by Ouida
But the brave words could not console those who had killed the Child of the Tricolor; they flung their carbines away, they beat their breasts, they cursed themselves and the mother who had borne them; the silent, rigid, motionless phalanx that had stood there in the dawn to see death dealt in the inexorable penalty of the law was broken up into a tumultuous, breathless, heart-stricken, infuriated throng, maddened with remorse, convulsed with sorrow, turning wild eyes of hate on him as on the cause through which their darling had been stricken. He, laying her down with unspeakable gentleness as she had bidden him, hung over her, leaning her head against his arm, and watching in paralyzed horror the helplessness of the quivering limbs, the slow flowing of the blood beneath the Cross that shone where that young heroic heart so soon would beat no more.
“Oh, my child, my child!” he moaned, as the full might and meaning of this devotion which had saved him at such cost rushed on him. “What am I worth that you should perish for me? Better a thousand times have left me to my fate! Such nobility, such sacrifice, such love!”
The hot color flushed her face once more; she was strong to the last to conceal that passion for which she was still content to perish in her youth.
“Chut! We are comrades, and you are a brave man. I would do the same for any of my Spahis. Look you, I never heard of your arrest till I heard, too, of your sentence — —”
She paused a moment, and her features grew white and quivered with pain and with the oppression that seemed to lie like lead upon her chest. But she forced herself to be stronger than the anguish which assailed her strength; and she motioned them all to be silent as she spoke on while her voice still should serve her.
“They will tell you how I did it — I have not time. The Marshal gave his word you shall be saved; there is no fear. That is your friend who bends over me here? — is it not? A fair face, a brave face! You will go back to your land — you will live among your own people — and she, she will love you now — now she knows you are of her Order!”
Something of the old thrill of jealous dread and hate quivered through the words, but the purer nobler nature vanquished it; she smiled up in his eyes, heedless of the tumult round them.
“You will be happy. That is well. Look you — it is nothing that I did. I would have done it for any one of my soldiers. And for this” — she touched the blood flowing from her side with the old, bright, brave smile— “it was an accident; they must not grieve for it. My men are good to me; they will feel much regret and remorse; but do not let them. I am glad to die.”
The words were unwavering and heroic; but for one moment a convulsion went over her face; the young life was so strong in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. She loved life; the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation of death were horrible to her as the blackness and the solitude of night to a young child. Death, like night, can be welcome only to the weary, and she was weary of nothing on the earth that bore her buoyant steps; the suns, the winds, the delights of the sights, the joys of the senses, the music of her own laughter, the mere pleasure of the air upon her cheeks, or of the blue sky above her head, were all so sweet to her. Her welcome of her death-shot was the only untruth that had ever soiled her fearless lips. Death was terrible; yet she was content — content to have come to it for his sake.
There was a ghastly, stricken silence round her. The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than the martyrdom of her death.
The color was fast passing from her lips, and a mortal pallor settling there in the stead of that rich, bright hue, once warm as the scarlet heart of the pomegranate. Her head leaned back on Cecil’s breast and she felt the great burning tears fall, one by one, upon her brow as he hung speechless over her; she put her hand upward and touched his eyes softly.
“Chut! What is it to die — just to die? You have lived your martyrdom; I could not have done that. Listen, just one moment. You will be rich. Take care of the old man — he will not trouble long — and of Vole-qui-veut and Etoile, and Boule Blanche, and the rat, and all the dogs, will you? They will show you the Chateau de Cigarette in Algiers. I should not like to think that they would starve.”
She felt his lips move with the promise he could not find voice to utter; and she thanked him with that old child-like smile that had lost nothing of its light.
“That is good; they will be happy with you. And see here — that Arab must have back his white horse; he alone saved you. Have heed that they spare him. And make my grave somewhere where my army passes; where I can hear the trumpets, and the arms, and the passage of the troops — O God! I forgot! I shall not wake when the bugles sound. It will all end now; will it not? That is horrible, horrible!”
A shudder shook her as, for the moment, the full sense that all her glowing, redundant, sunlit, passionate life was crushed out forever from its place upon the earth forced itself on and overwhelmed her. But she was of too brave a mold to suffer any foe — even the foe that conquers kings — to have power to appall her. She raised herself, and looked at the soldiery around her, among them the men whose carbines had killed her, whose anguish was like the heart-rending anguish of women.
“Mes Francais! That was a foolish word of mine. How many of my bravest have fallen in death; and shall I be afraid of what they welcomed? Do not grieve like that. You could not help it; you were doing your duty. If the shots had not come to me, they would have gone to him; and he has been unhappy so long, and borne wrong so patiently, he has earned the right to live and enjoy. Now I — I have been happy all my days, like a bird, like a kitten, like a foal, just from being young and taking no thought. I should have had to suffer if I had lived. It is much best as it is — —”
Her voice failed her when she had spoken the heroic words; loss of blood was fast draining all strength from her, and she quivered in a torture she could not wholly conceal. He for whom she perished hung over her in an agony greater far than hers. It seemed a hideous dream to him that this child lay dying in his stead.
“Can nothing save her?” he cried aloud. “O God! that you had fired one moment sooner!”
She heard; and looked up at him with a look in which all the passionate, hopeless, imperishable love she had resisted and concealed so long spoke with an intensity she never dreamed.
“She is content,” she whispered softly. “You did not understand her rightly; that was all.”
“All! O God, how I have wronged you!”
The full strength, and nobility, and devotion of this passion he had disbelieved in and neglected rushed on him as he met her eyes; for the first time he saw her as she was; for the first time he saw all of which the splendid heroism of this untrained nature would have been capable under a different fate. And it struck him suddenly, heavily, as with a blow; it filled him with a passion of remorse.
“My darling! my darling! what have I done to be worthy of such love?” he murmured while the tears fell from his blinded eyes, and his head drooped until his lips met hers. At the first utterance of that word between them, at the unconscious tenderness of his kisses that had the anguish of a farewell in them, the color suddenly flushed all over her blanched face; she trembled in his arms; and a great, shivering sigh ran through her. It came too late, this warmth of love. She learned what its sweetness might have been only when her lips grew numb, and her eyes sightless, and her heart without pulse, and her senses without consciousness.
“Hush!” she answered, with a look that pierced his soul. “Keep those kisses for Milady. She will have the right to love you; she is of your ‘aristocrats,’ she is not ‘unsexed.’ As for me — I am only a little trooper who has saved my comrade! My soldiers, come round me one instant; I shall not long find words.”
Her eyes closed as she spoke; a deadly faintness and coldness passed over her; and she gasped for breath. A moment, and the resolute courage in her co
nquered; her eyes opened and rested on the war-worn faces of her “children” — rested in a long, last look of unspeakable wistfulness and tenderness.
“I cannot speak as I would,” she said at length, while her voice grew very faint. “But I have loved you. All is said!”
All was uttered in those four brief words. “She had loved them.” The whole story of her young life was told in the single phrase. And the gaunt, battle-scarred, murderous, ruthless veterans of Africa who heard her could have turned their weapons against their own breasts, and sheathed them there, rather than have looked on to see their darling die.
“I have been too quick in anger sometimes — forgive it,” she said gently. “And do not fight and curse among yourselves; it is bad amid brethren. Bury my Cross with me, if they will let you; and let the colors be over my grave, if you can. Think of me when you go into battle; and tell them in France — —”
For the first time her eyes filled with great tears as the name of her beloved land paused upon her lips. She stretched her arms out with a gesture of infinite longing, like a lost child that vainly seeks its mother.
“If I could only see France once more! France — —”
It was the last word upon her utterance; her eyes met Cecil’s in one fleeting, upward glance of unutterable tenderness, then, with her hands still stretched out westward to where her country was, and with the dauntless heroism of her smile upon her face like light, she gave a tired sigh as of a child that sinks to sleep, and in the midst of her Army of Africa the Little One lay dead.
In the shadow of his tent, at midnight he whom she had rescued stood looking down at a bowed, stricken form before him with an exceeding, yearning pity in his gaze.
The words had at length been spoken that had lifted from him the burden of another’s guilt; the hour at last had come in which his eyes had met the eyes of his friend, without a hidden thought between them. The sacrifice was ended, the martyrdom was over; henceforth this doom of exile and of wretchedness would be but as a hideous dream; henceforth his name would be stainless among men, and the desire of his heart would be given him. And in this hour of release the strongest feeling in him was the sadness of an infinite compassion; and where his brother was stretched prostrate in shame before him, Cecil stooped and raised him tenderly.
“Say no more,” he murmured. “It has been well for me that I have suffered these things. For yourself — if you do indeed repent, and feel that you owe me any debt, atone for it, and pay it, by letting your own life be strong in truth and fair in honor.”
And it seemed to him that he himself had done no great or righteous thing in that servitude for another’s sake, whose yoke was now lifted off him for evermore. But, looking out over the sleeping camp where one young child alone lay in a slumber that never would be broken, his heart ached with the sense of some great, priceless gift received, and undeserved, and cast aside; even while in the dreams of passion that now knew its fruition possible, and the sweetness of communion with the friend whose faith had never forsaken him, he retraced the years of his exile, and thanked God that it was thus with him at the end.
CHAPTER THE LAST.
AT REST.
Under the green, springtide leafage of English woodlands, made musical with the movement and the song of innumerable birds that had their nests among the hawthorn boughs and deep, cool foliage of elm and beech, an old horse stood at pasture. Sleeping — with the sun on his gray, silken skin, and the flies driven off with a dreamy switch of his tail, and the grasses odorous about his hoofs, with dog-violets, and cowslips, and wild thyme — sleeping, yet not so surely but at one voice he started, and raised his head with all the eager grace of his youth, and gave a murmuring noise of welcome and delight. He had known that voice in an instant, though for so many years his ear had never thrilled to it; Forest King had never forgotten. Now, scarce a day passed but what it spoke to him some word of greeting or of affection, and his black, soft eyes would gleam with their old fire, because its tone brought back a thousand memories of bygone victory — only memories now, when Forest King, in the years of age, dreamed out his happy life under the fragrant shade of the forest wealth of Royallieu.
With his arm over the horse’s neck, the exile, who had returned to his birthright, stood silent a while, gazing out over the land on which his eyes never wearied of resting; the glad, cool, green, dew-freshened earth that was so sweet and full of peace, after the scorched and blood-stained plains, whose sun was as flame, and whose breath was as pestilence. Then his glance came back and dwelt upon the face beside him, the proud and splendid woman’s face that had learned its softness and its passion from him alone.
“It was worth banishment to return,” he murmured to her. “It was worth the trials that I bore to learn the love that I have known — —”
She, looking upward at him with those deep, lustrous, imperial eyes that had first met his own in the glare of the African noon, passed her hand over his lips with a gesture of tenderness far more eloquent from her than from women less proud and less prone to weakness.
“Ah, hush! when I think of what her love was, how worthless looks my own! How little worthy of the fate it finds! What have I done that every joy should become mine, when she — —”
Her mouth trembled, and the phrase died unfinished; strong as her love had grown, it looked to her unproven and without desert, beside that which had chose to perish for his sake. And where they stood with the future as fair before them as the light of the day around them, he bowed his head, as before some sacred thing, at the whisper of the child who had died for him. The memories of both went back to a place in a desert land where the folds of the Tricolor drooped over one little grave turned westward toward the shores of France — a grave made where the beat of drum, and the sound of moving squadrons, and the ring of the trumpet-call, and the noise of the assembling battalions could be heard by night and day; a grave where the troops, as they passed it by, saluted and lowered their arms in tender reverence, in faithful, unasked homage, because beneath the Flag they honored there was carved in the white stone one name that spoke to every heart within the army she had loved, one name on which the Arab sun streamed as with a martyr’s glory:
“CIGARETTE, “ENFANT DE L’ARMEE, SOLDAT DE LA FRANCE.”
Folle-Farine
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
BOOK IV.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
BOOK V.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The first edition’s title page
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
Not the wheat itself; not even so much as the chaff; only the dust from the corn. The dust which no one needs or notices; the mock farina which flies out from under the two revolving circles of the grindstones; the impalpable cloud which goes forth to gleam golden in the sun a moment, and then is s
cattered — on the wind, into the water, up in the sunlight, down in the mud. What matters? who cares?
Only the dust: a mote in the air; a speck in the light; a black spot in the living daytime; a colorless atom in the immensity of the atmosphere, borne up one instant to gleam against the sky, dropped down the next to lie in a fetid ditch.
Only the dust: the dust that flows out from between the grindstones, grinding exceeding hard and small, as the religion which calls itself Love avers that its God does grind the world.
“It is a nothing, less than nothing. The stones turn; the dust is born; it has a puff of life; it dies. Who cares? No one. Not the good God; not any man; not even the devil. It is a thing even devil-deserted. Ah, it is very like you,” said the old miller, watching the millstones.
Folle-Farine heard — she had heard a hundred times, — and held her peace.
Folle-Farine: the dust; only the dust.
As good a name as any other for a nameless creature. The dust, — sharp-winnowed and rejected of all, as less worthy than even the shred husks and the shattered stalks.
Folle-Farine, — she watched the dust fly in and out all day long from between the grindstones. She only wondered why, if she and the dust were thus kindred and namesakes, the wind flew away with the dust so mercifully, and yet never would fly away with her.
The dust was carried away by the breeze, and wandered wherever it listed. The dust had a sweet, short, summer-day life of its own ere it died. If it were worthless, it at least was free. It could lie in the curl of a green leaf, or on the white breast of a flower. It could mingle with the golden dust in a lily, and almost seem to be one with it. It could fly with the thistle-down, and with the feathers of the dandelion, on every roving wind that blew.
In a vague dreamy fashion, the child wondered why the dust was so much better dealt with than she was.
“Folle-Farine! Folle — Folle — Folle — Farine!” the other children hooted after her, echoing the name by which the grim humor of her bitter-tongued taskmaster had called her. She had got used to it, and answered to it as others to their birthnames.