She moved forward as her servant announced him; she saw him pause there like one spell-bound, and thought it the hesitation of one who felt sensitively his own low grade in life. She came toward him with the silent, sweeping grace that gave her the carriage of an empress; her voice fell on his ear with the accent of a woman immeasurably proud, but too proud not to bend softly and graciously to those who were so far beneath her that, without such aid from her, they could never have addressed or have approached her.
“You have come, I trust, to withdraw your prohibition? Nothing will give me greater pleasure than to bring his Majesty’s notice to one of the best soldiers his Army holds.”
There was that in the words, gently as they were spoken, that recalled him suddenly to himself; they had that negligent, courteous pity she would have shown to some colon begging at her gates! He forgot—forgot utterly—that he was only an African trooper. He only remembered that he had once been a gentleman, that—if a life of honor and of self-negation can make any so—he was one still. He advanced and bowed with the old serene elegance that his bow had once been famed for; and she, well used to be even overcritical in such trifles, thought, “That man has once lived in courts!”
“Pardon me, madame, I do not come to trespass so far upon your benignity,” he answered, as he bent before her. “I come to express, rather, my regret that you should have made one single error.”
“Error!”—a haughty surprise glanced from her eyes as they swept over him. Such a word had never been used to her in the whole course of her brilliant and pampered life of sovereignty and indulgence.
“One common enough, madame, in your Order. The error to suppose that under the rough cloth of a private trooper’s uniform there cannot possibly be such aristocratic monopolies as nerves to wound.”
“I do not comprehend you.” She spoke very coldly; she repented her profoundly of her concession in admitting a Chasseur d’Afrique to her presence.
“Possibly not. Mine was the folly to dream that you would ever do so. I should not have intruded on you now, but for this reason: the humiliation you were pleased to pass on me I could neither refuse nor resent to the dealer of it. Had I done so, men who are only too loyal to me would have resented with me, and been thrashed or been shot, as payment. I was compelled to accept it, and to wait until I could return your gift to you. I have no right to complain that you pained me with it, since one who occupies my position ought, I presume, to consider remembrance, even by an outrage, an honor done to him by the Princesse Corona.”
As he said the last words he laid on the table that stood near him the gold of Chateauroy’s insult. She had listened with a bewildering wonder, held in check by the haughtier impulse of offense, that a man in this grade could venture thus to address, thus to arraign her. His words were totally incomprehensible to her, though, by the grave rebuke of his manner, she saw that they were fully meant, and, as he considered, fully authorized by some wrong done to him. As he laid the gold pieces down upon her table, an idea of the truth came to her.
“I know nothing of what you complain of; I sent you no money. What is it you would imply?” she asked him, looking up from where she leaned back in the low couch into whose depth she had sunk as he had spoken.
“You did not send me these? Not as payment for the chess service?”
“Absolutely not. After what you said the other day, I should have scarcely been so ill-bred and so heedless of inflicting pain. Who used my name thus?”
His face lightened with a pleasure and a relief that changed it wonderfully; that brighter look of gladness had been a stranger to it for so many years.
“You give me infinite happiness, madame. You little dream how bitter such slights are where one has lost the power to resent them! It was M. de Chateauroy, who this morning—”
“Dared to tell you I sent you those coins?”
The serenity of a courtly woman of the world was unbroken, but her blue and brilliant eyes darkened and gleamed beneath the sweep of their lashes.
“Perhaps I can scarcely say so much. He gave them, and he implied that he gave them from you. The words he spoke were these.”
He told her them as they had been uttered, adding no more; she saw the construction they had been intended to bear, and that which they had borne naturally to his ear; she listened earnestly to the end. Then she turned to him with the exquisite softness of grace which, when she was moved to it, contrasted so vividly with the haughty and almost chill languor of her habitual manner.
“Believe me, I regret deeply that you should have been wounded by this most coarse indignity; I grieve sincerely that through myself in any way it should have been brought upon you. As for the perpetrator of it, M. de Chateauroy will be received here no more; and it shall be my care that he learns not only how I resent his unpardonable use of my name, but how I esteem his cruel outrage to a defender of his own Flag. You did exceedingly well and wisely to acquaint me; in your treatment of it as an affront that I was without warrant to offer you, you showed the just indignation of a soldier, and—of what I am very sure that you are—a gentleman.”
He bowed low before her.
“Madame, you have made me the debtor of my enemy’s outrage. Those words from you are more than sufficient compensation for it.”
“A poor one, I fear! Your Colonel is your enemy, then? And wherefore?”
He paused a moment.
“Why, at first, I scarcely know. We are antagonistic, I suppose.”
“But is it usual for officers of his high grade to show such malice to their soldiers?”
“Most unusual. In this service especially so; although officers rising from the ranks themselves are more apt to contract prejudices and ill feeling against, as they are to feel favoritism to, their men, than where they enter the regiment in a superior grade at once. At least, that is the opinion I myself have formed; studying the working of the different systems.”
“You know the English service, then?”
“I know something of it.”
“And still, though thinking this, you prefer the French?”
“I distinctly prefer it, as one that knows how to make fine soldiers and how to reward them; as one in which a brave man will be valued, and a worn-out veteran will not be left to die like a horse at a knacker’s.”
“A brave man valued, and yet you are a corporal!” thought Milady, as he pursued:
“Since I am here, madame, let me thank you, in the Army’s name, for your infinite goodness in acting so munificently on my slight hint. Your generosity has made many happy hearts in the hospital.”
“Generosity! Oh, do not call it by any such name! What did it cost me? We are terribly selfish here. I am indebted to you that for once you made me remember those who suffered.”
She spoke with a certain impulse of candor and of self-accusation that broke with great sweetness the somewhat coldness of her general manner; it was like a gleam of light that showed all the depth and the warmth that in truth lay beneath that imperious languor of habit. It broke further the ice of distance that severed the grande dame from the cavalry soldier.
Insensibly to himself, the knowledge that he had, in fact, the right to stand before her as an equal gave him the bearing of one who exercised that right, and her rapid perception had felt before now that this Roumi of Africa was as true a gentleman as any that had ever thronged about her in palaces. Her own life had been an uninterrupted course of luxury, prosperity, serenity, and power; the adversity which she could not but perceive had weighed on his had a strange interest to her. She had heard of many calamities, and aided many; but they had always been far sundered from her, they had never touched her; in this man’s presence they seemed to grow very close, terribly real. She led him on to speak of his comrades, of his daily life, of his harassing routine of duties in peace, and of his various experiences in war. He told her, too, of Leon Ramon’s history; and as she listened, he saw a mist arise and dim the brilliancy of those eyes that men complained would never soften. The very fidelity with which he sketched to her the bitter sufferings and the rough nobility that were momentarily borne and seen in that great military family of which he had become a son by adoption, interested her by its very unlikeness to anything in her own world.
His voice had still the old sweetness, his manner still its old grace; and added to these were a grave earnestness and a natural eloquence that the darkness of his own fortunes, and the sympathies with others that pain had awakened, had brought to him. He wholly forgot their respective stations; he only remembered that for the first time for so many years he had the charm of converse with a woman of high breeding, of inexpressible beauty, and of keen and delicate intuition. He wholly forgot how time passed, and she did not seek to remind him; indeed, she but little noted it herself.
At last the conversation turned back to his Chief.
“You seem to be aware of some motive for your commandant’s dislike?” she asked him. “Tell me to what you attribute it?”
“It is a long tale, madame.”
“No matter; I would hear it.”
“I fear it would only weary you.”
“Do not fear that. Tell it me.”
He obeyed, and told to her the story of the Emir and of the Pearl of the Desert; and Venetia Corona listened, as she had listened to him throughout, with an interest that she rarely vouchsafed to the recitals and the witticisms of her own circle. He gave to the narrative a soldierly simplicity and a picturesque coloring that lent a new interest to her; and she was of that nature which, however, it may be led to conceal feeling from pride and from hatred, never fails to awaken to indignant sympathy at wrong.
“This barbarian is your chief!” she said, as the tale closed. “His enmity is your honor! I can well credit that he will never pardon your having stood between him and his crime.”
“He has never pardoned it yet, of a surety.”
“I will not tell you it was a noble action,” she said, with a smile sweet as the morning—a smile that few saw light on them. “It came too naturally to a man of honor for you to care for the epithet. Yet it was a great one, a most generous one. But I have not heard one thing: what argument did you use to obtain her release?”
“No one has ever heard it,” he answered her, while his voice sank low. “I will trust you with it; it will not pass elsewhere. I told him enough of—of my own past life to show him that I knew what his had been, and that I knew, moreover, though they were dead to me now, men in that greater world of Europe who would believe my statement if I wrote them this outrage on the Emir, and would avenge it for the reputation of the Empire. And unless he released the Emir’s wife, I swore to him that I would so write, though he had me shot on the morrow; and he knew I should keep my word.”
She was silent some moments, looking on him with a musing gaze, in which some pity and more honor for him were blended.
“You told him your past. Will you confess it to me?”
“I cannot, madame.”
“And why?”
“Because I am dead! Because, in your presence, it becomes more bitter to me to remember that I ever lived.”
“You speak strangely. Cannot your life have a resurrection?”
“Never, madame. For a brief hour you have given it one—in dreams. It will have no other.”
“But surely there may be ways—such a story as you have told me brought to the Emperor’s knowledge, you would see your enemy disgraced, yourself honored?”
“Possibly, madame. But it is out of the question that it should ever be so brought. As I am now, so I desire to live and die.”
“You voluntarily condemn yourself to this?”
“I have voluntarily chosen it. I am well sure that the silence I entreat will be kept by you?”
“Assuredly; unless by your wish it be broken. Yet—I await my brother’s arrival here; he is a soldier himself; I shall hope that he will persuade you to think differently of your future. At any rate, both his and my own influence will always be exerted for you, if you will avail yourself of it.”
“You do me much honor, madame. All I will ever ask of you is to return those coins to my Colonel, and to forget that your gentleness has made me forget, for one merciful half hour, the sufferance on which alone a trooper can present himself here.”
He swept the ground with his kepi as though it were the plumed hat of a Marshal, and backed slowly from her presence, as he had many a time long before backed out of a throne-room.
As he went, his eyes caught the armies of the ivory chessmen; they stood under glass, and had not been broken by her lapdog.
Milady, left alone there in her luxurious morning room, sat a while lost in thought. He attracted her; he interested her; he aroused her sympathy and her wonder as the men of her own world failed to do—aroused them despite the pride which made her impatient of lending so much attention to a mere Chasseur d’Afrique. His knowledge of the fact that he was in reality the representative of his race, although the power to declare himself so had been forever abandoned and lost, had given him in her presence that day a certain melancholy, and a certain grave dignity that would have shown a far more superficial observer than she was that he had come of a great race, and had memories that were of a very different hue to the coarse and hard life which he led now. She had seen much of the world, and was naturally far more penetrative and more correct in judgment than are most women. She discovered the ring of true gold in his words, and the carriage of pure breeding in his actions. He interested her more than it pleased her that he should. A man so utterly beneath her; doubtless brought into the grade to which he had fallen by every kind of error, of improvidence, of folly—of probably worse than folly!
It was too absurd that she, so difficult to interest, so inaccessible, so fastidious, so satiated with all that was brilliant and celebrated, should find herself seriously spending her thoughts, her pity, and her speculation on an adventurer of the African Army! She laughed a little at herself as she stretched out her hand for a new volume of French poems dedicated to her by their accomplished writer, who was a Parisian diplomatist.
“One would imagine I was just out of a convent, and weaving a marvelous romance from a mystery and a tristesse, because the first soldier I notice in Algeria has a gentleman’s voice and is ill treated by his officers!” she thought with a smile, while she opened the poems which had that day arrived, radiant in the creamy vellum, the white velvet, and the gold of a dedication copy, with the coronet of the Corona d’Amague on their binding. The poems were sparkling with grace and elegant silvery harmonies; but they served ill to chain her attention, for while she read her eyes wandered at intervals to the chess battalions.
“Such a man as that buried in the ranks of this brutalized army!” she mused. “What fatal chance could bring him here? Misfortune, not misconduct, surely. I wonder if Lyon could learn? He shall try.”
“Your Chasseur has the air of a Prince, my love,” said a voice behind her.
“Equivocal compliment! A much better air than most Princes,” said Mme. Corona, glancing up with a slight shrug of her shoulders, as her guest and traveling companion, the Marquise de Renardiere, entered.
“Indeed! I saw him as he passed out; and he saluted me as if he had been a Marshal. Why did he come?”
Venetia Corona pointed to the Napoleons, and told the story; rather listlessly and briefly.
“Ah! The man has been a gentleman, I dare say. So many of them come to our army. I remember General Villefleur’s telling me—he commanded here a while—that the ranks of the Zephyrs and Zouaves were full of well-born men, utterly good-for-nothing, the handsomest scoundrels possible; who had every gift and every grace, and yet come to no better end than a pistol-shot in a ditch or a mortal thrust from Bedouin steel. I dare say your Corporal is one of them.”
“It may be so.”
“But you doubt it, I imagine.”
“I am not sure now that I do. But this person is certainly unlike a man to whom disgrace has ever attached.”
“You think your protege, then, has become what he is through adversity, I suppose? Very interesting!”
“I really can tell you nothing of his antecedents. Through his skill at sculpture, and my notice of it, considerable indignity has been brought upon him; and a soldier can feel, it seems, though it is very absurd that he should! That is all my concern with the matter, except that I have to teach his commander not to play with my name in his barrack yard.”
She spoke with that negligence which always sounded very cold, though the words were so gently spoken. Her best and most familiar friends always knew when, with that courtly chillness, she had signed them their line of demarcation.
And the Marquise de Renardiere said no more, but talked of the Ambassador’s poems.
CHAPTER XXV
“LE BON ZIG.”
Meanwhile the subject of their first discourse returned to the Chambree.
He had encouraged the men to pursue those various industries and ingenuities, which, though they are affectedly considered against “discipline,” formed, as he knew well, the best preservative from real insubordination, and the best instrument in humanizing and ameliorating the condition of his comrades. The habit of application alone was something gained; and if it kept them only for a while from the haunts of those coarsest debaucheries which are the only possible form in which the soldier can pursue the forbidden license of vice, it was better than that leisure should be spent in that joyless bestiality which made Cecil, once used to every refinement of luxury and indulgence, sicken with a pitying wonder for those who found in it the only shape they knew of “pleasure.”
He had seen from the first, capabilities that might be turned to endless uses; in the conscript drawn from the populace of the provinces there was almost always a knowledge of self-help, and often of some trade, coupled with habits of diligence; in the soldier made from the street Arab of Paris there were always inconceivable intelligence, rapidity of wit, and plastic vivacity; in the adventurers come, like himself, from higher grades of society, and burying a broken career under the shelter of the tricolor, there were continually gifts and acquirements, and even genius, that had run to seed and brought forth no fruit. Of all these France always avails herself in a great degree; but, as far as Cecil’s influence extended, they were developed much more than usual. As his own character gradually changed under the force of fate, the desire for some interest in life grew on him (every man, save one absolutely brainless and self-engrossed, feels this sooner or late); and that interest he found, or rather created, in his regiment. All that he could do to contribute to its efficiency in the field he did; all that he could do to further its internal excellence he did likewise.
Coarseness perceptibly abated, and violence became much rarer in that portion of his corps with which he had immediately to do; the men gradually acquired from him a better, a higher tone; they learned to do duties inglorious and distasteful as well as they did those which led them to the danger and the excitation that they loved; and, having their good faith and sympathy, heart and soul, with him, he met, in these lawless leopards of African France, with loyalty, courage, generosity, and self-abnegation far surpassing those which he had ever met with in the polished civilization of his early experience.
For their sakes, he spent many of his free hours in the Chambree. Many a man, seeing him there, came and worked at some ingenious design, instead of going off to burn his brains out with brandy, if he had sous enough to buy any, or to do some dexterous bit of thieving on a native, if he had not. Many a time knowing him to be there sufficed to restrain the talk around from lewdness and from ribaldry, and turn it into channels at once less loathsome and more mirthful, because they felt that obscenity and vulgarity were alike jarring on his ear, although he had never more than tacitly shown that they were so. A precisian would have been covered with their contumely and ridicule; a saint would have been driven out from their midst with every missile merciless tongues and merciless hands could pelt with; a martinet would have been cursed aloud, and cheated, flouted, rebelled against, on every possible occasion. But the man who was “one of them” entirely, while yet simply and thoroughly a gentleman, had great influence—an influence exclusively for good.
The Chambree was empty when he returned; the men were scattered over the town in one of their scant pauses of liberty; there was only the dog of the regiment, Flick-Flack, a snow-white poodle, asleep in the heat, on a sack, who, without waking, moved his tail in a sign of gratification as Cecil stroked him and sat down near; betaking himself to the work he had in hand.
It was a stone for the grave of Leon Ramon. There was no other to remember the dead Chasseur; no other beside himself, save an old woman sitting spinning at her wheel under the low-sloping, shingle roof of a cottage by the western Biscayan sea, who, as she spun, and as the thread flew, looked with anxious, aged eyes over the purple waves where she had seen his father—the son of her youth—go down beneath the waters.
But the thread of her flax would be spun out, and the thread of her waning life be broken, ere ever the soldier for whom she watched would go back to her and to Languedoc.
For life is brutal; and to none so brutal as to the aged who remember so well, and yet are forgotten as though already they were amid the dead.
Cecil’s hand pressed the graver along the letters, but his thoughts wandered far from the place where he was. Alone there, in the great sun-scorched barrack room, the news that he had read, the presence he had quitted, seemed like a dream.
He had never known fully all that he had lost until he had stood before the beauty of this woman, in whose deep imperial eyes the light of other years seemed to lie; the memories of other worlds seemed to slumber.
These blue, proud, fathomless eyes! Why had they looked on him? He had grown content with his fate; he had been satisfied to live and to fall a soldier of France; he had set a seal on that far-off life of his earlier time, and had grown to forget that it had ever been. Why had chance flung him in her way that, with one careless, haughty glance, one smile of courteous pity, she should have undone in a moment all the work of a half-score years, and shattered in a day the serenity which it had cost him such weary self-contest, such hard-fought victory, to attain?
She had come to pain, to weaken, to disturb, to influence him, to shadow his peace, to wring his pride, to unman his resolve, as women do mostly with men. Was life not hard enough here already, that she must make it more bitter yet to bear?
He had been content, with a soldier’s contentment, in danger and in duty; and she must waken the old coiled serpent of restless, stinging regret which he had thought lulled to rest forever!
“If I had my heritage!” he thought; and the chisel fell from his hands as he looked down the length of the barrack room with the blue glare of the African sky through the casement.
Then he smiled at his own folly, in dreaming idly thus of things that might have been.
“I will see her no more,” he said to himself. “If I do not take care, I shall end by thinking myself a martyr—the last refuge and consolation of emasculate vanity, of impotent egotism!”
For though his whole existence was a sacrifice, it never occurred to him that there was anything whatever great in its acceptation, or unjust in its endurance. He thought too little of his life’s value, or of its deserts, even to consider by any chance that it had been harshly dealt with, or unmeritedly visited.
At that instant Petit Picpon’s keen, pale, Parisian face peered through the door; his great, black eyes, that at times had so pathetic a melancholy, and at others such a monkeyish mirth and malice, were sparkling excitedly and gleefully.
“Mon Caporal!”
“You, Picpon! What is it?”
“Mon, Caporal, there is great news. There is fighting broken out yonder.”
“Ah! Are you sure?”
“Sure, mon Caporal. The Arbicos want a skirmish to the music of musketry. We are not to know just yet; we are to have the order de route to-morrow. I overheard our officers say so. They think we shall have brisk work. And for that they will not punish the vieille lame.”
“Punish! Is there fresh disobedience? In my squadron; in my absence?”
He rose instinctively, buckling on the sword which he had put aside.
“Not in your squadron, mon Caporal,” said Picpon quickly. “It is not much, either. Only the bon zig Rac.”
“Rake? What has he been doing?”
There was infinite anxiety and vexation in his voice. Rake had recently been changed into another squadron of the regiment, to his great loss and regret; for not only did he miss the man’s bright face and familiar voice from the Chambree, but he had much disquietude on the score of his safety, for Rake was an incorrigible pratique, had only been kept from scrapes and mischief by Cecil’s influence, and even despite that had been often in hot water, and once even had been drafted for a year or so of chastisement among the “Zephyrs,” a mode of punishment which, but for its separation of him from his idol, would have given unmitigated delight to the audacious offender.
“Very little, mon Caporal!” said Picpon eagerly. “A mere nothing—a bagatelle! Run a Spahi through the stomach, that is all. I don’t think the man is so much as dead, even!”
“I hope not, indeed. When will you cease this brawling among yourselves? A soldier’s blade should never be turned upon men of his own army. How did it happen?”
“A woman! They quarreled about a little fruit-seller. The Spahi was in fault. ‘Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort’ was there before him; and was preferred by the girl; and women should be allowed something to do with choosing their lovers, that I think, though it is true they often take the worst man. They quarreled; the Spahi drew first; and then, pouf et passe! quick as thought, Rac lunged through him. He has always a most beautiful stroke. Le Capitaine Argentier was passing, and made a fuss; else nothing would have been done. They have put him under arrest; but I heard them say they would let him free to-night because we should march at dawn.”
“I will go and see him at once.”
“Wait, mon Caporal; I have something to tell you,” said Picpon quickly. “The zig has a motive in what he does. Rac wanted to get the prison. He has done more than one bit of mischief only for that.”
“Only for what? He cannot be in love with the prison?”
“It serves his turn,” said Picpon mysteriously. “Did you never guess why, mon Caporal? Well, I have. ‘Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort’ is a fine fearless soldier. The officers know it; the bureaus know it. He would have mounted, mounted, mounted, and been a Captain long before now, if he had not been a pratique.”
“I know that; so would many of you.”
“Ah, mon Caporal; but that is just what Rac does not choose. In the books his page beats every man’s, except yours. They have talked of him many times for the cross and for promotion; but whenever they do he goes off to a bit of mischief, and gets himself punished. Any term of punishment, long or short, serves his purpose. They think him too wild to take out of the ranks. You remember, mon Caporal, that splendid thing that he did five years ago at Sabasasta? Well, you know they spoke of promoting him for it, and he would have run up all the grades like a squirrel, and died a Kebir, I dare say. What did he do to prevent it? Why, went that escapade into Oran disguised as a Dervish, and go the prison instead.”
“To prevent it? Not purposely?”
“Purposely, mon Caporal,” said Petit Picpon, with a sapient nod that spoke volumes. “He always does something when he thinks promotion is coming—something to get himself out of its way, do you see? And the reason is this: ‘tis a good zig, and loves you, and will not be put over your head. ‘Me rise afore him?’ said the zig to me once. ‘I’ll have the As de pique on my collar fifty times over first! He’s a Prince, and I’m a mongrel got in a gutter! I owe him more than I’ll ever pay, and I’ll kill the Kebir himself afore I’ll insult him that way.’ So say little to him about the Spahi, mon Caporal. He loves you well, does your Rac.”
“Well, indeed! Good God! what nobility!”
Picpon glanced at him; then, with the tact of his nation, glided away and busied himself teaching Flick-Flack to shoulder and present arms, the weapon being a long stick.
“After all, Diderot was in the right when he told Rousseau which side of the question to take,” mused Cecil, as he crossed the barrack-yard a few minutes later to visit the incarcerated pratique. “On my life, civilization develops comfort, but I do believe it kills nobility. Individuality dies in it, and egotism grows strong and specious. Why is it that in a polished life a man, while becoming incapable of sinking to crime, almost always becomes also incapable of rising to greatness? Why is it that misery, tumult, privation, bloodshed, famine, beget, in such a life as this, such countless things of heroism, of endurance, of self-sacrifice—things worthy of demigods—in men who quarrel with the wolves for a wild-boar’s carcass, for a sheep’s offal?”
A question which perplexes, very wearily, thinkers who have more time, more subtlety, and more logic to bring to its unravelment than Bertie had either leisure or inclination to do.
“Is this true, Rake—that you intentionally commit these freaks of misconduct to escape promotion?” he asked of the man when he stood alone with him in his place of confinement.