The red-hot light of the after-glow still burned on the waters of the bay, and shed its Egyptian-like luster on the city that lies in the circle of the Sahel, with the Mediterranean so softly lashing with its violet waves the feet of the white, sloping town. The sun had sunk down in fire—the sun that once looked over those waters on the legions of Scipio and the iron brood of Hamilcar, and that now gave its luster on the folds of the French flags as they floated above the shipping of the harbor, and on the glitter of the French arms, as a squadron of the army of Algeria swept back over the hills to their barracks. Pell-mell in its fantastic confusion, its incongruous blending, its forced mixture of two races—that will touch, but never mingle; that will be chained together, but will never assimilate—the Gallic-Moorish life of the city poured out; all the coloring of Haroun al Raschid scattered broadcast among Parisian fashion and French routine. Away yonder, on the spurs and tops of the hills, the green sea-pines seemed to pierce the transparent air; in the Cabash old, dreamy Arabian legends, poetic as Hafiz, seem still to linger here and there under the foliage of hanging gardens or the picturesque curves of broken terraces; in the distance the brown, rugged Kabyl mountains lay like a couched camel, and far off against the golden haze a single palm rose, at a few rare intervals, with its drooped, curled leaves, as though to recall, amid the shame of foreign domination, that this was once the home of Hannibal; the Africa that had made Rome tremble.
In the straight, white boulevards, as in the winding ancient streets; under the huge barn-like walls of barracks, as beneath the marvelous mosaics of mosques; the strange bizarre conflict of European and Oriental life spread its panorama. Staff officers, all aglitter with crosses, galloped past; mules, laden with green maize and driven by lean, brown Bedouins, swept past the plate-glass windows of bonbon shops; grave, white-bearded sheiks drank petits verres in the guinguettes; sapeurs, Chasseurs, Zouaves, cantinieres—all the varieties of French military life—mingled with jet-black Soudans, desert kings wrathful and silent, Eastern women shrouded in haick and serroual, eagle-eyed Arabs flinging back snow-white burnous, and handling ominously the jeweled halts of their cangiars. Alcazar chansons rang out from the cafes, while in their midst stood the mosque, that had used to resound with the Muezzin. Bijou-blondine and Bebee La-la and all the sister-heroines of demi-monde dragged their voluminous Paris-made dresses side by side with Moorish beauties, who only dared show the gleam of their bright black eyes through the yashmak; the reverberes were lit in the Place du Gouvernement, and a group fit for the days of Solyman the Magnificent sat under the white marble beauty of the Mohammedan church. “Rein n'est sacre pour un sapeur!” was being sung to a circle of sous-officiers, close in the ear of a patriarch serenely majestic as Abraham; gaslights were flashing, cigar shops were filling, newspapers were being read, the Rigolboche was being danced, commis-voyageurs were chattering with grisettes, drums were beating, trumpets were sounding, bands were playing, and, amid it all, grave men were dropping on their square of carpet to pray, brass trays of sweetmeats were passing, ostrich eggs were dangling, henna-tipped fingers were drawing the envious veil close, and noble Oriental shadows were gliding to and fro through the open doors of the mosques, like a picture of the “Arabian Nights,” like a poem of dead Islamism—in a word, it was Algiers at evening.
In one of the cafes there, a mingling of all the nations under the sun was drinking demi-tasses, absinthe, vermouth, or old wines, in the comparative silence that had succeeded to a song, sung by a certain favorite of the Spahis, known as Loo-Loo-j'n-m'en soucie guere, from Mlle. Loo-Loo's well-known habits of independence and bravado, which last had gone once so far as shooting a man through the chest in the Rue Bab-al-Oued, and setting all the gendarmes and sergents-de-ville at defiance afterward. Half a dozen of that famous regiment the Chasseurs d'Afrique were gathered together, some with their feet resting on the little marble-topped tables, some reading the French papers, all smoking their inseparable companions—the brules-gueles; fine, stalwart, sun-burned fellows, with faces and figures that the glowing colors of their uniform set off to the best advantage.
“Loo-Loo was in fine voice to-night,” said one.
“Yes; she took plenty of cognac before she sang; that always clears her voice,” said a second.
“And I think that did her spirits good, shooting that Kabyl,” said a third. “By the way, did he die?”
“N'sais pas, Loo-Loo's a good aim.”
“Sac a papier, yes! Rire-pour-tout taught her.”
“Ah! There never was a shot like Rire-pour-tout. When he went out, he always asked his adversary, 'Where will you like it? your lungs, your heart, your brain? It is quite a matter of choice;'—and whichever they chose, he shot there. Le pauvre Rire-pour-tout! He was always good-natured.”
“And did he never meet his match?” asked a sous-officier of the line.
The speaker looked down on the piou-piou with superb contempt, and twisted his mustaches. “Monsieur! how could he? He was a Chasseur.”
“But if he never met his match, how did he die?” pursued the irreverent piou-piou—a little wiry man, black as a berry, agile as a monkey, tough and short as a pipe-stopper.
The magnificent Chasseur laughed in his splendid disdain. “A piou-piou never killed him, that I promise you. He spitted half a dozen of you before breakfast, to give him a relish. How did Rire-pour-tout die? I will tell you.”
He dipped his long mustaches into a beaker of still champagne. Claude, Viscomte de Chanrellon, though in the ranks, could afford those luxuries.
“He died this way, did Rire-pour-tout! Dieu de Dieu! a very good way too. Send us all the like when our time comes! We were out yonder” (and he nodded his handsome head outward to where the brown, seared plateaux and the Kabyl mountains lay). “We were hunting Arabs, of course—pot-shooting, rather, as we never got nigh enough to their main body to have a clear charge at them. Rire-pour-tout grew sick of it. 'This won't do,' he said; 'here's two weeks gone by, and I haven't shot anything but kites and jackals. I shall get my hand out.' For Rire-pour-tout, as the army knows, somehow or other, generally potted his man every day, and he missed it terribly. Well, what did he do? He rode off one morning and found out the Arab camp, and he waved a white flag for a parley. He didn't dismount, but he just faced the Arabs and spoke to their Sheik. 'Things are slow,' he said to them. 'I have come for a little amusement. Set aside six of your best warriors, and I'll fight them one after another for the honor of France and a drink of brandy to the conqueror.' They demurred; they thought it unfair to him to have six to one. 'Ah!' he laughs, 'you have heard of Rire-pour-tout, and you are afraid!' That put their blood up: they said they would fight him before all his Chasseurs. 'Come, and welcome,' said Rire-pour-tout; 'and not a hair of your beards shall be touched except by me.' So the bargain was made for an hour before sunset that night. Mort de Dieu! that was a grand duel!”
He dipped his long mustaches again into another beaker of still. Talking was thirsty work; the story was well known in all the African army, but the piou-piou, having served in China, was new to the soil.
“The General was ill-pleased when he heard it, and half for arresting Rire-pour-tout; but—sacre!—the thing was done; our honor was involved; he had engaged to fight these men, and engaged for us to let them go in peace afterward; there was no more to be said, unless we had looked like cowards, or traitors, or both. There was a wide, level plateau in front of our camp, and the hills were at our backs—a fine field for the duello; and, true to time, the Arabs filed on to the plain, and fronted us in a long line, with their standards, and their crescents, and their cymbals and reed-pipes, and kettle-drums, all glittering and sounding. Sac a papier! There was a show, and we could not fight one of them! We were drawn up in line—Horse, Foot, and Artillery—Rire-pour-tout all alone, some way in advance; mounted, of course. The General and the Sheik had a conference; then the play began. There were six Arabs picked out—the flower of the army—all white and scarlet, and in their handsomest bravery, as if they came to an aouda. They were fine men—diable!—they were fine men. Now the duel was to be with swords; these had been selected; and each Arab was to come against Rire-pour-tout singly, in succession. Our drums rolled the pas de charge, and their cymbals clashed; they shouted 'Fantasia!' and the first Arab rode at him. Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock, and lunge went his steel through the Bedouin's lung, before you could cry hola!—a death-stroke, of course; Rire-pour-tout always killed: that was his perfect science. Another and another and another came, just as fast as the blood flowed. You know what the Arabs are—vous autres? How they wheel and swerve and fight flying, and pick up their saber from the ground, while their horse is galloping ventre a terre, and pierce you here and pierce you there, and circle round you like so many hawks? You know how they fought Rire-pour-tout then, one after another, more like devils than men. Mort de Dieu! it was a magnificent sight! He was gashed here and gashed there; but they could never unseat him, try how they would; and one after another he caught them sooner or later, and sent them reeling out of their saddles, till there was a great red lake of blood all round him, and five of them lay dead or dying down in the sand. He had mounted afresh twice, three horses had been killed underneath him, and his jacket all hung in strips where the steel had slashed it. It was grand to see, and did one's heart good; but—ventre bleu!—how one longed to go in too.
“There was only one left now—a young Arab, the Sheik's son, and down he came like the wind. He thought with the shock to unhorse Rire-pour-tout, and finish him then at his leisure. You could hear the crash as they met, like two huge cymbals smashing together. Their chargers hit and tore at each other's manes; they were twined in together there as if they were but one man and one beast; they shook and they swayed and they rocked; the sabers played about their heads so quick that it was like lightning, as they flashed and twirled in the sun; the hoofs trampled up the sand till a yellow cloud hid their struggle, and out of it all you could see was the head of a horse tossing up and spouting with foam, or a sword-blade lifted to strike. Then the tawny cloud settled down a little, the sand mist cleared away, the Arab's saddle was empty—but Rire-pour-tout sat like a rock. The old Chief bowed his head. 'It is over! Allah is great!' And he knew his son lay there dead. Then we broke from the ranks, and we rushed to the place where the chargers and men were piled like so many slaughtered sheep. Rire-pour-tout laughed such a gay, ringing laugh as the desert never had heard. 'Vive la France!' he cried. 'And now bring me my toss of brandy.' Then down headlong out of his stirrups he reeled and fell under his horse; and when we lifted him up there were two broken sword-blades buried in him, and the blood was pouring fast as water out of thirty wounds and more. That was how Rire-pour-tout died, piou-piou; laughing to the last. Sacre bleu! It was a splendid end; I wish I were sure of the like.”
And Claude de Chanrellon drank down his third beaker, for overmuch speech made him thirsty.
The men around him emptied their glasses in honor of the dead hero.
“Rire-pour-tout was a croc-mitaine,” they said solemnly, with almost a sigh; so tendering by their words the highest funeral oration.
“You have much of such sharp service here, I suppose?” asked a voice in very pure French. The speaker was leaning against the open door of the cafe; a tall, lightly built man, dressed in a velvet shooting tunic, much the worse for wind and weather, a loose shirt, and jack-boots splashed and worn out.
“When we are at it, monsieur,” returned the Chasseur. “I only wish we had more.”
“Of course. Are you in need of recruits?”
“They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves,” smiled Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. “Still, a good sword brings its welcome. Do you ask seriously, monsieur?”
The bearded Arabs smoking their long pipes, the little piou-piou drowning his mortification in some curacoa, the idlers reading the “Akbah” or the “Presse,” the Chasseurs lounging over their drink, the ecarte players lost in their game, all looked up at the newcomer. They thought he looked a likely wearer of the dead honors of Rire-pour-tout.
He did not answer the question literally, but came over from the doorway and seated himself at the little marble table opposite Claude, leaning his elbows on it.
“I have a doubt,” he said. “I am more inclined to your foes.”
“Dieu de Dieu!” exclaimed Chanrellon, pulling at his tawny mustaches. “A bold thing to say before five Chasseurs.”
He smiled, a little contemptuously, a little amusedly.
“I am not a croc-mitaine, perhaps; but I say what I think, with little heed of my auditors, usually.”
Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. “He is a croc-mitaine,” he thought. “He is not to be lost.”
“I prefer your foes,” went on the other, quite quietly, quite listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of French soldiers. “In the first place, they are on the losing side; in the second, they are the lords of the soil; in the third, they live as free as air; and in the fourth, they have undoubtedly the right of the quarrel!”
“Monsieur!” cried the Chasseurs, laying their hands on their swords, fiery as lions. He looked indolently and wearily up from under the long lashes of his lids, and went on, as though they had not spoken.
“I will fight you all, if you like, as that worthy of yours, Rire-pour-tout, did, but I don't think it's worth while,” he said carelessly, where he leaned over the marble table. “Brawling's bad style; we don't do it. I was saying, I like your foes best; mere matter of taste; no need to quarrel over it—that I see. I shall go into their service or into yours, monsieur—will you play a game of dice to decide?”
“Decide?—but how?”
“Why—this way,” said the other, with the weary listlessness of one who cares not two straws how things turn. “If I win, I go to the Arabs; if you win, I come to your ranks.”
“Mort de Dieu! it is a droll gambling,” murmured Chanrellon. “But—if you win, do you think we shall let you go off to our enemies? Pas si bete, monsieur!”
“Yes, you will,” said the other quietly. “Men who knew what honor meant enough to redeem Rire-pour-tout's pledge of safety to the Bedouins, will not take advantage of an openly confessed and unarmed adversary.”
A murmur of ratification ran through his listeners.
Chanrellon swore a mighty oath.
“Pardieu, no. You are right. If you want to go, you shall go. Hola there! bring the dice. Champagne, monsieur? Vermouth? Cognac?”
“Nothing, I thank you.”
He leaned back with an apathetic indolence and indifference oddly at contrast with the injudicious daring of his war-provoking words and the rough campaigning that he sought. The assembled Chasseurs eyed him curiously; they liked his manner and they resented his first speeches; they noted every particular about him—his delicate white hands, his weather-worn and travel-stained dress, his fair, aristocratic features, his sweeping, abundant beard, his careless, cool, tired, reckless way; and they were uncertain what to make of him.
The dice were brought.
“What stakes, monsieur?” asked Chanrellon.
“Ten napoleons a side—and—the Arabs.”
He set ten napoleons down on the table; they were the only coins he had in the world; it was very characteristic that he risked them.
They threw the main—two sixes.
“You see,” he murmured, with a half smile, “the dice know it is a drawn duel between you and the Arabs.”
“C'est un drole, c'est un brave!” muttered Chanrellon; and they threw again.
The Chasseur cast a five; his was a five again.
“The dice cannot make up their minds,” said the other listlessly, “they know you are Might and the Arabs are Right.”
The Frenchmen laughed; they could take a jest good-humoredly, and alone amid so many of them, he was made sacred at once by the very length of odds against him.
They rattled the boxes and threw again—Chanrellon's was three; his two.
“Ah!” he murmured. “Right kicks the beam and loses; it always does, poor devil!”
The Chasseur leaned across the table, with his brown, fearless sunny eyes full of pleasure.
“Monsieur! never lament such good fortune for France. You belong to us now; let me claim you!”
He bowed more gravely than he had borne himself hitherto.
“You do me much honor; fortune has willed it so. One word only in stipulation.”
“Chanrellon assented courteously.
“As many as you choose.”
“I have a companion who must be brigaded with me, and I must go on active service at once.”
“With infinite pleasure. That doubtless can be arranged. You shall present yourself to-morrow morning; and for to-night, this is not the season here yet; and we are triste a faire fremir; still I can show you a little fun, though it is not Paris!”
But he rose and bowed again.
“I thank you, not to-night. You shall see me at your barracks with the morning.”
“Ah, ah! monsieur!” cried the Chasseur eagerly, and a little annoyed. “What warrant have we that you will not dispute the decree of the dice, and go off to your favorites, the Arabs?”
He turned back and looked full in Chanrellon's face his own eyes a little surprised, and infinitely weary.
“What warrant? My promise.”
Then, without another syllable, he lounged slowly out through the soldiers and the idlers, and disappeared in the confused din and chiar-oscuro of the gas-lit street without, through the press of troopers, grisettes, merchants, beggars, sweetmeat-sellers, lemonade-sellers, curacoa sellers, gaunt Bedouins, negro boys, shrieking muleteers, laughing lorettes, and glittering staff officers.
“That is done!” he murmured to his own thoughts. “Now for life under another flag!”
Claude de Chanrellon sat mute and amazed a while, gazing at the open door; then he drank a fourth beaker of champagne and flung the emptied glass down with a mighty crash.
“Ventre bleu! Whoever he is, that man will eat fire, bons garcons!”
Three months later it was guest-night in the messroom of a certain famous light cavalry regiment, who bear the reputation of being the fastest corps in the English service. Of a truth, they do “plunge” a little too wildly; and stories are told of bets over ecarte in their anteroom that have been prompt extinction forever and aye to the losers, for they rarely play money down, their stakes are too high, and moderate fortunes may go in a night with the other convenient but fatal system. But, this one indiscretion apart, they are a model corps for blood, for dash, for perfect social accord, for the finest horseflesh in the kingdom, and the best president at a mess-table that ever drilled the cook to matchlessness, and made the ice dry, and the old burgundies, the admired of all newcomers.
Just now they had pleasant quarters enough in York, had a couple of hundred hunters, all in all, in their stalls, were showing the Ridings that they could “go like birds,” and were using up their second horses with every day out, in the first of the season. A cracker over the best of the ground with the York and Ainsty, that had given two first-rate things quick as lightning, and both closed with a kill, had filled the day; and they were dining with a fair quantity of county guests, and all the splendor of plate, and ceremony, and magnificent hospitalities which characterize those beaux sabreurs wheresoever they go. At one part of the table a discussion was going on but they drank singularly little; it was not their “form” ever to indulge in that way; and the Chief, as dashing a sabreur as ever crossed a saddle, though lenient to looseness in all other matters, and very young for his command, would have been down like steel on “the boys,” had any of them taken to the pastime of overmuch drinking in any shape.
“I can't get the rights of the story,” said one of the guests, a hunting baronet, and M. F. H. “It's something very dark, isn't it?”
“Very dark,” assented a tall, handsome man, with a habitual air of the most utterly exhausted apathy ever attained by the human features, but who, nevertheless, had been christened, by the fiercest of the warrior nations of the Punjaub, as the Shumsheer-i-Shaitan, or Sword of the Evil One, so terrible had the circling sweep of one back stroke of his, when he was quite a boy, become to them.
“Guard cut up fearfully rough,” murmured one near him, known as “the Dauphin.” “Such a low sort of thing, you know; that's the worst of it. Seraph's name, too.”
“Poor old Seraph! He's fairly bowled over about it,” added a third. “Feels it awfully—by Jove, he does! It's my belief he paid those Jew fellows the whole sum to get the pursuit slackened.”
“So Thelusson says. Thelusson says Jews have made a cracker by it. I dare say! Jews always do,” muttered a fourth. “First Life would have given Beauty a million sooner than have him do it. Horrible thing for the Household.”
“But is he dead?” pursued their guest.
“Beauty? Yes; smashed in that express, you know.”
“But there was no evidence?”
“I don't know what you call evidence,” murmured “the Dauphin.” “Horses are sent to England from Paris; clearly shows he went to Paris. Marseilles train smashes; twenty people ground into indistinguishable amalgamation; two of the amalgamated jammed head foremost in a carriage alone; only traps in carriage with them, Beauty's traps, with name clear on the brass outside, and crest clear on silver things inside; two men ground to atoms, but traps safe; two men, of course Beauty and servant; man was a plucky fellow, sure, to stay with him.”
And having given the desired evidence in lazy little intervals of speech, he took some Rhenish.
“Well—yes; nothing could be more conclusive, certainly,” assented the Baronet, resignedly convinced. “It was the best thing that could happen under the unfortunate circumstances; so Lord Royallieu thinks, I suppose. He allowed no one to wear mourning, and had his unhappy son's portrait taken down and burned.”
“How melodramatic!” reflected Leo Charteris. “Now what the deuce can it hurt a dead man to have his portrait made into a bonfire? Old lord always did hate Beauty, though. Rock does all the mourning; he's cut up no end; never saw a fellow so knocked out of time. Vowed at first he'd sell out, and go into the Austrian service; swore he couldn't stay in the Household, but would get a command of some Heavies, and be changed to India.”
“Duke didn't like that—didn't want him shot; nobody else, you see, for the title. By George! I wish you'd seen Rock the other day on the Heath; little Pulteney came up to him.”
“What Pulteney?—Jimmy, or the Earl?”
“Oh, the Earl! Jimmy would have known better. These new men never know anything. 'You purchased that famous steeple-chaser of his from Mr. Cecil's creditors, didn't you!' asks Pulteney. Rock just looks him over. Such a look, by George! 'I received Forest King as my dead friend's last gift.' Pulteney never takes the hint—not he. On he blunders: 'Because, if you were inclined to part with him, I want a good new hunting strain, with plenty of fencing power, and I'd take him for the stud at any figure you liked.' I thought the Seraph would have knocked him down—I did, upon my honor! He was red as this wine in a second with rage, and then as white as a woman. 'You are quite right,' he says quietly, and I swear each word cut like a bullet, 'you do want a new strain with something like breeding in it, but—I hardly think you'll get it for the three next generations. You must learn to know what it means first.' Then away he lounges. By Jove! I don't think the Cotton-Earl will forget this Cambridgeshire in a hurry, or try horse-dealing on the Seraph again.”
Laughter loud and long greeted the story.
“Poor Beauty,” said the Dauphin, “he'd have enjoyed that. He always put down Pulteney himself. I remember his telling me he was on duty at Windsor once when Pulteney was staying there. Pulteney's always horribly funked at Court; frightened out of his life when he dines with any royalties; makes an awful figure too in a public ceremony; can't walk backward for any money, and at his first levee tumbled down right in the Queen's face. Now at the Castle one night he just happened to come down a corridor as Beauty was smoking. Beauty made believe to take him for a servant, took out a sovereign, and tossed it to him. 'Here, keep a still tongue about my cigar, my good fellow!' Pulteney turned hot and cold, and stammered out God knows what, about his mighty dignity being mistaken for a valet. Bertie just laughed a little, ever so softly, 'Beg your pardon—thought you were one of the people; wouldn't have done it for worlds; I know you're never at ease with a sovereign!' Now Pulteney wasn't likely to forget that. If he wanted the King, I'll lay any money it was to give him to some wretched mount who'd break his back over a fence in a selling race.”
“Well, he won't have him; Seraph don't intend to have the horse ever ridden or hunted at all.”
“Nonsense!”
“By Jove, he means it! nobody's to cross the King's back; he wants weight-carriers himself, you know, and precious strong ones too. The King's put in stud at Lyonnesse. Poor Bertie! Nobody ever managed a close finish as he did at the Grand National—last but two—don't you remember?”
“Yes; waited so beautifully on Fly-by-Night, and shot by him like lightning, just before the run-in. Pity he went to the bad!”
“Ah, what a hand he played at ecarte; the very best of the French science.”
“But reckless at whist; a wild game there—uncommonly wild. Drove Cis Delareux half mad one night at Royallieu with the way he threw his trumps out. Old Cis dashed his cards down at last, and looked him full in the face. 'Beauty, do you know, or do you not know, that a whist-table is not to be taken as you take a timber in a hunting-field, on the principle of clear it or smash it?' 'Faith!' said Bertie, 'clear it or smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a trifle too energetic for me.'”
“The deuce, he's had enough of 'smashing' at last! I wish he hadn't come to grief in that style; it's a shocking bore for the Guards—such an ugly story.”
“It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did—best possible taste.”
“Only thing he could do.”
“Better taste would have been to do it earlier. I always wondered he stopped for the row.”
“Oh, never thought it would turn up; trusted to a fluke.”
He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, but who held in polite society the title of Lord Kergenven, drank some hock slowly, and murmured as his sole quota to the conversation, very lazily and languidly:
“Bet you he isn't dead at all.”
“The deuce you do? And why?” chorused the table; “when a fellow's body's found with all his traps round him!”
“I don't believe he's dead,” murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous eyes.
“But why? Have you heard anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Why do you say he's alive, then?”
My lord lifted his brows ever so little.
“I think so, that's all.”
“But you must have a reason, Ker?”
Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following:
“It don't follow one has reasons for anything; pray don't get logical. Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, central France; perhaps you don't know their work? It's uncommonly queer. Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack to hunt through and through it. Delightful chance for coming to grief; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, you'll get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don't get flattened under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger. Uncommonly good sport.”
Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency sherry.
“Hang it, Ker!” cried the Dauphin. “What's that to do with Beauty?”
My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under his black lashes, that said mutely, “Do I, who hate talking, ever talk wide of any point?”
“Why, this,” he murmured. “He was with us down at Veille-roc—Louis D'Auvrai's place, you know; and we were out after an old boar—not too old to race; but still tough enough to be likely to turn and trust to his tusks if the pace got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the finish. We hadn't found till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to the work, and the November day was short, of course; the pack got on the slot of a roebuck too, and were off the boar's scent in a little while, running wild. Altogether we got scattered, and in the forest it grew almost as dark as pitch; you followed just as you could, and could only guide yourself by your ear when the hounds gave cry, or the horns sounded. On you blundered, hit or miss, headlong down the rocks and through the branches; horses warmed wonderfully to the business, scrambled like cats, slid down like otters, kept their footing where nobody'd have thought anything but a goat could stand. Our hunting bloods wouldn't live an hour in a French forest. You see we just look for pace and strength in the shoulders; we don't much want anything else—except good jumping power. What a lot of fellows—even in the crack packs—will always funk water! Horses will fly, but they can't swim. Now, to my fancy, a clever beast ought to take even a swelling bit of water like a duck. How poor Standard breasted rivers till that fool staked him!”
He dropped more walnuts into his wine, wistfully recalling a mighty hero of Leicestershire fame, that had given him many a magnificent day out, and had been the idol of his stables, till in his twelfth year the noble old sorrel had been killed by a groom's recklessness; recklessness that met with such chastisement as told how and why the hill-tribes' sobriquet had been given to the hand that would lie so long in indolent rest, to strike with such fearful force when once raised.
“Well,” he went on once more, “we were all of us scattered; scarcely two kept together anywhere; where the pack was, where the boar was, where the huntsmen were, nobody knew. Now and then I heard the hounds giving tongue at the distance, and I rode after that to the best of my science; and uncommonly bad was the best. That forest work perplexes one, after the grass-country. You can't view the beauties two minutes together; and as for sinning by overriding 'em, you're very safe not to do that! At last I heard a crashing sound, loud and furious; I thought they had got him to bay at last. There was a great oak thicket as hard as iron, and as close as a net, between me and the place; the boughs were all twisted together, God knows how, and grew so low down that the naked branches had to be broken though at every step by the horse's fore hoofs, before he could force a step. We did force it somehow at last, and came into a green, open space, where there were fewer trees, and the moon was shining in; there, without a hound near, true enough was the boar rolling on the ground, and somebody rolling under him. They were locked in so close they looked just like one huge beast, pitching here and there, as you've seen the rhinos wallow in Indian jheels. Of course, I leveled my rifle, but I waited to get a clear aim; for which was man and which was boar, the deuce a bit could I tell; just as I had pointed, Beauty's voice called out to me; 'Keep your fire, Ker! I want to have him myself.' It was he that was under the brute. Just as he spoke they rolled toward me, the boar foaming and spouting blood, and plunging his tusks into Cecil; he got his right arm out from under the beast, and crushed under there as he was, drew it free, with the knife well gripped; then down he dashed it three times into the veteran's hide, just beneath the ribs; it was the coup de grace; the boar lay dead, and Beauty lay half dead too; the blood rushing out of him where the tusks had dived. Two minutes, though, and a draught of my brandy brought him all round; and the first words he spoke were, 'Thanks Ker; you did as you would be done by—a shot would have spoilt it all.' The brute had crossed his path far away from the pack, and he had flung himself out of saddle and had a neck-and-neck struggle. And that night we played baccarat by his bedside to amuse him; and he played just as well as ever. Now this is why I don't think he's dead; a fellow who served a wild boar like that won't have let a train knock him over. And I don't believe he forged that stiff, though all the evidence says so; Beauty hadn't a touch of the blackguard in him.”
With which declaration of his views, Kergenven lapsed into immutable silence and slumberous apathy, from whose shelter nothing could tempt him afresh; and the Colonel, with all the rest, lounged into the anteroom, where the tables were set, and began “plunging” in earnest at sums that might sound fabulous, were they written here. The players staked heavily; but it was the gallery who watched around, making their bets, and backing their favorites, that lost on the whole the most.
“Horse Guards have heard of the plunging; think we're going too fast,” murmured the Chief to Kergenven, his Major, who lifted his brows, and murmured back with the demureness of a maiden:
“Tell 'em it's our only vice; we're models of propriety.”
Which possibly would not have been received with the belief desirable by the skeptics of Pall Mall.
So the De Profundis was said over Bertie Cecil; and “Beauty of the Brigades” ceased to be named in the service, and soon ceased to be even remembered. In the steeple-chase of life there is no time to look back at the failures, who have gone down over a “double and drop,” and fallen out of the pace.
“Did I not say he would eat fire?”
“Pardieu! C'est un brave.”
“Rides like an Arab.”
“Smokes like a Zouave.”
“Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep—ah—h——h! magnificent!”
“And dances like an Aristocrat; not like a tipsy Spahi!”
The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the circle of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of inimitable canteen-slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker who had perched astride on a broken fragment of wall, with her barrel of wine set up on end on the stones in front of her, and her six soldiers, her gros bebees, as she was given maternally to calling them, lounging at their ease on the arid, dusty turf below. She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was cut as short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular feature in it. But then—regularity! who wanted it, who would have thought the most pure classic type a change for the better, with those dark, dancing, challenging eyes; with that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never so handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not seldom a short pipe itself?
She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss off her brandy or her vermouth like a trooper; she would on occasion clinch her little brown hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice; she was an enfant de Paris and had all its wickedness at her fingers; she would sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and she would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest giant of a Cuirassier there. And yet with all that, she was not wholly unsexed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance of youth, and had not left a certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a vivandiere's uniform, and had been born in a barrack, and meant to die in a battle; it was the blending of the two that made her piquante, made her a notoriety in her own way; known at pleasure, and equally, in the Army of Africa as “Cigarette,” and “L'Amie du Drapeau.”
“Not like a tipsy Spahi!” It was a cruel cut to her gros bebees, mostly Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the foot of the wall, singing the praises—with magnanimity beyond praise—of a certain Chasseur d'Afrique.
“Ho, Cigarette!” growled a little Zouave, known as Tata Leroux. “That is the way thou forsakest thy friends for the first fresh face.”
“Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, Tata!” responded Cigarette, with a puff of her namesake; the repartee of the camp is apt to be rough. “He is Bel-a-faire-peur, as you nickname him.”
“A woman's face!” growled the injured Tata; whose own countenance was of the color and well-nigh of the flatness of one of the red bricks of the wall.
“Ouf!” said the Friend of the Flag, with more expression in that single exclamation than could be put in a volume. “He does woman's deeds, does he? He has woman's hands, but they can fight, I fancy? Six Arabs to his own sword the other day in that skirmish! Superb!”
“Sapristi! And what did he say, this droll, when he looked at them lying there? Just shrugged his shoulders and rode away. 'I'd better have killed myself; less mischief, on the whole!' Now who is to make anything of such a man as that?”
“Ah! he did not stop to cut their gold buttons off, and steal their cangiars, as thou wouldst have done, Tata? Well! he has not learned la guerre,” laughed Cigarette. “It was a waste; he should have brought me their sashes, at least. By the way—when did he join?”
“Ten—twelve—years ago, or thereabouts.”
“He should have learned to strip Arabs by this time, then,” said the Amie du Drapeau, turning the tap of her barrel to replenish the wine-cup; “and to steal from them too, living or dead. Thou must take him in hand, Tata!”
Tata laughed, considering that he had received a compliment.
“Diable! I did a neat thing yesterday. Out on the hills, there, was a shepherd; he'd got two live geese swinging by their feet. They were screeching—screeching—screeching!—and they looked so nice and so plump that I could smell them, as if they were stewing in a casserole, till I began to get as hungry as a gamin. A lunge would just have cut the question at once; but the orders have got so strict about petting the natives I thought I wouldn't have any violence, if the thing would go nice and smoothly. So I just walked behind him, and tripped him up before he knew where he was—it was a picture! He was down with his face in the sand before you could sing Tra-la-la! Then I just sat upon him; but gently—very gently; and what with the sand and the heat, and the surprise, and, in truth, perhaps, a little too, my own weight, he was half suffocated. He had never seen me; he did not know what it was that was sitting on him; and I sent my voice out with a roar—'I am a demon, and the fiend hath bidden me take him thy soul to-night!' Ah! how he began to tremble, and to kick, and to quiver. He thought it was the devil a-top of him; and he began to moan, as well as the sand would let him, that he was a poor man, and an innocent, and the geese were the only things he ever stole in all his life. Then I went through a little pantomime with him, and I was very terrible in my threats, and he was choking and choking with the sand, though he never let go of the geese. At last I relented a little, and told him I would spare him that once, if he gave up the stolen goods, and never lifted his head for an hour. Sapristi! How glad he was of the terms! I dare say my weight was unpleasant; so the geese made us a divine stew that night, and the last thing I saw of my man was his lying flat as I left him, with his face still down in the sand-hole.”
Cigarette nodded and laughed.
“Pretty fair, Tata; but I have heard better. Bah! a grand thing certainly, to fright a peasant, and scamper off with a goose!”
“Sacre bleu!” grumbled Tata, who was himself of opinion that his exploit had been worthy of the feats of Harlequin; “thy heart is all gone to the Englishman.”
Cigarette laughed saucily and heartily, tickled at the joke. Sentiment has an exquisitely ludicrous side when one is a black-eyed wine-seller perched astride on a wall, and dispensing bandy-dashed wine to half a dozen sun-baked Spahis.
“My heart is a reveil matin, Tata; it wakes fresh every day. An Englishman! Why dost thou think him that?”
“Because he is a giant,” said Tata.
Cigarette snapped her fingers:
“I have danced with grenadiers and cuirassiers quite as tall, and twice as heavy. Apres?”
“Because he bathes—splash! Like any water-dog.”
“Because he is silent.”
“Because he rises in his stirrups.”
“Because he likes the sea.”
“Because he knows boxing.”
“Because he is so quiet, and blazes like the devil underneath.”
Under which mass of overwhelming proofs of nationality the Amie du Drapeau gave in.
“Yes, like enough. Besides, the other one is English. One of the Chasseurs d'Afrique tells me that the other one waits on him like a slave when he can—cleans his harness, litters his horse, saves him all the hard work, when he can do it without being found out. Where did they come from?”
“They will never tell.”
Cigarette tossed her nonchalant head, with a pout of her cherry lips, and a slang oath.
“Paf!—they will tell it to me!”
“Thou mayest make a lion tame, a vulture leave blood, a drum beat its own rataplan, a dead man fire a musket; but thou wilt never make an Englishman speak when he is bent to be silent.”
Cigarette launched a choice missile of barrack slang and an array of metaphors, which their propounder thought stupendous in their brilliancy.
“When you stole your geese, you did but take your brethren home! Englishmen are but men. Put the wine in their head, make them whirl in a waltz, promise them a kiss, and one turns such brains as they have inside out, as a piou-piou turns a dead soldier's wallet. When a woman is handsome, she is never denied. He shall tell me where he comes from. I doubt that it is from England! See here—why not! first, he never says God-damn; second, he don't eat his meat raw; third, he speaks very soft; fourth, he waltzes so light, so light! fifth, he never grumbles in his throat like an angry bear; sixth, there is no fog in him. How can he be English with all that?”
“There are English, and English,” said the philosophic Tata, who piqued himself on being serenely cosmopolitan.
Cigarette blew a contemptuous puff of smoke.
“There was never one yet that did not growl! Pauvres diables! If they don't use their tusks, they sit and sulk!—an Englishman is always boxing or grumbling—the two make up his life.”
Which view of Anglo-rabies she had derived from a profound study of various vaudevilles, in which the traditional God-damn was pre-eminent in his usual hues; and having delivered it, she sprang down from her wall, strapped on her little barrel, nodded to her gros bebees, where they lounged full-length in the shadow of the stone wall, and left them to resume their game at Boc, while she started on her way, as swift and as light as a chamois, singing, with gay, ringing emphasis that echoed all down the hot and silent air.
Hers was a dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its youth, loving plunder, and mischief, and mirth; caring for nothing; and always ready with a laugh, a song, a slang repartee, or a shot from the dainty pistols thrust in her sash, that a general of division had given her, whichever best suited the moment. She had never shed tears in her life.
Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who, a spoiled child of the Army from her birth, with a heart as bronzed as her cheek; yet with odd, stray, nature-sown instincts here and there, of a devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace that nothing could kill—Cigarette was the pet of the Army of Africa, and was as lawless as most of her patrons.
She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier because it had been a soldier's “loot”; she would wear the gold plunder off dead Arabs' dress, and never have a pang of conscience with it; she would dance all night long, when she had a chance, like a little Bacchante; she would shoot a man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the world. She had had a thousand lovers, from handsome marquises of the Guides to tawny, black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and the sight of her own arch, defiant face, with its scarlet lips and its short jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished cuirass, that served her for a mirror. She was more like a handsome, saucy boy than anything else under the sun, and yet there was that in the pretty, impudent, little Friend of the Flag that was feminine with it all—generous and graceful amid all her boldness, and her license, her revelries, and the unsettled life she led in the barracks and the camps, under the shadow of the eagles.
Away she went down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah; the hilts of the tiny pistols glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning sunlight pouring down unheeded on the brave, bright hawk eyes that had never, since they first opened to the world, drooped or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or the gaze of a lover; for the menace of death, or the presence of war.
Of course, she was a little Amazon; of course, she was a little Guerrilla; of course, she did not know what a blush meant; of course, her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as her mutinous mischief was in its act; but she was “bon soldat,” as she was given to say, with a toss of her curly head; and she had some of the virtues of soldiers. Soldiers had been about her ever since she first remembered having a wooden casserole for a cradle, and sucking down red wine through a pipe-stem. Soldiers had been her books, her teachers, her models, her guardians, and, later on, her lovers, all the days of her life. She had had no guiding-star, except the eagles on the standards; she had had no cradle-song, except the rataplan and the reveille; she had had no sense of duty taught her, except to face fire boldly, never to betray a comrade, and to worship but two deities, “la Gloire” and “la France.”
Yet there were tales told in the barrack-yards and under canvas of the little Amie du Drapeau that had a gentler side. Of how softly she would touch the wounded; of how deftly she would cure them. Of how carelessly she would dash through under a raking fire, to take a draught of water to a dying man. Of how she had sat by an old Grenadier's death-couch, to sing to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at Chalons, and she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of how she had ridden twenty leagues on a saddleless Arab horse, to fetch the surgeon of the Spahis to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of shot-wounds. Of how she had sent every sou of her money to her mother, so long as that mother lived—a brutal, drunk, vile-tongued old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes, as the sole maternal attention, when she was but an infant. These things were told of Cigarette, and with a perfect truth. She was a thorough scamp, but a thorough soldier, as she classified herself. Her own sex would have seen no good in her; but her comrades-at-arms could and did. Of a surety, she missed virtues that women prize; but, not less of a surety, had she caught some that they miss.
Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a greyhound, light as a hare; glancing here and glancing there as she bounded over the picturesque desolation of the Cashbah; it was just noon, and there were few could brave the noon-heat as she did; it was very still; there was only from a little distance the roll of the French kettle-drums where the drummers of the African regiments were practicing. “Hola!” cried Cigarette to herself, as her falcon-eyes darted right and left, and, like a chamois, she leaped down over the great masses of Turkish ruins, cleared the channel of a dry water-course, and alighted just in front of a Chasseur d'Afrique, who was sitting alone on a broken fragment of white marble, relic of some Moorish mosque, whose delicate columns, crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, against the deep intense blue of the cloudless sky.
He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service. He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft—for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, “a woman's face”—a long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel. She glanced at his hands, which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that fall to a private of Chasseurs.
“Beau lion!” she thought, “and noble, whatever he is.”
But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian regiments; she had known so many of them—those gilded butterflies of the Chaussee d'Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night.
She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a challenge to wine.
“Ah, ha! Tata Leroux says you are English; by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight! Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines—not I! I know better than to drink them myself.”
He started and rose; and, before he took the little wooden drinking-cup, bowed to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance; a bow that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection of grace.
“Ah, ma belle, is it you?” he said wearily. “You do me much honor.”
Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine-barrel. She was not used to that style of salutation. She half liked it—half resented it. It made her wish, with an impatient scorn for the wish, that she knew how to read and had not her hair cut short like a boy's—a weakness the little vivandiere had never been visited with before.
“Morbleu!” she said pettishly. “You are too fine for us mon brave. In what country, I should wonder, does one learn such dainty ceremony as that?”
“Where should one learn courtesies, if not in France?” he answered wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons and the Bedouins to Claude de Chanrellon; but his thoughts were far from her in this moment.
“Ouf! You have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue!” cried Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment than that. From generals and staff officers, as from drummers and trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a barrack flavor about it, commonly is; she would, as often as not, to be sure, finish it with the butt-end of her pistol, or the butt-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for all that, she liked it, and resented its omission. “They say you are English, but I don't believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the double L's too well. A Spaniard?”
“Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so?”
She laughed. “A Greek, then?”
“Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards?”
“An Austrian? You waltz like a White Coat!”
He shook his head.
She stamped her little foot into the ground—a foot fit for a model, with its shapely military boot; spurred, too, for Cigarette rode like a circus-rider.
“Say what you are, then, at once.”
“A soldier of France. Can you wish me more?”
For the first time her eyes flashed and softened—her one love was the tricolor.
“True!” she said simply. “But you were not always a soldier of France? You joined, they say, twelve years ago. What were you before then?”
She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her elbows on the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him with all the frank curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imaginable, as she launched the question point-blank.
“Before!” he said slowly. “Well—a fool.”
“You belonged in the majority, then!” said Cigarette, with a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the camp slang she spoke in. “You should not have had to come into the ranks, mon ami; majorities—specially that majority—have very smooth sailing generally!”
He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him.
“Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Bah! one is never young, and always young in camps. Young? Pardieu! When I was four I could swear like a grenadier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink like a bohemian.”
Yet—with all that—and it was the truth, the brow was so open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth!
“Why did you come into the service?” she went on, before he had a chance to answer her. “You were born in the Noblesse—bah! I know an aristocrat at a glance! Now many of those aristocrats come; shoals of them; but it is always for something. They all come for something; most of them have been ruined by the lionnes, a hundred million of francs gone in a quarter! Ah, bah! what blind bats the best of you are! They have gambled, or bet, or got into hot water, or fought too many duels or caused a court scandal, or something; all the aristocrats that come to Africa are ruined. What ruined you, M. l'Aristocrat?”
“Aristocrat? I am none. I am a Corporal of the Chasseurs.”
“Diable! I have known a Duke a Corporal! What ruined you?”
“What ruins most men, I imagine—folly.”
“Folly, sure enough!” retorted Cigarette, with scornful acquiescence. She had no patience with him. He danced so deliciously, he looked so superb, and he would give her nothing but these absent answers. “Wisdom don't bring men who look as you look into the ranks of the volunteers for Africa. Besides, you are too handsome to be a sage!”
He laughed a little.
“I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty to be a cynic.”
“A what?” She did not know the word. “Is that a good cigar you have? Give me one. Do women smoke in your old country?”
“Oh, yes—many of them.”
“Where is it, then?”
“I have no country—now.”
“But the one you had?”
“I have forgotten I ever had one.”
“Did it treat you ill, then?”
“Not at all.”
“Had you anything you cared for in it?”
“Well—yes.”
“What was it? A woman?”
“No—a horse.”
He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more figures slowly in the sand.
“Ah!”
She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she would only have laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than complimentary in her estimate of her own sex.
“There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew,” she went on softly, “loved a horse like that;—he would have died for Cossack—but he was a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what I like to play myself. Well, one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone; and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left. Staked and lost the horse! He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once—twice—thrice—and shot himself through the heart.”
“Poor fellow!” murmured the Chasseur d'Afrique, in his chestnut beard.
Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; “he had gambled away a good deal too,” she thought. “It is always the same old story with them.”
“Your cigars are good, mon lion,” she said impatiently, as she sprang up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon. “Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is! If you had been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn with you in the cancan!”
And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow's, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder out of bravado. “To have nothing more to say to me after dancing with me all night!” thought Cigarette, with fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis had ever experienced.
She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that momentary wish that she knew how to read and looked less like a boy—just because a Chasseur with white hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow! She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history, and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. “Let him take care!” muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white teeth; so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol. “Let him take care! If he offend me there are five hundred swords that will thrust civility into him, five hundred shots that will teach him the cost of daring to provoke Cigarette!”
En route through the town her wayward way took the pretty brunette Friend of the Flag as many devious meandering as a bird takes in a summer's day flight, when it stops here for a berry, there for a grass seed, here to dip its beak into cherries, there to dart after a dragon-fly, here to shake its wings in a brook, there to poise on a lily-bell.
She loitered in a thousand places, for Cigarette knew everybody; she chatted with a group of Turcos, she emptied her barrel for some Zouaves, she ate sweetmeats with a lot of negro boys, she boxed a little drummer's ear for slurring over the “r'lin tintin” at his practice, she drank a demi-tasse with some officers at a cafe; she had ten minutes' pistol-shooting, where she beat hollow a young dandy of the Guides who had come to look at Algiers for a week, and made even points with one of the first shots of the “Cavalry a pied,” as the Algerian antithesis runs. Finally she paused before the open French window of a snow-white villa, half-buried in tamarisk and orange and pomegranate, with the deep-hued flowers glaring in the sun, and a hedge of wild cactus fencing it in; through the cactus she made her way as easily as a rabbit burrows; it would have been an impossibility to Cigarette to enter by any ordinary means; and balancing herself lightly on the sill for a second, stood looking in at the chamber.
“Ho, M. le Marquis! the Zouaves have drunk all my wine up; fill me my keg with yours for once—the very best burgundy, mind. I'm half afraid your cellar will hurt my reputation.”
The chamber was very handsome, hung and furnished in the very best Paris fashion, and all glittering with amber and ormolu and velvets; in it half a dozen men—officers of the cavalry—were sitting over their noon breakfast, and playing at lansquenet at the same time. The table was crowded with dishes of every sort, and wines of every vintage; and the fragrance of their bouquet, the clouds of smoke, and the heavy scent of the orange blossom without, mingled together in an intense perfume. He whom she addressed, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, laughed, and looked up.
“Ah, is it thee, my pretty brunette? Take what thou wantest out of the ice pails.”
“The best growths?” asked Cigarette, with the dubious air and caution of a connoisseur.
“Yes!” said M. le Marquis, amused with the precautions taken with his cellar, one of the finest in Algiers. “Come in and have some breakfast, ma belle. Only pay the toll.”
Where he sat between the window and the table he caught her in his arms and drew her pretty face down; Cigarette, with the laugh of a saucy child, whisked her cigar out of her mouth and blew a great cloud of smoke in his eyes. She had no particular fancy for him, though she had for his wines; shouts of mirth from the other men completed the Marquis' discomfiture, as she swayed away from him, and went over to the other side of the table, emptying some bottles unceremoniously into her wine-keg; iced, ruby, perfumy claret that she could not have bought anywhere for the barracks.