon still lighted with its furnace glow the hillside and the plain.
The whole of the Army of the South was drawn up on the immense level of the plateau to witness the presentation of the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
It was full noon. The sun shone without a single cloud on the deep, sparkling azure of the skies. The troops stretched east and west, north and south, formed up in three sides of one vast, massive square. The battalions of Zouaves and of Zephyrs; the brigade of Chasseurs d’Afrique; the squadrons of Spahis; the regiments of Tirailleurs and Turcos; the batteries of Flying Artillery, were all massed there, reassembled from the various camps and stations of the southern provinces to do honor to the day — to do honor in especial to one by whom the glory of the Tricolor had been saved unstained.
The red, white, and blue of the standards, the brass of the eagle guidons; the gray, tossed manes of the chargers; the fierce, swarthy faces of the soldiery; the scarlet of the Spahis’ cloaks, and the snowy folds of the Demi-Cavalry turbans; the shine of the sloped lances, and the glisten of the carbine barrels, fused together in one sea of blended color, flashed into a million prismatic hues against the somber shadow of the sunburned plains and the clear blue of the skies.
It had been a sanguinary, fruitless, cruel campaign; it had availed nothing, except to drive the Arabs away from some hundred leagues of useless and profitless soil; hundreds of French soldiers had fallen by disease, and drought, and dysentery, as well as by shot and saber, and were unrecorded save on the books of the bureaus; unlamented, save, perhaps, in some little nestling hamlet among the great, green woods of Normandy, or some wooden hut among the olives and the vines of Provence, where some woman, toiling till sunset among the fields, or praying before some wayside saint’s stone niche, would give a thought to the far-off and devouring desert that had drawn down beneath its sands the head that used to lie upon her bosom, cradled as a child’s, or caressed as a lover’s.
But the drums rolled out their long, deep thunder over the water; and the shot-torn standards fluttered gayly in the breeze blowing from the west; and the clear, full music of the French bands echoed away to the dim, distant, terrible south, where the desert-scorch and the desert-thirst had murdered their bravest and best — and the Army was en fete. En fete, for it did honor to its darling. Cigarette received the Cross.
Mounted on her own little, bright bay, Etoile-Filante, with tricolor ribbons flying from his bridle and among the glossy fringes of his mane, the Little One rode among her Spahis. A scarlet kepi was set on her thick, silken curls, a tricolor sash was knotted round her waist, her wine-barrel was slung on her left hip, her pistols thrust in her ceinturon, and a light carbine held in her hand with the butt-end resting on her foot. With the sun on her childlike brunette face, her eyes flashing like brown diamonds in the light, and her marvelous horsemanship showing its skill in a hundred daring tricks, the little Friend of the Flag had come hither among her half-savage warriors, whose red robes surrounded her like a sea of blood.
And on a sea of blood she, the Child of War, had floated; never sinking in that awful flood, but buoyant ever above its darkest waves; catching ever some ray of sunlight upon her fair young head, and being oftentimes like a star of hope to those over whom its dreaded waters closed. Therefore they loved her, these grim, slaughterous, and lustful warriors, to whom no other thing of womanhood was sacred; by whom in their wrath or their crime no friend and no brother was spared, whose law was license, and whose mercy was murder. They loved her, these brutes whose greed was like the tiger’s, whose hate was like the devouring flame; and any who should have harmed a single lock of her curling hair would have had the spears of the African Mussulmans buried by the score in his body. They loved her, with the one fond, triumphant love these vultures of the army ever knew; and to-day they gloried in her with fierce, passionate delight. To-day she was to her wild wolves of Africa what Jeanne of Vaucouleurs was to her brethren of France. And today was the crown of her young life.
In the fair, slight, girlish body of the child-soldier there lived a courage as daring as Danton’s, a patriotism as pure as Vergniaud’s, a soul as aspiring as Napoleon’s. Untaught, untutored, uninspired by poet’s words or patriot’s bidding, spontaneous as the rising and the blossoming of some wind-sown, sun-fed flower, there was, in this child of the battle, the spirit of genius, the desire to live and to die greatly. To be forever a beloved tradition in the army of her country, to have her name remembered in the roll-call; to be once shrined in the love and honor of France, Cigarette — full of the boundless joys of life that knew no weakness and no pain; strong as the young goat, happy as the young lamb, careless as the young flower tossing on the summer breeze — Cigarette would have died contentedly. And now, living, some measure of this desire had been fulfilled to her, some breath of this imperishable glory had passed over her. France had heard the story of Zaraila; from the Throne a message had been passed to her; what was far beyond all else to her, her own Army of Africa had crowned her, and thanked her, and adored her as with one voice, and wheresoever she passed the wild cheers rang through the roar of musketry, as through the silence of sunny air, and throughout the regiments every sword would have sprung from its scabbard in her defense if she had but lifted her hand and said one word— “Zaraila!”
The Army looked on her with delight now. In all that mute, still, immovable mass that stretched out so far, in such gorgeous array, there was not one man whose eyes did not turn on her, whose pride did not center in her — their Little One, who was so wholly theirs, and who had been under the shadow of their Flag ever since the curls, so dark now, had been yellow as wheat in her infancy. There was not one in all those hosts whose eyes did not turn on her with gratitude, and reverence, and delight in her as their own.
Not one; except where her own keen, rapid glance, far-seeing as the hawk’s, lighted on the squadrons of the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and found among their ranks one face, grave, weary, meditative, with a gaze that seemed looking far away from the glittering scene to a grave that lay unseen leagues beyond, behind the rocky ridge.
“He is thinking of the dead man, not of me,” thought Cigarette; and the first taint of bitterness entered into her cup of joy and triumph, as such bitterness enters into most cups that are drunk by human lips. A whole army was thinking of her, and of her alone; and there was a void in her heart, a thorn in her crown, because one among that mighty mass — one only — gave her presence little heed, but thought rather of a lonely tomb among the desolation of the plains.
But she had scarce time even for that flash of pain to quiver in impotent impatience through her. The trumpets sounded, the salvoes of artillery pealed out, the lances and the swords were carried up in salute; on the ground rode the Marshal of France, who represented the imperial will and presence, surrounded by his staff, by generals of division and brigade, by officers of rank, and by some few civilian riders. An aid galloped up to her where she stood with the corps of her Spahis and gave her his orders. The Little One nodded carelessly, and touched Etoile-Filante with the prick of the spur. Like lightning the animal bounded forth from the ranks, rearing and plunging, and swerving from side to side, while his rider, with exquisite grace and address, kept her seat like the little semi-Arab that she was, and with a thousand curves and bounds cantered down the line of the gathered troops, with the west wind blowing from the far-distant sea, and fanning her bright cheeks till they wore the soft, scarlet flush of the glowing japonica flower. And all down the ranks a low, hoarse, strange, longing murmur went — the buzz of the voices which, but that discipline suppressed them, would have broken out in worshiping acclamations.
As carelessly as though she reined up before the Cafe door of the As de Pique, she arrested her horse before the great Marshal who was the impersonation of authority, and put her hand up in salute, with her saucy, wayward laugh. He was the impersonation of that vast, silent, awful, irresponsible power which, under the name of the Second Empire, stretched its hand of iron across the sea, and forced the soldiers of France down into nameless graves, with the desert sa
nd choking their mouths; but he was no more to Cigarette than any drummer-boy that might be present. She had all the contempt for the laws of rank of your thorough inborn democrat, all the gay, insouciant indifference to station of the really free and untrammeled nature; and, in her sight, a dying soldier, lying quietly in a ditch to perish of shot-wounds without a word or a moan, was greater than all the Marshals glittering in their stars and orders. As for impressing her, or hoping to impress her, with rank — pooh! You might as well have bid the sailing clouds pause in their floating passage because they came between royalty and the sun. All the sovereigns of Europe would have awed Cigarette not one whit more than a gathering of muleteers. “Allied sovereigns — bah!” she would have said, “what did that mean in ‘15? A chorus of magpies chattering over one stricken eagle!”
So she reined up before the Marshal and his staff, and the few great personages whom Algeria could bring around them, as indifferently as she had many a time reined up before a knot of grim Turcos, smoking under a barrack-gate. He was nothing to her: it was her army that crowned her.
Nevertheless, despite her gay contempt for rank, her heart beat fast under its gold-laced packet as she reined up Etoile and saluted. In that hot, clear sun all the eyes of that immense host were fastened on her, and the hour of her longing desire was come at last. France had recognized that she had done greatly. There was a group before her, large and brilliant, but at them Cigarette never looked; what she saw were the faces of her “children,” of men who, in the majority, were old enough to be her grandsires, who had been with her through so many darksome hours, and whose black and rugged features lightened and grew tender whenever they looked upon their Little One. For the moment she felt giddy with sweet, fiery joy; they were here to behold her thanked in the name of France.
The Marshal, in advance of all his staff, doffed his plumed hat and bowed to his saddle-bow as he faced her. He knew her well by sight, this pretty child of his Army of Africa, who had, before then, suppressed mutiny like a veteran, and led the charge like a Murat — this kitten with a lion’s heart, this humming-bird with an eagle’s swoop.