by Ouida
Thus, he never heard the gallant words spoken in his behalf by the loyal lips that he had not cared to caress. As she passed down the ranks, indeed, he saw and smiled on his little champion; but the smile had only a weary kindness of recognition in it and it wounded Cigarette more than though he had struck her through the breast with his lance.
The moment that he had dreaded came; the troops broke up and marched past the representative of their empire, the cavalry at the head of the divisions. He passed among the rest; he raised his lance so that it hid his features as much as its slender shaft could do; the fair and noble face on which his glance flashed was very pale and very grave; the one beside her was sunny and frank, and unchanged by the years that had drifted by, and its azure eyes, so like her own, sweeping over the masses with all the swift, keen appreciation of a military glance, were so eagerly noting carriage, accouterment, harness, horses, that they never once fell upon the single soldier whose heart so unutterably longed for, even while it dreaded, his recognition.
Venetia gave a low, quick breath of mingled pain and relief as the last of the Chasseurs passed by. The Seraph started, and turned his head.
“My darling! Are you not well?”
“Perfectly!”
“You do not look so; and you forgot now to point me out this special trooper. I forgot him too.”
“He goes there — the tenth from here.”
Her brother looked; it was too late.
“He is taller than the others. That is all I can see now that his back is turned. I will seek him out when—”
“Do no such thing!”
“And why? It was your own request that I inquired—”
“Think me changeable as you will. Do nothing to seek him, to inquire for him—”
“But why? A man who at Zaraila—”
“Never mind! Do not let it be said you notice a Chasseur d’Afrique at my instance.”
The color flushed her face as she spoke; it was with the scorn, the hatred, of this shadow of an untruth with which she for the sole time in life soiled her lips. He, noting it, shook himself restlessly in his saddle. If he had not known her to be the noblest and the haughtiest of all the imperial women who had crowned his house with their beauty and their honor, he could have believed that some interest, degrading as disgrace, moved her toward this foreign trooper, and caused her altered wishes and her silence. As it was, so much insult to her as would have existed in the mere thought was impossible to him; yet it left him annoyed and vaguely disquieted.
The subject did not wholly fade from his mind throughout the entertainments that succeeded to the military inspection in the great white tent glistening with gilded bees and brightened with tricolor standards which the ingenuity of the soldiers of the administration had reared as though by magic amid the barrenness of the country, and in which the skill of camp cooks served up a delicate banquet. The scene was very picturesque, and all the more so for the widespread, changing panorama without the canvas city of the camp. It was chiefly designed to pleasure the great lady who had come so far southward; all the resources which could be employed were exhausted to make the occasion memorable and worthy of the dignity of the guests whom the Viceroy of the Empire delighted to honor. Yet she, seated there on his right hand, where the rich skins and cashmeres and carpets were strewn on a dais, saw in reality little save a confused blending of hues, and metals, and orders, and weapons, and snowy beards, and olive faces, and French elegance and glitter fused with the grave majesty of Arab pomp. For her thoughts were not with the scene around her, but with the soldier who was without in that teeming crowd of tents, who lived in poverty, and danger, and the hard slavery of unquestioning obedience, and asked only to be as one dead to all who had known and loved him in his youth. It was in vain that she repelled the memory; it usurped her, and would not be displaced.
Meantime, in another part of the camp, the heroine of Zaraila was feasted, not less distinctively, if more noisily and more familiarly, by the younger officers of the various regiments. La Cigarette, many a time before the reigning spirit of suppers and carouses, was banqueted with all the eclat that befitted that cross which sparkled on her blue and scarlet vest. High throned on a pyramid of knapsacks, canteens, and rugs, toasted a thousand times in all brandies and red wines that the stores would yield, sung of in improvised odes that were chanted by voices which might have won European fame as tenor or as basso, caressed and sued with all the rapid, fiery, lightly-come and lightly-go love of the camp, with twice a hundred flashing, darkling eyes bent on her in the hot admiration that her vain, coquette spirit found delight in, ruling as she would with jest, and caprice, and command, and bravado all these men who were terrible as tigers to their foes, the Little One reigned alone; and — like many who have reigned before her — found lead in her scepter, dross in her diadem, satiety in her kingdom.
When it was over, this banquet that was all in her honor, and that three months before would have been a paradise to her, she shook herself free of the scores of arms outstretched to keep her captive, and went out into the night alone. She did not know what she ailed, but she was restless, oppressed, weighed down with a sense of dissatisfied weariness that had never before touched the joyous and elastic nature of the child of France.
And this, too, in the moment when the very sweetest and loftiest of her ambitions was attained! When her hand wandered to that decoration on her heart which had been ever in her sight what the crown of wild olive and the wreath of summer grasses were to the youths and to the victors of the old, dead classic years! As she stood in solitude under the brilliancy of the stars, tears, unfamiliar and unbidden, rose in her eyes as they gazed over the hosts around her.
“How they live only for the slaughter! How they perish like the beasts of the field!” she thought. Upon her, as on the poet or the patriot who could translate and could utter the thought as she could not, there weighed the burden of that heart-sick consciousness of the vanity of the highest hope, the futility of the noblest effort, to bring light into the darkness of the suffering, toiling, blind throngs of human life.
“There is only one thing worth doing — to die greatly!” thought the aching heart of the child-soldier, unconsciously returning to the only end that the genius and the greatness of Greece could find as issue to the terrible jest, the mysterious despair, of all existence.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE DESERT HAWK AND THE PARADISE-BIRD.
Some way distant, parted by a broad strip of unoccupied ground from the camp, were the grand marquees set aside for the Marshal and for his guests. They were twelve in number, gayly decorated — as far as decoration could be obtained in the southern provinces of Algeria — and had, Arab-like, in front of each the standard of the Tricolor. Before one were two other standards also: the flags of England and of Spain. Cigarette, looking on from afar, saw the alien colors wave in the torchlight flickering on them. “That is hers,” thought the Little One, with the mournful and noble emotions of the previous moments swiftly changing into the violent, reasonless, tumultuous hatred at once of a rival and of an Order.
Cigarette was a thorough democrat; when she was two years old she had sat on the topmost pile of a Parisian barricade, with the red bonnet on her curls, and had clapped her tiny hands for delight when the bullets flew, and the “Marseillaise” rose above the cannonading; and the spirit of the musketry and of the “Marseillaise” had together passed into her and made her what she was. She was a genuine democrat; and nothing short of the pure isonomy of the Greeks was tolerated in her political philosophy, though she could not have told what such a word had meant for her life. She had all the furious prejudices and all the instinctive truths in her of an uncompromising Rouge; and the sight alone of those lofty standards, signalizing the place of rest of the “aristocrats,” while her “children’s” lowly tents wore in her sight all the dignity and all the distinction of the true field, would have aroused her ire at any time. But now a hate tenfold keener moved her; she
had a jealousy of the one in whose honor those two foreign ensigns floated, that was the most bitter thing which had ever entered her short and sunny life — a hate the hotter because tinged with that sickening sense of self-humiliation, because mingled with that wondering emotion at beholding something so utterly unlike to all that she had known or dreamed.
She had it in her, could she have had the power, to mercilessly and brutally destroy this woman’s beauty, which was so far above her reach, as she had once destroyed the ivory wreath; yet, as that of the snow-white carving had done, so did this fair and regal beauty touch her, even in the midst of her fury, with a certain reverent awe, with a certain dim sense of something her own life had missed. She had trodden the ivory in pieces with all the violence of childish, savage, uncalculating hate, and she had been chidden, as by a rebuking voice, by the wreck which her action had made at her feet; so could she now, had it been possible, have ruined and annihilated the loveliness that filled his heart and his soul; but so would she also, the moment her instinct to avenge herself had been sated, have felt the remorse and the shame of having struck down a delicate and gracious thing that even in its destruction had a glory that was above her.
Even her very hate attracted her to the sight, to the study, to the presence of this woman, who was as dissimilar to all of womanhood that had ever crossed her path, in camp and barrack, as the pure, white gleaming lily of the hothouse is unlike the wind-tossed, sand-stained, yellow leaf down-trodden in the mud. An irresistible fascination drew her toward the self-same pain which had so wounded her a few hours before — an impulse more intense than curiosity, and more vital than caprice, urged her to the vicinity of the only human being who had ever awakened in her the pang of humiliation, the throbs of envy.
And she went to that vicinity, now that the daylight had just changed to evening, and the ruddy torch-glare was glowing everywhere from great pine boughs thrust in the ground, with their resinous branches steeped in oil and flaring alight. There was not a man that night in camp who would have dared oppose the steps of the young heroine of the Cross wherever they might choose, in their fantastic flight, to wander. The sentinels passing up and down the great space before the marquees challenged her, indeed, but she was quick to give the answering password, and they let her go by them, their eyes turning after the little picturesque form that every soldier of the Corps of Africa loved almost like the flag beneath which he fought. Once in the magic circle, she paused a while; the desire that urged her on, and the hate that impelled her backward, keeping her rooted there in the dusky shadow which the flapping standards threw.
To creep covertly into her rival’s presence, to hide herself like a spy to see what she wished, to show fear, or hesitation, or deference, were not in the least what she contemplated. What she intended was to confront this fair, strange, cold, cruel thing, and see if she were of flesh and blood like other living beings, and do the best that could be done to outrage, to scourge, to challenge, to deride her with all the insolent artillery of camp ribaldry, and show her how a child of the people could laugh at her rank, and affront her purity, and scorn her power. Definite idea there was none to her; she had come on impulse. But a vague longing in some way to break down that proud serenity which galled her so sharply, and bring hot blood of shame into that delicate face, and cast indignity on that imperious and unassailable pride, consumed her.
She longed to do as some girl of whom she had once been told by an old Invalide had done in the ‘89 — a girl of the people, a fisher-girl of the Cannebiere, who had loved one above her rank, a noble who deserted her for a woman of his own Order, a beautiful, soft-skinned, lily-like, scornful aristocrat, with the silver ring of merciless laughter and the languid luster of sweet, contemptuous eyes. The Marseillaise bore her wrong in silence — she was a daughter of the south and of the populace, with a dark, brooding, burning beauty, strong and fierce, and braced with the salt lashing of the sea and with the keen breath of the stormy mistral. She held her peace while the great lady was wooed and won, while the marriage joys came with the purple vintage time, while the people were made drunk at the bridal of their chatelaine in those hot, ruddy, luscious autumn days.
She held her peace; and the Terror came, and the streets of the city by the sea ran blood, and the scorch of the sun blazed, every noon, on the scaffold. Then she had her vengeance. She stood and saw the ax fall down on the proud, snow-white neck that never had bent till it bent there, and she drew the severed head into her own bronzed hands and smote the lips his lips had kissed, — a cruel blow that blurred their beauty out, — and twined a fish-hook in the long and glistening hair, and drew it, laughing as she went, through dust, and mire, and gore, and over the rough stones of the town, and through the shouting crowds of the multitudes, and tossed it out on to the sea, laughing still as the waves flung it out from billow to billow, and the fish sucked it down to make their feast. She stood and laughed by the side of the gray, angry water, watching the tresses of the floating hair sink downward like a heap of sea-tossed weed.
That horrible story came to the memory of Cigarette now as it had been told her by the old soldier who, in his boyhood, had seen the entry of the Marseillais to Paris. She knew what the woman of the people had felt when she had bruised and mocked and thrown out to the devouring waters that fair and fallen head.
“I could do it — I could do it,” she thought, with the savage instinct of her many-sided nature dominant, leaving uppermost only its ferocity — the same ferocity as had moved the southern woman to wreak her hatred on the senseless head of her rival. The school in which the child-soldier had been reared had been one to foster all those barbaric impulses; to leave in their inborn, uncontrolled force all those native desires which the human shares with the animal nature. There had been no more to teach her that these were criminal or forbidden than there is to teach the young tigress that it is cruel to tear the antelope for food. What Cigarette was, that nature had made her; she was no more trained to self-control, or to the knowledge of good, than is the tiger’s cub as it wantons in its play under the great, broad tropic leaves.
Now, she acted on her impulse; her impulse of open scorn of rank, of reckless vindication of her right to do just whatsoever pleasured her; and she went boldly forward and dashed aside, with no gentle hand, the folds that hung before the entrance of the tent, and stood there with the gleam of the starry night and the glow of the torches behind her, so that her picturesque and brightly colored form looked painted on a dusky, lurid background of shadow and of flame.
The action startled the occupants of the tent, and made them both look up; they were Venetia Corona and a Levantine woman, who was her favorite and most devoted attendant, and had been about her from her birth. The tent was the first of three set aside for her occupancy, and had been adorned with as much luxury as was procurable, and with many of the rich and curious things of Algerian art and workmanship, so far as they could be hastily collected by the skill and quickness of the French intendance. Cigarette stood silently looking at the scene on which she had thus broken without leave or question; she saw nothing of it except one head lifted in surprise at her entrance — just such a head, just so proudly carried, just so crowned with gleaming hair as that which the Marseillaise had dragged through the dust of the streets and cast out into the lust of the sharks. Venetia hesitated a moment in astonished wonder; then, with the grace and the courtesy of her race, rose and approached the entrance of her tent, in which that fierce — half a soldier, half a child — was standing, with the fitful, reddened light behind. She recognized whose it was.
“Is it you, ma petite?” she said kindly. “Come within. Do not be afraid — —”
She spoke with the gentle consideration of a great lady to one whom she admired for her heroism, compassionated for her position, and thought naturally in need of such encouragement. She had liked the frank, fearless, ardent brunette face of the Little Friend of the Flag; she had liked her fiery and indomitable defense of the soldie
r of Zaraila; she felt an interest in her as deep as her pity, and she was above the scruples which many women of her rank might have had as to the fitness of entering into conversation with this child of the army. She was gentle to her as to a young bird, a young kitten, a young colt; what her brother had said of the vivandiere’s love for one whom the girl only knew as a trooper of Chasseurs filled with an indefinable compassion the woman who knew him as her own equal and of her own Order.
Cigarette, for once, answered nothing; her eyes very lowering, burning, savage.
“You wish to see me?” Venetia asked once more. “Come nearer. Have no fear—”
The one word unloosed the spell which had kept Cigarette speechless; the one word was an insult beyond endurance, that lashed all the worst spirit in her into flame.
“Fear!” she cried, with a camp oath, whose blasphemy was happily unintelligible to her listener. “Fear! You think I fear you! — the darling of the army, who saved the squadron at Zaraila, who has seen a thousand days of bloodshed, who has killed as many men with her own hand as any Lascar among them all — fear you, you hothouse flower, you paradise-bird, you silver pheasant, who never did aught but spread your dainty colors in the sun, and never earned so much as the right to eat a pierce of black bread, if you had your deserts! Fear you — I! Why! do you not know that I could kill you where you stand as easily as I could wring the neck of any one of those gold-winged orioles that flew above your head to-day, and who have more right to live than you, for they do at least labor in their own fashion for their food, and their drink, and their dwelling? Dieu de Dieu! Why, I have killed Arabs, I tell you — great, gaunt, grim men — and made them bite the dust under my fire. Do you think I would check for a moment at dealing you death, you beautiful, useless, honeyed, poisoned, painted exotic, that has every wind tempered to you, and thinks the world only made to bear the fall of your foot!”