Thus burdened, he made his way for over two leagues. The hurricane never abated, and the blinding dust rose around him in great waves. The horse fell lame; he had to dismount, and move slowly and painfully over the loose, heavy soil on foot, raising the drooping head of the lifeless rider. It was bitter, weary, cruel travail, of an intolerable labor, of an intolerable pain.
Once or twice he grew sick and giddy, and lost for a moment all consciousness; but he pressed onward, resolute not to yield and leave the vultures, hovering aloft, their prey. He was still somewhat weakened by the wounds of Zaraila; he had been bruised and exhausted by the skirmish of the past night; he was weary and heart-broken; but he did not yield to his longing to sink down on the sands, and let his life ebb out; he held patiently onward through the infinite misery of the passage. At last he drew near the caravanserai where he had been directed to obtain a change of horses. It stood midway in the distance that he had to traverse, and almost alone when the face of the country changed, and was more full of color, and more broken into rocky and irregular surfaces.
As a man walks in a dream, he led the sinking beast toward its shelter, as its irregular corner towers became dimly perceptible to him through the dizzy mists that had obscured his sight. By sheer instinct he found his route straight toward the open arch of its entrance-way, and into the square courtyard thronged with mules and camels and horses; for the caravanserai stood on the only road that led through that district to the south, and was the only house of call for drovers, or shelter for travelers and artists of Europe who might pass that way. The groups in the court paused in their converse and in their occupations, and looked in awe at the gray charger with its strange burden, and the French Chasseur who came so blindly forward like a man feeling his passage through the dark. There was something in the sight that had a vague terror for them before they clearly saw what this thing was which was thus brought into their presence. Cecil moved slowly on into their midst, his hand on the horse's rein; then a great darkness covered his sight; he swayed to and fro, and fell senseless on the gray stone of the paved court, while the muleteer and the camel-drivers, the Kabyls and the French, who were mingled there, crowded around him in fear and in wonder. When consciousness returned to him he was lying on a stone bench in the shadow of the wall, and a throng of lean, bronzed, eager faces about him in the midday sunlight which had broken through the windstorm.
Instantly he remembered all.
“Where is he?” he asked.
They knew he meant the dead man, and answered him in a hushed murmur of many voices. They had placed the body gently down within, in a darkened chamber.
A shiver passed over him; he stretched his hand out for water that they held to him.
“Saddle me a fresh horse; I have my work to do.”
He knew that for no friendship, or grief, or suffering, or self-pity might a soldier pause by the wayside while his errand was still undone, his duty unfulfilled.
He drank the water thirstily; then, reeling slightly still, from the weakness that was still upon him, he rose, rejecting their offers of aid. “Take me to him,” he said simply. They understood him; there were French soldiers among them, and they took him, without question or comment, across the court to the little square stone cell within one of the towers, where they had laid the corpse, with nothing to break the quiet and the solitude except the low, soft cooing of some doves that had their homes in its dark corners, and flew in and out at pleasure through the oval aperture that served as window.
He motioned them all back with his hand, and went into the gloom of the chamber alone. Not one among them followed.
When he came forth again the reckless and riotous soldiers of France turned silently and reverentially away, so that they should not look upon his face. For it was well known throughout the army that no common tie had bound together the exiles of England, and the fealty of comrade to comrade was sacred in their sight.
The fresh animal, saddled, was held ready outside the gates. He crossed the court, moving still like a man without sense of what he did; he had the instinct to carry out the mission trusted to him, instantly and accurately, but he had no distinct perception or memory of aught else, save of those long-familiar features of which, ere he could return, the cruel sun of Africa would not have spared one trace.
He passed under the shadow of the gateway arch—a shadow black and intense against the golden light which, with the ceasing of the storm, flooded the land in the full morning. There were movement, noise, changes, haste in the entrance. Besides the arrival of the detachment of the line and a string of northward-bound camels, the retinue of some travelers of rank was preparing for departure, and the resources of the humble caravanserai were taxed beyond their powers. The name that some of the hurrying grooms shouted loudly in their impatience broke through his stupor and reached him. It was that of the woman whom, however madly, he loved with all the strength of a passion born out of utter hopelessness. He turned to the outrider nearest him:
“You are of the Princesse Corona's suite? What does she do here?”
“Madame travels to see the country and the war.”
“The war? This is no place for her. The land is alive with danger—rife with death.”
“Milady travels with M. le Duc, her brother. Milady does not know what fear is.”
“But——”
The remonstrance died on his lips; he stood gazing out from the gloom of the arch at a face close to him, on which the sun shone full, a face unseen for twelve long years, and which, a moment before laughing and careless in the light, changed and grew set, and rigid, and pale with the pallor of an unutterable horror. His own flushed, and moved, and altered with a wholly different emotion—emotion that was, above all, of an intense and yearning tenderness. For a moment both stood motionless and speechless; then, with a marvelous self-command and self-restraint, Cecil brought his hand to his brow in military salute, passed with the impassiveness of a soldier who passed a gentleman, reached his charger, and rode away upon his errand over the brown and level ground.
He had known his brother in that fleeting glance, but he hoped that his brother would see no more in him than a French trooper who bore resemblance by a strange hazard to one long believed to be dead and gone. The instinct of generosity, the instinct of self-sacrifice, moved him now as, long ago one fatal night, they had moved him to bear the sin of his mother's darling as his own.
Full remembrance, full consideration of what he had done, never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion of a soldier's grave.
Within six-and-thirty hours the instructions he bore were in the tent of the Chef du Bataillon whom they were to direct, and he himself returned to the caravanserai to fulfill with his own hand to the dead those last offices which he would delegate to none. It was night when he arrived; all was still and deserted. He inquired if the party of tourists was gone; they answered him in the affirmative; there only remained the detachment of the French infantry, which were billeted there for a while.
It was in the coolness and the hush of the night, with the great stars shining clearly over the darkness of the plains, that they made the single grave, under a leaning shelf of rock, with the somber fans of a pine spread above it, and nothing near but the sleeping herds of goats. The sullen echo of the soldiers' muskets gave its only funeral requiem; and the young lambs and kids in many a future spring-time would come and play, and browse, and stretch their little, tired limbs upon its sod, its sole watchers in the desolation of the plains.
When all was over, and the startled flocks had settled once again to rest and slumber, Cecil still remained there alone. Thrown down upon the grave, he never moved as hour after hour went by. To others that lonely and unnoticed tomb would be as nothing; only one among the thousand marks left on the bosom of the violated earth by the ravenous and savage lusts of war. But to him it held all that had bound him to his lost youth, his lost country, his lost peace; all that had remained of the years that were gone, and were now as a dream of the night. This man had followed him, cleaved to him, endured misery and rejected honor for his sake; and all the recompense such a life received was to be stilled forever by a spear-thrust of an unknown foe, unthanked, undistinguished, unavenged! It seemed to him like murder—murder with which his own hand was stained.
The slow night hours passed; in the stillness that had succeeded to the storm of the past day there was not a sound except the bleating of the young goats straying from the herd. He lay prostrate under the black lengths of the pine; the exhaustion of great fatigue was on him; a grief, acute as remorse, consumed him for the man who, following his fate, had only found at the end a nameless and lonely grave in the land of his exile.
He started with a thrill of almost superstitious fear as through the silence he heard a name whispered—the name of his childhood, of his past.
He sprang to this feet, and as he turned in the moonlight he saw once more his brother's face, pale as the face of the dead, and strained with an agonizing dread. Concealment was no longer possible. The younger man knew that the elder lived; knew it by a strange and irresistible certainty that needed no proof, that left no place for hope or fear in its chill, leaden, merciless conviction.
For some moments neither spoke. A flood of innumerable memories choked thought or word in both. They knew each other—all was said in that.
Cecil was the first to break the silence. He moved nearer with a rapid movement, and his hand fell heavily on the other's shoulder.
“Have you lived stainlessly since?”
The question was stern as the demand of a judge. His brother shuddered beneath this touch, and covered his face with his hands.
“God is my witness, yes! But you—you—they said that you were dead!”
Cecil's hand fell from his shoulder. There was that in the words which smote him more cruelly than any Arab steel could have done; there was the accent of regret.
“I am dead,” he said simply; “dead to the world and you.”
He who bore the title of Royallieu covered his face.
“How have you lived?” he whispered hoarsely.
“Honorably. Let that suffice. And you?”
The other looked up at him with a piteous appeal—the old, timorous, terrified appeal that had been so often seen on the boy's face, strangely returning on the gracious and mature beauty of the man.
“In honor too, I swear! That was my first disgrace, and my last. You bore the weight of my shame? Good God, what can I say? Such nobility, such sacrifice——”
He would have said enough, more than enough, to satisfy the one who had lost all for his sake, had there but been once in his voice no fear, but only love. As it was, that which he still thought of was himself alone. While crushed with the weight of his brother's surpassing generosity, he still was filled with only one thought that burned through the darkness of his bewildered horror, and that thought was his own jeopardy. Even in the very first hours of his knowledge that the man whom he had believed dead was living—living and bearing the burden of the guilt he should have borne—what he was filled with was the imminence of his own peril.
Cecil stood in silence, looking at him. He saw the boyish loveliness he remembered so well altered into the stronger and fuller beauty of the man. He saw that life had gone softly, smoothly, joyously, with this weak and feminine nature; and that, in the absence of temptation to evil, its career had been fair and straight in the sight of the world. He saw that his brother had been, in one word, happy. He saw that happiness had done for this character what adversity had done for his own. He saw that by it had been saved a temperament that calamity would have wrecked. He stood and looked at him, but he spoke not one word; whatever he felt, he restrained from all expression.
The younger man still hid his face upon his hands, as if, even in those pale, gray moonbeams, he shunned the light that was about him.
“We believed you were dead,” he murmured wildly. “They said so; there seemed every proof. But when I saw you yesterday, I knew you—I knew you, though you passed me as a stranger. I stayed on here; they told me you would return. God! what agony this day and night have been!”
Cecil was silent still; he knew that this agony had been the dread lest he should be living.
There were many emotions at war in him—scorn, and pity, and wounded love, and pride too proud to sue for a gratitude denied, or quote a sacrifice that was almost without parallel in generosity, all held him speechless. To overwhelm the sinner before him with reproaches, to count and claim the immeasurable debts due to him, to upbraid and to revile the wretched weakness that had left the soil of a guilt not his own to rest upon him—to do aught of this was not in him. Long ago he had accepted the weight of an alien crime, and borne it as his own; to undo now all that he had done in the past, to fling out to ruin now the one whom he had saved at such a cost; to turn, after twelve years, and forsake the man, all coward though he was, whom he had shielded for so long—this was not possible to him. Though it would be but his own birthright that he would demand, his own justification that he would establish, it would have seemed to him like a treacherous and craven thing. No matter that the one for whom the sacrifice had been made was unworthy of it, he held that every law of honor and justice forbade him now to abandon his brother and yield him up to the retribution of his early fault. It might have been a folly in the first instance; it might even have been a madness, that choice of standing in his brother's place to receive the shame of his brother's action; but it had been done so long before—done on the spur of generous affection, and actuated by the strange hazard that made the keeping of a woman's secret demand the same reticence which also saved the young lad's name; to draw back from it now would have been a cowardice impossible to his nature.
All seemed uttered, without words, by their gaze at one another. He could not speak with tenderness to this craven who had been false to the fair repute of their name—and he would not speak with harshness. He felt too sick at heart, too weary, too filled with pain, to ask aught of his brother's life. It had been saved from temptation, and therefore saved from evil; that knowledge sufficed to him.
The younger man stood half stupefied, half maddened. In the many years that had passed by, although his character had not changed, his position had altered greatly; and in the last few months he had enjoyed all the power that wealth and independence and the accession to his title could bestow. He felt some dull, hot, angered sense of wrong done to him by the fact that the rightful heir of them still lived; some chafing, ingrate, and unreasoning impatience with the savior of his whole existence; some bitter pangs of conscience that he would be baser yet, base beyond all baseness, to remain in his elder's place, and accept this sacrifice still, while knowing now the truth.
“Bertie—Bertie!” he stammered, in hurried appeal—and the name of his youth touched the hearer of it strangely, making him for the moment forget all save that he looked once more upon one of his own race—“on my soul, I never doubted that the story of your death was true. No one did. All the world believed it. If I had known you lived, I would have said that you were innocent; I would—I would have told them how I forged your friend's name and your own when I was so desperate that I scarce knew what I did. But they said that you were killed, and I thought then—then—it was not worth while; it would have broken my father's heart. God help me! I was a coward!”
He spoke the truth; he was a coward; he had ever been one. Herein lay the whole story of his fall, his weakness, his sin, and his ingratitude. Cecil knew that never will gratitude exist where craven selfishness holds reign; yet there was an infinite pity mingled with the scorn that moved him. After the years of bitter endurance he had passed, the heroic endurance he had witnessed, the hard and unending miseries that he had learned to take as his daily portion, this feebleness and fear roused his wondering compassion almost as a woman's weakness would have done. Still he never answered. The hatred of the stain that had been brought upon their name by his brother's deed (stain none the less dark, in his sight, because hidden from the world), his revulsion from this man, who was the only creature of their race who ever had turned poltroon, the thousand remembrances of childhood that uprose before him, the irresistible yearning for some word from the other's lips that should tell of some lingering trace in him of the old love strong enough to kill, for the moment at least, the selfish horror of personal peril—all these kept him silent.
His brother misinterpreted that silence.
“I am in your power—utterly in your power,” he moaned in his fear. “I stand in your place; I bear your title; you know that our father and our brother are dead? All I have inherited is yours. Do you know that, since you have never claimed it?”
“I know it.”
“And you have never come forward to take your rights?”
“What I did not do to clear my own honor, I was not likely to do merely to hold a title.”
The meaning of his answer drifted beyond the ear on which his words fell; it was too high to be comprehended by the lower nature. The man who lived in prosperity and peace, and in the smile of the world, and the purple of power, looked bewildered at the man who led the simple, necessitous, perilous, semi-barbaric existence of an Arab-Franco soldier.
“But—great Heaven!—this life of yours? It must be wretchedness?”
“Perhaps. It has at least no disgrace in it.”
The reply had the only sternness of contempt that he had suffered himself to show. It stung down to his listener's soul.
“No—no!” he murmured. “You are happier than I. You have no remorse to bear! And yet—to tell the world that I am guilty——”
“You need never tell it; I shall not.”
He spoke quite quietly, quite patiently. Yet he well knew, and had well weighed, all he surrendered in that promise—the promise to condemn himself to a barren and hopeless fate forever.
“You will not?”
The question died almost inaudible on his dry, parched tongue. The one passion of fear upon him was for himself; even in that moment of supplication his disordered thoughts hovered wildly over the chances of whether, if his elder brother even now asserted his innocence and claimed his birthright, the world and its judges would ever believe him.
Cecil for a while again was silent, standing there by the newly made grave of the soldier who had been faithful as those of his own race and of his own Order never had been. His heart was full. The ingratitude and the self-absorption of this life for which his own had been destroyed smote him with a fearful suffering. And only a few hours before he had looked once more on the face of the beloved friend of his youth; a deadlier sacrifice than to lay down wealth, and name, and heritage, and the world's love, was to live on, leaving that one comrade of his early days to believe him dead after a deed of shame.
His brother sank down on the mound of freshly flung earth, sinking his head upon his arms with a low moan. Time had not changed him greatly; it had merely made him more intensely desirous of the pleasures and the powers of life, more intensely abhorrent of pain, of censure, of the contempt of the world. As, to escape these in his boyhood, he had stooped to any degradation, so, to escape them in his manhood, he was capable of descending to any falsehood or any weakness. His was one of those natures which, having no love of evil for evil's sake, still embrace any form of evil which may save them from the penalty of their own weakness. Now, thus meeting one who for twelve years he had believed must rise from the tomb itself to reproach or to accuse him, unstrung his every nerve, and left him with only one consciousness—the desire, at all costs, to be saved.
Cecil's eyes rested on him with a strange, melancholy pity. He had loved his brother as a youth—loved him well enough to take and bear a heavy burden of disgrace in his stead. The old love was not dead; but stronger than itself was his hatred of the shame that had touched their race by the wretched crime that had driven him into exile, and his wondering scorn for the feeble and self-engrossed character that had lived contentedly under false colors, and with a hidden blot screened by a fictitious semblance of honor. He could not linger with him; he did not know how to support the intolerable pain that oppressed him in the presence of the only living creature of his race; he could not answer for himself what passionate and withering words might not escape him; every instant of their interview was a horrible temptation to him—the temptation to demand from this coward his own justification before the world—the temptation to seize out of those unworthy hands his birthright and his due.
But the temptation—sweet, insidious, intense, strengthened by the strength of right, and well-nigh overwhelming with all its fair, delicious promise for the future—did not conquer him. What resisted it was his own simple instinct of justice; an instinct too straight and true either to yield to self-pity or to passionate desire—justice which made him feel that, since he had chosen to save this weakling once for their lost mother's sake, he was bound forever not to repent nor to retract. He gazed a while longer, silently, at the younger man, who sat, still rocking himself wearily to and fro on the loose earth of the freshly filled grave. Then he went and laid his hand on his brother's shoulder. The other started and trembled; he remembered that touch in days of old.
“Do not fear me,” he said, gently and very gravely. “I have kept your secret twelve years; I will keep it still. Be happy—be as happy as you can. All I bid of you in return is so to live that in your future your past shall be redeemed.”
The words of the saint to the thief were not more merciful, not more noble, than the words with which he purchased, at the sacrifice of his own life, the redemption of his brother's. The other looked at him with a look that was half of terror—terror at the magnitude of this ransom that was given to save him from the bondage of evil.
“My God! You cannot mean it! And you——”
“I shall lead the life fittest for me. I am content in it. It is enough.”
The answer was very calm, but it choked him in its utterance. Before his memory rose one fair, proud face. “Content!” Ah, Heaven! It was the only lie that had ever passed his lips.
His hand lay still upon his brother's shoulder, leaning more heavily there, in the silence that brooded over the hushed plains.
“Let us part now, and forever. Leave Algeria at once. That is all I ask.”
Then, without another word that could add reproach or seek for gratitude, he turned and went away over the great, dim level of the African waste, while the man whom he had saved sat as in stupor; gazing at the brown shadows, and the sleeping herds, and the falling stars that ran across the sky, and doubting whether the voice he had head and the face upon which he had looked were not the visions of a waking dream.
How that night was spent Cecil could never recall in full. Vague memories remained with him of wandering over the shadowy country, of seeking by bodily fatigue to kill the thoughts rising in him, of drinking at a little water-channel in the rocks as thirstily as some driven deer, of flinging himself down at length, worn out, to sleep under the hanging brow of a mighty wall of rock; of waking, when the dawn was reddening the east, with the brown plains around him, and far away, under a knot of palms was a goatherd with his flock, like an idyl from the old pastoral life of Syria. He stood looking at the light which heralded the sun, with some indefinite sense of heavy loss, of fresh calamity, upon him. It was only slowly that he remembered all. Years seemed to have been pressed into the three nights and days since he had sat by the bivouac-fire, listening to the fiery words of the little Friend of the Flag.
The full consciousness of all that he had surrendered in yielding up afresh his heritage rolled in on his memory, like the wave of some heavy sea that sweeps down all before it.
When that tear-blotted and miserable letter had reached him in the green alleys of the Stephanien, and confessed to him that his brother had relied on the personal likeness between them and the similarity of their handwriting to pass off as his the bill in which his own name and that of his friend was forged, no thought had crossed him to take upon himself the lad's sin. It had only been when, brought under the charge, he must, to clear himself, have at once accused the boy, and have betrayed the woman whose reputation was in his keeping, that, rather by generous impulse than by studied intention, he had taken up the burden that he had now carried for so long. Whether or no the money-lenders had been themselves in reality deceived, he could never tell; but it had been certain that, having avowed themselves confident of his guilt, they could never shift the charge on to his brother in the face of his own acceptance of it. So he had saved the youth without premeditation or reckoning of the cost. And now that the full cost was known to him, he had not shrunk back from its payment. Yet that payment was one that gave him a greater anguish than if he had laid down his life in physical martyrdom.
To go back to the old luxury, and ease, and careless peace; to go back to the old, fresh, fair English woodlands, to go back to the power of command and the delight of free gifts, to go back to men's honor, and reverence, and high esteem—these would have been sweet enough—sweet as food after long famine. But far more than these would it have been to go back and take the hand of his friend once more in the old, unclouded trust of their youth; to go back, and stand free and blameless among his peers, and know that all that man could do to win the heart and the soul of a woman he could at his will do to win hers whose mere glance of careless pity had sufficed to light his life to passion. And he had renounced all this. This was the cost; and he had paid it—paid it because the simple, natural, inflexible law of justice had demanded it.
One whom he had once chosen to save he could not now have deserted, except by what would have been, in his sight, dishonor. Therefore, when the day broke, and the memories of the night came with his awakening, he knew that his future was without hope—without it as utterly as was ever that of any captive shut in darkness, and silence, and loneliness, in a prison, whose only issue was the oubliettes. There is infinite misery in the world, but this one misery is rare; or men would perish from the face of the earth as though the sun withdrew its light.
Alone in that dreary scene, beautiful from its vastness and its solemnity, but unutterably melancholy, unutterably oppressive, he also wondered whether he lived or dreamed.
From among the reeds the plovers were rising; over the barren rocks the dazzling lizards glided; afar off strayed the goats; that was the only sign of animal existence. He had wandered a long way from the caravanserai, and he began to retrace his steps, for his horse was there, and although he had received license to take leisure in returning, he had no home but the camp, no friends but those wild-eyed, leopard-like throng around him like a pack of dogs, each eager for the first glance, the first word; these companions of his adversity and of his perils, whom he had learned to love, with all their vices and all their crimes, for sake of the rough, courageous love that they could give in answer.
He moved slowly back over the desolate tracks of land stretched between him and the Algerian halting-place. He had no fear that he would find his brother there. He knew too well the nature with which he had to deal to hope that old affection would so have outweighed present fear that his debtor would have stayed to meet him yet once more. On the impulse of the ungovernable pain which the other's presence had been, he had bidden him leave Africa at once; now he almost wished he had bid him stay. There was a weary, unsatisfied longing for some touch of love or of gratitude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man whom he remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the hand of their dying mother lying in benediction on the fair, silken curls.
He had asked no questions. He had gone back to no recriminations. He guessed all it needed him to know; and he recoiled from the recital of the existence whose happiness was purchased by his own misery, and whose dignity was built on sand. His sacrifice had not been in vain. Placed out of the reach of temptation, the plastic, feminine, unstable character had been without a stain in the sight of men. But it was little better at the core; and he wondered, in his suffering, as he went onward through the beauty of the young day, whether it had been worth the bitter price he had paid to raise this bending reed from out the waters which would have broken and swamped it at the outset. It grew fair, and free, and flower-crowned now, in the midst of a tranquil and sunlit lake; but was it of more value than a drifted weed bearing the snake-egg hidden at its root?
He had come so far out of the ordinary route across the plains that it was two hours or more before he saw the dark, gray square of the caravanserai walls, and to its left that single, leaning pine growing out of a cleft within the rock that overhung the spot where the keenest anguish of all his life had known had been encountered and endured—the spot which yet, for sake of the one laid to rest there beneath the somber branches, would be forever dearer to him than any other place in the soil of Africa.
While yet the caravanserai was distant, the piteous cries of a mother-goat caught his ear. She was bleating beside a water-course, into which her kid of that spring had fallen, and whose rapid swell, filled by the recent storm, was too strong for the young creature. Absorbed as he was in his own thoughts, the cry reached him and drew him to the spot. It was not in him willingly to let any living thing suffer, and he was always gentle to all animals. He stooped, and, with some little difficulty, rescued the little goat for its delighted dam.
As he bent over the water he saw something glitter beneath it. He caught it in his hand and brought it up. It was the broken half of a chain of gold, with a jewel in each link. He changed color as he saw it; he remembered it as one that Venetia Corona had worn on the morning that he had been admitted to her. It was of peculiar workmanship, and he recognized it at once. He stood with the toy in his hand, looking long at the shining links, with their flashes of precious stones. They seemed to have voices that spoke to him of her about whose beautiful white throat they had been woven—voices that whispered incessantly in his ear, “Take up your birthright, and you will be free to sue to her at least, if not to win her.” No golden and jeweled plaything ever tempted a starving man to theft as this tempted him now to break the pledge he had just given.
His birthright! He longed for it for this woman's sake—for the sake, at least, of the right to stand before her as an equal, and to risk his chance with others who sought her smile—as he had never done for any other thing which, with that heritage, would have become his. Yet he knew that, even were he to be false to his word, and go forward and claim his right, he would never be able to prove his innocence; he would never hope to make the would believe him unless the real criminal made that confession which he held himself forbidden, by his own past action, ever to extort.
He gazed long at the broken, costly toy, while his heart ached with a cruel pang; then he placed it in safety in the little blue enamel box, beside the ring which Cigarette had flung back to him, and went onward to the caravanserai. She was no longer there, in all probability; but the lost bagatelle would give him, some time or another, a plea on which to enter her presence. It was a pleasure to him to know that; though he knew also that every added moment spent under the sweet sovereignty of her glance was so much added pain, so much added folly, to the dream-like and baseless passion with which she had inspired him.
The trifling incident of the goat's rescue and the chain's trouvaille, slight as they were, still were of service to him. They called him back from the past to the present; they broke the stupor of suffering that had fastened on him; they recalled him to the actual world about him in which he had to fulfill his duties as a trooper of France.
It was almost noon when, under the sun-scorched branches of the pine that stretched its somber fans up against the glittering azure of the morning skies, he approached the gates of the Algerine house-of-call—a study for the color of Gerome, with the pearly gray of its stone tints, and the pigeons wheeling above its corner towers, while under the arch of its entrance a string of mules, maize-laden, were guided; and on its bench sat a French soldier, singing gayly songs of Paris while he cut open a yellow gourd.
Cecil went within, and bathed, and dressed, and drank some of the thin, cool wine that found its way thither in the wake of the French army. Then he sat down for a while at one of the square, cabin-like holes which served for casements in the tower he occupied, and, looking out into the court, tried to shape his thoughts and plan his course. As a soldier he had no freedom, no will of his own, save for this extra twelve or twenty-four hours which they had allowed him for leisure in his return journey. He was obliged to go back to his camp, and there, he knew, he might again encounter one whose tender memories would be as quick to recognize him as the craven dread of his brother had been. He had always feared this ordeal, although the arduous service in which his chief years in Africa had been spent, and the remote expeditions on which he had always been employed, had partially removed him from the ever-present danger of such recognition until now. And now he felt that if once the brave, kind eyes of his old friend should meet his own, concealment would be no longer possible; yet, for the sake of that promise he had sworn in the past night, it must be maintained at every hazard, every cost. Vacantly he sat and watched the play of the sunshine in the prismatic water of the courtyard fountain, and the splashing, and the pluming, and the murmuring of the doves and pigeons on its edge. He felt meshed in a net from which there was no escape—none—unless, on his homeward passage, a thrust of Arab steel should give him liberty.
The trampling of horses on the pavement below roused his attention. A thrill of hope went through him that his brother might have lingering conscience, latent love enough, to have made him refuse to obey the bidding to leave Africa. He rose and leaned out. Amid the little throng of riding-horses, grooms, and attendants who made an open way through the polyglot crowd of an Algerian caravanserai at noon, he saw the one dazzling face of which he had so lately dreamed by the water-freshet in the plains. It was but a moment's glance, for she had already dismounted from her mare, and was passing within with two other ladies of her party; but in that one glance he knew her. His discovery of the chain gave him a plea to seek her. Should he avail himself of it? He hesitated a while. It would be safest, wisest, best, to deliver up the trinket to her courier, and pass on his way without another look at that beauty which could never be his, which could never lighten for him even with the smile that a woman may give her equal or her friend. She could never be aught to him save one more memory of pain, save one remembrance the more to embitter the career which not even hope would ever illumine. He knew that it was only madness to go into her presence, and feed, with the cadence of her voice, the gold light of her hair, the grace and graciousness of her every movement, the love which she would deem such intolerable insult, that, did he ever speak it, she would order her people to drive him from her like a chidden hound. He knew that; but he longed to indulge the madness, despite it; and he did so. He went down into the court below, and found her suite.
“Tell your mistress that I, Louis Victor, have some jewels which belong to her, and ask her permission to restore them to her hands,” he said to one of her equerries.
“Give them to me, if you have picked them up,” said the man, putting out his hand for them.
Cecil closed his own upon them.
“Go and do as I bid you.”
The equerry paused, doubtful whether or no to resist the tone and the words. A Frenchman's respect for the military uniform prevailed. He went within.
In the best chamber of the caravanserai Venetia Corona was sitting, listless in the heat, when her attendant entered. The grandes dames who were her companions in their tour through the seat of war were gone to their siesta. She was alone, with a scarlet burnous thrown about her, and upon her all the languor and idleness common to the noontide, which was still very warm, though, in the autumn, the nights were so icily cold on the exposed level of the plains. She was lost in thought, moreover. She had heard, the day before, a story that had touched her—of a soldier who had been slain crossing the plains, and had been brought, through the hurricane and the sandstorm, at every risk, by his comrade, who had chosen to endure all peril and wretchedness rather than leave the dead body to the vultures and the kites. It was a nameless story to her—the story of two obscure troopers, who, for aught she knew, might have been two of the riotous and savage brigands that were common in the Army of Africa. But the loyalty and the love shown in it had moved her; and to the woman whose life had been cloudless and cradled in ease from her birth, there was that in the suffering and the sacrifice which the anecdote suggested, that had at once the fascination of the unknown, and the pathos of a life so far removed from her, so little dreamed of by her, that all its coarser cruelty was hidden, while only its unutterable sadness and courage remained before her sight.
Had she, could she, ever have seen it in its realities, watched and read and understood it, she would have been too intensely revolted to have perceived the actual, latent nobility possible in such an existence. As it was she heard but of it in such words as alone could meet the ear of a great lady; she gazed at it only in pity from a far-distant height, and its terrible tragedy had solemnity and beauty for her.
When her servant approached her now with Cecil's message she hesitated some few moments in surprise. She had not known that he was in her vicinity. The story she had heard had been simply of two unnamed Chasseurs d'Afrique, and he himself might have fallen on the field weeks before, for aught that she had heard of him. Some stray rumors of his defense of the encampment of Zaraila, and of the fine prowess shown in his last charge, alone had drifted to her. He was but a trooper; and he fought in Africa. The world had no concern with him, save the miniature world of his own regiment.
She hesitated some moments; then gave the required permission. “He has once been a gentleman; it would be cruel to wound him,” thought the imperial beauty, who would have refused a prince or neglected a duke with chill indifference, but who was too generous to risk the semblance of humiliation to the man who could never approach her save upon such sufferance as was in itself mortification to one whose pride survived his fallen fortunes.
Moreover, the interest he had succeeded in awakening in her, the mingling of pity and of respect that his words and his bearing had aroused, was not extinct; had, indeed, only been strengthened by the vague stories that had of late floated to her of the day of Zaraila; of the day of smoke and steel and carnage, of war in its grandest yet its most frightful shape, of the darkness of death which the courage of human souls had power to illumine as the rays of the sun the tempest-cloud. Something more like quickened and pleasured expectation than any one among her many lovers had ever had power to rouse, moved her as she heard of the presence of the man who, in that day, had saved the honor of his Flag. She came of a heroic race; she had heroic blood in her; and heroism, physical and moral, won her regard as no other quality could ever do. A man capable of daring greatly, and of suffering silently, was the only man who could ever hope to hold her thoughts.
The room was darkened from the piercing light without; and in its gloom, as he was ushered in, the scarlet of her cashmere and the gleam of her fair hair was all that, for the moment, he could see. He bowed very low that he might get his calmness back before he looked at her; and her voice in its lingering music came on his ear.
“You have found my chain, I think? I lost it in riding yesterday. I am greatly indebted to you for taking care of it.”
She felt that she could only thank, as she would have thanked an equal who should have done her this sort of slight service, the man who had brought to her the gold pieces with which his Colonel had insulted him.
“It is I, madame, who am the debtor of so happy an accident.”
His words were very low, and his voice shook a little over them; he was thinking not of the jeweled toy that he came here to restore, but of the inheritance that had passed away from him forever, and which, possessed, would have given him the title to seek what his own efforts could do to wake a look of tenderness in those proud eyes which men ever called so cold, but which he felt might still soften, and change, and grow dark with the thoughts and the passions of love, if the soul that gazed through them were but once stirred from its repose.
“Your chain is here, madame, though broken, I regret to see,” he continued, as he took the little box from his coat and handed it to her. She took it, and thanked him, without, for the moment, opening the enamel case as she motioned him to a seat at a little distance from her own.
“You have been in terrible scenes since I saw you last,” she continued. “The story of Zaraila reached us. Surely they cannot refuse you the reward of your service now?”
“It will make little difference, madame, whether they do or not.”
“Little difference! How is that?”
“To my own fate, I meant. Whether I be captain or a corporal cannot alter——”
He paused; he dreaded lest the word should escape him which should reveal to her that which she would regard as such intolerable offense, such insolent indignity, when felt for her by a soldier in the grade he held.
“No? Yet such recognition is usually the ambition of every military life.”
A very weary smile passed over his face.
“I have no ambition, madame. Or, if I have, it is not a pair of epaulettes that will content it.”
She understood him; she comprehended the bitter mockery that the tawdry, meretricious rewards of regimental decoration seemed to the man who had waited to die at Zaraila as patiently and as grandly as the Old Guard at Waterloo.
“I understand! The rewards are pitifully disproportionate to the services in the army. Yet how magnificently you and your men, as I have been told, held your ground all through that fearful day!”
“We did our duty—nothing more.”
“Well! is not that the rarest thing among men?”
“Not among soldiers, madame.”
“Then you think that every trooper in a regiment is actuated by the finest and most impersonal sentiment that can actuate human beings!”
“I will not say that. Poor wretches! They are degraded enough, too often. But I believe that more or less in every good soldier, even when he is utterly unconscious of it, is an impersonal love for the honor of his Flag, an uncalculating instinct to do his best for the reputation of his corps. We are called human machines; we are so, since we move by no will of our own; but the lowest among us will at times be propelled by one single impulse—a desire to die greatly. It is all that is left to most of us to do.”
She looked at him with that old look which he had seen once or twice before in her, of pity, respect, sympathy, and wonder, all in one. He spoke to her as he had never spoken to any living being. The grave, quiet, listless impassiveness that still was habitual with him—relic of the old habits of his former life—was very rarely broken, for his real nature or his real thoughts to be seen beneath it. But she, so far removed from him by position and by circumstance, and distant with him as a great lady could not but be with a soldier of whose antecedents and whose character she knew nothing, gave him sympathy, a sympathy that was sweet and rather felt than uttered; and it was like balm to a wound, like sweet melodies on a weary ear, to the man who had carried his secret so silently and so long, without one to know his burden or to soothe his pain.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, while over the brilliancy of her face there passed a shadow. “There must be infinite nobility among these men, who live without hope—live only to die. That soldier, a day or two ago, who brought his dead comrade through the hurricane, risking his own death rather than leave the body to the carrion-birds—you have heard of him? What tenderness, what greatness there must have been in that poor fellow's heart!”
“Oh, no! That was nothing.”
“Nothing! They have told me he came every inch of the way in danger of the Arabs' shot and steel. He had suffered so much to bring the body safe across the plains, he fell down insensible on his entrance here.”
“You set too much store on it. I owed him a debt far greater than any act like that could ever repay.”
“You! Was it you?”
“Yes, madame. He who perished had a thousandfold more of such nobility as you have praised than I.”
“Ah! Tell me of him,” she said simply; but he saw that the lustrous eyes bent on him had a grave, sweet sadness in them that was more precious and more pitiful than a million utterances of regret could ever have been.
Those belied her much who said that she was heartless; though grief had never touched her, she could feel keenly the grief of other lives. He obeyed her bidding now, and told her, in brief words, the story, which had a profound pathos spoken there, where without, through the oval, unglazed casement in the distance, there was seen the tall, dark, leaning pine that overhung the grave of yesternight—the story over which his voice oftentimes fell with the hush of a cruel pain in it, and which he could have related to no other save herself. It had an intense melancholy and a strange beauty in its brevity and its simplicity, told in that gaunt, still, darkened chamber of the caravanserai, with the gray gloom of its stone walls around, and the rays of the golden sunlight from without straying in to touch the glistening hair of the proud head that bent forward to listen to the recital. Her face grew paler as she heard, and a mist was over the radiance of her azure eyes; that death in the loneliness of the plains moved her deeply with the grand simplicity of its unconscious heroism. And, though he spoke little of himself, she felt, with all the divination of a woman's sympathies, how he who told her this thing had suffered by it—suffered far more than the comrade whom he had laid down in the grave where, far off in the noonday warmth, the young goats were at rest on the sod. When he ceased, there was a long silence; he had lost even the memory of her in the memory of the death that he had painted to her; and she was moved with that wondering pain, that emotion, half dread and half regret, with which the contemplation of calamities that have never touched, and that can never touch them, will move women far more callous, far more world-chilled than herself.
In the silence her hands toyed listlessly with the enamel bonbonniere, whose silver had lost all its bright enameling, and was dinted and dulled till it looked no more than lead. The lid came off at her touch as she musingly moved it round and round; the chain and the ring fell into her lap; the lid remained in her hand, its interior unspoiled and studded in its center with a name in turquoise letters—“Venetia.”
She started as the word caught her eye and broke her reverie; the color came warmer into her cheek; she looked closer and closer at the box; then, with a rapid movement, turned her head and gazed at her companion.
“How did you obtain this?”
“The chain, madame? It had fallen in the water.”
“The chain! No! the box!”
He looked at her in surprise.
“It was given me very long ago.”
“And by whom?”
“By a young child, madame.”
Her lips parted slightly, the flush on her cheeks deepened; the beautiful face, which the Roman sculptor had said only wanted tenderness to make it perfect, changed, moved, was quickened with a thousand shadows of thought.
“The box is mine! I gave it! And you?”
He rose to his feet, and stood entranced before her, breathless and mute.
“And you?” she repeated.
He was silent still, gazing at her. He knew her now—how had he been so blind as never to guess the truth before, as never to know that those imperial eyes and that diadem of golden hair could belong alone but to the women of one race?
“And you?” she cried once more, while she stretched her hand out to him. “And you—you are Philip's friend? you are Bertie Cecil?”
Silently he bowed his head; not even for his brother's sake, or for the sake of his pledged word, could he have lied to her.
But her outstretched hands he would not see, he would not take. The shadow of an imputed crime was stretched between them.
“Petite Reine!” he murmured. “Ah, God! how could I be so blind?”
She grew very pale as she sank back again upon the couch from which she had risen. It seemed to her as though a thousand years had drifted by since she had stood beside this man under the summer leaves of the Stephanien, and he had kissed her childish lips, and thanked her for her loving gift. And now—they had met thus!
He said nothing. He stood paralyzed, gazing at her. There had been no added bitterness needed in the cup which he drank for his brother's sake, yet this bitterness surpassed all other; it seemed beyond his strength to leave her in the belief that he was guilty. She in whom all fair and gracious things were met; she who was linked by her race to his past and his youth; she whose clear eyes in her childhood had looked upon him in that first hour of the agony that he had suffered then, and still suffered on, in the cause of a coward and an ingrate.
She was pale still; and her eyes were fixed on him with a gaze that recalled to him the look with which “Petite Reine” had promised that summer day to keep his secret, and tell none of that misery of which she had been witness.
“They thought that you were dead,” she said at length, while her voice sank very low. “Why have you lived like this?”
He made no answer.
“It was cruel to Philip,” she went on, while her voice still shook. “Child though I was, I remember his passion of grief when the news came that you had lost your life. He has never forgotten you. So often now he will still speak of you! He is in your camp. We are traveling together. He will be here this evening. What delight it will give him to know his dearest friend is living! But why—why—have kept him ignorant, if you were lost to all the world beside?”
Still he answered her nothing. The truth he could not tell; the lie he would not. She paused, waiting reply. Receiving none, she spoke once more, her words full of that exquisite softness which was far more beautiful in her than in women less tranquil, less chill, and less negligent in ordinary moments.
“Mr. Cecil, I divined rightly! I knew that you were far higher than your grade in Africa; I felt that in all things, save in some accident of position, we were equals. But why have you condemned yourself to this misery? Your life is brave, is noble, but it must be a constant torture to such as you? I remember well what you were—so well, that I wonder we have never recognized each other before now. The existence you lead in Algeria must be very terrible to you, though it is greater, in truth, than your old years of indolence.”
He sank down beside her on a low seat, and bowed his head on his hands for some moments. He knew that he must leave this woman whom he loved, and who knew him now as one whom in her childhood she had seen caressed and welcomed by all her race, to hold him guilty of this wretched, mean, and fraudulent thing, under whose charge he had quitted her country. Great dews of intense pain gathered on his forehead; his whole mind, and heart, and soul revolted against this brand of a guilt not his own that was stamped on him; he could have cried out to her the truth in all the eloquence of a breaking heart.
But he knew that his lips had been sealed by his own choice forever; and the old habits of his early life were strong upon him still. He lifted his head and spoke gently, and very quietly, though she caught the tremor that shook through the words.
“Do not let us speak of myself. You see what my life is; there is no more to be said. Tell me rather of your own story—you are no longer the Lady Venetia? You have been wedded and widowed, they say?”
“The wife of an hour—yes! But it is of yourself that I would hear. Why have left the world, and, above all, why have left us, to think you dead? I was not so young when we last saw you, but that I remember well how all my people loved you.”
Had she been kept in ignorance of the accusation beneath which his flight had been made? He began to think so. It was possible. She had been so young a child when he had left for Africa; then the story was probably withheld from reaching her; and now, what memory had the world to give a man whose requiem it had said twelve long years before? In all likelihood she had never heard his name, save from her brother's lips, that had been silent on the shame of his old comrade.
“Leave my life alone, for God's sake!” he said passionately. “Tell me of your own—tell me, above all, of his. He loved me, you say?—O Heaven! he did! Better than any creature that ever breathed; save the man whose grave lies yonder.”
“He does so still,” she answered eagerly. “Philip's is not a heart that forgets. It is a heart of gold, and the name of his earliest friend is graven on it as deeply now as ever. He thinks you dead; to-night will be the happiest hour he had ever known when he shall meet you here.”
He rose hastily, and moved thrice to and fro the narrow floor whose rugged earth had been covered with furs and rugs lest it should strike a chill to her as she passed over it; the torture grew unsupportable to him. And yet, it had so much of sweetness that he was powerless to end it—sweetness in the knowledge that she knew him now her equal, at least by birth; in the change that it had made in her voice and her glance, while the first grew tender with olden memories, and the last had the smile of friendship; in the closeness of the remembrances that seemed to draw and bind them together; in the swift sense that in an instant, by the utterance of a name, the ex-barrier of caste which had been between them had fallen now and forever.
She watched him with grave, musing eyes. She was moved, startled, softened to a profound pity for him, and filled with a wondering of regret; yet a strong emotion of relief, of pleasure, rose above these. She had never forgotten the man to whom, in her childish innocence, she had brought the gifts of her golden store; she was glad that he lived, though he lived thus, glad with a quicker, warmer, more vivid emotion than any that had ever occupied her for any man living or dead except her brother. The interest she had vaguely felt in a stranger's fortunes, and which she had driven contemptuously away as unworthy of her harboring, was justified for one whom her people had known and valued while she had been in her infancy, and of whom she had never heard from her brother's lips aught except constant regret and imperishable attachment. For it was true, as Cecil divined, that the dark cloud under which his memory had passed to all in England had never been seen by her eyes, from which, in childhood, it had been screened, and, in womanhood, withheld, because his name had been absolutely forgotten by all save the Seraph, to whom it had been fraught with too much pain for its utterance to be ever voluntary.
“What is it you fear from Philip?” she asked him, at last, when she had waited vainly for him to break the silence. “You can remember him but ill if you think that there will be anything in his heart save joy when he shall know that you are living. You little dream how dear your memory is to him—”
He paused before her abruptly.
“Hush, hush! or you will kill me! Why!—three nights ago I fled the camp as men flee pestilence, because I saw his face in the light of the bivouac-fire and dreaded that he should so see mine!”
She gazed at him in troubled amaze; there was that in the passionate agitation of this man who had been serene through so much danger, and unmoved beneath so much disaster, that startled and bewildered her.
“You fled from Philip? Ah! how you must wrong him! What will it matter to him whether you be prince or trooper, wear a peer's robes or a soldier's uniform? His friendship never yet was given to externals. But—why?—that reminds me of your inheritance. Do you know that lord Royallieu is dead? That your younger brother bears the title, thinking you perished at Marseilles? He was here with me yesterday; he has come to Algeria for the autumn. Whatever your motive may have been to remain thus hidden from us all, you must claim your own rights now. You must go back to all that is so justly yours. Whatever your reason be to have borne with all the suffering and the indignity that have been your portion here, they will be ended now.”
Her beauty had never struck him as intensely as at this moment, when, in urging him to the demand of his rights, she so unconsciously tempted him to betray his brother and to forsake his word. The indifference and the careless coldness that had to so many seemed impenetrable and unalterable in her were broken and had changed to the warmth of sympathy, of interest, of excitation. There was a world of feeling in her face, of eloquence in her eyes, as she stooped slightly forward with the rich glow of the cashmeres about her, and the sun-gleam falling across her brow. Pure, and proud, and noble in every thought, and pressing on him now what was the due of his birth and his heritage, she yet unwittingly tempted him with as deadly a power as though she were the vilest of her sex, seducing him downward to some infamous dishonor.
To do what she said would be but his actual right, and would open to him a future so fair that his heart grew sick with longing for it; and yet to yield, and to claim justice for himself, was forbidden him as utterly as though it were some murderous guilt. He had promised never to sacrifice his brother; the promise held him like the fetters of a galley slave.
“Why do you not answer me?” she pursued, while she leaned nearer with wonder, and doubt, and a certain awakening dread shadowing the blue luster of her eyes that were bent so thoughtfully, so searchingly, upon him. “Is it possible that you have heard of your inheritance, of your title and estates, and that you voluntarily remain a soldier here? Lord Royallieu must yield them in the instant you prove your identity, and in that there could be no difficulty. I remember you well now, and Philip, I am certain, will only need to see you once to—”
“Hush, for pity's sake! Have you never heard—have none ever told you——”
“What?”
Her face grew paler with a vague sense of fear; she knew that he had been equable and resolute under the severest tests that could try the strength and the patience of man, and she knew, therefore, that no slender thing could agitate and could unman him thus.
“What is it I should have heard?” she asked him, as he kept his silence.
He turned from her so that she could not see his face.
“That, when I became dead to the world, I died with the taint of crime on me!”
“Of crime?”
An intense horror thrilled through the echo of the word; but she rose, and moved, and faced him with the fearless resolve of a woman whom no half-truth would blind, and no shadowy terror appall.
“Of crime? What crime?”
Then, and then only, he looked at her, a strange, fixed, hopeless, yet serene look, that she knew no criminal ever would or could have given.
“I was accused of having forged your brother's name.”
A faint cry escaped her; her lips grew white, and her eyes darkened and dilated.
“Accused. But wrongfully?”
His breath came and went in quick, sharp spasms.
“I could not prove that.”
“Not prove it? Why?”
“I could not.”
“But he—Philip—never believed you guilty?”
“I cannot tell. He may; he must.”
“But you are not!”
It was not an interrogation, but an affirmation that rang out in the silver clearness of her voice. There was not a single intonation of doubt in it; there was rather a haughty authority that forbade even himself to say that one of his race and that one of his Order could have been capable of such ignoble and craven sin.
His mouth quivered, a bitter sigh broke from him; he turned his eyes on her with a look that pierced her to the heart.
“Think me guilty or guiltless, as you will; I cannot answer you.”
His last words were suffocated with the supreme anguish of their utterance. As she heard it, the generosity, the faith, the inherent justice, and the intrinsic sweetness that were latent in her beneath the negligence and the chillness of external semblance rose at once to reject the baser, to accept the nobler, belief offered to her choice. She had lived much in the world, but it had not corroded her; she had acquired keen discernment from it, but she had preserved all the courageous and the chivalrous instincts of her superb nature. She looked at him now, and stretched her hands out toward him with a royal and gracious gesture of infinite eloquence.
“You are guiltless, whatever circumstance may have arrayed against you, whatever shadow of evil may have fallen falsely on you. Is it not so?”
He bowed his head low over her hands as he took them. In that moment half the bitterness of his doom passed from him; he had at least her faith. But his face was bloodless as that of a corpse, and the loud beatings of his heart were audible on the stillness. This faith must live on without one thing to show that he deserved it; if, in time to come, it should waver and fall, and leave him in the darkness of the foul suspicion under which he dwelt, what wonder would there be?
He lifted his head and looked her full in the eyes; her own closed involuntarily, and filled with tears. She felt that the despair and the patience of that look would haunt her until her dying day.