by Ouida
“He is the head of my house!” he answered her, scarce knowing what he answered. “He should bear the title that I bear now. He is here, in this misery, because he is the most merciful, the most generous, the most long-suffering of living souls! If he dies, it is not they who have killed him; it is I!”
She listened, with her face set in that stern, fixed, resolute command which never varied; she neglected all that wonder, or curiosity, or interest would have made her as at any other time, she only heeded the few great facts that bore upon the fate of the condemned.
“Settle with yourself for that sin,” she said bitterly. “Your remorse will not save him. But do the thing that I bid you, if that remorse be sincere. Write me out here that title you say he should bear, and your statement that he is your brother, and should be the chief of your house; then sign it, and give it to me.”
He seized her hands, and gazed with imploring eyes into her face.
“Who are you? What are you? If you have the power to do it, for the love of God rescue him! It is I who have murdered him — I — who have let him live on in this hell for my sake!”
“For your sake!”
She flung his hands off her and looked him full in the face; that glance of the speechless scorn, the unutterable rebuke of the woman-child who would herself have died a thousand deaths rather than have purchased a whole existence by a single falsehood or a single cowardice, smote him like a blow, and avenged his sin more absolutely than any public chastisement. The courage and the truth of a girl scorned his timorous fear and his living lie. His head sank, he seemed to shrink under her gaze; his act had never looked so vile to him as it looked now.
She gazed a moment longer at him with her mute and wondering disdain that there should be on earth a male life capable of such fear and of such ignominy as this. Then the strong and rapid power in her took its instant ascendancy over the weaker nature.
“Monsieur, I do not know your story, I do not want. I am not used to men who let others suffer for them. What I want is your written statement of your brother’s name and station; give it me.”
He made a gesture of consent; he would have signed away his soul, if he could, in the stupor of remorse which had seized him. She brought him pens and paper from the Turk’s store, and dictated what he wrote:
“I hereby affirm that the person serving in the Chasseurs d’Afrique under the name of Louis Victor is my older brother, Bertie Cecil, lawfully, by inheritance, the Viscount Royallieu, Peer of England. I hereby also acknowledge that I have succeeded to and borne the title illegally, under the supposition of his death.
“BERKELEY CECIL.” (Signed)
He wrote it mechanically; the force of her will and the torture of his own conscience driving him, on an impulse, to undo in an instant the whole web of falsehood that he had let circumstance weave on and on to shelter him through twelve long years. He let her draw the paper from him and fold it away in her belt. He watched her with a curious, dreamy sense of his own impotence against the fierce and fiery torrent of her bidding.
“What is it you will do?” he asked her.
“The best that shall lie in my power. Do you the same.”
“Can his life yet be saved?”
“His honor may — his honor shall.”
Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke though it was stern and rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over it. She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would choose the vindication of his honor before the rescue of his life. He laid his hand on her as she moved.
“Stay! — stay! One word — —”
She flung him off her again.
“This is no time for words. Go to him — coward! — and let the balls that kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of manhood left in you!”
Then, swiftly as a swallow darts, she quitted him and flew on her headlong way, down through the pressure of the people, and the throngs of the marts, and the noise, and the color, and the movement of the streets.
The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode out of the city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as the antelope and as wild, with her only equipment some pistols in her holsters, and a bag of rice and a skin of water slung at her saddle-bow.
They asked her where she went; she never answered. The hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers. Her comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright, brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.
“What is it with the Cigarette?” they asked each other. None could tell; the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies. The gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon’s on it were the last they ever saw of Cigarette.
All her fluent, untiring speech was gone — gone with the rose hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child’s joyance from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a soldier’s courage, with a martyr’s patience.
And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant’s hands in fearless glee to the mane of roughriders’ chargers. She never swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot currents of the cleft air with only one sense — that she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few moments of a charmed life fled away!
She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal — no more — betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the evening of the day to the dawn of the second day following; and some slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She could not tell how long he had to live.
There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader’s horse had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of D’Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do. Once only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in her eyes — the worst hunger — that which craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.
She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise; nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched, monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage, the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination; the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the waters to Circe.
The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank, faint an
d quivering, to the ground. Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress of inspection throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand questions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with the other.
“Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief.”
She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those who heard. She was not the Child of the Army whom they knew so well. She was a creature, desperate, hard-pressed, mute as death, strong as steel; above all, hunted by despair.
They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding. The one whom she sought was great and supreme here as a king; they dreaded to approach his staff, to ask his audience.
Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her Cross and held it out to an adjutant standing beneath the gates.
“Take that to the man who gave it me. Tell him Cigarette waits; and with each moment that she waits a soldier’s life is lost. Go!”
The adjutant took it, and went. Over and over again she had brought intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a contemplated razzia, warning of an internal revolt, or tidings of an encounter on the plains, that had been of priceless value to the army which she served. It was not lightly that Cigarette’s words were ever received when she spoke as she spoke now; nor was it impossible that she now brought to them that which would brook neither delay nor trifling.
She waited patiently; all the iron discipline of military life had never bound her gay and lawless spirit down; but now she was singularly still and mute. Only there gleamed thirstily in her eyes that fearful avarice which begrudges every moment in its flight as never the miser grudged his hoarded gold into the robber’s grasp.
A few minutes and the decoration was brought back to her, and her demand granted. She was summoned to the Marshal’s presence. It was the ordnance room, a long, vast, silent chamber filled with stands of arms, with all the arts and appliances of war brought to their uttermost perfection, and massed in all the resource of a great empire against the sons of the desert, who had nothing to oppose to them save the despair of a perishing nationality and a stifled freedom.
The Marshal, leaning against a brass field-piece, turned to her with a smile in his keen, stern eyes.
“You, my young one! What brings you here?”
She came up to him with her rapid leopard-like grace, and he started as he saw the change upon her features. She was covered with sand and dust, and with the animal’s blood-flecked foam. The beating of her heart from the fury of the gallop had drained every hue from her face; her voice was scarcely articulate in its breathless haste as she saluted him.
“Monsieur, I have come from Algiers since noon—”
“From Algiers!” He and his officers echoed the name of the city in incredulous amaze; they knew how far from them down along the sea-line the white town lay.
“Since noon, to rescue a life — the life of a great soldier, of a guiltless man. He who saved the honor of France at Zaraila is to die the death of a mutineer at dawn!”
“What! — your Chasseur!”
A dusky, scarlet fire burned through the pallor of her face; but her eyes never quailed, and the torrent of her eloquence returned under the pangs of shame that were beaten back under the noble instincts of her love.
“Mine! — since he is a soldier of France; yours, too, by that title. I am come here, from Algiers, to speak the truth in his name, and to save him for his own honor and the honor of my Empire. See here! At noon, I have this paper, sent by a swift pigeon. Read it! You see how he is to die, and why. Well, by my Cross, by my Flag, by my France, I swear that not a hair of his head shall be touched, and not a drop of blood in his veins shall be shed!”
He looked at her, astonished at the grandeur and the courage which could come on this child of razzias and revelries, and give to her all the splendor of a fearless command of some young empress. But his face darkened and set sternly as he read the paper; it was the greatest crime in the sight of a proud soldier, this crime against discipline, of the man for whom she pleaded.
“You speak madly,” he said, with cold brevity. “The offense merits the chastisement. I shall not attempt to interfere.”
“Wait! You will hear, at least, Monsieur?”
“I will hear you — yes, but I tell you, once for all, I never change sentences that are pronounced by councils of war; and this crime is the last for which you should attempt to plead for mercy with me.”
“Hear me, at least!” she cried, with passionate ferocity — the ferocity of a dumb animal wounded by a shot. “You do not know what this man is — how he has had to endure; I do. I have watched him; I have seen the brutal tyranny of his chief, who hated him because the soldiers loved him. I have seen his patience, his obedience, his long-suffering beneath insults that would have driven any other to revolt and murder. I have seen him — I have told you how — at Zaraila, thinking never of death or life, only of our Flag, that he has made his own, and under which he has been forced to lead the life of a galley slave—”
“The finer soldier he be, the less pardonable his offense.”
“That I deny! If he were a dolt, a brute, a thing of wood as many are, he would have no right to vengeance; as it is, he is a gentleman, a hero, a martyr; may he not forget for one hour that he is a slave? Look you! I have seen him so tried that I told him — I, who love my army better than any living thing under the sun — that I would forgive him if he forgot duty and dealt with his tyrant as man to man. And he always held his soul in patience. Why? Not because he feared death — he desired it; but because he loved his comrades, and suffered in peace and in silence lest, through him, they should be led into evil — —”
His eyes softened as he heard her; but the inflexibility of his voice never altered.
“It is useless to argue with me,” he said briefly; “I never change a sentence.”
“But I say that you shall!” As the audacious words were flung forth, she looked him full in the eyes, while her voice rang with its old imperious oratory. “You are a great chief; you are as a monarch here; you hold the gifts and the grandeur of the Empire; but, because of that — because you are as France in my eyes — I swear, by the name of France, that you shall see justice done to him; after death, if you cannot in life. Do you know who he is — this man whom his comrades will shoot down at sunrise as they shoot down the murderer and the ravisher in their crimes?”
“He is a rebellious soldier; it is sufficient.”
“He is not! He is a man who vindicated a woman’s honor; he is a man who suffers in a brother’s place; he is an aristocrat exiled to a martyrdom; he is a hero who has never been greater than he will be great in his last hour. Read that! What you refuse to justice, and mercy, and courage, and guiltlessness, you will grant, maybe, to your Order.”
She forced into his hand the written statement of Cecil’s name and station. All the hot blood was back in her cheek, all the fiery passion back in her eyes. She lashed this potent ruler with the scourge of her scorn as she had lashed a drunken horde of plunderers with her whip. She was reckless of what she said; she was conscious only of one thing — the despair that consumed her.
The French Marshal glanced his eye on the fragment, carelessly and coldly. As he saw the words, he started, and read on with wondering eagerness.
“Royallieu!” he muttered— “Royallieu!”
The name was familiar to him; he it was who, when he had murmured, “That man has the seat of the English Guards,” as a Chasseur d’Afrique had passed him, had been ignorant that in that Chasseur he saw one whom he had known in many a scene of court splendor and Parisian pleasure. The years had been many since Cecil and he had met, but not so many but that the name brought memories of friendship with it, and moved him with a strange emotion.
He turned with grave anxiety to Cigarette.
“You speak strangely. How came this in your hands?”
“Thus: the day that you gave me the Cross, I saw Mme. la Princesse Corona. I hated her, and I went — no matter! From her I learned that he whom we call Louis Victor was of her rank, was of old friendship with her house, was exiled and nameless, but for some reason unknown to her. She needed to see him; to bid him farewell, so she said. I took the message for her; I sent him to her.” Her voice grew husky and savage, but she forced her words on with the reckless sacrifice of self that moved her. “He went to her tent, alone, at night; that was, of course, whence he came when Chateauroy met him. I doubt not the Black Hawk had some foul thing to hint of his visit, and that blow was struck for her — for her! Well; in the streets of Algiers I saw a man with a face like his own, different, but the same race, look you. I spoke to him; I taxed him. When he found that the one whom I spoke of was under sentence of death, he grew mad; he cried out that he was his brother and had murdered him — that it was for his sake that the cruelty of this exile had been borne — that, if his brother perished, he would be his destroyer. Then I bade him write down that paper, since these English names were unknown to me, and I brought it hither to you that you might see, under his hand and with your own eyes, that I have uttered the truth. And now, is that man to be killed like a mad beast whom you fear? Is that death the reward France will give for Zaraila?”
Her eyes were fixed with a fearful intensity of appeal upon the stern face bent over her; her last arrow was sped; if this failed, all was over. As he heard, he was visibly moved; he remembered the felon’s shame that in years gone by had fallen across the banished name of Bertie Cecil; the history seemed clear as crystal to him, seen beneath the light shed on it from other days.
His hand fell heavily on the gun-carriage.
“Mort de Dieu! it was his brother’s sin, not his!”
There was a long silence; those present, who knew nothing of all that was in his memory, felt instinctively that some dead weight of alien guilt was lifted off a blameless life forever.